20
Extend Heartfelt Sympathy to All

A lurking instinct in me says that they are right; all the bridges are broken between today, yesterday and the day before yesterday.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European (1942)

 

IN THE SUMMER OF 1914, JACK THAYER BOARDED A WHITE Star Line ship for the first time since jumping from the Titanic. The Oceanic had been one of the ships docked in Southampton on the day the Titanic set sail, moored alongside the New York, which nearly scuppered the voyage. Boarding in New York Thomas Andrews’ first great project for the White Star Line, Jack discovered that one of the senior officers on board was Charles Lightoller, the officer who had helped lead his lifeboat to safety two years earlier. The two men had an opportunity to talk during the voyage and ‘again went over our experiences and checked our ideas of just what had happened. We agreed on almost everything, with the exception of the splitting or bending of the ship. He did not think it broke at all.’[1]

It was a more tranquil crossing than some which had taken place in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster. Five days after the sinking, first-class passengers on the German liner Bremen had been horrified when, from their promenade, they:

could make out small dots floating around in the sea, a feeling of awe and sadness crept over everyone on the ship … looking down over the rail we distinctly saw a number of bodies so clearly that we could make out what they were wearing and whether they were men or women. We saw one woman in her night dress, with a baby clasped closely to her breast. Several women passengers screamed and left the rail in a fainting condition. There was another woman, fully dressed, with her arms tight around the body of a shaggy dog. The bodies of three men in a group, all clinging to one steamship chair, floated near by, and just beyond them were a dozen bodies of men, all of them encased in life-preservers, clinging together as though in a last desperate struggle for life … Those were the only bodies we passed near enough to distinguish, but we could see the white life-preservers of many more dotting the sea.[2]

Their captain rejected passenger requests to stop to retrieve the bodies on the grounds that the White Star Line had already chartered trawlers staffed by sailors, clergymen and undertakers to recover as many of the Titanic dead as possible. A day after the Bremen’s upsetting discovery, the first of those trawlers, the Mackay-Bennett, arrived from Newfoundland and retrieved 306 corpses over the next five days, 116 of which were in such a state of decomposition that they had to be buried at sea.[3] [fn1] She was then replaced by the Minia, which salvaged fifteen and buried two at the site, between 26 April and 1 May. The Montgamny found four and the last, the Algerine, found only one on 16 May. The Oceanic later discovered one of the abandoned, leaking collapsibles – Collapsible A – with the bodies of two crew members and a passenger, a wedding ring and a fur coat. The three corpses had been people who had died shortly after fleeing the Titanic and had been left in the damaged boat when the living occupants were moved to another lifeboat before reaching the Carpathia. The bodies of two other victims, both stewards, were picked up by two other ships on 6 and 8 May. All five of those accidentally discovered bodies were buried at sea. A total of 209 bodies were brought back to the trawlers’ native Canada, fifty-nine of which were claimed by relatives, include Isidor Straus’s. Ida’s body either had not been discovered or had been one of those that were never properly identified. If that was the case, then her remains lie in one of the anonymous graves in the Mount Olivet, Fairview or Baron von Hirsch cemeteries, the three Canadian sites that house the 150 unclaimed bodies. The south-drifting current also carried many of the bodies away from the original site and in total 1,159 of the Titanic dead were never accounted for.[4]

Perhaps fortunately for Jack’s state of mind, in 1914 the Oceanic did not sail through the area where the Titanic had foundered. After the respective American and British inquiries, the recommended shipping routes had shifted south. The US Senate inquiry had opened at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the day after the Carpathia deposited the survivors. The fine impression created by this ‘startling display of bureaucratic efficiency’ in organising an inquiry so swiftly did not last, particularly among the Titanic’s crew who were called as some of the eighty-two witnesses.[5] Charles Lightoller and the other surviving officers had been increasingly contemptuous of the ‘complete farce’ of the American inquiry, reserving particular scorn for the admittedly curious decision to entrust it to Senator William Alden Smith, a representative for Michigan, a state which borders lakes but not the sea, and who asked a few nautical questions which the officers evidently felt were so staggeringly obvious that they were hard pressed to deliver polite answers.[6] One of Senator Smith’s questions seemed to suggest that he did not know what a watertight bulkhead was, leading to certain sections of the British press nicknaming the Senator ‘Watertight Smith’ and mocking him for questions through which he ‘betrays once more the amazing ignorance’.[7] However, although Lightoller painted the American inquiry as representing ‘such a contrast to the dignity and decorum of the Court held by Lord Mersey in London’, in reality both sets of inquiries reached broadly similar conclusions.[fn2] [8] Both were subsequently accused of whitewash for failing to indict any one responsible guilty party, both recommended twenty-four-hour wireless operation so that no ship could be so close to a disaster, as the Californian had been, and miss the radioed requests for assistance. They both demanded sufficient lifeboat provisions for all passengers, mandatory lifeboat drills at the start of a voyage so that there would never again be a disaster in which passengers, unsure of what to do, congregated for an impromptu concert in the first-class Lounge or waited to be given directions to the Boat Deck from the third-class General Room. The American inquiry recommended that rockets should never be fired at sea except for distress, largely to undercut the problematic claim by the Californian’s crew that they had not been aware of what the Titanic’s rockets signified. The internal height of watertight bulkheads should be raised because, although it was unlikely that higher bulkheads would have saved the Titanic, it might have marginally slowed the sinking; and in 1914, acting on the inquiries’ findings, the International Ice Patrol was established as an arm of the United States Coast Guard, with funding from thirteen nations.[9]

