CHAPTER 7 A Decent Wee Man
Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anyone a bore, the fault is yours.
Cecilia Bowes-Lyon, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne (1862–1938)
FRIDAY, APRIL 12, THE VOYAGE’S first full day without a port of call, arrived clear, calm, and “fresh,” as the Daily Chart informed the passengers, along with the information that, by noon, the ship had traveled 386 miles from Queenstown.1 Along with the company pennant on her aft mast, the Titanic flew both the Stars and Stripes and the Blue Ensign. Until the outbreak of the First World War, British passenger ships typically displayed the national flag of their ultimate destination; shortly before arrival, the Union Jack would be rehoisted. On the Titanic, this meant that for most of the trip her forward mast flew an American flag with forty-six stars since, although New Mexico and Arizona had been admitted as the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states of the Union earlier that year, their stars would not officially be added to the flag until the Fourth of July. The Blue Ensign was a mark of distinction, flown from the stern with Admiralty permission on any ship with a captain who was a member of the Royal Navy Reserve, which the Titanic’s commander, Captain Smith, had been for years.2 That afternoon, he ordered a new boiler, the twenty-first, opened up to test an increase in speed, around the same time as the ship received her first warning of “thick ice” ahead from Captain Caussin of the French liner La Touraine, who signed off his telegram with “best regards and bon voyage.”3
Friday was an opportunity for Jack Thayer to start exploring “all over the ship.” Moving through the first-class quarters on the Titanic while his parents socialized with their friends, seventeen-year-old Jack was in awe of the “palatial” ship, although so far as we can tell his favorite activity remained firmly centered on mealtimes.4 There were some rooms to which he did not have access, namely the Smoking Room, on account of his age, and the Reading and Writing Room, on account of his gender. The latter had been designed with his mother and all the other women of First Class in mind since, according to an industry magazine, “the pure white walls and elegant furniture show us that this is essentially a ladies’ room.” Mahogany doors opened into a bay-windowed drawing room with thick rose-colored carpet and floral-patterned chairs and armchairs. Writing desks and potted plants dotted the room. With everything in its design geared towards solitude, the Writing Room was not a social space. Apart from the turn of a magazine or book page or the scratch of a nib on the White Star–embossed stationery, the only intended noise was the tick of the Magneta-linked clock above the electric-grate fireplace. Unfortunately, the equivalent room on the Olympic had not been without its teething problems, particularly with the excessive use of electric lights. After an afternoon spent there, a passenger had complained in a spirit of magisterial disapproval that “one cannot contemplate spending a couple of hours under this illumination, with even the most enticing of novels, without anticipating the burning eyes that must surely result from the glare from the dazzling points of light above.”5
The ship’s publicity material described the Writing Room as a tribute to the late Georgian period, as was the male-only Smoking Room on the same deck. The gender-neutral Lounge was apparently “decorated in the style which was in vogue in France when Louis XV was on the throne, when social intercourse was the finest of fine arts.”6 With far less historical precision, the ship’s Turkish Baths, located as part of a complex on F-Deck that also contained a swimming pool and electric baths, an early form of the tanning bed, was described as conveying “something of the grandeur of the mysterious East.”7 The Titanic was, like the era that created her, somewhere between nostalgia and experiment, with the latter spirit reflected in her technology but banished from her accommodation. Her interiors conspicuously eschewed anything that smacked of the outré. As with most of her contemporary counterparts, the Titanic’s renderings of historical styles were distinctly sanitized and improved, inspiring a contemporary travel guide for first-class passengers to joke good-naturedly of the Olympic class, “When you board… you enter the reception-room, which is Jacobean English in style, but so modernised and improved that even King James might be forgiven if he did not identify it.”8 Despite subsequent claims for the daring, unparalleled cutting-edge modernity of the Titanic, the governing prescription for the interiors of the White Star sisters was conservative splendor. It was not until the unveiling of the Île de France in 1927 that transatlantic liners began to have a uniform internal decorating scheme and started to influence architecture on land, rather than vice versa.9 A year after the Titanic’s voyage, Richard Fletcher wrote in his study-cum-travel guide, Travelling Palaces, that when it came to the great liners:
