THE SHIP OF DREAMS
The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era
Gareth Russell

Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019 as The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World

Copyright © Gareth Russell 2019

Cover Image © Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images

Gareth Russell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008263201

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008263171

Version: 2020-02-03

Praise

‘[The Ship of Dreams] installs a fresh lens onto a drama that most of us first heard as children … As Mr Russell moves to the fateful Sunday of the voyage, the suspense becomes terrifying.’

Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal

‘The Titanic sinking does offer a metaphor for its era … Many authors have referenced this, but Gareth Russell is the first I am aware of who has comprehensively explored these and charted in detail the context … Russell does this deftly and intriguingly.’

Irish Independent

‘A fascinating look at life during a doomed era … Russell’s observations are sharp and witty … The wider history he presents is packed with interesting details.’

The Times, Book of the Week

‘Russell relates this drama in thrilling, vivid detail – an extraordinary story of human courage.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Russell explores the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic both as a human reality and a metaphor … to sketch the world beyond the ship in this engrossing history … The detail richly evokes the scale and texture of Titanic life … This masterly reconstruction renders the Titanic story vital again.’

Mail on Sunday

‘Brilliantly narrates the story of the Titanic … with admirable research and rhetoric … Anyone fascinated by Erik Larson’s Dead Wake or by James Cameron’s Titanic will be drawn in by Russell’s well-crafted wit and reportage.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Russell tells these stories in gripping detail … The attention to detail is astonishing, if you’ve ever wondered how passengers booked a hot bath, look no further.’

Sunday Times

‘Gareth Russell has chosen a handful of passengers on the doomed liner and by training a spotlight on every detail of their lives, he has given us a meticulous, sensitive, and at times harsh picture of the early 20th century in Britain and America. A marvellous piece of work.’

Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey

‘Deeply researched and lushly detailed, the book shines new light on both the bygone Golden Age and the iconic tragedy that marked the beginning of its end.’

Lynn Vincent, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Indianapolis

‘This absorbing account proves that there are many levels to the endless fascination of the Titanic story … Gareth Russell skilfully constructs an eloquent and gripping narrative that is essentially a microcosm of the moribund Edwardian class system that would go down with the Titanic and finally be obliterated by war in 1914.’

Helen Rappaport, author of Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses

‘A meticulously researched retelling of history’s most infamous voyage … Through the eyes of this select group of privileged individuals, we are witness to the end of a glamorous crossing and an era, neither of which could be sustained or remain afloat.’

Denise Kiernan, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City

Dedication

For my great-grandparents,

Thomas Hutton and Elizabeth Johnston-Clarke,

The first to tell me stories of the Titanic,

And my father,

Who encouraged me to write them.

Epigraph

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be;

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon two halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain

(Lines on the loss of the ‘Titanic’) (1912)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Dramatis Personae

Author’s Note

1. The Lords Act

2. The Sash My Father Wore

3. Southampton

4. A Contest of Sea Giants

5. A Safe Harbour for Ships

6. The Lucky Holdup

7. A Decent Wee Man

8. A Kind of Hieroglyphic World

9. Its Own Appointed Limits Keep

10. Two More Boilers

11. A Thousand Uneasy Sparks of Light

12. Going Up to See the Fun

13. Music in the First-Class Lounge

14. Vox faucibus haesit

15. Be British

16. Over the Top Together

17. The Awful Spectacle

18. Grip Fast

19. Where’s Daddy?

20. Extend Heartfelt Sympathy to All

21. The Spinner of the Years

Picture Section

Footnotes

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
THE COUNTESS OF ROTHES

LUCY-NOËLLE-MARTHA LESLIE, Countess of Rothes

NORMAN LESLIE, 19TH EARL OF ROTHES, her husband

MALCOLM, VISCOUNT LESLIE, their eldest son, later 20th Earl of Rothes

THE HONOURABLE JOHN LESLIE, their youngest son

GLADYS CHERRY, the Earl’s cousin and the Countess’s travelling companion

CLEMENTINA and THOMAS DYER-EDWARDES, the Countess’s parents

ROBERTA (‘CISSY’) MAIONI, the Countess’s lady’s maid

THOMAS ANDREWS

THOMAS ANDREWS, Managing Director of the Harland and Wolff shipyard

HELEN ANDREWS, his wife

ELIZABETH ANDREWS, their daughter

WILLIAM, 1ST LORD PIRRIE, Thomas’s uncle, Chairman of Harland and Wolff

THE STRAUSES

IDA STRAUS, a philanthropist

ISIDOR STRAUS, Ida’s husband, a former congressman for New York and co-owner of Macy’s department store

ELLEN BIRD, Ida’s lady’s maid

JOHN FARTHING, Isidor’s valet

JESSE STRAUS CLARENCE STRAUS PERCY STRAUS SARA HESS MINNIE WEIL HERBERT STRAUS VIVIAN SCHEFTEL

Ida and Isidor’s children

THE THAYERS

JOHN BORLAND THAYER, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad

MARIAN THAYER, his wife

JOHN BORLAND THAYER III (‘JACK’), their eldest child

MARGARET FLEMING, Marian’s lady’s maid

FREDERICK THAYER MARGARET THAYER (LATER TALBOTT) PAULINE THAYER (LATER DOLAN)

The Thayers’ younger children

DOROTHY GIBSON

DOROTHY GIBSON, an actress

PAULINE GIBSON, her mother

GEORGE BATTIER, Dorothy’s husband

JULES BRULATOUR, a movie producer and Dorothy’s lover

LEONARD GIBSON, Dorothy’s stepfather

OTHER RELEVANT PASSENGERS

RHODA ABBOTT, a Salvation Army officer, travelling in Third Class

MADELEINE and COLONEL JOHN JACOB ASTOR IV

ALGERNON BARKWORTH, a landowner from Yorkshire

LAWRENCE BEESLEY, a science teacher, travelling in Second Class, subsequently author of The Loss of the S.S. Titanic

MAJOR ARCHIBALD BUTT, Military Aide to President William Howard Taft

CHARLOTTE DRAKE CARDEZA, a socialite from Pennsylvania

ELEANOR CASSEBEER, returning home to New York

LUCY, LADY DUFF GORDON, a fashion designer

ELIZABETH EUSTIS and MARTHA STEPHENSON, sisters and neighbours of the Thayers

COLONEL ARCHIBALD GRACIE IV, an historian and friend of the Strauses

J. BRUCE ISMAY, Managing Director of the White Star Line

FRANCIS (‘FRANK’) MILLET, a painter, author and sculptor

ALFRED NOURNEY, a car salesman travelling under the pseudonym of a German baron

EMILY and ARTHUR RYERSON, friends of the Thayers, returning home after their son’s death

FREDERIC SEWARD, a New York-based lawyer and a bridge partner of Dorothy Gibson

WILLIAM SLOPER, an American stockbroker, who also played bridge with Dorothy Gibson

ELEANOR and GEORGE WIDENER, prominent members of Philadelphia Society and friends of the Thayers

RELEVANT MEMBERS OF THE CREW

HAROLD BRIDE, the Titanic’s Junior Wireless Operator

HARRY ETCHES, a steward in First Class

VIOLET JESSOP, a stewardess in First Class

THOMAS JONES, Able Seaman, put in charge of Lifeboat 8

MARY SLOAN, a stewardess in First Class

ANNIE ROBINSON, a stewardess in First Class

CAPTAIN EDWARD J. SMITH, Commander of the Titanic

CAPTAIN ARTHUR ROSTRON, Commander of the Carpathia

DR FRANCIS (‘FRANK’) MCGEE, the Carpathia’s Surgeon

DR WILLIAM O’LOUGHLIN, the Titanic’s Surgeon

HENRY WILDE, the Titanic’s Chief Officer

WILLIAM MURDOCH, the Titanic’s First Officer

CHARLES LIGHTOLLER, the Titanic’s Second Officer

HERBERT PITMAN, the Titanic’s Third Officer

JOSEPH BOXHALL, the Titanic’s Fourth Officer

HAROLD LOWE, the Titanic’s Fifth Officer

JAMES MOODY, the Titanic’s Sixth Officer

AUTHOR’S NOTE

On Sunday 14 April 1912, at about 11.40 p.m., the Titanic, an ocean liner operated by a British shipping company with American owners, struck an iceberg. Two hours and forty minutes later, she sank with a loss of life that was variably estimated at 1,502, 1,503, 1,512, 1,517 and 1,522 but which has recently been established at 1,496.[1] A total of 712 survivors in lifeboats were rescued by another British ship, the Carpathia, between two and six hours after the Titanic disappeared. Two inquiries were held, in each of her homelands, and they reached broadly similar conclusions about what had been done in the past and should be done in the future. In 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered 2½ miles under by an expedition led by American oceanographer Robert Ballard.[2]

These are the bare facts surrounding a ship that is, arguably, the most famous vessel in history. When compared to nearly any other contender for that epithet, the Titanic’s popular appeal outstrips that of Cleopatra’s barge, the Mayflower, the Lusitania and perhaps even Noah’s Ark. Her name has become a synonym for catastrophe. The story of the largest and most luxurious ship ever built, racing across the Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to break the record for that journey, ignoring numerous ice warnings and then sinking with the loss of thousands, is an entrenched narrative, the belittling of which is surprisingly easy, if one is so inclined. Had she survived her first voyage, the Titanic would have dated like other ocean liners. While she was the largest man-made moving object when she eased off from her Southampton pier in 1912, she would only have held that accolade for the next thirteen months, until the arrival of a German passenger liner with room for a thousand more passengers amid 6,000 more tons.[3] Some of the Titanic’s second-class passengers preferred the accommodation on the Mauretania.[4] Before she sank, the Titanic was eclipsed in fame by her elder and slightly smaller sister ship, the Olympic, which had captured the attention of the world’s press when she set sail a year earlier.[5] Her passenger quarters, while splendid in many places, were soon surpassed – the march of comfort on the sea lanes did not halt in the spring of 1912.

The exceptionalism of the Titanic can be rubbished in other ways. On a more macabre note, she was neither the only great seafaring tragedy of the Edwardian era – two years after her, the Empress of Ireland sank following a collision with another ship as she departed Quebec City, with the loss of just over a thousand lives.[6] Nor, arguably, was she the most important. In 1915, the Titanic’s one-time rival, the Lusitania, foundered off the coast of Ireland with marginally fewer casualties, but far greater and more tangible a political impact. The attack on the Lusitania by the German submarine U-20 irrevocably hardened attitudes towards Imperial Germany in the United States at the height of the First World War, forcing an emergency meeting of the Crown Council in Berlin which effectively altered German naval policy for the next eighteen months and prepared the mood that would bring America into the war against Germany two years later.[7]

However, although the Titanic’s dreadful allure may be easy to unpick, it is impossible to dispel. There are societies dedicated to the study of the Titanic across the world, along with numerous museums, souvenirs, novels, musicals, children’s cartoons, computer games, television shows and movies. The first Titanic motion picture was produced in the weeks immediately after the sinking, another silent movie was produced in Germany later that same year, and an early ‘talkie’, Atlantic, appeared in 1929, heavily inspired by the sinking but with the ship’s name and appearance altered after the Titanic’s still-operational owners, the White Star Line, allegedly threatened a lawsuit.[8] A project in the late 1930s between David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock to dramatise the disaster never moved beyond pre-production, with the result that after Atlantic it was another fourteen years before a motion picture that was both filmed in sound and unambiguously about the Titanic appeared.[9]

On 30 April 1943, Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, banned the movie Titanic, the production of which he had initially authorised.[10] Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Goebbels had overseen a series of anti-British costume dramas that were released in Germany and then, despite some concerns about their potential impact, in various Nazi-occupied territories. Titanic proved to be the last of this politicised genre, which had begun with 1940’s Der Fuchs von Glenarvon and 1941’s Mein Leben für Irland, both dramatising the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. They were joined by Ohm Krüger, set during the Boer wars, and by a biographical drama loosely based on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with her English kinswoman, Elizabeth I, cast as a villain who was manipulative to the point of depravity. By the time Titanic went into production, American entry into the war on the Allied side had widened the target of these historical didactics, for which the sinking of the Anglo-American Titanic offered seemingly perfect fodder. The allocated budget made Titanic one of the most expensive motion pictures produced thus far in Germany, dozens of naval personnel were transferred from active duty at the front to serve as extras, and the decommissioned German passenger liner Cap Arcona was provided as a set for much of the filming. Prior to the war, the Cap Arcona had been the most luxurious ship to ply the route to South America, sailing from Hamburg to Buenos Aires, but like many vessels she had been removed from commercial service upon the outbreak of hostilities.

Goebbels wanted Titanic to depict Teutonic heroism, to which end a fictional German officer was inserted into the ship’s roster and shown in the final scenes dashing bravely through flooding corridors to rescue trapped children, but the movie was also intended to highlight the corruption of Germany’s enemies. In one particularly memorable scene, showing a dinner during the Titanic’s voyage, the shipping line’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay, gives a speech to the Dining Saloon boasting of the liner’s record-breaking speed. At his announcement, several American financiers scuttle away from their tables to send telegrams ordering their brokers to buy shares in the White Star Line while, back in the Saloon, the Titanic’s privileged passengers stand as the ship’s orchestra plays ‘God Save the King’. As a depiction of German perceptions of British arrogance and American greed, the scene had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer – although that, of course, was not the reason Goebbels vetoed his own creation.

Filming had been plagued with difficulties from the start. The director, Herbert Selpin, privately complained about the military extras’ sexual harassment of the actresses, comments that may have widened into criticism of the armed forces. The scriptwriter reported Selpin’s comments to the Gestapo, who had him arrested and imprisoned, at which point Goebbels almost certainly gave the order that Selpin was to be found hanged in his cell, as if from suicide. Certainly, almost nobody believed Selpin had died by his own hand.[11] Back on set, the production costs were spiralling beyond the generous allowance and several Allied bombing raids on nearby towns intermittently disrupted filming. By the time Goebbels saw the movie at a private screening, those bombing raids had helped turn the tide of the war against Nazi Germany and Goebbels was concerned that the scenes of passengers screaming in panic during the evacuation would remind too many moviegoers of their own experiences during the air raids. He also allegedly worried that German civilians might sympathise with the plight of the British and American passengers as they struggled to escape the Titanic, no matter how repugnant their on-screen leaders.[12] Titanic was the last of the anti-British Nazi historical dramas, after which productions shrank as the Reich stuttered towards oblivion.[13]

During the regime’s depraved unravelling, the Cap Arcona was once again pressed into service, this time to move 9,000 people from Nazi Poland, most of them prisoners from local camps. Whether the SS knew that the Cap Arcona had been identified as a target by the Royal Air Force before they herded the prisoners on board and if that was the reason they herded all the prisoners below deck to make sure the British pilots did not cease fire is unclear. According to the fullest modern account of the Cap Arcona’s career, the surviving evidence suggests that if the British aeroplanes had not turned up as expected to attack the ship the SS would have bombed it themselves and placed the blame on the Allies, the main reason for moving the prisoners on to known targets being the guards’ hopes of destroying living evidence of the existence of the neighbouring concentration camps.[14] As the RAF attacked the ship, small German boats near by evacuated only fleeing camp guards and SS personnel, who were also the only passengers to have been provided with lifebelts. The Cap Arcona burned, capsized and sank with the lost of about 5,000 lives, meaning that the Titanic’s one-time cinematic stand-in became the first ship to break her record for the greatest loss of life at sea.

Goebbels’ Titanic is one of the least-known if most repellently intriguing interpretations of the Titanic as both a symbol of Anglo-American cooperation and a damning indictment of its elites. Although no subsequent dramatisations of the disaster have mined the depths of national stereotypes seen in the 1943 version, the story of the Titanic’s owners pushing her to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic has been replicated ad nauseam. Where Goebbels sought to excoriate, others have sympathised or simply remained fascinated. As a child growing up in Belfast, I heard stories from my great-grandfather, who had seen the Titanic’s construction and departure from the city and remembered men and women weeping in the streets when the news broke of the sinking. For him, something had shattered, some certainty had vanished, in that moment. He had never seen his father cry before that morning and he did not remember seeing him do so again. Admittedly, many are unimpressed by the allure of the Titanic to its own or subsequent generations. When he edited the memoirs of one of the Titanic’s surviving crew members, Stewardess Violet Jessop, the late historian John Maxtone-Graham was unmoved by the liner’s appeal, positing, ‘Ostensibly sinkable in life, she has proved positively unsinkable posthumously … My sense is that we should view the vessel as neither symbol nor metaphor but merely an imprudently captained vessel lost at sea. Leave Titanic as she was, one of hundreds of wrecks littering the Atlantic depths.’[15]

With respect to a fine historian, this sounds unduly curmudgeonly. The Titanic has become both cultural touchstone and looking glass. There is an enduring sense that what happened to the Titanic in April 1912 was somehow totemic, a process which began during her construction, when the Titanic was woven into a political debate over the future of the United Kingdom. The Titanic, like her sister ships, was a child of Anglo-American capitalism. In response to the disaster, King George V sent a public telegram of condolence to President Taft in which he expressed how he and his wife were ‘anxious to assure you and the American nation of the great sorrow which we experienced at the terrible loss of life that has occurred among the American citizens, as well as many of my own subjects, by the foundering of the Titanic. Our two countries are so intimately allied by ties of friendship and brotherhood that any misfortunes which affect the one must necessarily affect the other, and on the present terrible occasion they are both equally sufferers.’[16]

The 2012 centenary of the disaster significantly increased the corpus of Titanic literature, with several excellent panoramic accounts of the voyage appearing in print, including the immensely thorough On a Sea of Glass, product of the research and authorship of Tad Fitch, J. Kent Layton and Bill Wormstedt. In the strictest sense, The Ship of Dreams is not solely an account of the Titanic disaster, nor a striving to replace the works of earlier scholars who examined the catastrophe as a whole. As its subtitle suggests, it is an attempt to look at her sinking as a fin de siècle, with a deliberate exploration of the voyage as a microcosm of the unsettled world of the Edwardian upper classes. With the admittedly dubious benefit of hindsight, the Titanic’s story functions like the Lady of Shalott’s mirror, reflecting shadows of the world around it, its splendours and injustices. Since its maiden voyage, the ship has been inextricably linked in popular culture with the question of class. British taste and American money built the Titanic, which had room for more first-class passengers, even as a percentage, than almost any other ship then at sea, and the perceived symbiosis between the Titanic and the elites who designed her and sailed on her is compelling.[17] In the years before the Titanic’s creation, the Industrial Revolution and the corresponding expansions of both the British Empire and the American economy had created new kinds of wealth. Modernity had shaken the class system. There were many different kinds of privilege in pre-war Britain and America, the Titanic’s respective spiritual and economic homelands, and all of these elites would be, as individuals and a class, changed by the decade that lay ahead.

The focus of this narrative is six first-class passengers and their families: a British aristocrat, a patriotic maritime architect, an American plutocrat and his son, a first-generation American philanthropist, and one of the first movie stars. By examining its story through the experiences of these six first-class passengers, it is not only possible to explore the ways in which the upper classes were changing by 1912 but also to reflect on how the isolation created by privilege left many of them unaware or indifferent to the coming danger, until it was too late. Some first-class passengers did not realise anything was seriously wrong with the Titanic until they spotted pyjama legs poking from beneath the trousers of the White Star Line’s normally fastidiously well-dressed Managing Director. Others belatedly guessed that a crisis was looming when they realised that some of the people standing next to them on the Promenade Deck were from Third Class. The Titanic’s only commercial voyage is a window into a world that was by turns victim and author of the tragedies that overtook it.