Both the British press and the surviving officers were arguably too harsh in their criticisms of Senator Smith, except in their unease at what the Daily Mail had called his ‘inflated rhetoric’. Nowhere had this been more apparent than in the Senator’s treatment of Bruce Ismay. A lifetime of thinly veiled hostility towards the media and an unfortunate run-in with press baron William Randolph Hearst at a dinner party years earlier had left Ismay as an easy, desirable target for many American newspapers; those under Hearst’s control took to printing Ismay’s photograph with captions that changed ‘Bruce’ to ‘Brute’. There were suggestions that the company’s logo should be changed from a white star to a yellow liver; the New York American called Ismay’s survival when so many had perished the act of a man who had crawled ‘through unspeakable disgrace to his own safety’. Contemporary opinion in America was disinclined to feel sympathy for plutocrat or aristocrat, and Ismay seemed a lugubrious combination of both; that he had inherited his position from his father made him a perfect embodiment of the effete, entitled European, a curious mingling of the useless and the malign.[10] He had also made an error, although seemingly from honest intention rather than malice, in booking passage home on White Star’s Cedric for the day after he reached New York, which he apparently did in the mistaken belief that since the Titanic had flown the British flag the only inquiry into the loss would be held in London.[11] To his growing number of critics, it looked as if Ismay had been attempting to flee.

He was helped neither by his own mistakes nor by others’ mendacity. Some of the lies about him, like the claim from first-class passenger Mahala Douglas that Ismay had fled in the first lifeboat, seem to have been genuine errors. No such charity can be extended to the outrageous spite that motivated Mrs Charlotte Drake Cardeza’s claim that she had personally witnessed Ismay depart in the first lifeboat, after hand-selecting the crew members to row him to safety.[12] There were stories of Ismay parading on the Carpathia and immediately shouting, ‘I’m Ismay, for God’s sake give me something to eat,’ or ‘I’m Ismay! I’m Ismay! Get me a stateroom!’, which bear no relation to the behaviour reported by eyewitnesses on deck at the time. Initially, it seemed that his British compatriots would treat Ismay more kindly. There had been unease and then anger at how he had been handled by the Senate inquiry and revulsion at the tone adopted by the Hearst newspapers. Ismay was greeted with cheers from the dockside crowd who gathered to see him when he returned to England, Thomas Andrews’ aunt Lady Pirrie had written in Ismay’s defence, and at the subsequent Board of Trade inquiry Lord Mersey concluded that ‘Mr Ismay [had], after rending assistance to many passengers, found “C” collapsible, the last boat on the starboard side, actually being lowered. No other people were there at the time. There was room for him and he jumped in. Had he not jumped in he would merely have added one more life, namely his own, to the number of those lost.’ This conclusion was borne out by the most reliable accounts of Ismay’s final moments on board the Titanic; there were, admittedly, discrepancies between various testimonies about whether it had been Captain Smith or Chief Officer Wilde, but several survivors recalled hearing someone order Ismay into the boat. What was almost universally agreed upon was that when Ismay stepped into the lifeboat, either of his own volition or on the orders of the Captain or an officer, there had been repeated calls for more women or children and since that particular stretch of deck had been relatively empty, there had been none near by, hence Lord Mersey’s conclusion that if Ismay had stayed on the Titanic no other lives would have been spared in lieu of his own. Several female passengers and crew credited Ismay with saving their lives by urging them into the boats. One stewardess recalled a horrible incident where some officers and crew had ordered female crew members, who subsequently lost their lives, out of the boats in the final hour of the evacuation, while in contrast Ismay dismissed the protestation of ‘We are only stewardesses, sir’ and urged them into the lifeboats.[13]