In the dining-rooms every ornamental historical period has been resuscitated. You may sleep in a bed depicting one ruler’s fancy, breakfast under another dynasty altogether, lunch under a different flag and furniture scheme, play cards or smoke, or indulge in music under three other monarchs, have your afternoon cup of tea in a verandah which is essentially modern and cosmopolitan, and return to one of the historical periods experienced earlier in the day for your dinner in the evening at which meal, whatever be the imperial style or the degree of Colonial simplicity, you will appear in very modern evening dress.10
Like Jack Thayer, Thomas Andrews spent most of his Friday inspecting the ship. Unlike Jack, there were no rooms to which he did not have access. Although it was only the second day of the voyage for most of the Titanic’s passengers, Andrews had been working almost nonstop since the previous Tuesday. He was at the head of the nine-man “Guarantee Group” from Harland and Wolff, who were tasked with inspecting any issues arising on the maiden voyage, be they big or small, fixing what they could and writing detailed reports for the yard back in Belfast. It had been eighteen months since Andrews’s boss and uncle, Lord Pirrie, issued a directive that his nephew “should be present on board all steamers built by us while undergoing their trials and accompany them on the run round to the cross-channel or other port to which they are ordered from Belfast.”11 As with the Olympic, the maiden voyage of a ship as prestigious as the Titanic required Andrews to go beyond his uncle’s stipulation by staying on board until the final port of call. It was not a task he relished and, by Friday, he was painfully homesick.12
Depending on one’s interpretation of good fortune, Andrews was therefore lucky in having more than enough to keep him occupied. A stewardess recalled that “if anything went wrong it was always to Mr. Andrews one went. Even when a fan stuck in a stateroom, one would say, ‘Wait for Mr. Andrews, he’ll soon see to it,’ and you would find him settling even the little quarrels that arose between ourselves.” Perhaps a more pleasurable set of interruptions were the numerous passengers who sought Andrews out to congratulate him on his latest creation; Jack Thayer was not the only one who thought the Titanic was “splendid.” However, if he was in a hurry and wished to avoid his admirers, Andrews could travel through the ship via Scotland Road, a long corridor which ran along E-Deck and allowed the crew to move quickly from one area of the Titanic to another. Named after a street in Liverpool, it linked the respective classes of accommodation, and many of the ship’s first- and second-class stewards were housed in bunk-filled cabins lining the route.13 Jenny, the ship’s cat, prowled the halls after delivering a litter of kittens shortly before departure and seeking out the company of a “big, patient, overworked” scullion to whom she had taken a shine.14 Scotland Road ended at the Titanic’s Potato Store, filled at Southampton with 1,420 tons of the tuberous crop.15 Elsewhere on the same deck were the Titanic’s two hospital wards—one for recuperation, the other for quarantining the infectious. All of this was Tommy Andrews’s design and all, apparently, was remembered and observed by him with uncanny precision.
A deck above Scotland Road, Andrews had placed the first- and second-class Dining Saloons on the same level, so that they could be both separated and served by the Galley, where some of the ship’s six to ten thousand daily meals, depending on capacity, were cooked, and the Pantry, where these meals were prepared for service. Amid a mechanized forest of culinary equipment, the Galley’s Duck Press stood out as “most imposing” as it pulverized the dead fowls’ bones and internal organs, the results of which were then added to a sauce that could be spooned over the meat. Unfortunately, there was malfunctioning equipment in some of the Titanic’s other, smaller galleys; Andrews was trying to organize repair of the galley’s hot press on B-Deck.16 Heating, in general, seemed to be the vessel’s major teething problem by Friday afternoon. One ailing, if singularly loquacious, lady in Second Class had sent a dozen complaints to the Purser’s Office in the course of thirty-six hours, demanding she be rehoused since the radiators in her cabin were not working.17 At the same time as she fretted about being forced to recuperate in a furnished icebox, other second-class passengers had asked for their heating to be switched off entirely, as their radiators seemed stuck on the highest possible setting. Similar problems were being reported in a few of the third-class cabins, and one stateroom in First Class had been unable to access hot running water. The button used to summon a steward was not working for Ann Isham, an American traveling in C-49.18 Andrews’s encyclopedic eye for detail also led to him making notes to the effect that there were too many unsightly screws in the hat hooks in the first-class cabins. There had been a series of objections from the clerks who manned the Mail Room on G-Deck. Their quarters shared walls with the cabins reserved for single men traveling in Third Class and the clerks felt that, after the long shifts they worked, the resultant noise was too much to bear.19