Sources from the Titanic’s passengers and crew are numerous. There are inevitable problems in reliability arising from eyewitness testimonies by those who were participants in something deeply traumatic. It is not always possible or advisable to construct a precise chronology of what happened between the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg and the rescue of her survivors. One can, however, query the improbable or dismiss the impossible and, by comparing eyewitness accounts with modern research, particularly after the discovery of the Titanic’s wreck, offer a convincing account of the Titanic’s short career.

1
The Lords Act

In a dream I saw territories,

So broad, so rich and handsome,

Lapped by the blue sea,

Rimmed by mountains’ crest.

And at the centre of the territories

Stood a tall oak tree,

Of venerable appearance,

Almost as old as its country.

Storms and weather

Had already taken their toll;

Almost bare of leaves it was,

Its bark rough and shaggy.

Only its crown on high

Had not been blown away,

Woven of parched twigs,

Skeleton of former splendour …

Elisabeth of Bavaria (1837–98), Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, ‘Neujahrsnacht 1887’

FLOWING IN FROM NORTH AND WEST, WEAVING PAST Roman and Celtic monuments of obscure purpose, two streams joined with the River Leven to ring the ‘magnificently wooded gardens’ of Leslie House, the thirty-seven-bedroom country seat of Norman Leslie, 19th Earl of Rothes.[fn1] Nestling in 10,000 acres of ‘excellent arable land’, in 1911 Leslie House dominated the encircling parish, as it had for centuries. The minister of the local Church of Scotland drew his salary from the Earl’s coffers. So complete was the Leslie family’s influence in this part of eastern Scotland that the parish’s ancient recorded name of Fetkill had faded to become the parish of Leslie.

It had been predominantly a benign local absolutism. When an amateur historian arrived in Leslie in the 1830s, in the hope of unearthing grisly anecdotes from the village archives, he was, in his own words, distressed to find ‘nothing generally interesting in them’, with no perceptible drama having occurred in Leslie over the course of the last 300 years. The 800-seat chapel was built, the flax mills spun, whisky houses and inns were opened, closed and renamed, and local legend had it that King James V had written his poem ‘Christ’s Kirk on the Green’, in celebration of a Caledonian pastoral idyll, after his hunting trip near the village in the 1530s.[1]

As the Edwardian era drew to its close, the then Countess of Rothes, Lucy NoÉlle Martha Leslie, had busied herself with the renovation and preservation of Leslie House. Given the spiralling cost of maintaining a stately home, expansion, in the hope of restoring the house to what it had been in the previous centuries, would have been financially lunatic, although even at that the young Countess had sunk nearly £11,000 of her natal family’s money into the preservation and beautification of her husband’s ancestral home.[2] She had married into the Leslie family on a ‘delightfully bright and genial’ day in 1900, with a service at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, near the London townhouse of her parents where the future countess had been born on Christmas Day twenty-two years earlier.[3] Christ’s Nativity gave Lucy Dyer-Edwardes the first of her two middle names, Noël (the spelling on her birth certificate, but commonly spelled in Society columns and by various relatives as Noëlle); the other was Martha. These names and spellings were used variably throughout her life, although by adulthood she increasingly seemed to prefer her middle name of Noëlle. Her education had been entrusted to governesses and tutors who moved with the family as they oscillated between the Kensington house, their château in Normandy and their favourite home, Prinknash Park, the Dyer-Edwardeses’ country seat in Gloucestershire. Prinknash, pronounced ‘Prinnage’ as one of the thousands of anti-phonetic nomenclatures that form the pleasurable minefield of English place names, was originally a Benedictine monastery founded, with spectacularly poor luck on the Order’s part, only thirteen years before England’s break with Rome. Secularised and sold by the Tudors, Prinknash Park had become a beautiful stately pile in idyllic countryside, where Noëlle’s father, Thomas, was free to pursue his fascination with his home’s long-dead original owners and, bit by bit, their Catholic faith, to the distress of his wife, who regarded the Church of Rome as a foreigner’s creed.[4]

An only child and thus sole heiress to a substantial fortune, Noëlle also had the added benefit of blossoming into what one family member called ‘a true English rose beauty’ by the time she turned eighteen and could be launched into the ballrooms and on to the marriage market of the upper classes as part of the debutante Season. After a formal presentation at Buckingham Palace, which marked their ‘coming out’ into Society, the debutantes were, in the words of an Irish peer’s daughter, paraded ‘to shooting and tennis parties, polo matches, tea with the Viceroy in Dublin’ or, in Noëlle’s case, with the who’s who of the London beau monde.[5] The ultimate goal of this whirlwind of merrymaking was a wedding announcement in The Times, but although Noëlle was a popular ‘deb’, she resisted many of the offers of marriage that came her way until she met Norman Leslie, 19th Earl of Rothes, an infantry officer with a ‘pleasant face and manners’, who proposed to her in 1899.[6]

‘One of the most beautiful young women seen at the Court this season’: the Countess of Rothes, shortly after her marriage.

Countess of Rothes. Unknown photographer (The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Married the following spring in ‘a pretty gown of white satin covered with exquisite Brussels lace’ and carrying a bouquet of carnations and white heather, Noëlle honeymooned on the Isle of Wight, before returning to London for her first audience at Court as the new Countess of Rothes.[7] A young, wealthy and good-looking couple, who were clearly very much in love, the Rotheses became a fixture in Society columns. The aristocracy were obsessive points of interest for the British, and certain sections of the American, press – the ‘beautiful people’ of the era, according to a critical study of their long decline.[8] It made the press’s job easier when, like Noëlle, the subject actually was physically beautiful, with even the Washington Post informing its readers, 3,000 miles away, that on her second trip to Buckingham Palace when she curtseyed to the Princess of Wales for the first time as a countess Noëlle was, by general agreement, ‘one of the most beautiful young women seen at the Court this season’.[9]

After their honeymoon, the newlyweds had spent most of their time at the Rotheses’ country house in Devonshire and their mansion in Chelsea, where their first son, Malcolm, was born on 8 February 1902 and the couple attended King Edward VII’s coronation in the capital on 9 August of that year. By the time their second son, John, was born in December 1909, the death of Norman’s great-uncle had freed up Leslie House for their use and Noëlle was enraptured with her husband’s fiefdom. With the piqued pride of a jilted friend who cannot quite believe the world exists beyond the sparkle of London, the Bystander reported that the Countess of Rothes, who had been the toast of the capital at the time of Edward VII’s succession, was now ‘so devoted to her Scottish home, Leslie House, that neither she nor Lord Rothes are often to be seen in London or anywhere else [where] the world of amusement foregathers’.[10] A journalist from the Scotsman observed that within a few years of her residency at Leslie House ‘not a Christmastide passed but the Countess celebrated her birthday, Dec. 25, by treating all the children in the parish to an entertainment in Leslie Town Hall, and presenting each with a Christmas gift’.[11] Convinced of the benefits created by clean air, Noëlle organised trips for young women employed in local factories to visit the beach or the countryside. She funded the creation of Fife’s first ambulance corps, the Countess of Rothes Voluntary Aid Detachment, she paid for the neighbouring parish of Kinglassie’s first clinic, organised parties to raise money for veterans from her husband’s regiment, and two years after John’s birth she began training with the Red Cross as a nurse.

Despite the Bystander’s gripes, London was not quite abandoned by the Rotheses and Noëlle often returned for the Season. She joined the committee that organised the Royal Caledonian Ball, an annual highlight for the capital’s socialites with its insistence on proper Highland attire and music. The funds raised were channelled to the Royal Caledonian Educational Trust’s care for Scottish orphanages.[12] She worked for the YMCA Bazaar and the Children’s Guild; she sat on the foundation boards for the Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital and the Queen Victoria School in Dunblane, which taught the sons of Scottish military personnel, and her passion for preserving a rural way of life in Britain brought her to serve the Village Clubs Association. The young Countess’s charitable activities were a mixture of the more glittering variety of philanthropy and intense hands-on work, and the former solidified many of her relationships with fellow like-minded aristocrats – Evelyn Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, Consuelo Spencer-Churchill (née Vanderbilt), Duchess of Marlborough, Kathleen Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington, and Constance Sackville, the Dowager Countess De La Warr, became close friends. With Millicent Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, Noëlle helped raise a substantial amount of money for the National Milk Hostels’ quest to provide ‘wholesome milk for poor families’, through a series of Society masquerade balls and garden parties, at which tickets were costly and donations firmly encouraged.[13]

One of Noëlle’s philanthropic connections was Louise, Duchess of Fife, who alone of King Edward VII’s daughters had married into the native aristocracy.[14] Through her, Noëlle met, and was sincerely liked by, King Edward’s daughter-in-law Mary, Princess of Wales. Her friendships within the Royal Family added a personal affection to the feudal obligations that brought Norman and Noëlle to most major state occasions, including the funeral of Edward VII, after his death at Buckingham Palace was announced on 6 May 1910. Over the course of the next three days, a quarter of a million people filed past the royal coffin to pay their respects. Despite a reign of only nine years, Edward VII had, in his Foreign Secretary’s observation, grown ‘intensely and increasingly popular’ and grief at his passing was judged stronger than the mourning surrounding Queen Victoria’s death nine years earlier.[15] The first people in the queue to pass King Edward’s bier, ‘guarded by household cavalry, soldiers of the line and men from Indian and Colonial contingents, all in the characteristic pose of mourning, that is with bowed heads with their hands crossed over rifle butts and the hilts of their swords’, had been ‘three women of the seamstress class: very poorly dressed and very reverent’.[16] When the Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was caught leaning against a pillar during the lying in state, courtiers judged ‘his attitude and general demeanour rather offensive’ and concluded that he must have been tipsy to behave so atrociously or, as one of them put it with leaden subtext, ‘I fear he had dined well.’[17]

There were no comparable faux pas at the funeral procession three days later. Many of the mourners had camped out overnight to vouchsafe their place in the crowds, which in places stood 100 yards deep, to watch Edward VII’s body being conducted from Westminster Hall to Windsor. As the catafalque passed Hyde Park, where nearly 300,000 had congregated, cigarettes were stubbed out and a forest of caps rose into the air. After the body, the first being to receive these gestures of deference was Caesar, Edward VII’s white terrier, who with the Queen Mother’s permission trotted by his dead master’s side.[18] Caesar was followed by nine monarchs on horseback, leading perhaps the largest gathering of royalty in history, with one of the emperors joking that this was the first time in his life he had yielded precedence to a canine.[19] Monarchy, the cause in which Edward VII had been such a devout believer, had come to inter ‘the uncle of Europe’. His son and heir, now George V, rode with two of the late King’s brothers-in-law, Denmark’s Frederick VIII and Greece’s George I, with one of his sons-in-law, King Haakon VII of Norway, and with two of his nephews – one by birth, the other by marriage, both heroically moustached – the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. They and their glinting medals were joined by the young Portuguese and Belgian sovereigns, Manuel II and Albert I, both on their respective thrones for less than two years. If Prime Minister Asquith’s slouching had been noted at the lying in state, so too were other things that mattered deeply to the Edwardian upper classes – it was observed by one civil servant that the rotund Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria had the worst seat on a horse of any royal present; the phrase ‘like a sack’ was tossed around with uncharitable accuracy.[20]

Affection rippled through the crowd as the fantastic spectacle of the Golden State Coach trundled into view, carrying four women transformed into black pillars by clouds of mourning lace and veil. Edward VII’s sixty-five-year-old widow, Alexandra of Denmark, one of the most consistently popular members of the British Royal Family since her arrival in 1863, had borne five children and buried two, but she retained the slender beauty of a person twenty or thirty years her junior. The Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law, who watched as Alexandra went by and saw her later at the interment, wrote in her diary that evening, ‘She has the finest carriage and walks better than anyone of our time and not only has she grace, charm and real beauty but all the atmosphere of a fascinating female queen for whom men and women die.’[21] Joined in the coach by her younger sister the Dowager Empress of Russia, her daughter Queen Maud of Norway and her daughter-in-law the new Queen consort, Alexandra was so moved by the sight of the crowds that at Hyde Park she broke with protocol by lifting her veil to bow her head to them, at which point hundreds of people began shouting variations of ‘God bless you!’[22] Most unusually in a country that still prided itself on its proverbial stiff upper lip when in public, the Queen Mother’s gesture produced sobbing from dozens, if not hundreds, of people.[23] Behind her carriage came coaches attended by scarlet-liveried footmen and transporting the men who were one day expected to inherit the thrones of Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro. They were followed by representatives from the reigning houses of Russia, China, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia and Siam. With this dynastic confraternity sat members of the deposed royal houses of France and Brazil, as proudly and conspicuously as if their families still reigned from the Tuileries and São Cristóvão – as though nothing had ever really changed and the republics that had toppled them were an aberration, a nightmarish blip from which the world might soon recover. Noëlle’s husband marched with the dukes, marquesses and earls of Edward’s nobilities, custodians of the hereditary compact that stretched back to before the three British kingdoms and one principality had been ruled by a single house.[fn2] Far behind these princes and potentates, America’s President Theodore Roosevelt rode with delegates sent by other republics, in a horse-drawn carriage without gilding and manned by footmen in a duller colour of livery. The French republic’s Foreign Minister was incandescent at the slight; Roosevelt, at least publicly, insisted that he did not care.[24]

After the funeral: the monarchs who gathered to mourn Edward VII, standing from left to right King Haakon VII of Norway, Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manuel II of Portugal, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, Greece’s King George I and King Albert I of the Belgians. Sitting from left to right are kings Alfonso XIII of Spain, George V of the United Kingdom and Frederick VIII of Denmark.

Sovereign funeral (The Protected Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

With the benefit of hindsight, Edward VII’s funeral took on the appearance of an entire world gathering to bury itself alongside the man whose name had been given to their era, but at the time it appeared instead as the appropriate grief of an immutable order. When a peer who had taken his little daughter to watch the royal funeral asked her to say her prayers before bedtime, she replied, ‘It won’t be any use. God will be too busy unpacking King Edward.’[25]

Nonetheless, Edward VII’s death heightened the general sense of unease in his country. The King’s passing could not have come at a more politically delicate moment for Britain, one that Edward’s subtle influence and considerable experience had, rightly or wrongly, been trusted by many to ameliorate. Seven months before bronchitis took Edward VII, the United Kingdom had collided with a constitutional crisis through the deployment of their veto by the House of Lords, the upper chamber of Parliament consisting of the Lords Spiritual, the bishops of the devolved branches of the Anglican churches in England, Scotland, and Wales, and the Lords Temporal, the hereditary peers. The Lords’ use of the veto was well within their constitutional rights, but their decision to wield it against the Liberal government’s Budget was vibrant testament to the difference between the permissible and the sensible. The House of Lords had not vetoed any financial Bill sent to them by the elected House of Commons since the seventeenth century and so their decision to do so in the winter of 1909 focused attention on whether the veto should have survived into the twentieth.

The new Budget raised taxes substantially on the wealthiest of King Edward’s subjects, ostensibly in furtherance of the aim of providing funds for old age pensions and to meet the cost of naval rearmament. The surtax of 2.5 per cent on the amount by which all incomes of £5,000 or more exceeded £3,000 might seem laughably low today, but the four new kinds of tax levied on land struck the peers as a deliberate piece of class warfare, with the majority of the shrapnel aimed squarely at those whose ancient privileges were tied to their positions as landowners. That taxes were not being raised as significantly on those made rich by the factories of the Industrial Revolution did not go unnoticed; likewise invoked were dark mutterings that the Budget represented a grossly untenable expansion of the state’s powers. The upper chamber’s rejection of the Budget forced the King to call another election at which, incredibly, the Lords seemed to receive some limited form of popular approval when the Conservatives, who dominated the hereditary Lords but had lost their majority in the elected Commons, won back 100 of the seats they had lost in the 1906 election. The Liberals had, however, still won enough to be returned to office and they immediately allied themselves with two smaller parties, Labour and the Irish Parliamentary Party, to outnumber the Tories decisively in the House of Commons. In a victorious mood, the Liberal coalition tabled three resolutions to prevent a repeat of 1909 – firstly, the Lords would lose the right to amend or reject a financial Bill; secondly, the lifespan of a Parliament was decreased from seven years to five, thus enabling more frequent elections; and, finally, the Lords’ veto was to vanish, to be replaced by the right to delay by a maximum of twenty-five months any piece of legislation passed in the Commons.

It was as this dilemma over the greatest change to the British Constitution in centuries accelerated that Edward VII died. Expectations that his reactionary son would lend royal support to the nobility were crushed when George V made it clear that he saw his job as brokering a peaceful settlement rather than favouring one side against the other, whatever his personal opinions might be. Lord Haldane, the Liberal government’s Secretary of State for War, who had initially expected subtle Tory politicking from the new monarch, was touched and impressed by how George V walked the tightrope of his first few steps as monarch: ‘I have in these days come to greatly admire the King. He has shown himself to have far more of his father’s qualities of tact and judgement than I supposed. He is being bombarded by Tory extremists with all sorts of suggestions.’[26] The proposal that George V should withhold the Royal Assent, something which had not been done since the reign of his distant predecessor Queen Anne, was shot down by the King, who rightly predicted it would divide the nation even further.[27]

Noëlle’s husband Norman threw himself into working with the bloc in the Lords who opposed the impending Parliament Bill, or the ‘Lords Act’ as it was more generally known.[28] At first, cold logic dictated that the House of Lords had one immeasurable advantage in their favour: to pass this Bill neutering them, Prime Minister Asquith needed the victims’ acquiescence. They, fairly obviously, were expected to veto the Parliament Bill with savage alacrity, piously arguing that not to do so would ensure that their legacies ‘would be degraded by our failure to be faithful to our trust’.[29] Asquith and his allies threatened to pull the monarchy into the maelstrom by pressuring the King who was, after all, the hereditary guardian of the elected government; they wanted him to flood the House of Lords with an unprecedented number of newly created peerages, all awarded to prominent Liberal sympathisers. Privately, George V regarded Asquith’s plan as ‘a dirty, low-down trick’, but practically he had no intention of seeing the Crown dragged into the mire of an ugly political quarrel, particularly after one fraught prime ministerial audience at the Palace, during which Asquith reiterated that, if his demands were not met, ‘I should immediately resign and at the next election should make the cry, “The King and the Peers against the people.”’[30] This threat to the monarchy reawakened feelings of chivalric loyalty in a sufficient number of peers, including Noëlle’s husband and her friend’s husband, the Duke of Sutherland, who fell on their swords for their king by agreeing either to abstain or vote for the Bill that would castrate them. A less charitable interpretation of their actions might be that they chose to surrender decorously only once they realised they could not win at anything but the most pyrrhic of costs.