However, the charitable attitude in Britain towards Ismay was neither universal nor enduring. His wife banned the Daily Mail from their homes after it offered a criticism of his conduct that was mild in comparison to the opinion expressed in the periodical John Bull, which called for Ismay to be executed for cowardice. A former friend closed the door in Ismay’s face when he called on them and he was blackballed from his club. There were times when he would wake up his whole household with his screams from some nightmare, yet this private anguish was hidden by his public rigidity. There were tone-deaf statements, like the one issued to reporters upon leaving the Carpathia: ‘The Titanic was the last word in shipbuilding. Every regulation prescribed by the British Board of Trade had been strictly complied with, the master, officers and crew were the most experienced and skilful in British service.’ Whether that was true or not was beside the point. In the context of unprecedented losses at sea, it rang in the public’s ears like a callous boast. Two of Ismay’s servants, his valet Richard Fry and his secretary William Harrison, had drowned on the Titanic. It made Ismay’s survival seem somehow more suspicious, while his insistence that he had done nothing wrong sounded heartless.

Ismay’s wife also banned all discussion of the Titanic, hoping it would soothe the pain her husband felt. Despite the strained state of their marriage before the sinking, Florence had felt such a rush of relief at the news that Ismay had not been lost that she emerged determined to fix their relationship. Ismay, however, retreated from her and struck up an epistolary relationship with Marian Thayer. The crush he had developed for Marian on the Titanic seemingly blossomed after the tragedy into an infatuation. For her part, Marian had done her best to defend Ismay in America. It has been suggested here that in order to protect Captain Smith’s posthumous reputation Marian fudged the timeline of his attendance at the Wideners’ dinner party a few hours before the collision. Even those who had also been in the Restaurant and corrected her narrative, in letters to the Senate or in letters to, or interviews with, the press, did not suggest that Smith had drunk anything or dallied too long after coffee. It seemed in her zeal to correct the more outrageous charges against the departed, such as the tale that Smith had drunkenly steered the Titanic into the iceberg, Marian was quite prepared to massage the facts, often unnecessarily. In her biography of Ismay, Frances Wilson has persuasively argued that Marian may have mounted a similar campaign for Ismay by persuading her friend Emily Ryerson to omit from her affidavit to the Senate inquiry the information that, during their conversation with Ismay on the afternoon of Sunday 14 April, he had mentioned that more boilers were being lit over the next few hours to increase the Titanic’s speed. Judging, almost certainly correctly, that Ismay had been the recipient of that news, rather than the instigator, Marian felt the senators and the wider public would not properly understand the information and thus worked to have it withheld.

Marian’s sympathy for the White Star Line’s Managing Director was not shared or understood by many in her circle. Eleanor Widener may have disliked Ismay even before the disaster – it is interesting that when arranging a dinner in the Captain’s honour she had not issued an invitation to Ismay, despite the fact that he also frequently dined in the Restaurant – but her attitude towards him lacked any ambiguity afterwards. When comparing Ismay to Marian’s dead husband, Eleanor said, ‘Better a thousand times a dead John B. Thayer than a living Ismay.’ A distant relative of the Thayers, US Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, was unmoved by the argument that the empty deck and half-filled lifeboat exonerated Ismay, since ‘so long as there was a soul that could be saved, the obligation lay upon Mr Ismay that that one person and not he should have been on the boat’.

Yet in the weeks after returning to Pennsylvania, Marian suffered terribly and she felt that Ismay was one of the few people who understood her. Before he left New York on 5 May 1912, she had a telephone conversation with him in which she expressed the wish that she had drowned alongside her husband. She tried to fill her days – at the end of the month she journeyed to New York to attend a luncheon thrown by Madeleine Astor to honour the Carpathia’s Captain Rostron and Dr McGee. She gave both men golden cigarette cases and hosted a similarly themed dinner in Philadelphia. It did nothing to detract from the fact that she found herself a widow with four children in the most unexpected of circumstances and she poured those feelings out in her letters to Ismay, who was as entranced by Marian’s gift for friendship, her capacity for sympathy, as the dead Major Butt had been on the Titanic. While she expressed her heartbreak in their letters, Ismay gave vent to the depths of his self-disgust: ‘Of course one cannot hurt people without hurting oneself. Very often a word would make things right, one’s horrid pride slips in and this causes unhappiness. I wonder if you know all I mean. I can hear you saying what a horrible character and I agree. I absolutely hate myself. Tell me what I can do to cure myself.’