The clerks’ decision to approach Andrews with their concerns over their sleeping arrangements was a shrewd one, since he had a reputation for going above and beyond the call of duty in trying to make a crew’s life comfortable, and central to that was where they slept. A crew member wrote later that Andrews could remember hundreds of names and details of employees’ shifts and, no matter how busy, he would always find time for even the swiftest of friendly hellos.20 Even while preparations for the Titanic’s sailing day had consumed his attention in Southampton, Andrews had sent a memo to a lower-ranking colleague, urging, “I have always in mind a week’s holiday due to you from last summer and shall be glad if you will make arrangements to take these on my return, as, although you may not desire to have them, I feel sure that a week’s rest will do you good.”21 Sincerely touched by the efforts he had gone to in improving their accommodation, the stewards had invited Andrews down to Scotland Road before departure, “which he did to receive their warm-hearted thanks,” wrote stewardess Violet Jessop. “His gentle face lit up with real pleasure, for he alone understood—nobody else had bothered to understand—how deeply these men feel to show any sentiment at all.” They had passed a vote of thanks to Andrews, something many of them had also done when they worked on the Olympic’s maiden voyage a year earlier, when they had clubbed together to present him with a walking cane as a token of their gratitude. His schedule at home when he was dashing around the shipyard and his at-sea inspections had already begun to take their toll on Andrews, who, at thirty-nine, had started to develop varicose veins. They again produced a gift to accompany their thanks, but unfortunately the only surviving source, a stewardess’s memoirs, does not specify what it was.22
This rather touching anecdote of improvements to the crew’s accommodation from the Olympic to the Titanic leads us tangentially to a historical theory so painfully ridiculous that one can only lament the thousands of trees which lost their lives to provide the paper on which it has been articulated. It originated with The Riddle of the Titanic, a book first published in 1995 and cowritten by Dutch military historian Dan van der Vat and British engineer Robin Gardiner. The root of this conspiracy-heavy version of what happened to the Titanic in April 1912 lies with the Olympic’s previously mentioned collision with the British warship Hawke in September 1911. The damage done to the Olympic’s hull was light enough that it could be temporarily mended until a weeklong window could be found to send her to Harland and Wolff for more thorough repairs, which included replacing a propeller blade she had lost or “thrown” mid-Atlantic. From March 1 to 7, 1912, the Olympic was docked alongside the Titanic in Belfast. For six days, the sisters sat next to one another as the Titanic was prepared to enter service and the Olympic was prepared to re-enter it.
The origin of the “switch theory”: the Olympic (LEFT) and the Titanic side by side in Belfast for a few days in March 1912.
It was at this point, the story goes, that the Olympic allegedly became the Titanic. Allegedly, the damage inflicted by the Hawke had belatedly been diagnosed as debilitating, making the Olympic such a bad investment for the White Star Line that the only logical thing to do was to commit the most audacious piece of insurance fraud in history. Since the Olympic was already damaged goods, the company decided to switch her with the unblemished and therefore insured-at-a-premium Titanic, which would be deliberately sailed into an iceberg on her maiden voyage in a few weeks’ time. Several ships operated by other lines in the J. P. Morgan empire were to move into position around the predetermined crash site and, ostensibly by fortuitous coincidence, safely evacuate all the passengers and crew, before the Olympic, masquerading as the Titanic, sank beneath the waves and left her owners to collect a check from Lloyd’s of London. The horrible loss of life was never planned, but “the ever-impetuous Smith gets it wrong and crashes early,” so none of the IMM’s preplanned rescue party of ships was near enough to help.23 The Titanic, rechristened as the Olympic, went on to have a long, successful seagoing career until the economic lugubriousness of the Great Depression forced her retirement in 1935.