The Lords Act was a critical moment in the decline of the British aristocracy, indeed arguably its most significant single event. Their power had been waning since 1832, thanks to a series of prerogative-clipping Reform Acts, while a sustained period of agricultural recession, beginning in the 1870s, had caused irreparable damage to a caste that still generally drew most of its income from the rural economies. There was also a sense of malaise and victimhood within the aristocracy that accelerated, and perhaps secured, their decline, while the rise of capitalism had left many of them confused and, for the first time, familiar with the uncomfortable sensation of not being the chief beneficiaries of the passing of the ages. Noëlle Rothes had a political mind which, like her husband’s, leaned strongly towards Toryism. She was also a supporter of the suffragettes, a cause she shared with her friend Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscountess Castlereagh, whose husband Charles was heir to the marquessate of Londonderry, one of the most prestigious peerages in Ireland. Edith, like Noëlle, was aghast at the Lords Act, not just because it was their class’s legislative equivalent of seppuku, but also for what it meant to the other great crisis of Edwardian Britain – Irish Home Rule, the movement born in the nineteenth century that sought some form of governmental independence for Ireland. Initially, the proposal had called for a Dublin Parliament that had jurisdiction over local matters, within a system that remained tied to Britain through foreign policy, which was to be left to the London Parliament at Westminster, and through the Crown, with the King and his heirs remaining kings and queens of Ireland.

Lady Rothes in the outfit she wore to George V’s coronation.

Countess of Rothes, 1911 (© The Randy Bryan Bigham Collection)

This seemingly mild proposal was hugely popular in Ireland’s southern three provinces and intensely feared in most of Ulster, Ireland’s northern segment. The Irish branch of the aristocracy, often referred to as the Ascendancy, were similarly alarmed, seeing in the Home Rule movement the first whisper of their requiem; as a result, the House of Lords had twice vetoed Home Rule Bills. Now, with that power of destruction softened simply to one of delay, Asquith had promised his Irish nationalist allies a Third Home Rule Bill which this time would almost certainly pass. Plans to prevent Home Rule being granted to any part of Ireland now looked hopeless, resulting in Ulster unionists adjusting their focus to populist agitation in the north of Ireland and, if necessary, arming their supporters as part of the new ‘Save Ulster’ campaign, the de facto headquarters of which were to be the north’s industrial centre, the city of Belfast.

The Parliament Bill was reintroduced to the House of Commons on 21 February 1911 and it had passed all its necessary stages there by 15 May. A brief lull in proceedings ensued, generated by cross-party deference for the kaleidoscope of patriotic festivities surrounding the opening of the Festival of Empire in London and George V’s coronation at Westminster Abbey five weeks later, alongside his Anglo-German wife, Mary of Teck, the first British queen consort to be born in the country since Katherine Parr, four centuries earlier.[31] As the morning of the coronation dawned, with his typical pragmatism the King noted in his diary that it was ‘Overcast and cloudy, with some showers and a strongish cool breeze, but better for the people than great heat’.[32] By the time Noëlle and her husband boarded the train to return north to Leslie House for the start of the grouse-shooting season on 12 August, the King had signed the Bill, the Home Rule crisis was one step closer and the British aristocracy’s greatest remaining form of tangible political clout was dead.

*

Between the Festival of Empire and the coronation, Belfast, the nexus of the coming crisis, celebrated the launch of a ship. Two minutes before she slid into the Lagan river for the first time, the Titanic claimed her sixth victim.[33] As workers wove in and out beneath the 26,000-ton hull, knocking away the massive timber supports which had cradled the Titanic’s belly during her construction, one collapsed on to James Dobbin, shattering his pelvis. The forty-three-year-old shipwright had worked at the Harland and Wolff shipyards for nearly two decades; he was carried to the company car, which rushed him to the Royal Victoria Hospital, recently completed thanks to the fund-raising of Harland and Wolff’s owner William, Lord Pirrie.[34] Pirrie himself, unaware that one of his employees was fatally haemorrhaging, remained in the specially erected stands with the 100,000-strong crowd, an extraordinary turn-out considering it was nearly one-third the size of the total population of Belfast; they had gathered to watch the launching ceremony of what would, within a year, become the largest moving object in human history.[35] Flags spelling out the word ‘SUCCESS’ fluttered from the grandstand.[36] Proceeds from ticket sales for the launch would be gifted to the hospital where James Dobbin was now fighting for his life.[37] Within twenty-four hours, Dobbin was another subject for the grim joke that did the rounds at Harland and Wolff when a colleague perished on the job: ‘He’s gone to another yard.’[38]

Joining Pirrie at the launch were his wife Margaret; his nephew Thomas Andrews, the yard’s Managing Director and a man largely responsible for designing the ship; the slender Joseph Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star Line, the new vessel’s operators; Ismay’s New York-born wife Florence, who had never quite accustomed herself to giving up a life spent shuttling pleasurably between homes on Madison Avenue and Tuxedo Park for residency in the Ismays’ faux-baronial pile outside Liverpool, and the Titanic’s de facto owner, the imposing American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, in declining health and painfully conscious of the inflammation of his nose caused by rhinophyma.[39] Morgan’s cabal of shipping companies, the International Mercantile Marine, had bought the White Star Line as the jewel in its crown in 1903, after several years of bumper revenue for the transatlantic passenger trade.[40] Eight years on, Morgan’s capital had created the Titanic, the second in a three-ship design that would give IMM the largest and most luxurious vessels in the world, operating a weekly run between Britain and America. Her elder sister, the Olympic, would be handed over from builders to owners that same afternoon, in preparation for her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York two weeks later.[41]

Despite their American ownership, White Star ships were still built by a British firm, were staffed predominantly by British crews and flew the British flag. The Titanic was thus the most recent child of Anglo-American cooperation, a product of British sensibilities and American money or, as the Belfast News-Letter put it, a demonstration of how the empire and ‘the mighty Republic in the West’ had produced a ‘pre-eminent example of the vitality and the progressive instincts of the Anglo-Saxon race’.[42] Keeping with White Star tradition of no inaugural speech or shattering-on-the-bow champagne, at 12.13 p.m. a firework streaked into ‘the glow of the turquoise sky, from which the piercing rays of the sun descended, making the heat exceedingly trying’.[43] With the signal given, two foremen turned the release valve. It took sixty-two seconds for the Titanic’s 882-foot hull to move through 21 tons of lubricating tallow as she ‘glided down to the river with a grace and dignity which for the moment gave one the impression that she was conscious of her own strength and beauty’.[44]

‘Down to the river with a grace and dignity’: the launch of the Titanic.

Launch of the RMS Titanic at Belfast, 31 May 1911 (By kind permission of Daniel Klistorner from his personal collection)

Cheers erupted from the onlookers, hats and handkerchiefs were waved in the air; small river craft sounded their sirens, as chains created enough drag to stop the Titanic slamming into the other side of the river.[45] With no funnels or masts and empty interiors, she came to a gentle stop in the water and attention turned to the completed Olympic, which the Titanic would one day so closely resemble. A journalist from the Shipbuilder, the industry’s most respected trade journal, waxed lyrical about White Star’s new flagship, half as heavy again as the previous record holder, the Cunard Line’s Mauretania:

The Olympic is the most beautiful boat ever built on Queen’s Island. The grace and harmony of her lines were admired by the thousands of enthusiasts who saw her on the day of her launch, but since then the work on her has been advanced, and her four massive funnels seem to add immeasurably to her splendour and dignity. Her majestic proportions and her unparalleled dimensions tend to enhance her picturesqueness and power, and one can well understand the interest with which the builders and owners are anticipating her maiden voyage … In her equipment she possesses features that are not to be found on any other boat.[46]

Among the new features celebrated in the press, the Olympic offered the first lift for second-class passengers and the first swimming pool at sea, in First Class.[47] Three weeks later, she arrived to a rapturous welcome in New York, returning eastward on 28 June with a record-breaking number of first-class passengers.[48] Both the Olympic and the Titanic had nearly as many berths for first-class travellers as for Third, a reflection of the growing number of wealthy people travelling across the North Atlantic on a regular basis, apparently justifying the White Star Line’s investment in the future earning potential of the privileged. For all the talk of an assault on the established order, the world spun onwards, simultaneously contented in the accumulated treasures of a century of economic progress and tense at the uncertainty of what lay ahead. When the grouse-shooting season was over, the King and Queen sailed to India for a theatrical and manufactured ceremony at which they were crowned Emperor and Empress of India. One peer’s daughter in attendance marvelled at the maharajahs’ jewels as ‘a thing to dream of – great ropes of pearls and emeralds as large as pigeon eggs such as I have never seen before’, though she thought it ‘so strange to see them adorning men’.[49] The old boys’ network flourished in the King’s absence when, to the surprise of many, including himself, the recently elected MP Sir Robert Sanders was invited to become one of the Conservative and Unionist whips. In his diary, he stated with crushing self-honesty, ‘I believe I owe it mainly to the fact that I was a successful Master of the Devon and Somerset [Staghounds].’[50]

In Russia, the Tsar’s eldest daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga, made her debut into Society with a 140-guest candlelight supper at her family’s Crimean summer palace. At the ball that followed, wearing her first floor-length evening gown, its sash pinned by roses, the Grand Duchess was partnered in her first waltz by her father. The sixteen-year-old had her first sip of champagne and one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting rhapsodised over ‘the music of the unseen orchestra floating in from the rose garden like a breath of its own wondrous fragrance. It was a perfect night, clear and warm, and the gowns and jewels of the women and the brilliant uniforms of the men made a striking spectacle under the blaze of the electric lights.’[51]

In Austria, hat-wear changed as usual with the Vienna Derby marking the point at which it became de rigueur for gentlemen to switch from derbies to summer boaters, while later in the Season the country’s octogenarian Emperor, Franz Josef, was seen in a rare public good mood when he visited the village of Schwarzau for the wedding of his great-nephew, the twenty-four-year-old Archduke Karl, to Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma.[52] That evening, cheering villagers processed in torchlight celebration past the imperial couple as a prelude to a fireworks display over the castle.[53] Born in Italy to a French family, educated at a Catholic boarding school in Britain, fluent in six languages, walked down the aisle by the Duke of Madrid, married by the Pope’s personal representative, granddaughter of a king of Portugal, great-great-granddaughter of the last Bourbon king of France, first cousin of the Queen consort of the Belgians and sister-in-law of the Bulgarian Tsar, the new Archduchess Zita was a reassuring return to marital form for a Habsburg heir, after the first in line had caused collective palpitations a decade earlier by proposing to a commoner.[54] She had been a countess, but to the Habsburgs he might as well have walked up the aisle with Rosa Luxemburg.

As summer bled into autumn and winter, the great migrations began. After ‘two terrible years’ watching her marriage disintegrate under the strain of her husband’s mental ill-health, the American novelist Edith Wharton went skiing in St Moritz, where she was joined by her friend, the Italian nobleman Prince Alfonso Doria-Pamphilj.[55] The new American Ambassador to Germany, a former vice-president of Carnegie Steel, invited the Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad and his wife to visit him and the Consul General in Berlin. Crossing the Atlantic not long after them was the co-owner of Macy’s department store and his wife, fleeing the Manhattan blizzards for the restorative warmth of Cannes. They arrived in France as another of their compatriots was leaving it: the London dinner-party circuit had it that the American socialite Gladys Deacon had quit Paris to rent an apartment at 11 Savile Row in London, above Huntsman the Tailor, fuelling rumours of a reconciliation with her unhappily married lover, the Duke of Marlborough.[56]

Noëlle and Lord Rothes spent a week as guests at a hunting party given by their friend the Marquess of Bute and they hosted their own autumnal shooting weekends at Leslie House as usual.[57] It was a splendid home for entertaining and despite the recent financial and political pressures on the aristocracy, to outward appearances it remained as majestic and tranquil as it had been for centuries. Leslie House had, within a generation of its construction in the seventeenth century, been referred to as a palace by visitors, who favourably compared it to William III’s residence at Kensington Palace and his controversial imitation of Versailles, for which he had ordered the demolition of half of the original Tudor wings at Hampton Court Palace.[58] Leslie House had boasted two courtyards, an entrance hall ‘pav’d with black and white Marble’, and one of the finest private libraries in Great Britain. Then, early in the reign of George III, much of that splendour went up in flames.[59] Snow was falling as three-quarters of Leslie House burned in the night air, immolating one of the courtyards and the entirety of the library. Some sources give the date of the fire as Christmas Day 1763; others say it was three days later, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Either way, there is a general agreement of a Yuletide conflagration.

One feature that survived the 1763 Leslie House fire was a magnificent gallery, three feet longer than its counterpart at Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Royal Family’s official residence in Scotland. There, in paint and tapestry and silver, unfurled the genealogical and political history of the Leslies. Like most ancient aristocratic families, the Leslies have their own contested origin myth in the mist-shrouded centuries of document-deficient antiquity. In their case, that a Flemish or Hungarian baron called Bartholomew arrived in Scotland in the entourage of Margaret of Wessex, an eleventh-century English princess and subsequent saint, who had been raised in exile in Hungary before her marriage to King Malcolm III, and a series of legends arose about his subsequent career in Scotland.[fn3] Much of the more lovely nonsense associated with Bartholomew’s life was politely disbelieved by many of the later Leslies themselves who, in 1910, submitted evidence to The Scots Peerage that their first recorded grant of land had arrived at some respectably distant juncture in the 1170s, when a Malcolm Leslie, traditionally described as Bartholomew’s son, had been a recipient of royal largesse from William the Lion, King of Scots.[60]

From there, a fusion of family legend and historical evidence placed a Leslie on the Crusades, another pledging allegiance to Robert the Bruce in his quarrel with England’s Edward Longshanks, and others representing Scotland on diplomatic missions to the courts of Pope John XXII and King Edward III of England. A spirit of ferocious devotion to the Crown, seemingly equally nurtured by loyalty and ambition, had pushed the Leslies upwards as the centuries wore on. The first recorded mention of them in possession of the earldom of Rothes dates from March 1458, after they supported King James II in his torturous dispute over the earldom of Mar. In the next generation, they continued to aid the consolidation of royal authority under the Stewart monarchs, who ruled Scotland from 1371 to 1714. The 3rd Earl of Rothes fell in combat at the Battle of Flodden, while supporting James IV’s failed invasion of England; his son, the 4th Earl, himself tussled unsuccessfully with Henry VIII’s armies, this time at the Battle of Solway Moss in 1542, but survived to attend James V at his deathbed, and later represented his kingdom at the Parisian wedding of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the future King François II of France. That Earl’s death, on his way home, from food poisoning was, probably erroneously, attributed to the French family of Scotland’s Queen Mother, Marie de Guise, in retribution for the Leslies’ vigorous involvement in the assassination of her adviser, Cardinal Beaton. The dagger used to stab His Eminence was still, in 1911, mounted in the Leslie House gallery, next to a portrait of the accidentally poisoned Earl’s son, the 5th Earl of Rothes, who had ended the family’s brief flirtation with disloyalty by holding his allegiance to Mary, Queen of Scots, long after her deposition and despite finding themselves on different sides of the confessional aisle created by the Protestant Reformation.

A generation later, when Mary’s son, James VI, inherited the English and Irish thrones as their King James I, the Leslies’ fidelity to the reigning house eventually catapulted them into the national trauma that English histories refer to as ‘the English Civil War’, but which might more properly be remembered by its British name of ‘the War of the Three Kingdoms’, given its appalling impacts on all the constituent parts of what later became the United Kingdom. The Leslies supported King Charles I even as the monarchy entered freefall. Also mounted on their gallery walls was the Sword of State carried by the 7th Earl at the first coronation of King Charles II at Scone in 1651, after Scotland had refused to accept the legality of Charles I’s execution or the English republican regime that had arisen in its wake. Ruinously fined for their loyalty to the deposed royals, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought the Leslies back into the sunlight of governmental favour. Next to the portrait of the 7th Earl and his monarchy-affirming sword, the gallery boasted, near one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, a likeness of Mary of Modena, the last Catholic queen consort in Britain.[61] In recognition of their steadfastness to the royalist cause, Charles II had granted the ‘able and magnificent’ 7th Earl of Rothes the unusual honour of allowing his title to descend through or to the female line. This royal gratitude had prevented the Leslies from stuttering into oblivion thanks to the lack of a Y-chromosome, on which rock so many other noble families had perished. Through the 7th Earl’s overzealous defence of royal-led Anglicanism in Scotland in the seventeenth century, his immediate descendants’ refusal to support either of the Jacobite rebellions in the eighteenth, or the service of the 10th Earl – rendered for the gallery’s posterity by the brush of Joshua Reynolds – who had accompanied George II as one of his generals to the Battle of Dettingen, the Leslies had remained conspicuously loyal to the British monarchy, regardless of the head of the family’s gender. Also in their gallery was a beautiful old tapestry that depicted the mythical, fatal voyage of Leander, crossing a darkened, storm-struck stretch of sea in pursuit of Hero.[62]

Clan Leslie and the Rothes earldom had a history that tied them to the developments of the Scottish kingdom, then Great Britain, the United Kingdom and its empire. They had faced many obstacles over the centuries and it was clear that after 1911 they would face more. To maintain Leslie House, not only had Noëlle invested a substantial amount of her own inheritance but Norman had sold various parcels of land and considered other income-generating projects. After the frantic social whirl surrounding the coronation, Norman planned to skip the next London Season with a prolonged trip to America where he would undertake a fact-finding mission for the British government and also explore the possibility of investing in the New World.

2
The Sash My Father Wore

Cursèd be he that curses his mother. I cannot be

Anyone else than what this land engendered me:

… I can say Ireland is hooey, Ireland is

A gallery of fake tapestries,

But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed,

The woven figure cannot undo its thread.

Louis MacNeice, ‘Valediction’ (1934)

IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING OF TUESDAY 2 April 1912, before the electric trams with their recently added roofs commenced their shuttle into the city centre, a Renault motor car waited on tree-lined Windsor Avenue in south Belfast.[1] The residential street, full of alternating white and redbrick mansions, ran between the Lisburn and Malone roads, the axis of upwardly mobile prosperity that was both child and parent of the city’s most affluent suburb. Like Windsor Avenue’s homage to Britain’s most famous castle, many of Malone’s public spaces had adopted royally inspired names which proclaimed the area’s loyalty to the throne along with, perhaps, a faint sense of self-identified social kinship with its incumbent. Twenty years earlier, the residents had ditched the workaday address of Stockman’s Lane, at the bottom of the Malone Road, to rechristen it Balmoral Avenue, in a nod to Queen Victoria’s favourite home.[2] Near by, various streets and stations were named in honour of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, William IV’s queen; Belvoir and Deramore honoured a late Tory baron; the Annadale embankment, which lines the slow-flowing waters of the Lagan river where young medical students practised their rowing on weekend mornings, was named for another deceased local aristocrat, Anne Wellesley, Countess of Mornington.[3] Later, when a school was founded near the Annadale embankment, it was called Wellington after Anne Wellesley’s son, the 1st Duke of Wellington.[4] Shaftesbury Square, the urban gateway to south Belfast, bore the name of an earldom with historic influence in the north of Ireland, while multiple streets and buildings paid tribute to the Chichester family and their marquessate of Donegall.[fn1] There were various parks, roads and avenues with the prefix of Osborne in honour of Queen Victoria’s former summer house on the Isle of Wight, while Sans Souci Park, near the top of the Malone Road, widened the geography of homage, if not the class, by choosing as its inspiration the baroque palace built for King Friedrich the Great of Prussia.