Ismay had a masochistic streak, nurtured by his late father, who had habitually humiliated him in front of White Star colleagues. After the Titanic, he seemed to yearn for punishment. His letters to Marian shifted into agonising self-reproach, which she soon found uncomfortable and even unsettling. When she suggested that he should not isolate himself further but rather attempt to socialise more frequently, his response was, ‘What do you mean by saying “don’t lock yourself tight up?” When did you notice this was another of my failings? Do you know that I always put my worst side forward and very very few people ever get under the surface? I cannot help it, can you help me to change my horrid nature?’ His half of the correspondence also took on an unambiguously romantic tone: ‘My wife has gone to church and I am sitting writing to you by the open window, looking over the garden. Oh, how I wish you were here.’

His love, however, was never strong enough to trump his punctilious commitment to due process. When Marian began the process of filling in life insurance forms concerning her late husband, she decided to utilise her friendship with Ismay by asking him to use his influence at the White Star Line on her behalf. Like many socialites, Marian lived in a world of mutual favours, something which Ismay found objectionable. While he may have been comfortable with such attitudes when it came to offering the grieving Ryersons extra cabins on the Titanic, he drew the line at interfering in a legal matter:

I would do a great deal for you, and you know it, what you ask is impossible … I am deeply sorry for the loss you have sustained and of course I know any claim you put in would be absolutely right, but you must agree with me that all claims must be dealt with on the same basis now don’t you? … You must not think me unkind or inconsiderate and I am satisfied that if you will think this matter over you will agree that I am acting rightly. Don’t let us say anything more about this please.

It is tempting to suggest that, once he proved of no use to her, Marian discarded Ismay, yet the truth is that even before this she had felt uneasy about his reliance on her. In her letter of 18 June 1912, she had begged him not to confuse her hyperbolic expressions of friendship with a declaration of love. Falling back on the power of etiquette to convey the point subtly if firmly, Marian sent a letter of Christmas good wishes to Ismay’s wife, followed by several polite letters addressed to Florence, while the frequency of her correspondence to Ismay decreased. ‘Please,’ he wrote to her with a mixture of patronising demand and despair, ‘do not think a cable message is satisfying, you owe me at least two letters and they can’t be cables.’ When Marian returned to Europe in 1914 on the Lusitania, she did not visit Ismay and she deliberately allowed their friendship to wither. Even before the Titanic, he had been planning to retire from both the White Star Line and her parent organisation, the International Mercantile Marine, in 1913 and, when he briefly hesitated, it was made politely clear to him that his retirement was now required, rather than simply allowed. He donated $50,000 to aid the widows of the Titanic’s crew and in 1924 he founded the National Mercantile Marine Fund with a personal donation of $125,000. He lost part of his right leg to diabetes in 1936 and, following a stroke, died in October the following year. During his last Christmas, his wife’s ban on discussing the Titanic was innocently broken by one of their grandchildren who asked if Ismay had ever been in a shipwreck. Apparently, he replied, ‘Yes, I was once in a ship which was believed to be unsinkable.’[14]

After he reached Southampton in 1914, it does not seem that Jack called on Ismay either. He had come ‘to play cricket in and around London, on a Marion Cricket Club team’, just as his father had when he was a young man.[15] Honouring the late John Thayer had shaped a significant number of Jack’s decisions after April 1912 – he had abandoned his plans to apply to Princeton to enrol at the University of Pennsylvania, his father’s former college, where he joined junior societies, social clubs and athletic associations and pledged the Delta Psi fraternity. In 1913, he started a courtship of Lois Buchanan Cassatt, whose grandfather had served as President of the Pennsylvania Railroad and moved in the same circles as the Thayers. The weather for his 1914 sojourn in England was perfect for cricket – a hot and dry summer. His games in London coincided with the Season, unofficially commencing with the Royal Academy Private View and the Chelsea Flower Show, at its new home at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, where it had first met for the 1912 show, the one which Lady Rothes had missed for her trip to America. She and her husband did not miss the 1914 round of merrymaking, unknowingly the last of the Edwardian era, as they moved through concerts from the military bands in Hyde Park and St James’s Park, nights at the Royal Opera House, tennis at Wimbledon, rowing at the Henley Royal Regatta, horses at Ascot and balls held in the great townhouses of the aristocracy, including the Royal Caledonian, co-organised by Lady Rothes, who was once again singled out for her beauty and the ‘superb jewels’ she wore when greeting guests alongside her fellow organisers, the duchesses of Sutherland and Roxburghe and the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne.[fn3] The 1914 Royal Caledonian was the largest it had ever been, with 2,000 guests; Lady Rothes returned to dancing the reels after sitting them out the previous year, for the first time since her marriage.[16] The Rotheses hosted garden parties for the Archbishop of Canterbury, with invitations extended to Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, and a former Liberal Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery.[17]