Three years after The Riddle of the Titanic had been released, one of its authors, Robin Gardiner, went further with a solo effort, Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank?, in which he argued that there was no ice collision because “steel, even of the quality in use in 1912, is very much harder than ice,” an observation that has seemingly evaded generations of sailors and which must presumably come as a colossal surprise to the International Ice Patrol.24 Gardiner instead argued, “What lay in the Titanic’s path, however, was not an iceberg with its white fringe and line of phosphorescence at the waterline, but one of the rescue ships. This vessel had its lights out and had probably been damaged by the ice. For this reason Titanic’s lookouts, who were concentrating on searching the sea ahead of the ship for ice, failed to see the darkened silhouette of the blacked-out ship until it was too late to avoid the collision.”25 The original theory, of an insurance-motivated charge into an iceberg, was the recipient of more undeserved attention in 2004 following a British documentary which culminated with grainy shots of the Titanic’s wrecked bow as viewers were told, with the helpful use of some CGI, that the brass letters of the ship’s nameplate had fallen away to reveal the M and P of Olympic beneath.26 In reality, footage from an early exploration of the wreck in 1987 and high-def filming in 2010 quite clearly show the name Titanic intact upon the bow, a situation aided no doubt by the fact that neither of the sisters ever had their names rendered in brass lettering. The names were inscribed into their hulls and then painted white, as hundreds of photographs testify.
A major plank of the argument that the sisters could be, and thus were, switched in the course of that week at Belfast in March 1912 is Gardiner’s assertion that the Titanic was “superficially identical to her sister except for her C Deck portholes.”27 On the surface, there is some merit to this claim. The two liners had exactly the same dimensions, they were built from the same plans, and their interior decorations were in many places a carbon copy of one another’s. After the Titanic had sunk and there was a surge in demand for photographs of her, images of the Olympic were—and often still are—either deliberately substituted for the Titanic or innocently mislabeled as such. For the eagle-eyed, differentiating the sisters is relatively easy because of changes made to the first-class promenade areas on A- and B-Deck. The forward half of the Titanic’s A-Deck Promenade was enclosed by glass windows, while aft was left open to the elements. On the Olympic, the whole deck remained open. This alteration has traditionally been attributed to the fact that during the Olympic’s early crossings it became clear to her operators that the North Atlantic was often too cold or too blustery to justify an open promenade space. However, Mark Chirnside, author of the most thorough modern account of the Olympic’s career, has conclusively proven that this could not have been the motivation. The Olympic had three promenade areas for her first-class passengers—their space on the Boat Deck, which as the top level of the ship was completely exposed to the elements, then the A-Deck Promenade, which had a roof but no windows, and below that a fully enclosed promenade on B-Deck. After observing that all three areas were generally underused on the Olympic, White Star decided that this was excessive. The B-Deck walkway was thus altered on the Titanic to allow for the installation of a new class of suites, with their own private promenade spaces, the creation of the Café Parisian, and the expansion of an adjoining restaurant. The two types of promenade, enclosed and exposed, offered on different decks on the Olympic were merged in the Titanic on A-Deck, with windows added to the front half.
The Olympic (ABOVE) with the Titanic (BELOW). The differences between their two A-Deck Promenades are particularly noticeable here—the Olympic’s is completely open, compared to windows on the forward half of the Titanic’s.