In neighbouring Stranmillis, the suburb that intersects Malone, newly completed streets were given the name Pretoria to commemorate imperial victories in southern Africa. On the other side of the river, the Ormeau neighbourhood created roads called Agra, Baroda and Delhi, after areas of the British Empire in India. Botanic, the final stretch of land before south Belfast gave way to the city centre, contained new avenues after seventeenth-century British generals or, like Candahar Street, to celebrate successful colonial expeditions into Afghanistan.[5]

From his home on Windsor Avenue, Thomas Andrews, the thirty-nine-year-old Managing Director of the Harland and Wolff shipyards, stepped into his waiting car before it turned towards the Malone Road.[6] He left behind his wife of four years, Helen, and their two-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Andrews, who would be gone for several weeks supervising the maiden voyage of the Titanic, was ambitious and almost fanatically dedicated to his career, but when he travelled he suffered dreadfully from homesickness, particularly after the arrival of little Elizabeth.[7] One of the five servants they employed was a nurse for the toddler.[8] His car turned left on to Malone to continue its journey towards east Belfast, where the Titanic was docked in preparation for her sea trials.

Thomas Andrews, c.1912.

Thomas Andrews Jr (Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photos)

Tall and softly handsome, with a trim build, dark hair and brown eyes, Andrews – known as Tommy to his family and closest friends – had the elegant manners and unfailing kindness with which even the most exacting of aristocratic etiquette experts would have struggled to find fault. His work in the shipyards brought him into regular contact with men from all walks of life – be they industrialists, like his uncle Lord Pirrie, or semi-literate labourers from east Belfast, some of whom brought their seven- or eight-year-old sons to work in the shipyard because they could not afford to send them to school. Andrews’ total lack of snobbery, his sense of fairness and his gentle tone in conversation endeared him to most of his colleagues and helped spare him from accusations of nepotism.[9]

As Andrews’ automobile moved down the gentle slope that marked the end of the Malone Road, he passed the still-slumbering accommodation of the 400 or so students of Methodist College.[10] A boarding school with a white Maltese cross for its crest, ‘Methody’, as it was known by locals and alumni, had a stellar reputation for academics and sports. Two weeks earlier, its rugby team had competed in the Ulster Schools’ Cup Final, a match held annually in Belfast on St Patrick’s Day, in which the two best squads in the north of Ireland played against one another. That March, rather gratifyingly for Tommy Andrews, Methody had played and lost 11–3 against his own alma mater, the Royal Belfast Academical Institute.[11]

‘Inst’, as it was and is referred to for reasons of ease, laziness and affection, lay less than a mile from Methody. Tommy Andrews, like his brothers John, James and William, was proud of their status as ‘Old Instonians’, regularly contributing to fund-raising for the school sports and prizes. Cricket had been one of Andrews’ favourite clubs as a pupil and he retained a keen interest in the sport.[12] Between them, Methody, Inst and Victoria, the all-girls school which then had its campus halfway between them, were consciously turning out sons and daughters of the British Empire.[13] It was one generation’s duty to prepare the next. In east Belfast, the late textile magnate Henry Campbell had left a bequest to found an all-boys college that bore his name. Every year, Campbell College, which operated an Officer Training Corps as part of its extracurricular activities, celebrated Empire Day, during which the head prefect would plant a tree in the school grounds, symbolising with each passing year and each new tree the empire’s continued growth and the shelter it would provide to its obedient subjects. Its founder’s will stated that Campbell was ‘to be used as a College for the purpose of giving there a superior liberal Protestant education’ and, flowing from all the schools that dotted the emerging or established suburbs of middle- and upper-class Belfast, there was a steady stream of young men and women who would ‘Fear God and serve the King’.[14]

Tommy Andrews had benefited from this kind of education that inculcated Protestantism, patriotism and propriety in almost equal measure. Like many residents of Malone in 1912, Andrews displayed the easy-going grace popularly associated with the patrician classes but, again like Malone itself, he was in reality a product rendered in its final form by the plutocracy, the expansion of the British Empire and its Industrial Revolution. The other prominent families in Malone were, like Andrews, tied to trade. His wife, Helen, came from the Barbour family of linen merchants. The Johnstons and MacNeices had been made rich by tea; the Andrewses’ immediate neighbours, the Corrys, were in timber. The Stevensons ran Ireland’s largest printing press and its second-largest glue factory. The McDonnells, father, son and grandson, were lawyers. Most of Maryville Park’s grand homes were occupied by Andrews’ similarly well-paid colleagues from Harland and Wolff. The former south Belfast home of Lord Deramore was now rented by the Wilsons, who had made their fortune in the property boom of the 1890s. By 1912, the aristocracy’s influence in the day-to-day life of Belfast looked set to contract to matters of taste and prestige by proxy.

It was a trend in time that had worked in the Andrewses’ favour. Tommy had learned to ride to hounds, becoming a skilled horseman and hunter, and he had played cricket at his local club – where his love of the sea earned him the nickname ‘the Admiral’ – but despite these activities neither he nor his ancestors had ever been part of the Ascendancy.[15] The family had been based in the village of Comber, 11 miles outside Belfast, since the seventeenth century, when another Thomas Andrews had established the local corn mill, which turned near their pretty house, Ardara, product of its profits. By the time Tommy Andrews was born at Ardara in 1873, the house and its lawns had acquired a mature grace, reached by an avenue lined with rhododendrons leading down to the gleaming waters of Strangford Lough.[16] The Andrewses’ sustained upward trajectory over the course of the nineteenth century had been part of Britain’s quiet revolution in local government, as the increasing complexity and size of modern bureaucracy saw power shift permanently from the hands of the landed classes to those of useful local businessmen, who became loyal politicians. Along with ownership of the mill and serving as Chairman of the Belfast and County Down Railway Company, Tommy’s father was High Sheriff of the county, Chairman of the Down County Council and President of the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association.[17] His uncle, William Andrews, was a judge in the Irish High Court; both had been made Privy Councillors during the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.[18] Tommy’s maternal uncle, Lord Pirrie, remained Chairman of Harland and Wolff while being twice elected Lord Mayor of Belfast and elevated to the peerage for his philanthropy, and Edward VII had approved his induction into the Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick, a chivalric order of knighthood once reserved for sons of the Hibernian nobility.[19]

Tommy’s car progressed from the quiet avenues of Malone to a city centre dominated by sprawling temples to commerce. During working hours, this part of Belfast was a hive of activity, described by The Industries of Ireland as a place of ‘crowded rushing thoroughfares [where] we find the pulsing heart of a mighty commercial organisation, whose vitality is ever augmenting, and whose influence is already world-wide’.[20] No other town in Ireland had benefited so significantly and unambiguously from the successes of the British Empire. As Britannia’s boundaries were set ‘wider still and wider’, Belfast had boomed and its growth seemed only to accelerate. Its population had risen seventeen-fold over the nineteenth century, with the biggest spurt occurring in the final twenty-five years, when it had doubled.[21] From a town that still, in 1800, had operated as a fiefdom of the marquesses of Donegall, Belfast had, by 1900, become one of the largest urban centres in the United Kingdom, dominated and defined by its industries.[22] Granted city status in 1888, a mere three years later Belfast had outstripped Dublin in terms of population and living standards.[23] To celebrate, Belfast’s City Council, with the hungry and gaudy vitality of a newly enfranchised adolescent, approved the construction of a Grand Opera House, where audiences sat beneath a dome decorated with paintings of cheerfully obedient life throughout Queen Victoria’s Indian dominions as goldleafed elephants gazed down from the front-facing corners of the proscenium arch.[24]

The Opera House had been part of a building mania that swept Belfast in the twenty years preceding the Titanic’s construction. The spires of the seven-year-old Protestant St Anne’s Cathedral were visible as Tommy Andrews’ car turned right from his former school to motor down Wellington Place and pass the new City Hall, a looming quadrangle in Portland stone, with ornamental gardens, stained-glass windows, turrets and a soaring copper dome. Completed two years after St Anne’s, the City Hall had cost more than £350,000, a sum that had not been without controversy, especially for some of the city’s more parsimonious Presbyterians. But there were many more, including Belfast’s Chamber of Commerce, who had applauded the council’s extravagance on the grounds that a powerhouse like Belfast, ‘a great, wide, vigorous, prosperous, growing city’, needed to be represented with appropriate splendour.[25]

As a younger man, Andrews had been there to witness the surge of capitalist confidence in Belfast’s heartlands. The journey from Comber to the city was too long for the early-morning starts required by the shipyards, so after he had secured his apprenticeship aged sixteen Andrews became a boarder in the home of a middle-aged dressmaker and her sister on Wellington Place.[26] From there, he had witnessed the construction of the City Hall in the same years as Belfast inaugurated its new Customs House, a Water Office built to imitate an Italian Renaissance palazzo, and four banking headquarters.

Belfast’s Donegall Square North. Robinson and Cleaver is on the left.

Panoramic view from the corner of Donegall Square West, by Robert John Welch (© National Museums NI)

Directly in front of City Hall, between its imposing entrance and its wrought-iron gates, a statue of Queen Victoria stared unseeing towards the sandstone turrets of Robinson and Cleaver, one of the most expensive and prestigious department stores in the United Kingdom. Inside the ‘Harrods of Ireland’, 3,000 square feet of polished mirrors lined the shop’s interiors, spread over four working floors, all connected by white marble staircases, at the top of which stood statues of Britannia.[27] Belfast’s well-heeled customers flocked to Robinson and Cleaver, as did prosperous members of county Society, who were prepared to pay for goods shipped ‘from every corner of His Majesty’s Empire’. Reflected in Robinson and Cleaver’s mirrors were busts of the store’s most august clients, including the late Lady Lily Beresford and Hariot Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, one of the bluest of the Ascendancy’s blue bloods as Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, who had used her time in India as wife of the British Viceroy to campaign for better medical care for Indian women and introduce Robinson and Cleaver’s produce to the Maharajah of Cooch-Behar, who now also stood beside her in bust form, along with Queen Victoria’s German grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his consort, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, who had temporarily overcome her pathological hatred of Britain to place repeated orders with the firm.[28]

Many of the craftsmen who worked on the construction and decoration of Robinson and Cleaver, and then on the interiors of City Hall, had also laboured on the ships designed by Tommy Andrews for Harland and Wolff.[29] His car passed the earliest rising of these workers as they travelled on foot, by bicycle or by tram over the bridges linking the city centre to the east, Queen’s Island, and the shipyards. The majority of these dawn risers were on their way to work on Andrews’ latest and grandest creation, the Britannic, whose hull had been laid amid the driving Belfast winter rains six months earlier.[30] As the journey of a million miles begins with a single step, the foundation of the largest ship built on British soil for the next two decades was already taking shape in her embryonic form. Britannic was not scheduled to grace the waters of Belfast Lough for another two years and her maiden voyage to New York was timetabled for the spring of 1915, at which point she would become the flagship of the White Star Line, completing the Olympic-class.[31]

End of the day: workers from Harland and Wolff with an under-construction Titanic in the background.

Queen’s Island workmen homeward bound, by Robert John Welch (© National Museums NI)

The relationship with White Star Line was a source of pride to many in Belfast, which was hardly surprising considering the employment and revenue it generated, both of which were regularly cited in speeches by city officials and businessmen as among the many reasons for Belfast’s superiority over other Irish cities, a conclusion with which Andrews wholeheartedly concurred.[32] Even in the very poorest parts of Belfast, all houses were single-occupancy units for families. Unlike Dublin or Cork, Belfast’s leaders had worked hard to avoid the horrors associated with the special strain of poverty bred in tenements. Alongside the thick brogue of natives, Scottish and English accents could be heard in the jostling crowds that poured from the Protestant working-class neighbourhoods, their owners lured to Ulster by promises of affordable, good-quality housing through jobs at Harland and Wolff, in one of Belfast’s 192 linen manufacturers or in its behemoth-like rope or tobacco factories.[33] Belfast had one of the lowest urban rates of infant mortality in the British Empire; with eighty-two state-funded schools, it also had the highest rate of literacy for any area in Ireland, and it implemented provisions for the care of the deaf and dumb long before most other towns.[34] As its two synagogues, built by the migrant-turned-merchant-turned-city mayor Sir Otto Jaffe, attested, Belfast was also so far the only section of Ireland to welcome and nurture a Jewish community.[35] In the eyes of the loyal, all this was abundant proof that Belfast had benefited from the spirit of dynamic, self-fulfilling conservatism that guided its civic authorities and indelibly separated it – in spirit and soon, God willing, in law – from the south.[36]

Five years earlier, this march of progress and prosperity had been interrupted by strikes that erupted in Harland and Wolff and then spread to the adjacent dockyards. For Protestants to protest was, by 1907, an event so remarkable it shocked even seasoned observers. The dock riots erupted as work on the first of the Olympic-class was due to commence. Tommy Andrews, while concerned about his timetable being disrupted, was also protective of the workers who turned his projects into a reality.[37] He was appalled by some of the conditions in the yard, particularly on the gantries, where men too often fell to their deaths, lost limbs in preventable accidents or were dismissed when they burned themselves badly on the rivets. His argument that paternalism must remedy the situation before socialism seized it had been ignored by his superiors and by his uncle Lord Pirrie, though he took no pleasure in being proved right.[38] At the height of the dispute, about 3,500 workers were on strike, most of them organised by the charismatic trade union leader James Larkin.[39] Initially, the demonstrations had looked for support from their cousins across the Irish Sea – the 1907 dock protesters voiced many left-wing sentiments, but they did so in the spirit of British social democracy, expressing implicit faith in British trade unionism, rather than Irish republicanism. However, cries of ‘Go back to work!’ and even ‘Traitors!’ grew louder after the strike’s opponents, aided by most of Belfast’s newspapers, painted the protest as furthering a crypto-nationalist agenda which could lethally weaken Ulster’s economy, ultimately leaving it at the mercy of the Home Rule movement. These conspiracy politics were given regrettable credibility by the behaviour of certain Irish nationalist politicians, particularly west Belfast’s Joseph Devlin, who actively attempted to turn the protests into displays of anti-British sentiment.[40] The strike collapsed and Larkin left Ireland, repulsed by the sight of people in working-class districts taking to their streets to celebrate the strike’s defeat. The passing years did not lessen the contempt directed at those who had betrayed the side by striking. Weeks after the Titanic’s completion, 600 ‘rotten Prods’ were driven from their jobs at Harland and Wolff by their own colleagues for daring to sympathise with left-wing movements that allegedly threatened the productivity of the yard and, through it, Ulster’s unchecked evolution further and further away from the agrarian economies of the southern three provinces.[41] Incredibly, given its position as a major industrial city, there was no serious interest in trade unionism from Belfast for another twenty years. It was seen as somehow disloyal, destructive of the greater good. Nor were the 600 rotten Prods of 1912 expelled alone. At the same time, a sectarian pogrom in employment forced the shipyard’s 2,400 Catholic employees to quit.[42]

Belfast’s growth was as remarkable as it was undeniable, but to pretend that the fruits of that progress were evenly distributed is absurd. There were no laws in Edwardian Ulster that mandated discrimination against the province’s Catholic minority, but equally there were none to stop it and this left Protestants free to hire those of their own preference who were, overwhelmingly, their co-religionists. Protestant jobs were often marginally better paid and nearly always significantly more secure than a northern Catholic’s. As the Home Rule crisis accelerated, so too did Protestants’ antipathy towards their Catholic neighbours, resulting in appalling events like the aforementioned expulsion of thousands from their jobs at Harland and Wolff. Belfast’s reputation for anti-Catholic discrimination was so widespread that San Francisco’s civic authorities refused to name one of their streets in the city’s honour, despite a petition from Ulster-born immigrants.[43]

From the route Andrews’ car took, just visible on the horizon was the spire of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, another product of the construction bonanza, but one which a man like Tommy would likely never see save from a distance. Located in west Belfast, Holy Redeemer was described at the time of its completion as ‘a noble Church in the most Catholic quarter of a bitterly Protestant city’.[44] The two communities’ decisions to congregate themselves into working-class neighbourhoods in the west and east was a prophylactic kind of social engineering, which, like all such things, had the potential to fail.

Religion gave a toxic, defining flavour to this political quarrel. It was true, as many in the north of Ireland so strenuously insisted, that the troubles of their region were not caused by religion, in so far as no one ever rioted in defence of consubstantiation or tossed a brick over whether there are seven sacraments or two. But that is to miss the point, in that religious affiliation defined the boundaries of division. Although it was not universally true, overwhelmingly Protestants favoured retaining union with Britain, while Catholics hoped for the opposite. The years preceding the Titanic’s construction had witnessed an intensification of this trend. A series of mid- and late nineteenth-century evangelical missions into the working-class areas of Belfast had deliberately solidified a view of Catholicism as backward, tyrannical and superstitious.[45] Just as they pointedly began to eschew the adjective ‘Irish’ in favour of ‘northern Irish’ or simply ‘British’, many of the more zealous Ulster Protestants began to redefine the etymology of the word ‘Christian’ to mean axiomatically, and solely, ‘Protestant’. When a Catholic converted to Protestantism, the phrase ‘He has become a Christian’ was launched with depressing frequency. Meanwhile, the Gaelic Revival, a rejuvenated and sustained interest in the Celtic culture of Ireland, created a series of societies that defined being Irish in opposition to that which was British, right the way down to what sports should be played.[46] Some of these groups made an effort to reach out to Irish Protestants, others made an effort to do the exact opposite by helping ‘to embed the myth that Ireland was a religiously and ethnically homogeneous society’.[47] This idea that to be Irish meant being Catholic played into the hands of unionists in the north who claimed that a compromise with Home Rule would be tantamount to collective suicide, particularly since unionists insisted that the moderate proposals for Home Rule would inevitably result in full independence. The nineteenth century’s torturous preoccupation with race birthed apparently ‘scientific’ justification of each side’s respective prejudice; the ‘Two Nations Theory’ insisted that there were insuperable racial, moral, cultural and intellectual differences between Irish Catholics and Protestants. Even academic publications like the Ulster Journal of Archaeology promulgated the idea that Irish Protestants, particularly those in the north, were essentially Anglo-Saxon, while Irish Catholics were predominantly Celtic, giving both a distinct set of characteristics which made political union between them an absurdity. Protestants were hard-working, law abiding and stalwart; Catholics, as Celts, were lazy, dishonest and prone to drunkenness. Nationalists often accepted this racial hogwash, but rejigged it to class Hibernian Catholics as hospitable, artistic and passionate, while Protestants were dour, miserly and cruel.[48]

By the time the Titanic had been completed, the question of Irish independence, whether in part or in full, was the blood seeping beneath a closed door in Belfast. Fear of it preoccupied everybody, including Thomas Andrews. In his own political views, Andrews was described by family friends as ‘an Imperialist, loving peace and consequently in favour of an unchallengeable Navy. He was a firm Unionist, being convinced that Home Rule would spell financial ruin to Ireland.’ However, he was uneasy with the perceptible drift towards Irish politics being governed by ‘passion rather than by means of reasoned argument’.[49] Many Ulster Protestants sincerely believed, and were proved correct in their suspicions, that Irish independence would constitute a major triumph for Catholicism in the island, with an Irish government choosing to grant special status to the Catholic faith.[50] Ironically, the north’s fevered insistence on absenting itself from independence was the behaviour of Laius after the Oracle since Ulster’s secession would mean the removal of the majority of Irish Protestants from a future Irish state, whatever the strength of that state’s ties to Britain, thus enabling many of the events they claimed to fear. As a southern lawyer practising in Belfast tried in vain to warn his unionist friends, if the predominantly Protestant north separated from the predominantly Catholic south, ‘you would have not one, but two, oppressed minorities’.[51]

Protestant fears of being outnumbered and thus overruled by their Catholic compatriots were lent unfortunate credence by Pope Pius X’s issuing of the Ne Temere decree of 1907. The decree ruled that any marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant was invalid unless it was witnessed by a priest, implicit within that stipulation and often explicit in its application being a priest’s refusal to officiate unless an undertaking was given that any children born to that couple were raised Catholic. Ne Temere seemed particularly unhelpful in the Irish context because it negated a papal rescript, issued by Pius VI in 1785, which had allowed for the legality of mixed marriages in Ireland, even if they were not solemnised before a Catholic priest.[52] Viewed as pastoral care by its defenders and lambasted by critics as prejudice by stealth, Ne Temere resulted four years later in the McCann case, when the marriage between a Belfast resident called Alexander McCann, a Catholic, and his Protestant wife Agnes fell apart. A private sorrow became a public circus when McCann’s local priest allegedly encouraged the separation and certainly helped Mr McCann gain sole custody of his children, despite the fact that the McCanns had married before the publication of Ne Temere. Agnes McCann went to her local minister, Reverend William Corkey, who had already regularly waxed apoplectic in his sermons about the ‘foul’ Ne Temere decree and saw in the McCann case the inevitable fruition of Pius X’s edict.[53] As such things often did in Edwardian Belfast, the issue moved from the pulpit to the press to protests, the latter of which spread from Belfast to London, Dublin and Glasgow.[54] At one rally, the McCanns’ marriage certificate was held up before the crowd, as a Presbyterian clergyman roared, ‘I hold in my hand a marriage certificate bearing the seal of the British Empire, and recording the marriage of Alexander McCann and Agnes Jane Barclay. This certificate declares that according to the law of Britain these two are husband and wife. This Papal decree says their marriage is “no marriage at all”. Which law is going to be supreme in Great Britain?’[55] The pursuit of the answer had already fractured lifelong friendships and it looked, in 1912, as if it had the potential to destabilise an empire.