There was no repeat of the unpleasant incident that had occurred the previous Season when Lady Rothes had been at the Ritz in London ‘dining out with some friends & not thinking or talking of the Titanic when I suddenly felt the awful feeling of intense cold & Horror that I associated with it all & I then realised the Orchestra was playing the Tales of Hoffmann which was the last music I heard played after dinner on the Titanic tho’ until that moment I had quite forgotten this’.[18] In 1914, young daughters of privilege flocked to Vacani’s School of Dancing in Knightsbridge to master the deep curtsey they were expected to give to Their Majesties at the formal presentation at Buckingham Palace, along with lessons in how to carry a court train while managing a bouquet and fan, to do it all gracefully, followed by memorising diagrams of the Palace’s relevant rooms and which members of the Royal Family would be standing or sitting, and where.[19] The Season’s polo at Hurlingham, Roehampton and Ranelagh had brought the Duke of Peñaranda over from Spain to show off his equestrian and sporting prowess.[20]

Some socialites kept busy, like the Marchioness of Londonderry, who was busy dispensing funds, patronage and, in her own words, ‘beautifully packed bundles’ of guns to hard-line unionist organisations in the north of Ireland, and the Duchess of Portland, who with less controversy yet no corresponding diminution of zeal threw herself into her work for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.[21] In southern Ireland, county Society in Kilkenny prepared to celebrate the marriage of two young members of the Ascendancy – Marguerite Connellan to her soldier fiancé, Richard Solly-Flood. Wedding gifts from local families, like the diamond and fire opal pendant from the Earl and Countess of Bessborough or the diamonds from Lord and Lady Donoughmore, had arrived, as had the bride’s £200 wedding trousseau from London in time for the service at the Protestant cathedral in Kilkenny, with the Archbishop of Armagh presiding.[22] In the north, the turreted Thomas Andrews Memorial Hall in his home town of Comber was nearing completion, facing the same route a horse and cart driven by a Harland and Wolff employee had travelled two years earlier with a telegram to inform Thomas Andrews’ parents that their son had been lost at sea.[23] It had been the first in an avalanche of correspondence received by Andrews’ grieving parents and by his widow, who had agreed to open the Memorial Hall. Some of the condolences arrived from strangers who, having read of Andrews’ fate in the newspapers, felt moved to tell his parents, as did one correspondent, ‘I would be a proud and thankful woman if, when the day arrives for my son to face the portals of his life, I might have the joy of feeling he left behind him the unstained noble record of your dear son.’[24] Others arrived from relatives, including one bearing the heartbreaking conclusion, ‘There is not a better boy in heaven.’[25] Members of the Ascendancy, including the Duke of Abercorn, wrote to the Andrews family to express their sorrow at the news and one in particular, the unionist politician Sir Horace Plunkett, persuaded the family to approve the writing of a short commemorative biography of Andrews by Ulster-born writer Shan Bullock. Plunkett himself would write the foreword. While there is no suggestion that Plunkett was not distressed by Andrews’ death – his letter to Andrews’ father four days after the sinking began with the words, ‘No act of friendship is so difficult as the letter of condolence upon the loss of one who is near and dear’ – his desire to memorialise Andrews sat alongside a political agenda. In his foreword, he attributed the biography’s creation to a committee of men ‘deeply interested in the great achievements of Ulster industry’ and tied that cause to the life of Thomas Andrews who ‘notwithstanding his noble end, [has] been represented as the plain, hard-working Ulster boy, growing into exemplary and finally the heroic Ulster man that we knew’.[26] Perhaps keener to paint a picture of the man, in the course of his research its author Shan Bullock visited the Harland and Wolff shipyards where he personally witnessed the grief of many of its employees. When news broke in Belfast of the Titanic’s loss, men from the yard were seen weeping in the streets. During their ensuing shifts on Queen’s Island, they composed songs about it – one of which ran, ‘I lost the best friend that ever I had when the great ship Titanic went down,’ and another, specifically about Andrews, which Bullock heard and transcribed:

  A Queen’s Island Trojan, he worked to the last;
  Very proud we all feel of him here in Belfast;
  Our working-men knew him as one of the best –
  He stuck to his duty, and God gave him rest.[27]
   

These same men continued to work on Andrews’ last creation, the Britannic, throughout the spring and summer of 1914, in time for her projected maiden voyage the following year. The Aquitania sailed from Liverpool as the new Cunard flagship, earning the nickname ‘the Ship Beautiful’ for her first-class interiors, and the Vaterland left on her maiden voyage from Hamburg to New York as the world’s largest liner. In Russia, the Tsar’s second daughter, the Grand Duchess Tatiana, made her Society debut at a ball thrown in her honour at the Anichkov Palace by her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Empress. Chaperoned by her father and free from the frivolity-aversion of her mother, who left early due to a combined attack of sciatica and antipathy towards her mother-in-law, the young Grand Duchess danced until 4.30 in the morning. The hostess was one of the most popular members of the Imperial Family and the guest of honour generally considered one of the most beautiful. In later years, the ball was judged the highlight of the St Petersburg Season.[28] Much as many survivors of the Titanic seemed to remember the final night of the voyage as the most splendid or contented of the trip, despite the fact that it was a Sunday, which meant it was in fact one of the quietest days of the trip, the European Seasons of 1914 acquired a reputation for unparalleled majesty that may perhaps have been endowed with hindsight by the fact that they were the last of the line.

The Vienna Bank Employees’ Club gave a costume ball – the year before, ladies came dressed as balance sheets, thin men were encouraged to come as deposits, and the heavier male guests good-naturedly turned up as withdrawals – and on 25 June the Duchess of Hohenberg arrived at the spa town of Ilidža.[29] Two days later she was joined there by her husband, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, and they used the town as their base for a series of official visits into the neighbouring city of Sarajevo.[30] A Belfast of the Balkans, Sarajevo was divided between two communities, those who wished to remain under Habsburg rule and those who hoped to unite with the independent kingdom of Serbia. On 28 June, while returning in their car from a civic luncheon, the Archduke and his wife were shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist. As soon as doctors had confirmed the couple’s deaths, the empire’s telegraph wires were shut down to ensure their three children did not hear the news from anyone except their aunt, who told them after dinner that evening.[31] The Hohenberg children had the unhappy distinction of becoming the first orphans of the First World War.

The Austrian government suspected, correctly, that the gunman had not acted independently, but had received backing from the highest levels of the Serbian government. The step from what is correct to what is sensible was taken with catastrophic ease when this allowed the hawks in Vienna to deliver an ultimatum, to the Serbian government and which they could not possibly agree to in its entirety without a de facto abdication of their country’s independence. Apparently surprised that funding and facilitating the murder of Austria’s next emperor could rebound upon them with negative consequences, Serbia appealed in a spirit of Slavic brotherhood to Imperial Russia, where public opinion generally remained sympathetic towards ‘little Serbia’. Austria-Hungary asked for, and received, a promise of full support from its German ally, which prompted Russia to request the same from France, which Germany then decided to attack by marching through Belgium; in turn, Belgium’s independence and right to neutrality had been guaranteed by the Treaty of London, which the United Kingdom felt called upon to honour. Following Germany’s failure yearsto leave Belgian territory, Britain declared war on 4 August. The assassinations at Sarajevo had tripped the wire of long-festering tensions between the Great Powers and to the surprise of millions of Europeans, including a worrying number of people involved in the highest levels of their governments, caused a continent-wide war.

Image Missing

The Britannic in service as a hospital ship during the First World War.

HMHS Britannic (History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

There was a general feeling that one should ‘do one’s part’ for the war effort, which extended to the Titanic’s former operators who, despite their American ownership, proved their sincerity when they had promised a decade earlier that they would remain under British sovereignty. The Olympic’s fittings went into storage and she served as a troop transport for the next four years, while the Britannic became a hospital ship before she had ever completed a commercial voyage. As part of the Middle Eastern and then Mediterranean campaigns, the latter was on a return trip and thus mercifully sailing with comparatively empty wards when she struck a German mine on the morning of 21 November 1916 and sank near the Greek island of Kea with the loss of thirty lives. The largest ship built on British soil for the next twenty years remains, at the time of writing, the largest-known passenger ship on the seafloor. There was a hideous poetry in the fact that the first ship to sink on service in the First World War was the Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, the ship whose creation had inaugurated the race of the great liners and who ended her career by being scuttled by her own crew after a tussle with the Royal Navy off the coast of Africa. By the time the Britannic went down, the Lusitania, one of the last to remain in passenger service, had been torpedoed on a return trip from New York to widespread international condemnation. Another Cunard casualty, inflicted in the war’s dying days, was the Carpathia, also struck by a German torpedo while off the southern Irish coast. Five lives were lost. She was no longer commanded by Captain Arthur Rostron, who had been promoted after 1912, and was then serving as commander of the Mauretania, which had also been reconfigured as a troop transport for the Royal Navy.