Supporters of van der Vat and Gardiner’s version of events argue that all that was required was to change a few nameplates, add some windows to the A-Deck Promenade, and race through alterations to B-Deck, which allegedly explains why parts of the Titanic’s Café Parisian were still being painted en route from Belfast to Southampton. However, as the crewmen’s gratitude to Thomas Andrews for their improved quarters suggests, there were in fact many more differences between the Olympic and the Titanic beyond the cosmetic issue of the Promenade Deck. The Restaurant was not the only room to be expanded between the Olympic and the Titanic; its popularity on the former had led to a larger Reception Room on the latter. The Bridge’s bulwark was teak on the Olympic and steel on the Titanic. The Wheelhouses had different layouts. There were fewer windows in the younger ship’s Chart Room. The barrier rails for the Officers’ Promenade were further forward on the Titanic; their bedrooms were nine feet aft. The size and shape of the sisters’ on-deck ventilators were completely different from one to the other. Water pipes ran higher up the Titanic’s funnels; her hatch covers on the forecastle were in different places, as were the doors to her deck cranes. The C-Deck cabin portholes were in a different configuration, which Gardiner and van der Vat both acknowledged. The roofs of the first-class Smoking Room, Writing Room, and Lounge were higher on the Titanic. The third-class General Room had a different porthole arrangement. Several styles of cabin were replicated but moved around and some, like Thomas Andrews’s own bedroom, A-36, did not even exist on the Olympic. The layout of the Turkish Baths on F-Deck was significantly altered between the two sisters, and dives to the Titanic’s wreck site confirmed that she sank with her own arrangement in the Baths intact, while photographs taken on the Olympic in 1911, before the alleged switch took place, and 1928, long afterwards, show that she kept the same configuration in the Turkish Baths throughout her career. The problems with the heating experienced by some of the Titanic’s passengers and the nonfunctioning faucets in several second-class bathrooms, which were not fixed until the ship reached Southampton from Belfast, are not issues that could have arisen on a ship that had already been in service for just under a year. The Olympic and the Titanic were cosmetically similar, but in their minutiae they differed in dozens of points, all of which, where access has been possible for submariners, have been confirmed by explorations of the Titanic’s wreck or, in other cases, by photographs from the Olympic before and after 1912.28
The ships had their own yard numbers during construction, respectively 400 and 401. At the time of writing, one of the Titanic’s propeller blades, jutting from the seafloor, still clearly displays the number 401. This is countered in The Riddle of the Titanic with the proposition, “Yes; but the Titanic was cannibalized for parts when the Olympic was damaged: could this not have been one of them?”29 Even if one charitably endows that fragile suggestion with strength, there is still the torrent of evidence that poured from the Olympic’s retirement auctions in 1935, when many of her fittings were removed to be sold before her scrapping, including the wood paneling that had been installed in 1911. In hundreds of cases, the number 400 was stamped on the back of those panels and can be seen in many of the pieces that survive to the present. To the objection that Belfast, a shipbuilding city, was not awash with rumors of what was going on as one liner was suspiciously traded for another, Gardiner and van der Vat proposed that the changes were “surprisingly modest, perhaps as little as exchanging the ship’s name-plates and the odd loose item such as lifebuoys (very few items bore the ships’ names)—a task for a small team of men acting under the cover of all the work going on aboard other liners.”30 In fact, this “small team of men” would have needed to smelt away and then reinscribe the names, redesign the Wheelhouse, make a few changes to the funnels, switch at least one of the propeller blades and forget to remove the number 401 from it, alter the deck cranes and forecastle hatches, move a deck rail, enclose half a promenade in glass, install a new set of ventilators, alter the roofs over three public rooms and the portholes in another, add in at least eight new cabins and move the officers’, reconfigure the Turkish Baths and the Chart Room, and rip out every piece of wood paneling to erase 401 and rebrand them all with the number 400 for an auction that no one then knew would take place, a quarter of a century later. All this, the unknown small group would have had to manage without anybody noticing, in the course of one week.
Even the foundation of the “switch theory,” that the Olympic was rendered a dud by her collision in 1911, is tempered by a passing contextual knowledge of the shipping industry at the time. Collisions like those between the Olympic and the Hawke were an unfortunate occupational hazard. The Kaiser Wilhelm der Große had been damaged by a dock fire in Hoboken in 1900 and hit a naval ram while navigating Cherbourg harbor in 1906.31 In 1907, the White Star Line had been prepared to replace the entire bow of their Suevic after she ran aground off the coast of Cornwall, which suggests strongly that sinking their onetime flagship over something as minor as two damaged watertight compartments was unlikely to be viewed by them, or indeed most people, as a sensible plan. The Olympic had more Hawke-like collisions throughout her career, including an impact with another British warship, the Audacious, in October 1914, and she accidentally rammed and sank LV-117, one of the Nantucket lightships, in 1934. In none of those cases was the ship so damaged that it was in her owner’s best interests to destroy her, rather than continue with her in operation.