*

As he boarded the Titanic, Andrews received a note from one of his colleagues saying that there was a problem in one of the boiler rooms. Since this was their first full run, that was to be expected. A fire had started raging when some of the coal stored in one of the bunkers had caught fire and there was no chance of putting it out before the ship was due to start her tests. Should they postpone them? No, not if the fire in question could be contained. An extra squadron of stokers and firemen was deployed to monitor the troubled boiler room, the others were fired up and, without fanfare, the Titanic took to the ocean for the first time, beginning six hours of technical manoeuvres and trials.

The sea trial had originally been scheduled for the previous day, but was postponed in the face of high winds which would have made it impossible to vet properly the Titanic’s speed, turning and stopping capabilities in calm seas. The winds had since died down, allowing for the leviathan to undertake manoeuvres which saw her tested at a variety of speeds, ranging from 11 to 21½ knots, the latter being close to her expected full speed. She was also halted at 18 knots, coming to a stop three minutes and fifteen seconds later, at just three and a half times her own length which, for a ship of her size travelling at that velocity, was judged yet another encouraging indicator of her safety.[56] On board, Andrews meticulously watched each manoeuvre, joined by some of the colleagues who knew the ship almost as well as he did, chief among them Francis Carruthers, the British Board of Trade’s on-site surveyor, and Edward Wilding, the yard’s Senior Naval Architect. As the Board’s eyes at Harland and Wolff, Carruthers had made hundreds of trips to the Titanic over the course of her construction. Wilding, like Carruthers an Englishman who had relocated to Ireland for his job, was not just a colleague but a friend, who had been a guest at Andrews’ wedding in 1910. Together, the three men had watched Titanic’s ‘vast shape slowly assuming beauty and symmetry’. She was, thus far, the crowning glory of Andrews’ and Wilding’s careers, ‘an evolution rather than a creation’, according to one of their contemporaries, ‘triumphant product of numberless experiments, a perfection embodying who knows what endeavour, from this a little, from that a little more, of human brain and hand and imagination’.[57]

The Titanic in Belfast Lough during her sea trials.

The completed steamship Titanic at Belfast, Ireland (Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photos)

On her way back into Belfast, Titanic passed the seaside town of middle-class Holywood on one side of the Belfast Lough and working-class Carrickfergus on the other. In both towns, it was time for local chapters of the Orange Order to be out on the streets practising their music, hymns and configurations in preparation for the start of marching season, an annual series of parades held to commemorate the anniversary of King William III’s victory over his Catholic uncle at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the ensuing establishment of a legal Protestant ascendancy in Ireland for the next century. The Orange Order, founded as that ascendancy had cracked open in defeat at the end of the eighteenth century, organised itself somewhere between masonic and military lines, claiming nearly one-third of northern Protestant men as members.[58] Each was required, by oath, to ‘love, uphold, and defend the Protestant religion, and sincerely desire and endeavour to propagate its doctrines and precepts [and] strenuously oppose and protest against the errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome; he should, by all lawful means, resist the ascendancy of that church’. A later extension to the formula, added in 1860, prohibited members from ever attending a Roman Catholic religious service.[fn2][59]

Disruption, intimidation and violence at Order events had resulted in legislation curtailing its parades in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its reputation for disruptiveness had lasted, even among many Protestants, until the 1870s.[60] By 1912, however, its influence in the north of Ireland was enormous. Even politicians and clergymen who were indifferent or hostile to the Order’s aims, like the MP Sir Edward Carson who privately compared it to an ancient Egyptian mummy, a preserved and desiccated corpse of something that had mattered long ago, ‘all old bones and rotten rags’, felt that they had to join if they stood any chance of appealing to working-class voters.[61] Andrews and his brothers came from a family with a long association with the Order who marched with its orange sashes around their necks, every year.[62] Andrews would be back in Belfast by the time of the Order’s parades at the high point of marching season, 12 July.[fn3] Each lodge had their own banner, depicting a vividly rendered moment in Irish Protestant history – a particular favourite was an image of drowning settlers, usually women and children, piously clutching a cross as they were butchered, with the slogan ‘My Faith Looks Up to Thee’, victims of anti-Protestant massacres carried out in 1641. On the reverse of all banners, long-dead King William forded the waters of the Boyne river atop his white steed, his sword already drawn for the children of the Glorious Revolution and their descendants, who would defend its legacy. As the Order’s most famous song proclaimed:

For those brave men who crossed the Boyne have not fought or died in vain,

Our Unity, Religion, Laws, and Freedom to maintain,

If the call should come we’ll follow the drum, and cross that river once more

That tomorrow’s Ulsterman may wear the sash my father wore!

By April 1912, the Order had helped rebrand Home Rule as ‘Rome Rule’. On the day the Titanic conducted her trials, a letter to the Belfast News-Letter from a local headmaster opined, ‘Under Rome Rule, there is no possible future for unionists, but despairing servitude or its preferable alternative – annihilation.’[63] Hysteria had trumped civic virtues. Rome was on the march. Upper-class Protestants had forgotten their fears of the radicalised workers and had instead given themselves over to the giddy novelty of Protestants straining together in common cause, as they had in days of old – or so the banners of the Orange Order told them. A paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force, was formed with thousands of recruits training on aristocratic estates as guns were smuggled into the island to arm them. One of Andrews’ compatriots wrote with moist-eyed pride that it was ‘indeed a wonderful time. Every county had its organisation; every down and district had its own corps. The young manhood of Ulster had enlisted and gone into training. Men of all ranks and occupations met together, in the evenings, for drill. This resulted in a great comradeship. Barriers of class were broken down or forgotten entirely. Protestant Ulster had become a fellowship.’[64]

The sound of these flute-serenaded battle cries followed the Titanic in and out of her home waters. She was born in this heartland of an industrial miracle, with its rich and explosive confusion. We might look back now and think it unutterably bizarre that Ulster was prepared to immolate itself to prevent a quasi-independence that might never have matured to full secession if the north had chosen to be a part of it, but to the participants in this quarrel they were contenders in a Manichean struggle for the very soul of Ireland. In London, the new King was frantically trying to organise a preventative peace conference at Buckingham Palace, hopeful of exploiting unionism’s atavistic attachment to the Crown to force its adherents back into line, and three days before the Titanic left Belfast the constitutional nationalist Sir John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, gave a speech in Dublin, squarely aimed at his compatriots in the north – ‘We have not one word of reproach or one word of bitter feeling,’ he promised. ‘We have one feeling in our hearts, and this is an earnest longing for the arrival of the day of reconciliation.’[65]

No one was listening. It was a man of action who flourished in April 1912, drowning out men of prudence. Unionism was now dominated by leaders like the lawyer Edward Carson, who had once served as the prosecuting counsel against Oscar Wilde, and the Andrewses’ family friend, the ferociously uncompromising Sir James Craig. To make explicit how far they were prepared to go if Home Rule was extended to Ulster, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Orange Order and the heads of the north’s major industries were organising one of the largest mobilisations of political sentiment in Irish history, a covenant due to be paraded through the province to an enormous final rally outside Belfast City Hall.[66] Agents were sent out to help those in the smaller towns and countryside who wanted to sign. Tommy Andrews and the men in his family intended to sign this declaration:

being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive to our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V., humbly relying on God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity, to stand by one another in defending, for ourselves and our children, our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us, we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right …[67]

Partly from despair and frustration that unionism would never willingly give so much as an inch in compromise and partly in tune with the mounting radicalisation of nationalist politics across Europe, Irish nationalism was evolving and splitting into republicanism, itself increasingly shaped by die-hards like Pádraig Pearse. Moderation had become a tarnished virtue, a tired or even pathetic concept. Although he begged his followers to ‘restrain the hotheads’, Edward Carson simultaneously urged them to ‘prepare for the worst and hope for the best. For God and Ulster! God Save the King!’[68] On the other side of the soon actualised barricades, Pearse urged his followers to hope for civil war, to pray for rebellion and for all of British Ireland to vanish in flames regardless of the human cost, because ‘Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.’[69] From their respective demagogues, all sides in Ireland heard the sibyl cry of their pasts, promising them the future glory of a war without ambiguity. Protestant and Catholic, loyalist and nationalist, Ireland would willingly wrestle itself off a cliff edge, plunging the entire island into the unknown. The head of the police service, the Royal Irish Constabulary, told the Chief Secretary of Ireland, ‘I am convinced that there will be serious loss of life and wholesale destruction of property in Belfast on the passing of the Home Rule bill.’[70]

When he arrived back in Belfast that night, after the sea trials, Andrews sent a note to his wife in Malone. Everything had gone well; there were one or two problems, which would no doubt be fixed by the time the ship reached Southampton three days later. Francis Carruthers had been duly satisfied by Titanic’s performance and he had granted her the Board of Trade’s standard twelve-month certificate as a passenger ship.[71] Andrews and Wilding spent the night on board, to prepare for the early-morning departure to England. The Union Jack fluttered from one of the Titanic’s flagpoles as the sun set around the slumbering leviathan with the fire burning unchecked within her interiors.

3
Southampton

[The Titanic] was so much larger than one even expected; she looked so solidly constructed, as one knew she must be, and her interior arrangements and appointments were so palatial that one forgot now and then that she was a ship at all. She seemed to be a spacious regal home of princes.

Ernest Townley, interview given to the Daily Express (16 April 1912)

ONE WEEK AFTER HER MIDNIGHT ARRIVAL AT Southampton, the Titanic’s main mast ran the company’s red flag with its eponymous white star, fluttering over final preparations for her first commercial voyage.[1] The day of departure, Wednesday 10 April, was overcast in the south of England, with the sun occasionally appearing from behind the scudding clouds to provide a mild temperature of about 9 degrees centigrade as the crew, numbering about 900, were divided into three groups for the muster. Firemen, seamen and those assigned to care for the soon-to-board passengers went through their final medical checks and a head count, carried out under the watchful eye of another representative of the Board of Trade, who then proceeded to observe as two of the ship’s twenty lifeboats were lowered down the side with eight trained crew wearing their lifejackets. Typically, this inspection would involve the tested lifeboats unfurling their sails, but an uncooperative breeze put pay to that, so the white-painted wooden craft were successfully raised back on to deck and into their davits, with their virgin sails left unfurled. Vast quantities of luggage were being manoeuvred on board. Pieces bound for the first-class quarters bore White Star-provided labels with variants of ‘CABIN’ or ‘STATEROOM’, to indicate that they should be taken to the passenger’s bedroom; ‘BAGGAGE ROOM’ or ‘WANTED’, if they were not to go immediately to their accommodation but contained items which might be required later in the voyage, a helpful utilisation of space given the upper classes’ minimum requirement of three outfit changes daily; and ‘NOT WANTED’, if the pieces were to go into the hold until disembarking.[2]

Thomas Andrews had arrived on board half an hour or so after dawn that morning, checking out from his interim accommodation at the nearby South-Western Hotel, where he had stayed in the week since leaving Belfast.[3] The days in between had been spent overseeing the last touches to the Titanic’s accommodation, which produced the kind of productive mania at which Andrews excelled. The ship’s schedule had already been altered, and then squeezed, by her elder sister’s accident in the Southampton waters a few months earlier when, moments after departure, the Olympic had collided with the British warship Hawke.[4] Mercifully, there had been no serious injuries, but a trip to Belfast for repairs was required, with the result that construction on the Titanic temporarily halted for a few days, tightening the preparation time allowed for the maiden voyage. Andrews himself did not doubt that ‘the ship will clean up all right before sailing on Wednesday’, but with the door hinges and paint still being applied to the Titanic’s Parisian-style café on Wednesday morning, White Star had ordered in vast quantities of fresh flowers which went straight into Titanic’s cold storage to be brought out over the course of the voyage to disguise any lingering smell of varnish.[5] Fixtures in some of the second-class lavatories needed to be attached, furniture bought from firms in England had to be delivered, the furniture in the Café Parisian still was not the right shade of green, and the pebbledashing in two of First Class’s most expensive private suites was too dark.[6] Andrews had overseen everything he could. His secretary, Thompson Hamilton, who had joined him from Belfast for the week, noticed, ‘He would himself put in their place such things as racks, tables, chairs, berth ladders, electric fans, saying that except he saw everything right he could not be satisfied.’[7] Meanwhile, a hose was working away on the contained fire in one of Boiler Room 5’s coal bunkers, with the source expected to be extinguished in the next few days.[8] By the evening of the 9th, everything of note had apparently been taken care of and Andrews could write to his wife, ‘The Titanic is now about complete and will I think do the old Firm credit to-morrow when we sail.’[9]

With their tasks accomplished, Andrews said a temporary farewell to colleagues, like Edward Wilding, whose work on Titanic ended in Southampton, and his secretary, Thompson Hamilton, who was travelling back to Belfast to handle any correspondence during Andrews’ absence. ‘Remember now,’ Andrews told Hamilton, with that second word ubiquitous to an Ulster dialect, ‘and keep Mrs Andrews informed of any news of the vessel.’[10] From the deck, Andrews could see other ships, moored together in greater numbers than usual. The British Miners’ Federation had voted to end a six-week strike only four days earlier and the impact on an industry as dependent on coal as shipping had been temporarily significant – many smaller liners had their voyages rescheduled to facilitate coal being reallocated for the on-time departures of the leviathans.[11] The red-, white- and blue-capped funnels of the American Line’s St Louis, Philadelphia and New York were moored next to White Star’s Majestic and Oceanic. After twenty-two years at sea, the Majestic had been withdrawn from regular service and designated a reserve ship, while the Philadelphia and New York were about to have their first-class quarters removed entirely for an increase of second- and third-class, as the drift of first-class clientele to larger, more modern ships had rendered them superfluous.[12] For Andrews, the most significant of the slumbering ships in the harbour was White Star’s former flagship, the Oceanic, berthed alongside the New York. After working his way up from his post-school apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff, Andrews had first been given charge of a design for the White Star Line in the late 1890s, helping to produce the Oceanic, praised then and later as a ‘ship of outstanding elegance both inside and out’.[13] The Oceanic was still in service in April 1912, but shipbuilding’s technological strides in the thirteen years since her debut had left that pretty ship far behind; the Titanic was nearly three times heavier than Andrews’ first ship, with room for almost twice as many passengers and crew.

Far below, the process of boarding the third-class passengers began shortly after the crew’s muster was completed. Since many in Third Class travelled as emigrating families, there were usually more children, necessitating a longer boarding process, combined with the delay-inducing medical inspections required by American immigration authorities.[14] Those on the dock that day were a few hundred of the 23,000 immigrants who would sail on White Star ships to America over the course of 1912–13.[15] Although it was, and is, often used to describe this collective, the word ‘steerage’ did not apply to those in Titanic’s Third Class. The noun sprang from the earlier days of mass migration to the United States and it could still in 1912 apply to the cheaper class of accommodation offered by other, often less prestigious travel companies, but there was an appreciable difference. Hamburg-Amerika’s soon to be launched Imperator would provide four classes of travel, delineating Third and Steerage as two different sections of the ship.[16] To qualify as steerage, there had to be communal dormitories, something that the Titanic did not offer. Every third-class passenger was in a cabin, albeit with bunk beds and, if travelling on their own, typically shared with others of their own gender. The White Star Line had a reputation for offering the best third-class accommodation then available, with the result that tickets on the Titanic or the Olympic could cost as much as Second Class on other liners.[17] Thus a contemporary travel guide could confidently assert that the White Star Line carried ‘a better class of emigrant’.[18]

Nonetheless, following a cholera epidemic among immigrants at the German port of Hamburg twenty years earlier, the United States had introduced firm policies on who could be admitted at Ellis Island.[19] This meant that all third-class passengers had to undergo medical examinations at embarkation and that there could be no contact between them and the two more expensive classes, because if there was, those passengers would also have to be inspected before leaving the ship in New York.[20] For first- and second-class passengers this meant that barring any glances from their promenade decks down to the outdoor areas at the stern for Third Class, boarding was likely to be the only time they had a sustained opportunity to see third-class passengers. Even leaving aside the quarantine issues set by the American government, contemporary travel guides insisted that it was the height of bad manners for a first-class passenger to play the tourist by asking to see the third-class public rooms during the voyage: ‘it cannot be urged too strongly that it is a gross breach of the etiquette of the sea life, and a shocking exhibition of bad manners and low inquisitiveness, for passengers to visit unasked the quarters of an inferior class … the third-class passengers would be within their rights in objecting to their presence … they expect to have the privileges and privacy of their quarters respected also.’[21]

Unlike passengers who could afford to cross the ocean annually or travel far and wide for their holidays, a third-class ticket was usually a one-way experience, a fact which produced particularly heartrending scenes on the dock. While viewing the boarding process of another of the ‘floating palaces’ in 1912, the contemporary travel writer R. A. Fletcher asked one of the crew for the reasons behind a much longer embarkation window for Third Class, which the latter explained had something to do with how often immigrants ran back across the gangplank to embrace loved ones who had come to wave them off. ‘It’s a nuisance, you know,’ the crew member remarked,

when you want to be off, but after all its [sic] human nature and you can’t blame them. If I were a woman I’d be as bad myself. You see, it comes harder to a married woman to pull up stakes and to make a new home in a new country than it does to a man or children. A man makes a new home and the children grow up in new surroundings and become accustomed to them; but God help most of the mothers. They go for the sake of husbands and children, but they leave their hearts behind them, in another sense, as often as not.[22]