Just as she had on the Carpathia, the Countess of Rothes volunteered to serve as a nurse during the Great War and her husband went off to the Front. The happiness of their marriage had not diminished. In 1912, Lord Rothes had escorted her from the Carpathia to a suite he had reserved at the Ritz-Carlton, where he ‘had every room banked with flowers’ and they quietly observed their twelfth wedding anniversary the following day. A doctor had been summoned to treat the Countess for exhaustion and she had declined requests for press interviews, until she took the bait when a spiteful story ran that ‘The Countess of Rothes is at the Ritz-Carlton under the care of a physician. It is not so much the exposure and the shock that ails her as the effects of her hard labor in pulling at the oars of her lifeboat.’ She was as irritated by that poor reflection on her character as she was embarrassed by subsequent stories from survivors which described her as a heroine. She invited journalists to a series of interviews over the course of 22 April in a private lounge at the Ritz. She kept her composure throughout and made frequent reference to her maid’s bravery. She confirmed that, in her opinion, the Californian had been close enough to mount a rescue operation, turning to her husband during the interview to ask, ‘I am a fair judge of distance, am I not?’ To which Lord Rothes replied, ‘Yes, you are.’ At the end, when asked about the crew, several journalists heard the Countess’s voice catch in her throat before she answered, ‘Brave men all that stood back so that women should have at least a chance, their memories should be held sacred in the mind of the world forever.’[32] Her father later funded the establishment and staffing of a lifeboat, the Lady Rothes, based in the east Scottish town of Fraserburgh in ‘thanks to Almighty God for the safety of his only child from the wreck of the Titanic’.[33] Back in Leslie, the local chapter of the Women’s Unionist Association, of which Lady Rothes served as chairperson, organised an open-air celebration of her survival and by the time Lady Rothes returned to Britain in the summer of 1912 she hoped that the interest in her by both public and press had been satisfied. Her father’s decision to fund the lifeboat rescue station bearing her name allegedly helped soothe the guilt she felt at failing to persuade other people in Lifeboat 8 to return to rescue those who had jumped from the Titanic in April 1912.[34] When the war came, she converted parts of Leslie House into wards and opened up the grounds to raise money for French and Belgian refugees, and military medical supplies. The 21st Earl of Rothes, her grandson, wrote later, ‘My grandmother presided over a lot of garden party bazaars in the interest of the war. That sort of thing was at the centre of life in villages then, and held more importance than it does today. I remember meeting people, even years after her death, who said they recalled my grandmother’s charming way with guests, her laugh and her knack for getting money for her charities out of the hardest-heart cases! “More tea?” she would ask, quickly followed by, “And you know you have got to pay for it!”’[35]

She was still serving as a nurse and fund-raiser when she received the news that her husband had sustained what The Times called ‘a bad shrapnel wound to the leg’ on the Western Front. She helped care for Norman, who then returned to military service, from which he was released in 1917 after sustaining another wound, which cost him one of his eyes. While nursing her husband in London, Lady Rothes sent a message to her eldest son at Eton asking him to take the train back to Scotland to stand in for her at the opening of a fund-raiser for the Soldiers and Sailors Fund. In 1918, she also loaned to a jewellery exhibit some of the pearls she had worn when she escaped the Titanic. The ticket-generated proceeds of the event benefited the Red Cross, with the Rothes pearls displayed along with several pieces on loan from the Queen Mother Alexandra. It was to be the last grand public display of Rothes splendour. To meet rising wages, the cost of living and taxes, Lord Rothes had been selling off pieces of the family estates in Scotland since 1904, and by the time the First World War ended in 1918 he was no longer able to cope. When news leaked in the village that the Earl of Rothes planned to sell his patrimony, a delegation was formed to beg the family to stay, but the management of the estate and the realities of a changing world had gone well past the point where they could be ameliorated by good intentions. Leslie House and the adjoining lands were sold to Captain Alexander Crundall, who himself sold it several years later to a buyer who gifted it to the Church of Scotland who later sold it to a property developer.[fn4] [36] At their farewell supper in the Town Hall, which was followed by a parade, Lord Rothes told his former tenants that it had been ‘a heavy blow to him to sever his connection to a property which had been in his family for many generations, and which has been his chief interest in life for the last fourteen years. The estate of Leslie, he regretted to say, was the last of the many properties which had been owned by his family in Scotland.’ The family relocated permanently to smaller homes in England, where in the post-war world Lady Rothes kept up many of her former charitable activities and half hid her discomfort when her father’s long-standing interest in Catholicism culminated with his conversion in 1924.[37]

