fn1 Pronounced ‘Rothiz’. Each time a peerage is created, the incumbents are numbered. If the title falls into disuse and is subsequently revived, the numbering starts anew.
fn2 The three kingdoms were England, Ireland and Scotland. Wales was a principality, the importance of which is reflected in the bestowal of the title of Prince of Wales on the heir-designate to the throne of the others.
fn3 Malcolm III (c.1031–93) was the historical inspiration for the prince whose military victory provides the denouement in Macbeth.
fn1 Created as the earldom of Donegall by Charles I in 1647 and elevated to a marquessate by George III in 1791, the title retains the antique spelling of ‘Donegall’, though the county itself is usually spelled ‘Donegal’ in English today. The heir uses the courtesy title of Earl of Belfast.
fn2 As of 2018, these injunctions remain in place.
fn3 This is sometimes colloquially known as ‘the Glorious Twelfth’ in the north of Ireland, although the term originally applied to the start of the grouse-shooting season for the landed classes on 12 August. Whether the appropriation of this nickname for 12 July originated as a joke or a mistake is unclear.
fn1 The counterpart of their suite on the Olympic was later offered to the future King Edward VIII when he returned on board from his visit to the United States in 1924. He asked to be moved to another room, because it was ‘too pretty for me’. The rooms were then assigned to the Prince’s Groom-in-Waiting, Brigadier-General Gerald Trotter. Why the Prince felt this way is unclear, given that his famous future home in the Bois de Boulogne did not exactly reek of the spirit of Sparta.
fn2 There remains some confusion about the Strauses’ itinerary that spring, with several modern accounts stating that they also visited Jerusalem and Palestine. However, it was Ida’s brother-in-law, Nathan Straus, who made the trip to Jerusalem in 1912, with his wife, Lina. En route, they stopped to spend several days with Ida and Isidor, but there was no time for the latter to join them as they travelled further east. They were still in Cannes when Ida and Isidor’s youngest daughter, Vivian Scheftel, briefly joined them with her husband and children.
fn1 Peskett’s assertion that the first-class cabins were similarly inferior to the Cunarders’ did not, however, meet with general agreement.
fn1 An early exception was Lady Rothes’ maid, who felt queasy shortly after departure from Cherbourg.
fn2 Dublin Mean Time was abolished in 1916 after it had caused confusion in relation to reports and reactions to an anti-British uprising in Dublin, generally known later and today as the Easter Rising. France also operated under its own time zone, until 1978, which was nine minutes and twenty-one seconds ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.
fn1 An equivalent list was also passed out in Second Class although, according to the recollections of passenger Kate Buss, it was not issued there until just after the next day’s breakfast.
fn1 In many accounts of the Titanic disaster, Mary Sloan’s age is given as twenty-eight, the age she herself rather delightfully provided in several newspaper interviews given in 1912 and afterwards. The 1911 census of Ireland records Mary’s age as forty-two.
fn1 Smith did not hold much interest in the possibilities of a shipwreck, having told a journalist three years earlier that ‘modern shipbuilding has gone beyond all that’.
fn2 This telegram had been passed on to Ismay by Captain Smith to whom it was returned that evening for posting in the Officers’ Mess. It was the only ice warning to the Titanic that was shown to Ismay and it may have been given to him as a courtesy because it came from another White Star ship.
fn1 Several of the Titanic’s passengers referred to the Restaurant as ‘the Ritz Restaurant’, a confusion that likely originated with the subcontracting of the first restaurants on Hamburg-Amerika liners to the Ritz hotels.
fn2 During several visits to the Mid-West, Major Butt had been deeply distressed to hear groups of children mocking the presidential embonpoint with the nicknames ‘Tum-Tum’ and ‘Taft the Tubby’, shouted at the presidential train as it pulled into the station.
fn3 A possible confusion of the Writing Room as a Smoking Room ‘for ladies’.
fn1 Andrews’ guess that they extended for approximately 300 feet might explain why he misdiagnosed by thirty minutes to an hour the time it would take for the Titanic to founder.
fn1 The davits could have accommodated a second vertical row of lifeboats, which were added to the Olympic after the Titanic’s sinking. Prior to the disaster, it was felt too many lifeboats would clutter the Boat Deck.
fn1 From Virgil’s Aeneid, referring to the moment when Aeneas’s voice catches in his throat.
fn1 In Lifeboat 8, Lady Rothes heard music from the ship until nearly the end, but she could never swear to the tunes floating over the water.
fn1 This man was probably one of the ship’s bakers. His blood alcohol level was so high that he insulated himself to the point that he survived in the waters far longer than any of the others who jumped from the Titanic. He died in New Jersey in 1956.
fn1 Damaged lifeboats and the collapsibles had been set adrift after their passengers were rescued by the Carpathia.
fn1 There is no truth in the urban legend that the bodies of third-class passengers were simply thrown back in the sea. Bodies were buried at sea only if they were in a state of decomposition.
fn2 The British inquiry, chaired by John Bigham, 1st Viscount Mersey, met in London from 1 May to 3 July 1912 and published its findings on 30 July of the same year.
fn3 The latter’s youngest daughter was later Duchess of York, Queen Consort and then Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1900–2002).
fn4 In 2009, Leslie House was gutted by a fire which inflicted even greater damage than the inferno of 1763, almost completely destroying the interiors and leaving only the façade intact. However, at the time of writing, planning permission has been granted for the restoration of the house for its development into a residence with several private apartments.
fn1 Despite her remarriage, Lady Rothes continued like many aristocratic widows to use her title from her first marriage.
fn2 Admittedly, this was nothing compared to Cissy Maioni’s lapses in memory. In 1926, she had won an essay-writing competition for the Daily Express with an account of her time as a first-class passenger on the Titanic and omitted to reveal that she had been travelling as a lady’s maid.