For the Countess of Rothes, the purpose of her transatlantic jaunt was also for the sake of her husband, albeit in happier and less permanent circumstances. The Earl had been in the United States since February, when he had sailed from Liverpool on the Lusitania, to go on a fact-finding mission, comparing the efficiency of the privately operated American telegraph system with that of its publicly owned British equivalent. After his work was finished, Norman took the opportunity to tour and he had invited Noëlle to join him in the United States to celebrate their twelfth wedding anniversary with a visit that would culminate with a stay in a rented cottage on an orange grove in Pasadena, California, one of the properties Norman was allegedly interested in purchasing.[23]

Trading the inconsistent loveliness of an English spring for the beautiful monotony of California’s had not presented Lady Rothes with an easy task when it came to packing. She had been piecing together a new wardrobe for her American sojourn up until the day before she left London, including a last-minute dash to Zyrot et Cie, a milliner’s near her townhouse on Hanover Square, where she picked out some new hats and motoring veils.[24] Most of those would go into one of the two steamer trunks that Noëlle would not need during the voyage, slumbering in the cavernous chill of the hold until they reached Manhattan. London was wrapped in its own brand of unseasonable frigidity with the result that most of Noëlle’s fellow passengers had boarded the train that morning wearing top coats and hats.[25]

Noëlle was boarding en famille in a travelling cabal held together by affection, vaguely complementing itineraries and curiosity about the Titanic. Her companion as far as New York was her husband’s cousin Gladys, a vivacious and unmarried fixture of the London social scene who had decided to keep Noëlle company for the voyage and visit her brother, Charles Cherry, an aspiring theatre actor who had moved to New York two years earlier. Gladys and Noëlle were friends and, following the convention of most families at the time, referred to each other as ‘my cousin’ after Noëlle and Norman’s marriage. They were joined by Noëlle’s parents, Thomas and Clementina Dyer-Edwardes. Thomas had taken long voyages before – indeed, arguably one of the longest possible when he had sailed from England to Australia in the 1860s to spend ten years increasing the family’s fortune – but this trip on the Titanic was not to add to the roster of his far-flung travels. He and Clementina were only going as far as the Titanic’s first port of call, the town of Cherbourg in north-western France. From there, they would travel to Château de Rétival, their eighteenth-century house in Normandy, which they were opening up for the summer. Since they usually made the first annual trip to expel Rétival’s dust covers in spring, the Dyer-Edwardeses had decided to combine their cross-Channel trip with Noëlle’s departure for America. It would be a chance to wish their only child Godspeed before she was gone for several months, with the added attraction of travelling, however briefly, on the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest liner. There seems to have been a slight delay with the boat train from Waterloo, which did not reach Southampton until about 11.30, thirty minutes before the ship’s scheduled departure.[26]

When the train came to a halt on tracks running parallel to the Titanic’s towering hull, the Countess’s party stepped out into a large shed, nearly 700 feet in length, where a small industrious army of porters were dealing with the last of the ship’s cargo and luggage.[27] Noëlle’s steamer trunks were added to their task as she, her parents, Gladys and Noëlle’s lady’s maid, Cissy Maioni, crossed under the skylights and up the stairs to an enclosed balcony, where they presented their tickets.[28] They were ushered over the 28 feet of the gangplank from which, turning right, they could see the second-class walkway, on the same level but 500 or so feet aft, and one of the third-class gangways, three decks below.

The view from the first-class gangplank on departure day. Those used by Second (above) and Third Class (below) can be seen in the distance.

View from the first-class gangplank of the RMS Titanic at approximately 11.30 a.m. on Wednesday 10 April 1912, as photographed by passenger, Father Francis Browne, SJ (Science & Society Library/Father Browne Collection)

They arrived to see crew members waiting for them in a white-panelled vestibule with a black-and-white-patterned floor, which had such a gleaming finish that some passengers initially mistook it for marble.[29] Several of the Titanic’s officers were required to be on meet-and-greet duty for the first-class passengers, a piece of etiquette that had survived in transmogrified form from the days of sail when the owners of ships had often escorted prominent passengers on board themselves.[30] However, it was the stewards and stewardesses, not the officers, who offered practical help by escorting the passengers to their rooms. Since they were only going as far as France, Noëlle’s parents had a ticket which entitled them to lunch and afternoon tea, but no cabin. Noëlle herself and Gladys were to spend six or seven nights as roommates in cabin C-37.[31]

The Titanic’s decks were labelled with alphabetical efficiency. Unlike many other liners, where decks were often given a name indicating their purpose, like ‘Shelter’, ‘Saloon’ or ‘Upper’, the Titanic’s top deck, which was open to the elements and housed her lifeboats, was called the ‘Boat Deck’, but after that her levels were ranked in consecutive descent from A- through to G-Deck, the final point accessible to passengers, below which were the boiler and engine rooms.[32] A common misconception about the allocation of space for the respective traveller classes was that the liners’ architecture directly replicated the concept of social hierarchy, with First Class occupying the top decks and Third spread over the lowest. In reality, the most stable parts of a liner are amidships, since they are the least prone to pitching during inclement weather. On Titanic, First and Second Class were located amidships, running downward through the ship and linked for the crew by various corridors. Both classes had access to the air on the Boat Deck, with a low dividing rail separating Second Class’s aft promenade from First’s more expansive, forward-facing space. First-class cabins, generally referred to by the slightly grander adjective of ‘stateroom’, ran from A- to E-Deck, while the public rooms were dotted around from the Gymnasium, through a door off the Boat Deck, to the Swimming Pool, Racquet Court and Turkish Baths down on F-Deck. Their public rooms generally lay on either side of the two sets of staircases, one forward and one aft, running through every level of first-class accommodation. The space between the staircases was connected by the stateroom corridors.

Every passenger with a first-class ticket had access to the same amenities and food included in the tariff, but there were significant gradations of luxury and corresponding cost when it came to the staterooms. The most expensive single class of ticket on the Titanic, one of the two suites with their own private verandahs, were located on B-Deck, and it was on B- and C-Deck that the ship’s most lavish accommodation was located. The only noticeable difference between the two decks’ staterooms was their windows – B-Deck was the lowest level of the Titanic’s white-painted superstructure, enabling her cabins and suites to offer rectangular windows. Immediately below and also painted white, C-Deck was the highest deck in the Titanic’s otherwise black hull; all cabin windows in the hull were the more traditional nautical portholes.

At Southampton, the Countess of Rothes and the other first-class travellers boarded straight on to B-Deck and, having confirmed their cabin numbers, were escorted by stewards from the vestibule, immediately turning right. They would then either have walked down the stairs or, less probably given how short the distance was, taken one of the three lifts to C-Deck. It was possible for first-class passengers travelling with their own servants, as Noëlle was with Cissy Maioni, to book them into cabins in Second Class, but Noëlle had evidently decided that that was rather mean-spirited, with the result that Cissy was to occupy a first-class cabin of her own, two levels below, on E-Deck.[33]

Between the train and the gangplank, the Countess had been asked for a comment by the English correspondent of a foreign gossip column, who wanted to know what the doyenne of the beau monde felt about ‘leaving London Society for a California fruit farm’. With her imperturbable no-nonsense cheer, the Countess had smiled back, ‘I am full of joyful expectation.’[34] Unfortunately, joyful expectation experienced its first stutter when the door to C-37 was opened for them. The Titanic’s surviving deck plans give several possible reasons for Noëlle’s request to be moved – the first being C-37’s location so close to the stairwell and lifts. It was located in the corridor immediately leading off from them, which may have made Noëlle worry unnecessarily about possible noise and disturbance. There was also the issue of C-37’s size, which offered comfortable if standard first-class accommodation, different to the more splendid options profiled in the White Star Line’s advertising.[35] It has been suggested that Lady Rothes’ parents decided to treat their daughter and her companion to an upgrade; it has also been suggested that the room was unsuitable for the Countess. The two explanations are not wholly contradictory. The Purser’s Office was on the same deck and requests to be moved were not uncommon. An admiring captain with the Cunard Line thought that pursers and their staff on board the great liners ‘do most of the clerical work of this floating city; the purser’s office is a kind of “enquire within” bureau for passengers; it is a reception office; it is the place where complaints are ventilated, and where official oil is poured on the sometimes troubled waters that are bound to occur in a ship that carries, as she often does, thirty different nationalities – including people of widely different tastes, customs, temperaments and requirements’.[36] Upon hearing that the request for a new room concerned Lady Rothes, Purser McElroy seems to have moved with breakneck speed.

They were escorted past the staircase, the Purser’s Office and its Enquiry Desk, which functioned much like the reception of a modern hotel, and into long white-panelled corridors leading to stateroom C-77. It was a particularly convenient relocation for Cissy, since her employer’s new room was opposite the small but comfortable special dining room set aside for maids, valets and other servants travelling with their employers.[37] Lady Rothes was, by European standards, the highest-ranking person on the ship, a silken-voiced embodiment of the empire of manners which the British aristocracy still commanded. With her caste’s social influence still tangible, Noëlle was not an anachronism on the Titanic, but she was an anomaly in being the only member of the nobility on board.[38] An old world silently passed a new one as the Countess’s party walked among the self-made millionaires and plutocrats who occupied most of the other C-Deck staterooms.

The parlour in the Strauses’ suite was identical on the Titanic and the Olympic. The desk where Ida wrote her letter to Lilian Burbidge can be seen on the far left.

Sitting room of first-class parlour suite on the Olympic, by Robert John Welch (© National Museums NI)

Ten doors up from the Countess’s new stateroom, sixty-three-year-old Ida Straus, travelling with her husband Isidor, a former Democratic congressman for New York and co-owner of Macy’s department store, was thrilled with her quarters. The Strauses had taken a parlour suite, which gave them a bedroom, a drawing room, a bathroom and ample wardrobe space. The layout of their rooms, C-55 and C-57, was almost identical to the same suite on the Olympic, from which several photographs fortunately survive showing in detail the parlour and bedroom occupied by Ida Straus and her husband.[fn1][39] The drawing room was decorated in an Edwardian take on the Regency era, with three-armed candelabra mounted throughout on the room’s mahogany walls, flecked with interweaving gold leaf. A tapestry of a pastoral scene, vaguely in the style of Fragonard, was displayed between two curtain-draped portholes and above the fireplace with its electric heater. On a table in the centre of the room, a large bouquet of flowers had been waiting for Ida when she arrived, a gift from Lilian Burbidge, wife of Richard Burbidge, Managing Director of Harrods. The two couples had spent some time together during the Strauses’ recent stay in London, during which the Burbidges had taken them to theatre and supper, favours which Ida planned to repay when the British couple visited New York the following summer.

The Atlantic Ocean had framed Ida and Isidor Straus’s life together. Both were first-generation Americans, emigrating to the United States as children – in Isidor’s case from the kingdom of Bavaria and in Ida’s from the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, two decades before both territories were incorporated with varying degrees of unwillingness into a unified Imperial Germany. Transatlantic travel then had been fraught with possible dangers and certain discomfort, but it had already begun its meteoric sequences of improvement when the couple first met in New York in the 1860s, at a time when their families were on opposite sides of the American Civil War and Isidor, who had then lived in Georgia, was preparing to sail back to Europe to work as a blockade runner for the Confederacy. He had called on old friends of his family in New York, including the young Ida Blun’s parents, before booking passage to England, while maintaining the pretence of being a Northerner under which he had arrived. By the time they met again and fell in love, the Confederacy as a political actuality had been wiped from the face of the earth and the Strauses had emigrated once more, this time trading Georgia for New York. Since then, there had been numerous trips across the Atlantic for the couple, initially because of Isidor’s desire to remain in touch with his German relatives and to visit London, a city he had fallen in love with during his time there in the 1860s.[40] Ida preferred Paris, partly thanks to her love of shopping; her husband tolerated rather than enjoyed their stays there.[41]

Isidor remained fascinated by liners and their technology, so the couple made their way on deck for the send-off, stopping at the end of their corridor to chat with a stewardess, who had once attended to them on the Olympic and thought them ‘a delightful old couple – old in years and young in character – whom we were always happy to see join us’.[42] When they reached the deck, they fell into conversation with their friend Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, who like Isidor came from Confederate stock – his father, General Archibald Gracie III, had been killed by a Union shell at the Siege of Petersburg in 1864.[43] Knowing that mail would be taken off the ship at Cherbourg in a few hours’ time, Ida wanted to make sure she sent a prompt thank-you note to Lilian Burbidge for the flowers and, since the Strauses had been spending the winters in Europe away from their New York home every year since 1899, the anchors-away moment no longer held much of a thrill for Ida.[44] While Isidor stayed up top with Gracie, Ida, by 1912 plump and elegant with a cloud of dark hair beginning to show streaks of grey, with a prominent flesh-coloured mole on the lower left-hand side of her face and a warm smile which many people considered her best feature, made her way back to their suite, sitting at its little escritoire beneath one of the portholes, while her new maid, Ellen Bird, and Isidor’s English valet, John Farthing, began the long process of unpacking.[45] Ida was a particularly hands-on housewife, who was almost alone among the wealthy women of Manhattan in never having hired a housekeeper; Isidor was constantly urging her to take on fewer responsibilities.[46] It had been a series of nervous complaints and then problems with Ida’s heart, flaring up with regularity over the previous three years, that had turned their annual migration to the French Riviera into something approaching a necessity. When they could not spend too much time away from America, Ida had gone to relax at their beach house in New Jersey and once to California.[47] That year, they had left New York in January aboard the Cunard Line’s Caronia, which plied the route from Manhattan to the Mediterranean, and spent most of their holiday at a quiet hotel in Cannes, which Ida in a letter home to her married daughter, Minnie, had described as ‘a lovely spot for old people’.[48] But Ida had made something of a poor swap, since New York had one of the mildest winters that anyone could remember, while the Riviera was pelted by rain for most of February and March.[fn2]

From five decks beneath her, the Titanic’s engines roared to life, producing a quiet hum beneath Ida’s feet and in the walls around her. Many of the passengers would remark later that the ship was so well designed that they were barely aware of the vibrations, although they certainly noticed them when they stopped, since the engines muffled much of the noise flowing between the relatively thin walls of the cabins.[49] The Strauses’ rooms, like the Countess’s, were on the Titanic’s starboard side, facing away from the pier, but the noise would have given Ida a general idea of what was going on. Far above her, the scream of the ship’s whistles and the cheers of the crowd announced that it was time for the Titanic to make her midday departure, only a few minutes late.[50] Then, a silence fell as the engines cut out and the Titanic floated adrift in the River Test, until the reassuring growls of the machinery eventually returned and the journey continued.

An explanation for this arrived when her husband returned. Sixty-seven years old, bald, with a well-trimmed white beard and occasional pain in his legs, Isidor told Ida that, as the Titanic set off, the suction from her three enormous propellers had caused the New York to break free from her moorings and drift towards her. A quarter of a century earlier, Isidor had sailed on the New York’s maiden voyage from Liverpool, when she had been considered ‘the last word in shipbuilding’.[51] In a harbour overcrowded by ships laid up by the miners’ strike, the coils of the ropes mooring the New York had snapped with a noise like gunfire, whipping back on to the docks to lacerate a woman in the crowd who had to be rushed away to receive medical attention. For one horrible moment, it looked as if there would be a repetition of the Olympic’s accident the previous year, with a smaller ship sucked into a voyage-cancelling collision.[52] The Titanic’s Captain had moved quickly to halt the churning of the propellers, giving those in the guiding tugboats time to manoeuvre the New York back to safety.[53]

This photograph caught from the pier shows just how close the New York came to colliding with the Titanic.

The near-collision of the RMS Titanic and the SS New York, 10 April 1912 (Trinity Mirror/Mirropix/Alamy Stock Photo)

The Titanic’s schedule had been dented before she even left her home waters, but she was intact. Later, many chose to reinterpret the near miss as an omen, such as the large flock of seagulls that Cissy Maioni noticed following the Titanic overhead as the ship resumed her journey.[54] Ida, however, turned back to her letter to Lilian Burbidge, as the waters of the Test became the Solent and then the Channel:

On Board R.M.S. Titanic

Wednesday

Dear Mrs Burbidge,

You cannot imagine how pleased I was to find your exquisite basket of flowers in our sitting-room on the steamer. The roses and carnations are all so beautiful in color and as fresh as though they had just been cut. Thank you so much for your sweet attention which we both appreciate very much.

But what a ship! So huge and so magnificently appointed. Our rooms are furnished in the best of taste and most luxuriously and they are really rooms not cabins. But size seems to bring its troubles – Mr. Straus, who was on deck when the start was made, said that at one time it stroked painfully near to the repetition of the Olympian’s [sic] experience on her first trip out of the harbor, but the danger was soon averted and we are now well on to our course across the channel to Cherbourg.

Again thanking you and Mr. Burbidge for your lovely attention and good wishes and in the pleasant anticipation of seeing you with us next summer. I am with cordial greetings in which Mr. Straus heartily joins,

Very sincerely yours,

Ida R. Straus[55]

4
A Contest of Sea Giants

To the battle of Transatlantic passenger service, the Titanic adds a new and important factor, of value to the aristocracy and the plutocracy attracted from East to West and West to East. With the Mauretania and the Lusitania of the Cunard, the Olympic and Titanic of the White Star, the Imperator and Kronprinzessin Cecilie of the Hamburg-Amerika, in the fight during the coming season, there will be a scent of battle all the way from New York to the shores of this country – a contest of sea giants in which the Titanic will doubtless take high honours.

The Standard (5 April 1912)

PASSENGERS WAITING TO BOARD THE TITANIC AT Cherbourg, the first of two European ports of call after Southampton, were told of the delay that had arisen as a result of the New York incident by Nicholas Martin, Manager of the White Star Line’s main French office, who had accompanied the firm’s boat train from Paris earlier that day.[1] He broke the news in an uncomfortably pitching tender, the Nomadic, built in Belfast two years earlier and boasting several decorative features like bronze grilles on the doors as aesthetic anticipations to the interiors of her destinations – either the Olympic or Titanic, both too large to dock in Cherbourg’s harbour. First- and second-class passengers were ferried to the waiting liners on the Nomadic; Third Class and mail were brought out by her partner, the Traffic.[2] Embarkation had been tentatively rescheduled by about ninety minutes for about half-past five at which time, despite the fact that the Titanic had still not actually come into view, the Nomadic’s skipper moved her off from the little quay and out into the breakwater, where it unhappily became clear that the lovely spring weather had obscured a strong breeze and equally lively currents. Many of the Nomadic’s 172 passengers became nauseous, either from the pitch or from the enforced cosiness of the crowded boat.[3] Several false sightings of the Titanic raised hopes whose disappointment nurtured irritation. Those with better sea legs distracted themselves with a ‘slight and passing interest in a fishing boat – [then] more waiting’.[4]

Grouped together in the Nomadic’s stultifying saloon were names that had already earned the Titanic’s crossing a press-created nickname of ‘the Millionaire’s Special’ – Astors on the final stretch of their honeymoon, a Guggenheim ending his winter on the Riviera, a presidential adviser emerging from a recuperative stay in Rome and a celebrated art historian returning to fractious negotiations about the design of the proposed Washington DC memorial to President Lincoln. By a considerable margin, Americans constituted the majority of the Titanic’s first-class ticket holders and the reason for this lay in the approaching summer Season. The East Coast upper class’s Season in the United States fell at about the same time as that of their British counterparts, but with far greater precision, lasting from Memorial Day, then commemorated on 30 May, until Labor Day on the first Monday in September, at which point wearing white slipped from a proclamation of belonging to an advertisement of bad taste. Well serviced by railways from the Paris terminals, Cherbourg proved a convenient point of embarkation for those who had spent their winters in the south of France or, equally popular with travelling Americans, Italy.