The horrors of the First World War help explain, in part, the relative dwindling of interest in the Titanic after 1914. While the sinking retained the record as the worst single maritime disaster until 1945, the Titanic’s casualty list of just under 1,500 had been matched and then exceeded by the deaths caused in the first two hours of the Battle of the Somme.[38] All the memorial services held and the monuments erected for the Titanic dead in the days immediately after the disaster – the Requiem Masses ordered in every church in the archdiocese by the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John Farley, the commemoration at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where a crowd of 10,000 had gathered outside and where Thomas Andrews’ predecessor at Harland and Wolff, Alexander Carlisle, became so moved that he fainted, or the 6,000 New Yorkers who gathered outside Carnegie Hall for a service in memory of Ida and Isidor Straus – as beautiful as they had been, paled in comparison to the collective grief and trauma engendered by the Great War.

For families of those lost on the Titanic, private mourning continued while public interest dissipated. Thomas Andrews’ widow, Helen, continued to live at their home for several years after her husband’s death until she remarried in 1917 to Henry Pierson Harland, who also worked at the shipyard which bore his family’s name. With Harland, Helen had four more children and she passed away at their Malone home in Adelaide Park in 1966.[39] Her daughter with Andrews, Elizabeth, nicknamed Elba in the family, outlived her mother by seven years, dying in a car crash just outside Dublin in 1973. She never married and became the first Northern Irish woman to gain her pilot’s licence, which she put to use when she volunteered for service in the Second World War.[40] Her paternal uncles had also been active in the public life of Northern Ireland after it was partitioned from the south in 1921 – Tommy’s brother James was created a baronet by George VI in 1942 and served as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland from 1937 until his death in 1951. Their eldest brother, John, became leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1940 to 1943. It is from Pathé newsreels of John Andrews as Prime Minister that we can gain an idea of what Tommy Andrews’ accent sounded like, which seems to have been relatively clipped in its consonants and with anglicised vowels, not too dissimilar to what was then common in most members of the upper and middle classes in south Belfast, county Society, and the northern parts of County Down.[41]

Ida and Isidor Straus’s children and grandchildren encountered stories of their loved ones’ generosity at unexpected intervals over the years, which was by turns painful and comforting for them. Ida’s maid Ellen Bird had sought out their daughter Sara to return the fur coat Ida had given to her as she left the Titanic, an offer which Sara refused on the grounds that it had been a gift to Ellen from their mother.[42] In 1934, the family received a letter from a British clergyman, the Rev. H. H. Redgrave, who had been in communication with Isidor during his final stay in London. On 9 April 1912, the day before he and Ida boarded the Titanic, Isidor had been reading the Daily Telegraph over breakfast at Claridge’s and was inspired to write to the Rev. Redgrave, ‘I learn from the Daily Telegraph … of the dire distress you are attempting in aid in relieving in the Pottery Districts, with which my firm has been in business for almost half a Century. I ask you to accept enclosed order in the Manchester & Liverpool District Bank for Fifty Pounds to assist in the worthy work.’[43] It was a legacy that Isidor and Ida’s family did their best to preserve. Donors from across New York had contributed to the foundation of a memorial park to Ida and Isidor Straus on the Upper West Side and their sons built a mausoleum at Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx. Although Ida’s body had never been recovered, Isidor’s remains were moved to the Woodlawn after the mausoleum’s completion in 1929. Both memorials to Ida and her husband contained biblical verses – in the case of the Straus Park, from the lives of King David and Prince Jonathan, ‘Lovely and Pleasant Were They in Their Lives, and in Their Death They Were Not Divided’.[44] At Woodlawn, Ida and Isidor were commemorated with a verse from the Song of Solomon: ‘Many waters cannot quench love – neither can the floods drown it.’[45]