Finally, beyond the overwhelming archaeological, photographic, logistical, and contextual evidence that shows this theory of a switch in 1912 to be utter nonsense, we might also add common sense, the silver bullet to so many conspiracy theories. The moment these ships took on paying customers, particularly those in First Class, there was a solid chance that the insurance paid out to their owners would fail to cover both the loss of the ship and the compensation which the White Star Line, in their turn, would have had to pay for the lost personal possessions of their passengers. When maritime historians Steve Hall, Bruce Beveridge, and Art Braunschweiger examined Gardiner and van der Vat’s arguments in 2012, they proffered the unanswerable conclusion that “there simply was no profit in sinking Titanic on purpose, and even if there were, an elaborate switch scheme would have been unnecessary. One man, one box of matches and a drum of lamp oil is all that would have been needed.”32 Fires while docked happened with brutal frequency—they had gutted the German ship Saale in 1900, they would destroy the French Line’s Paris in 1939 and Normandie in 1942. If the Olympic was no longer commercially viable, and there is nothing to suggest that this was the case, and much to the contrary, her trip for repairs to Belfast in the spring of 1912 would have been the perfect opportunity for a devastating fire made to resemble an accident. As a risk to her owners, an orchestrated inferno would have been far less severe, and infinitely less stupid, than sailing her out into the middle of the Atlantic with thousands of people, and their luggage, on board, and ramming her into an iceberg.33
Unaware of the dubious historiography that his creation would one day create, Tommy Andrews dressed for Friday dinner and walked down the three flights of stairs between his cabin and the Dining Saloon. As he descended into the Reception Room, Andrews did as many Irish people seem to do when traveling and found a few compatriots. Mary Sloan, a forty-three-year-old stewardess from Belfast, tall and thin with dark hair, was chatting to the Titanic’s surgeon, Dr. William O’Loughlin, middle-aged, genially rotund, and sporting a Bismarckian mustache.I O’Loughlin had been orphaned as a young man, then taken in by an uncle who encouraged him to succeed in his ambition of becoming a doctor, firstly through undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and then as a postgraduate at the Royal College of Surgeons in the same city. O’Loughlin was brilliant and well liked, and he and Andrews were old friends. They were close enough for O’Loughlin to call him by his familial nickname of Tommy. Mary Sloan knew Andrews less well but seemingly liked him just as much. If many of his colleagues admired Andrews deeply, his coworkers from the north of Ireland, in the words of one writer, “loved him.”34 Part of Andrews’s attraction was that he conformed so obviously to the criteria set in northern Irish culture for measuring masculine goodness; as the Ulster-born poet Louis MacNeice put it when reflecting on his Edwardian childhood, “their idea of goodness is summed up in the common phrase: ‘a decent wee man.’ The Decent Wee Man is unostentatious, sober, industrious, scrupulously honest, and genuinely charitable.”35 In a letter to her family in Belfast, Mary Sloan wrote of Andrews, “I was proud of him. He came from home and he made you feel on the ship that all was right.”36
O’Loughlin or, as Mary Sloan called him, “the dear old Doctor,” had been waiting for Andrews. The trio fell into conversation at the foot of the stairwell, unique among the Titanic’s stairwells in having an electric candelabra at its base. Mary assumed the two men would want to end the conversation as quickly as they could while remaining polite, so that they could go in to dinner. Instead, Andrews evaded every opportunity to exit. He told them that he had written to his wife twice a day since he left Belfast, and when Mary complimented him on “the beauty and perfection of the ship,” Andrews answered that the only thing he had to complain about was that the Titanic was taking him further and further away from home. O’Loughlin joked that he at least was grateful for the calm seas that had so far prevented any serious outbursts of seasickness. Throughout their conversation, Andrews failed to hide either his exhaustion or his homesickness well; he also mentioned that not only had his infant daughter been in poor health when he left Belfast, but his wife was unwell and his father quite seriously so. Mary wrote a few days later that during their conversation on Friday evening, “Mr. Andrews seemed loath to go, he wanted to talk about home.… I looked at him and his face struck me at the time as having a very sad expression.” Eventually, Andrews said goodbye to her and went through to the Saloon with Dr. O’Loughlin for the start of a seven-course meal.37
I. 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.