John Thayer, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

John Borland Thayer (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Heavy jawed, thickly but tidily mustachioed and eleven days short of his fiftieth birthday, John Borland Thayer Sr, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was, like many on the Nomadic that afternoon, a beneficiary of, and participant in, perhaps the greatest sustained economic expansion in recorded history. The assets of the most fantastically beneficed courtier at Versailles in the middle of the eighteenth century would have paled in comparison to the wealth of the American industrialists created in the nineteenth. The first few generations of American millionaires had led the surge that took their country from the British Empire’s most rebellious child to become its competitor and, in the years after 1912, its successor – in 1800, American factories produced just one-sixth the amount churned out in the United Kingdom; by the time the Titanic sailed, they were making 230 per cent more, accounting for 32 per cent of global industrial production, compared to 14 per cent from the admittedly far smaller Britain.[5] This growth had been sustained, at least initially, by an appalling humanitarian cost to America’s labourers – ‘the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly’, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, the soon to be Democratic nominee for the US presidency.[6] When the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited the United States in 1893 he had praised the Great Republic’s federalist structure but expressed horror at the treatment of the country’s workers, who, he believed, endured conditions far worse than anything seen in the more technically unequal kingdoms and empires of Europe. It was after his stay in New York that Franz Ferdinand concluded that in America, it seemed to him, ‘For the working class, freedom means freedom to starve.’[7] The Archduke’s depressing conclusions were unknowingly corroborated by one of his uncle’s former subjects, an immigrant to New York called Faustina Wiśniewska, who wrote home to her parents in the same year to tell them that ‘here they exploit the people as they did the Jews in Pharaoh’s time’, and by several prominent American industrialists, like bosses at the Carnegie steel conglomerate who issued advice to avoid placing orders with foreign factories, not for any reasons of national loyalty, but because foreigners, particularly the British, were ‘great sticklers for high wages, small production, and strikes’.[8]

By the turn of the century, many of the children and grandchildren of the plutocratic pioneers had sought to beautify and perhaps exorcise their legacy with a gilding borrowed from the once rejected hierarchies across the Atlantic. Palatial homes were built in imitation of the Trianon, Grand and Petit, albeit with modern plumbing, wiring and far better heating. The tribe was demarcated with rules as rigid as Habsburg Spain’s and a similar sense of worth. One of the Astors boarding the Titanic was a son of the famous socialite whose ballroom’s capacity of 400 had set the parameters of what constituted polite New York Society, known thereafter as ‘the Four Hundred’ – ‘If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease,’ explained one member of the sacred band. In that rarefied milieu, Mrs Astor had been compared by one admirer to Dante’s version of the Virgin Mary in The Divine Comedy, only here the ‘circulated melody’ surrounding the blessed lady was the Manhattan elite rather than the heavenly host, and the sparkle of the twelve celestial stars in the Virgin’s crown had been replaced by so many family diamonds that Mrs Astor was likened to a chandelier by a guest at one of her annual January balls. There she greeted guests sitting in a throne-like chair before a life-size portrait of herself, with her Fifth Avenue mansion staffed by footmen dressed head to toe in a livery inspired by those worn by the British Royal Family’s servants at Windsor Castle.[9] The fashions, sports and manners taught at Eton, Harrow and Winchester were imported and applauded, as were countless art treasures which were bought, shipped and quite probably saved from crumbling European palazzos, manors, castles and monasteries.

Following the Anglophile trend had come easily for John Thayer. Both he and his wife Marian, ten years his junior, were scions of old-money families from Philadelphia, America’s first capital, where Society predated the War of Independence. There had been born a class that would later jokingly be dubbed the acronymic WASPs, since they were all white and nearly all Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Thayer’s life had played out along the paths paved by this self-created aristocracy, beginning with prep schools and then an Ivy League education, where he had excelled at lacrosse. His summers had been divided between the family’s main home on the outskirts of Philadelphia and their sprawling mansion-sized cottage by the beach. He had pursued his love of cricket at their local club, Marion, in Haverford, which he represented in 1884 on a team sent to compete in England. That trip had apparently solidified Thayer’s belief that it was only in Europe that one could learn the ‘correct’ way of doing things. After he and Marian Morris married in 1893, jaunts across the Atlantic had become a regular part of their annual routine. That year, they had been accompanied by their eldest son, John Thayer III, known as ‘Jack’ in the family.[10] Seventeen years old, tall, blond, athletic and an excellent swimmer, Jack was sitting next to his parents on the Nomadic, returning to his three younger siblings and home, where as a student of the nearby Haverford School he would begin the application process for Princeton, after which he would be sent back to Europe for a few years of apprenticeship in private banking. In his words, ‘It could be planned. It was a certainty.’[11]

As the Nomadic and the Traffic made their way slowly towards the arriving Titanic, Tommy Andrews watched from the deck, anxiously inspecting their progress. A year earlier, the White Star Line had retired their antiquated tenders in favour of new constructions from Harland and Wolff to service the Olympic’s maiden stop at Cherbourg.[12] Relieved that the ferries still seemed to be working as expected, Andrews went back to his cabin to pen a brief letter to his wife, containing the observation, ‘We reached here in nice time and took on board quite a number of passengers. The two little tenders looked well, you will remember we built them a year ago. We expect to arrive at Queenstown about 10.30 a.m. to-morrow. The weather is fine and everything shaping for a good voyage.’[13]

The Titanic arrived just at the dying of the afternoon light with the sun setting behind her, and by the time of the last embarkation the liner’s decks, windows and portholes were illuminated against the night. As they approached, Edith Rosenbaum, an American fashion journalist returning from the Paris spring shows, observed, ‘In the dusk, her decks were 11 tiers of glittering electric lights. She was less a ship than a floating city, pennants streaming from her halyards like carnival in Nice.’ One of the Astors opined, ‘She’s unsinkable. A modern shipbuilding miracle.’[14] The Nomadic’s passengers gazed up at a ship weighing just over 46,000 tons, nearly 883 feet long and 92 feet wide, rising roughly to the height of an eleven-storey building beneath four funnels, their top quarters painted black and the rest in the buff yellow that constituted the White Star Line’s livery.[15] The last of those funnels was a dummy, used for ventilation, obviating the need to build as many on-deck ventilation shafts as were required on other ships. This decision by Andrews and his team had helped create in the Titanic and her sisters three extraordinarily elegant ships. They had more in common with the smooth lines of the private yachts of European royalty than with their often bulky commercial rivals. Particularly when seen in profile, the Olympic-class liners were blessed with a clean and appealing gracefulness, a fact frequently praised in shipbuilding journals and contemporary travel guides.[16] The earliest designs for the Titanic had apparently suggested only three funnels, but the White Star Line concluded that four were indelibly associated with great ships in the travelling public’s mind, thanks largely to a class of ships that had emerged from the Thayers’ last stop before Cherbourg.[17]

*

Prior to boarding the Titanic, John Thayer and his wife had spent some time visiting Berlin as guests of both the US Consul General, Alexander Montgomery Thackara, and the new American Ambassador, John Leishman, who had previously served as the US representative to Switzerland, the Ottoman Empire and Italy. Although it had existed for hundreds of years as Prussia’s capital, as Germany’s Berlin remained new, high on hustle and low in majesty, with most traces of the provincial capital vanishing in pursuit of modernity. Berlin, like Belfast, seemed ever expanding; Mark Twain had once quipped, ‘Next to it, Chicago would appear venerable.’[18] Nonetheless, it was European and, like Thayer, Leishman was persuaded of the European way of doing things, at least when it came to manners if not to business. Unhappily, by the time the Thayers arrived as guests of the embassy the Ambassador had run aground on some of the Old World’s less appealing attributes. His eldest daughter had already married a French count when her younger sister, Nancy, received a proposal from the Prince von Croÿ, who was in the happy and increasingly unusual position of possessing both a fortune and a pedigree like Midas’. Nancy, as an American and a commoner, was counted as defective on two fronts by the Prince’s formidable aunt, the Archduchess Isabella of Austria and in her crusade to prevent the nuptials, the Archduchess enlisted the help of the German Kaiser, who was traditionally required to give his blessing to the marriage of a subject as high-ranking as von Croÿ.[19] This the Kaiser declined to give, causing a rupture with the American Ambassador, who was understandably mortified by the insult to his daughter. As the newspapers buzzed with the scandal, relations between the Kaiser and the Ambassador deteriorated to the extent that, after Nancy and the Prince married without imperial permission in October 1913, Leishman felt he had no choice but to resign.[20]

For the Thayers, their trip to Germany had also offered an opportunity to see one of the world’s most prosperous states. With plenty of fertile agricultural land, huge natural reserves of coal and iron ore, and population growth sustained by an increasingly excellent healthcare system, Imperial Germany also stood at the forefront of new industries like electrical engineering as well as steel and chemical production. Germany’s public education system was superior to those in Britain, France or America, while conditions for its working classes, particularly after the development of its sophisticated welfare state, meant that a German factory worker’s average life expectancy was about five years longer than their British equivalents’ and nearly two decades longer than a Russian’s. This spate of progress was rendered all the more remarkable by the fact that Germany had existed as a political entity for only forty-one years by the time the Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage.

The recession of Habsburg influence in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars had allowed the northern kingdom of Prussia, ruled by the House of Hohenzollern, to assume primacy and eventually, in 1871, to unite the many kingdoms, grand duchies, principalities and states into the Second Reich, with the King of Prussia installed as hereditary German Emperor.[21] The other pre-unification German rulers kept their wealth, titles, prestige and varying degrees of regional influence, but it was the culture of Prussia – confident, militarist and expansionist – that dominated the new empire. This caused particular concern in London, Paris and eventually St Petersburg. Despite being the son of a British princess, upon his succession to the German throne in 1888 Kaiser Wilhelm II did little to allay British fears and much to exacerbate them. In some way, the Titanic’s genesis lay with the Kaiser’s dichotomy when it came to his mother’s homeland – devout emulation jarring with suspicious competition. Wilhelm II’s passionate interest in the mercantile marine had, in fact, begun thanks to a White Star liner, the Teutonic, when, during the Kaiser’s 1889 visit to the United Kingdom, she had been picked to underscore Britain’s commercial and military dominance of the oceans. Wilhelm had been invited to a naval review at Spithead and then, in the company of his uncle, the future Edward VII, offered a tour of the Teutonic. If the intention had been to intimidate the German Emperor, or gloat, it backfired spectacularly. Instead, as he viewed the Teutonic, the Kaiser was apparently heard to remark, ‘We must have some of these.’[22] In 1897, imperial encouragement, the sustained economic miracle of the Second Reich and a booming eastern European migrant trade for which the German ports proved more convenient points of embarkation to America than their rivals in Italy, France or England, wove together to create the Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, the first transatlantic liner with the soon to be iconic four funnels. Christened after the Kaiser’s late grandfather, the ship was a sensation – hugely popular with all classes of travellers, particularly European emigrants and affluent Americans – and lavishly decorated with the fantastically overwrought designs of Johann Poppe. A contemporary joke described the aesthetic as ‘two of everything but the kitchen range, and then gilded’.[23] Six months after her maiden voyage, she took the Blue Riband, the award for the fastest commercial crossing of the North Atlantic.[24] Her success was sufficient to inspire her owners, the Norddeutscher Lloyd, to commission three running mates over the next decade, all likewise named for, and launched in the presence of, members of the German Imperial Family.[25] A testament to how important these ships were to the German Empire’s sense of self was delivered via Our Future Lies upon the Water, a large allegorical mural painted for the first-class Smoking Room of the Kronprinz Wilhelm; it depicted conquering sea gods in aquatic chariots, holding aloft tridents and a banner that looked suspiciously like the German flag.[26] There seems to be no truth in the story that the last of the quadruplets, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, bearing the name of the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law, Cecilia of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which should logically have been the largest of the four, had her gross tonnage registered as one ton less than that of the third ship in the series, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, in deference to the Kaiser’s enormous yet fragile ego. In fact, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie was publicly listed as the heaviest of the four sister ships, with 19,400 tons against the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s marginally smaller 19,361.[27]

The first of the greyhounds: the Kaiser Wilhelm der Groβe.

Ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, photographed c.1897 (The Library of Congress)

Nicknamed ‘the German greyhounds’ and ‘the Hohenzollerns of Hoboken’ after Norddeutscher Lloyd’s piers on the Hudson, the Kaiser-class transformed the transatlantic trade by proving the idea of the commercially viable super-ship.[28] Norddeutscher Lloyd’s home-grown rivals, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, retaliated with their own four-stacker speed queen, the Deutschland. Reflecting on the race thirty years later, the maritime historian Gerald Aylmer wrote, ‘By 1903 Germany possessed the four fastest and best appointed merchant ships afloat, with another on order. This state of affairs was not palatable, to put it mildly, to Britain, a country which had always prided itself on its steamship construction and speed.’[29] Aylmer was right; the success of the Kaiser-class inflamed within the British a fear born of the belief that their place in the world was tied inextricably to mastery of the sea lanes, which had as much to do with their passenger and cargo ships as it did with their dreadnoughts and destroyers. During the Second Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, the White Star Line had donated several of its ships to temporary military service with the Royal Navy, which, combined with unease at the success of the German greyhounds, helps explain the British reaction when White Star was purchased by J. P. Morgan’s conglomerate in 1903.[30]

A few years earlier, the writer and apostle of British imperialism J. A. Froude had sounded like the voice of Cassandra when he warned his compatriots, ‘Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that guards them; her empire will come to an end; her colonies will fall off like leaves from a withered tree; and Britain will become once more an insignificant island in the North Sea.’[31] In 1903, despite assurances that it was only White Star shares and not her ships that were passing into American control, the sale was sufficiently worrying to inspire speeches in Parliament, a mood turned brilliantly to their advantage by White Star’s main British competitors, the Cunard Line, who intimated that they too were considering joining Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine. Suppressing the news that they had in fact already passed on a too low offer from Morgan, Cunard presented themselves as the firm who could gladly recapture Britain’s seagoing pride if only they had sufficient funds to prevent the ugly necessity of selling out to an American.[32] The government and the press took the bait. To help with their plan to outshine the Kaiser-class, Parliament voted Cunard a £2.5 million loan to be repaid over the next twenty years at 2.75 per cent interest, materially and obviously below the base rate of 3–4 per cent, coupled with an annual £150,000 operating subsidy.[33] In the autumn of 1907, Cunard delivered on the investment with the creation of the Scottish-built Lusitania and then her English-constructed sister, the Mauretania.[34] The latter was marginally larger and ultimately proved slightly faster as well, but with both sisters weighing in at about 32,000 tons, each was almost twice as heavy as the largest of the German greyhounds.[35] For the next three years, the Lucy and the Maury, as they were nicknamed by their legions of loyal customers and ship enthusiasts, cheerfully passed the Blue Riband between them until, in 1910, the Mauretania decisively took the prize with a crossing time of four days, ten hours and forty-one minutes, a record she would hold for the next nineteen years.[36]

Outflanked by the Germans and then by Cunard, Morgan and the White Star Line felt called upon to respond in similarly bombastic fashion, with three floating palaces to Cunard’s two, each of which was to be half as heavy again as the Mauretania. Thus were the Olympic-class born. In retaliation, Cunard had ordered a third behemoth, the Aquitania, due to sail from Liverpool to New York for the first time in 1914. Piqued and hitherto overlooked, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique was preparing to unveil their ‘château of the Atlantic’, the France, on her maiden voyage a few weeks after the Titanic’s, around the same time as the Kaiser planned to travel north to Bremerhaven to launch the Imperator which, a year later, would pluck the sobriquet of ‘world’s largest ship’ from the Titanic by a margin of 6,000 tons, a development that had forced a change of name for the Titanic’s youngest sister, even as she was being built in Belfast. Just as the names of Cunard ships, prior to the 1930s, ended with -ia thanks to the company’s policy of making use of provinces of the Roman Empire, White Star vessels were typically branded with an adjective transformed into a noun, ending with -ic. The Titanic and her two sisters were called after great species in Greek myth, respectively the gods of Olympus, the titans and the giants. However, the original name of Gigantic for the third sister never made it past a few provisional poster ideas and excitable press articles. In May 1912, the White Star Line filed the necessary papers to reserve the off-theme but patriotic name Britannic for their forthcoming flagship.

For decades, this shift has popularly been attributed to White Star’s desire to distance the third sister from the tragedy of the second by abandoning a too similar name. This is a logical explanation for how the Gigantic became the Britannic, especially in light of White Star officially filing for the new name a few weeks after the Titanic sank, but it is also incorrect. The alternative name of Gigantic seems to have been genuinely considered by the White Star Line only at the earliest stages in the vessel’s development and some of their contractors continued to use it, even after it had been abandoned – the order books for the English firm that made the liner’s anchors referenced her as Gigantic as late as 20 February 1912 – as did several Harland and Wolff employees, who remembered the original name in interviews given in the 1950s. Rumours that the ship was to be christened Gigantic were current and firmly denied by the White Star’s Managing Director, both in his testimony to the American inquiry into the loss of the Titanic and subsequently in a letter to a British newspaper.[37] Those printed denials may have been the company’s response to letters they had received from concerned members of the public, begging them not to tempt fate by giving the new ship a name so similar to the Titanic’s, although at least one of the latter’s survivors was sufficiently hardy to dismiss that as superstitious nonsense, ‘almost as if we were back in the Middle Ages’.[38] More prosaically, it was almost certainly the Imperator that prompted the rechristening. Since, by 1915, the Britannic would ‘only’ be the third largest ship afloat, behind the Imperator and her 1914-projected running mate, the Vaterland, to call her Gigantic under those circumstances seemed foolhardy.[39]

The Titanic’s looming black-painted hull, summoned into being by capitalist competition and the diplomatic thrombosis of pre-war Europe, greeted the Thayers as the Nomadic at last docked alongside the Titanic. The tender’s gangplank could not safely reach the B-Deck embarkation doors used at Southampton and so Tommy Andrews had designed another, two decks lower, reaching a vestibule which opened on to the first-class Reception Room, where stewards waited to guide first-class passengers to their cabins and second-class aft to their section of the ship. Standing in front of the Thayers as they boarded was J. Bruce Ismay, son of the White Star Line’s late founder and Managing Director since its merger with the IMM. If the Titanic’s legend has a two-dimensional caricature, it is Ismay, cast as both vulpine villain and a serial weakling in the hysterical aftermath of the sinking. So complete was Ismay’s historiographical evisceration that when a consultant first saw the script for what became a multi-Oscar-winning cinematic romance set on the Titanic and queried the characterisation of Ismay as a megalomaniacal moron, butt of penis-envy jokes he cannot understand and shameless manipulator of the Captain in the dangerous quest for more speed, he was told there was no point in changing it because ‘the public expects’ a heinous Ismay.[40] That is not to say that Ismay was incapable of moments of mind-boggling stupidity, but he was also astute, devoted to his company and, like Tommy Andrews, obsessed with detail.[41] A complex man whose inherent shyness produced acts of great kindness and flinch-inducing obtuseness, Ismay’s thoughtfulness had won out on 10 April as he bore down on the Thayers’ travelling companions and lifelong friends, Arthur and Emily Ryerson, who were returning home to America unexpectedly after hearing that their son, Arthur Junior, had been killed in a car accident during his sophomore spring at Yale. He had gone home to Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania for the Easter weekend where he had died, along with his classmate, John Hoffman, two days before the Titanic sailed.[42] Ismay took over from the Thayers as temporary chaperon of the grief-stricken by informing the Ryersons, who were travelling with their three younger children, a maid and a governess, that he had arranged for them to be given an extra stateroom adjoining those they had already booked, along with a personal steward to look after them during the voyage.[43] A broken Emily Ryerson intended to spend the trip in her cabin with her family, avoiding everyone else on board except the Thayers.

Less solemnly, a middle-aged New York widow, Ella White, was carried past the boarding passengers. She had fallen and sprained her ankle as the gangplank swayed in the winds.[44] A few stewards had been summoned to help Mrs White’s chauffeur lift her to her C-Deck stateroom, the same deck where the Thayers were also settling into their accommodation on the opposite corridor to the Strauses and the Countess of Rothes. The latter escorted her parents down to the Reception Room to see them off on to the Nomadic. Noëlle, Thomas and Clementina descended the staircase into the Reception Room. Directly ahead of that, they turned left at a wall mounted with a reproduction of the Chasse de Guise tapestry, depicting a hunting party, the original of which had been owned by the French aristocratic family unfairly accused of poisoning the 4th Earl of Rothes in the sixteenth century.[45] From two sets of double doors leading off the Reception Room into the Dining Saloon, the Countess and her parents heard hundreds of passengers tucking into their second meal of the voyage. They walked over dark Axminster carpets, past settees, armchairs, white cane chairs with green side pillows, potted palms and a Steinway piano, one of six on board, into the small vestibule that opened on to the gangplank and the night air.[46] Thomas and Clementina said their farewells, but at the last minute the normally reserved Clementina turned on impulse and dashed back to give her daughter a final embrace.[47] When the Dyer-Edwardeses joined the Titanic’s thirteen other cross-Channel ticket holders in the tender, the gangplank was disengaged and the boarding doors were closed. After they had been locked, crew members pulled wrought-iron gates back into place to shield the utilitarian steel from the passengers’ view.

The usual expectations governing dinner, including the formal dress code, were typically eschewed on the first night out.[48] Wearing the dress in which she had boarded, Noëlle left the vestibule for the Saloon, which has since become one of the Titanic’s most recognisable rooms thanks to its frequent depiction in silver-screen dramatisations of the voyage.[49] Meals in the Saloon were run on the same lines as they might be in a country house on shore, with limited options, generous portions, set times for each course every evening except the first, and placement decided by the host – in this case, the ship’s Purser, who assigned passengers to one of the 115 tables which variably sat two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten or twelve. His decisions with this social roulette could introduce a passenger to delightful week-long shipboard acquaintances or purgatorial companionship in a multi-course dinner that moved with the sprightliness of a state funeral. You could, of course, ask the Purser’s Office to move you to another table if you found the company particularly stultifying but, as a passenger on the Queen Mary noted later, ‘the cost of [which] would be the contempt of those still seated at the table you had spurned, and the frozen stares with which they’d greet you on deck for the rest of the trip’.[50]

Where to put a countess and her companion would have been one of Purser McElroy’s main priorities and it seems, from a letter sent by one of their stewards, that they won the lottery in their three gastronomic companions. A steward was assigned to every three diners and it was considered proper for those in his care to leave a gratuity at the end of the voyage, the amount of which very often outpaced his wages. The Countess’s Steward, Ewart Burr, described her group as being ‘very nice to run’. He was particularly pleased to have an aristocrat at his table and he made a point of mentioning it in the note he penned to his wife that evening, writing, ‘I know, darling, you will be glad to know this. I have got a five table, one being the Countess of Rothes, [who is] nice and young.’ Burr predicted that they would be generous at journey’s end or, as he put it, ‘I shall have a good show.’[51]

The decor in the Dining Saloon was loosely inspired by Elizabeth I’s childhood home at Hatfield Palace and the dukes of Rutland’s house at Haddon Hall. Despite both those buildings being Elizabethan and the Tudor roses in scrollwork on the Saloon’s roof, trade journals described the Titanic’s Saloon as reflective of ‘early Jacobean times’.[52] The green-leather chairs with their oak frames were heavy enough for White Star to do away with the bolted-to-the-floor chairs used on the Kaiser-class and the Cunard sisters. This was the only significant innovation in a room that several industry experts dismissed as conventional almost to the point of staid. One admittedly biased observer was Leonard Peskett, designer of the Lusitania and Mauretania, whose disapproval was laced with a vigorous dose of delight when he saw the near-identical Dining Saloon during his tour of the Olympic in 1911. The Titanic’s Dining Saloon may have been the largest room afloat but it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the finest, at least not in Peskett’s view or that of many of his colleagues, especially when compared to the two-storeyed domed Rococo equivalent on the Lusitania.[fn1] There was also a problem of over-heating caused by the Saloon’s 404 light bulbs, although the chill outside meant that this was unlikely to be a problem on 10 April.[53]

Stewards served the first course on the fine bone-china plates, edged with 22-carat gold and bearing the White Star logo at the centre, setting them down amid the small forest of silver-plated cutlery, while water was poured and wine decanted into crystal glassware.[54] At ten minutes past eight, some diners began to debate when they would leave Cherbourg; their Steward leaned in to inform them politely, ‘We have been outside the breakwater for more than ten minutes, Sir.’[55]

5
A Safe Harbour for Ships

And doesn’t old Cobh look charming there

Watching the wild waves’ motion,

Leaning her back up against the hills,

And the tip of her toes in the ocean.

John Locke, ‘Morning on the Irish Coast’ (1877)

TO REDUCE THE DELAY CAUSED BY THE LONDON BOAT trains and then by the New York, the Titanic’s speed was increased as she made her night-time crossing of the Celtic Sea from France to Ireland.[1] Twenty of her twenty-nine boilers were eventually operational that evening, during which the Captain stayed on the Bridge, rather than make an appearance at his table in the Dining Saloon.[2] He did not, apparently, miss much. Even the smoothest of travel days are liable to produce their own special brand of fatigue and many passengers retired early, abandoning the Titanic’s main after-dinner haunts like the Reception and the Lounge, three decks above, long before their respective closing times of 11 and 11.30 p.m.[3] One passenger recalled later that their day had been spent ‘unpacking, making the cabin homelike, getting the lay of the public rooms, trying to determine fore and aft, port and starboard [and] getting the feel of the ship … many passengers are so exhausted with farewell parties and preparations for the voyage’.[4]

At bedtime, those who wanted a restored shine on their shoes left them to be collected from the stateroom corridors, a service that was not required by Ida Straus’s husband as he was travelling with his own valet, Farthing, a man with several years’ service to the Strauses.[5] Such familiarity was not yet possible for Ida with her maid, Ellen Bird, who had celebrated her thirty-first birthday two days earlier while packing for a new chapter of her life, in America, after Ida’s maid, Marie, had quit to marry a barber she had met during the Strauses’ winter holiday on the French Riviera. The weeks during which Marie served out her notice had not apparently been pleasant for anyone involved and the normally magnanimous Isidor was offended on his wife’s behalf since, as Ida told a relative, Marie had begun ‘behaving very badly over here. When Papa sours on a girl you know there is good cause, and he is disgusted with her.’[6] She had intended to replace Marie with another French lady’s maid, but none could be found by the time the couple left for Britain, where, after another was retained and quit upon changing her mind about moving to America, Ida had hired Ellen on the recommendation of the housekeeper at Claridge’s, their hotel during their London stay. Like the Countess of Rothes’ maid, Cissy Maioni, Ellen came from a family with a history in domestic service and she had been a maid in various households since her early twenties. Although Ida remained worried, as she had been with Marie, about ‘whether I can count on her’, so far she was pleased with Ellen, whom she described in a letter home as a ‘nice English girl’.[7] Ellen helped prepare Ida for bed, then left for her own cabin which was in First Class and on the same corridor as the Strauses’.[8]

The Strauses’ bedroom, located between their parlour and private bathrooms, was decorated in the style of the First Napoleonic Empire, to which any curve left ungilded was regarded as a curve wasted. They slept in two single beds on opposite sides of the room, separated by the door to the parlour and a marble washstand; there was a dressing table on the other side of the room, along the wall that led to their wardrobe and bathrooms. At sea, as on land, many upper-class couples had separate bedrooms and so to put them in a double bed when they were travelling was considered infra dig. The Strauses’ decision to share a cabin, if not a bed, thus emphasises their closeness rather than the opposite. They had shared a room on their previous crossing on the seven-year-old Caronia, which still had bunk beds in some of its best first-class accommodation. Isidor had taken the top berth and, one morning after he had risen, its corner fell missing Ida’s head by inches. The ship’s Purser attributed its collapse to ‘some peculiar bend or twist of the ship’, although the fact that bunks existed at all on the Caronia showed how far ocean liners’ accommodation had evolved in a relatively short period.[9]

Their mattresses on the Titanic were firm, on the instructions of J. Bruce Ismay who had ordered a change throughout First Class after sailing on the maiden voyage of the Olympic, when he had observed, ‘The only trouble of any consequence on board the ship arose from the springs of the bed being too “springy”; this, in conjunction with the spring mattresses, accentuated the pulsation in the ship to such an extent as to seriously interfere with passengers sleeping.’[10] All first-class cabins were located amidships, where the ship was most stable, but this was also directly above, albeit far above, most of her elephantine engines, hence Ismay’s insistence on a new type of bedding to cushion any vibrations when the Titanic ran at high speed, as she incrementally began to do after Cherbourg. That evening, the extinguishing of the lamps installed over most of the Titanic’s first-class beds left a nocturnal gloom gently pierced by the glow from the electric heaters provided in every stateroom. The cold in London and the breeze in Cherbourg had followed the Titanic and combined to strengthen.[11] In cabins with portholes or windows, even if closed and latched, the chill was felt to some degree and so the heaters hummed in successful combat.[12] Fortunately, even as the wind whistled around their temporary home, few of the Titanic’s inhabitants experienced seasickness – she remained on an even keel.[fn1] As one of them put it a few days later, they slept contentedly thanks to ‘the lordly contempt of the Titanic for anything less than a hurricane’.[13]

This beacon of lordly contempt was sailing between Land’s End in Cornwall and the Scilly Isles when the sun rose through broken clouds; around the same time, nearly fifty of the ship’s clocks swung in silent unison from about 5.40 to 5.15 a.m.[14] As the ship sailed westward, two master clocks in her Chart Room, both displaying time to the second, were adjusted for the crossing of the time zones. Clocks throughout the crew’s quarters and the passengers’ public rooms were linked to these master clocks and adjusted automatically with them. Known as the Magneta system, it did away with the need for crew members to move through the ship manually adjusting individual timepieces.[15] Usually the reclaiming of an hour was calculated and implemented for about midnight during the voyage, but in 1912 Ireland operated under Dublin Mean Time, twenty-five minutes behind Greenwich, and the Titanic did not clear English waters until sunrise or shortly after.[fn2] As the ship awoke, a small battalion of stewards and stewardesses brought morning tea to the staterooms or breakfast trays for those, like Ida Straus, who had the option of taking the first meal of the day in their private parlours.[16] For the rest, the Dining Saloon revived for a two-hour window, beginning at eight o’clock.[17]

*

Shortly after breakfast, south-eastern Ireland came into view with ‘the brilliant morning sun showing up the green hillsides and picking out groups of dwellings dotted here and there above the rugged grey cliffs that fringed the coast’, according to one passenger’s memoirs.[18] The port they were heading for had first been referred to as ‘the Cove of Cork’, its nearest city, in the middle of the eighteenth century, which had inspired the town’s subsequent name of Cóbh, an Irish rendering of the English ‘cove’ and pronounced in the same way.[19] Following a visit by the young Queen Victoria in 1849, Cóbh had been rechristened Queenstown. However, opponents of the Union with Britain continued to refer to the town by its pre-Victorian name, which was legally restored following Irish independence in the 1920s. Queenstown’s motto, Statio Fidissima Classi (‘A Safe Harbour for Ships’), reflected its long history as a busy port, particularly as it became the main boarding point for the millions who emigrated from Ireland in the nineteenth century. By 1912, the Irish diaspora to America had slowed to a steady trickle compared to the anguished flood of previous decades and the Titanic’s call at Queenstown had more to do with fulfilling the obligations of White Star’s mail contract, through which the ship gained her prestigious prefix of RMS, or Royal Mail Steamer.[20]

Ports like Liverpool, New York and Southampton had frequently been dredged to accommodate the recent leaps in liner size, but Queenstown, like Cherbourg, still relied on tenders. The Ireland and the America beetled out into waters turned a murky brown as the seabed sand was churned to the surface by the Titanic’s slowing propellers.[21] Sacks of mail, luggage and 191 new passengers were moved from tenders to ship, while those taking the air on the Titanic’s Boat or Promenade decks joked about the seemingly minuscule size of the ferries, ‘tossing up and down like corks’ in the swell.[22] Many admired the view of Queenstown, particularly the turrets, buttresses and 300-foot spire of its Catholic cathedral, St Colman’s, a generation-long endeavour then seven years from completion.[23] This idyllic vista, particularly the green hills hugging Queenstown and running to the shore, justified Ireland’s nickname as the Emerald Isle, a phrase allegedly first committed to paper by one of Tommy Andrews’ maternal ancestors, the republican writer William Drennan, who had, to the embarrassment of his Edwardian descendants, sided with the ill-fated 1798 rebellion against the Crown and launched the famous moniker in his poem, ‘When Erin First Rose’.[24]

At anchor off Queenstown: many of the passengers visible on the stern were Irish immigrants who had boarded the Titanic in Third Class that morning.

The Titanic at anchor in Queenstown (Cóbh), photographed by Father Francis Browne, SJ, 11 April 1912 (Science and Society Picture Library/Father Browne Collection)

The stop at Queenstown vacated cabin A-37, directly opposite Andrews’ A-36 and occupied by a devout Irish Catholic, thirty-two-year-old Francis Browne, a charming amateur photographer who had gone to boarding school with James Joyce and was later immortalised as ‘Mr Browne the Jesuit’ in Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake.[25] Browne evidently had not lost his ability to make an impression, since at dinner the previous evening two of his companions in the Saloon, a wealthy couple from New York, had been so captivated by his eloquence that they offered to pay his fare if he wished to remain on the ship and at their table until America. Browne, who was reading Theology in Dublin with the aim of pursuing a vocation as a priest, had to ask his superior for the necessary permission to miss his studies for a few weeks. He received a sharply worded reply in telegram form, ‘Get off that ship’.[26] Had the Jesuit professor reached the opposite decision, Andrews might have grown accustomed to seeing Browne’s face throughout the voyage. As it was, the trainee priest was up as early as the ship’s designer to snap away on his camera, mostly in the better lighting provided on the Boat Deck.[27]

Andrews’ morning produced less picturesque sights, particularly through his inspection of the watertight doors between the ship’s subterranean boiler rooms.[28] The doors had already been repeatedly tested in Belfast, but a subsequent trial at sea was considered sensible. Almost in unison, the heavy mechanised doors slid into place, sealing the Titanic’s sixteen watertight compartments off from one another, as they would if the hull was ever breached. Joined by the ship’s Chief Officer, Henry Wilde, Andrews then watched to see if the crew could open and close the watertight doors manually with a large specially purposed spanner, in the event of the failure of the doors’ electric controls operated from the Bridge. This too was successfully executed, removing another item from Andrews’ and Wilde’s to-do list.[29] The latter’s posting to the Titanic had been very much last minute and it was attributed to his service in the same role on the Olympic, where he had been liked and trusted by Captain Smith, who had also been transferred to the Titanic. It may have been Smith’s friendship that prompted Wilde’s appointment only seven days before the Titanic sailed from Southampton, bumping William Murdoch down to First Officer and Charles Lightoller to Second. There were six officer posts on the Titanic, but since the Third Officer’s task functioned largely as an apprenticeship to serving as Second Officer, this meant the previous Second Officer, David Blair, had become surplus to requirements upon Wilde’s arrival. Wilde, who preferred the Olympic and said he had a ‘queer feeling’ about the Titanic, was no more happy at being summoned than Blair was at leaving ‘a magnificent ship. I feel very disappointed I am not to make the first voyage.’[30] This reshuffling of command had an important, if subsequently exaggerated, impact in the Crow’s Nest, the vantage point on the forward mast. As theirs had not yet arrived, Blair had offered to lend the lookouts his binoculars, which he innocently took with him when he left. When this was brought to Wilde’s attention, he hunted around the ship but there did not seem to be any permanent spare pair to loan to the Crow’s Nest for the duration of the voyage. Some of the lookouts refused to let the matter drop and approached Second Officer Lightoller, around the time the ship reached Queenstown. Lightoller agreed that binoculars would be helpful and went searching for an extra set, though with the same lack of success as Wilde. Other crew members, however, thought the lookouts were creating a fuss over nothing, that one’s eyes ought to be sharp enough to do without them or that binoculars would be a hindrance rather than an aid, since they might seduce a lookout into a sense of complacency or encourage undue focus on a far away point at the expense of more immediate dangers.

The notoriety of the Titanic’s failure to provide binoculars entered the popular mythology of the tragedy as another potent example of incompetence-laced hubris. The origins of that claim lay with one of the surviving lookouts, Frederick Fleet, who insisted at both subsequent inquiries into the disaster that if he had been provided with binoculars it would have given him more time to warn the Bridge, perhaps ‘enough to get out of the way’.[31] However, modern tests conducted in similar conditions seem to corroborate the views of contemporary seamen who countered Fleet’s testimony by stating that on dark and cold nights on open water binoculars are ineffective to the point of uselessness in spotting objects, particularly ones that are already dark, like a growler iceberg.[32]

While the Titanic’s anchors remained dropped at Queenstown, journalists from local newspapers and enthusiastic members of the Royal Cork Yacht Club skimmed out in crafts to photograph and admire the liner before, at half-past one, her anchors were raised, the seabed sand was disturbed again as the triple-screw propellers spun back into motion and she turned slowly to point her prow to the Atlantic. By the time afternoon tea was served, three hours later, the coast of Ireland was fading from view.[33] There were four venues in which first-class passengers could take tea, one of which afforded spectacular views towards the stern.[34] The Verandah Café, split into two rooms, one that allowed smoking and the other, particularly popular with mothers and their children, that did not, was located on A-Deck as the furthest aft of the first-class public rooms. Inspired by the ‘winter gardens’ popular on the German greyhounds, the Verandah was lined with bronze-framed windows and green trellises covered in growing plants. White wicker chairs and tables cluttered the room, reminiscent of a conservatory on land. As Ireland melted into the horizon, a passenger who had boarded there went up on to the Poop Deck, the area at the stern used as the promenade for Third Class. There, on his uilleann pipes, an Irish instrument similar to the Highlands’ bagpipes, the young man played ‘Erin’s Lament’ and ‘A Nation Once More’, paeans to the Irish quest for independence and, in the case of the former, sharply critical of the landed classes.[35] It is unlikely that anyone at tea heard him; the doors into the Verandah were designed to stifle a chill breeze and any sounds from the outside.[36]

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