CHAPTER 8 A Kind of Hieroglyphic World

The few hundred people who made up “the world” never tired of meeting each other, always the same ones, to exchange congratulations on still existing.

Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958)

DINNER IN THE SALOON THAT Friday began with hors d’oeuvres and oysters, then a soup course at which the choice was usually between a consommé and something heavier—in this case, a Consommé Sévigné or a Crème Condé. Halibut was served for the fish course, followed by a choice between duck and lobster Newburg. With the same course, a lighter, vegetarian option was also offered—mushroom vol-au-vent. For the next course, vegetables only appeared on the side of sirloin, a Surrey capon (rooster) with ox tongue, or a haunch of mutton, before the salad course. Dessert was ice cream, Pineapple Royale, or a friandise cake.¹ For some upper-class men and women who were keen to maintain a trim figure, the Saloon’s determination to serve dinner with the same marathon number of courses as one might find at a British country house weekend inevitably proved trying, even if portions were generally kept relatively small. Several passengers skipped certain courses, grazed at those they did take, or trusted in the power of the corset. There were also those who had surrendered to permanent temptation and wore their resulting embonpoint with pride.

Dr. O’Loughlin’s joke to Tommy Andrews and Mary Sloan about how few passengers were suffering from mal de mer might not have raised a giggle from one of the unhappy few, the Countess of Rothes’s maid, Cissy Maioni, who had been struggling with it since the Titanic’s first night out.² Elsewhere in First Class, a Swiss mother and daughter, and a Canadian matriarch and her landowning compatriot from Manitoba were also feeling unwell, as were a similarly small handful in Second and Third Class. Most of them generally attributed their discomfort to unfamiliarity with the sea, rather than to the weather, which remained “fresh” and “so calm.” With the exception of the Swiss ladies, who lay bedridden as martyrs to nausea in their darkened cabins, the other passengers with shaky sea legs, including Cissy, were able to function.³ In Cissy’s case, that brought her to her employer’s stateroom to help undress the Countess after dinner every evening and dress her for breakfast the next morning.⁴

Remembering her life in the Edwardian age, Lady Cynthia Asquith wrote later, “A large fraction of our time was spent in changing our clothes.… However small your dress allowance a different dinner dress for each night was considered necessary.”⁵ The latter expectation applied only to visits, holidays, or transatlantic voyages, which helps explain the mammoth quantity of luggage piled into the Titanic at her three ports of call. For the morning, ladies wore suits, often with narrow-heeled boots, since this was the outfit in which they would not just breakfast, but also take the air on the Boat or Promenade decks afterwards. These suits were a halfway nod to practicality, since the more fashion conscious donned the en vogue hobble skirt, which had tightened its grip as corsets loosened theirs. The French couturier Paul Poiret took dubious credit for the trend, remarking, “Yes I freed the bust, but I shackled the legs.”⁶ While it was considered extremely poor form for a man to keep his hat on indoors, the opposite was true for women, who were expected, when in company, to wear gloves and hats—by 1912 just slightly smaller than they had been in their gargantuan heyday in the summer of 1910—until they changed for the evening meal. Contemporary maids later told stories of employers donning gloves with sixteen buttons, rising to past the elbow and taking nearly twenty minutes to put on. Admittedly, those were extreme examples, as most memorable anecdotes are, but gloves were a staple of a lady’s wardrobe, usually changed throughout the first part of the day from the shorter, more practical ones for a morning walk to the longer pieces for lunch. In her quick stopover in Paris between Genoa and boarding the Titanic, Dorothy Gibson had as a treat bought dozens of pairs to equip herself for the voyage.⁷ Along with hats for the trip, Lady Rothes had also purchased new gloves and boots, the latter from the Bond Street shop of a now defunct firm called Hook, Knowles & Co., who also made shoes for the Royal Family.⁸

This carousel of clothing was used by some contemporary commentators to diminish the standing of women since, then as now, there existed a curious belief that an interest in one’s appearance automatically equated with a subpar moral worth or an indifference to intellect. In his memoirs The House of Commons from Within, and Other Memories, published that year, the former Liberal politician, Dr. Robert Farquharson, chose to cite hats as evidence against the suffragettes’ campaign, arguing that women were demonstrably unfit to vote on the grounds that “women seem inevitably to bring personal considerations into the discussion of larger questions, and appearance, manners, or even dress are apt to sway their opinions one way or the other.… They possess a selfish and cynical indifference to the convenience and safety of others, as is shown by the preposterous erections they proudly bear on the top of their heads.”⁹

For Cissy Maioni, her employer’s second outfit change of the day preceded lunch in the Saloon. By that point, many passengers had taken a walk on deck, where the Captain carried out his daily inspections between nine and eleven o’clock; at noon, the air was pierced by the sound of the testing of the whistles on the ship’s three working funnels.¹⁰ The afternoon was usually a quieter time, when many passengers relaxed in their cabins, read in the Lounge or in a steamer chair on deck, took tea, or, depending on their gender, wrote letters from the Smoking Room or the Writing Room—they could be delivered to the Purser’s Office for posting in New York. Just as he had announced luncheon, the ship’s twenty-five-year-old bugler, Percy Fletcher, moved through the main public areas to give the passengers an hour’s notice, and thus time to change, for dinner.¹¹ Fletcher’s seagoing equivalent of the butler’s ringing of the gong on land used the patriotic tune “The Roast Beef of Old England,” the unsung lyrics of which eulogized a happier time under Queen Elizabeth I when “our soldiers were brave, and our courtiers were good” and the general population “kept open house, with good cheer all day long” in a golden era when “mighty roast beef was the Englishman’s food.”

Women traveling without a lady’s maid or companion could ring the in-cabin electric bell for the assistance of a stewardess, since it was impossible to dress oneself fully given the length, complexities, and restrictions of Edwardian tailoring. Their surviving letters do not confirm it one way or the other, but considering that Lady Rothes was accompanied by a servant it seems probable that Cissy helped dress both the Countess and her roommate. It would have crowded the cabin for Gladys to summon a stewardess every evening before dinner and, given the number of passengers who required a similar service, quite possibly a waste of time as well.

The bedroom shared by the Countess of Rothes and Gladys Cherry was beautiful, with white walls, a small chandelier, rose-pink eiderdowns, mahogany wardrobes, armchairs, a sofa, and a dressing table. It was decorated in the late Georgian style, one of the sixteen aesthetics employed throughout the Olympic-class first-class accommodation, with the layout of bedrooms and parlors replicated or mimicked between the sisters, albeit with the cabins in different locations between the two ships.¹² The Countess’s stateroom on the Titanic, C-77, was more or less identical to the Olympic’s B-69, which was lovely enough for White Star to feature it in their early marketing campaigns for the Olympic. The only significant difference between them was that on the Olympic, as a B-Deck stateroom, the room had two windows, as shown in the surviving advertising prints, while on the Titanic the Countess and Gladys’s dressing table was relocated against the interior wall, and one of their rose-pink quilted beds was placed below the cabin’s two curtained portholes.¹³

It was here that Cissy spent hours of her time on the Titanic. Contemporary etiquette guides extolled the importance, rights, and responsibilities of a lady’s maid, who, in an ideal situation, was to be

on call for her mistress from the moment of waking until she retires to bed. The principal responsibility of this role is to make sure every detail of her mistress’s clothing is well presented at all times—only the Lady’s Maid is permitted to touch her mistress’s dressing tables—and that her hair is immaculately styled. Mending skills, tidiness and the ability to pack clothes correctly and speedily are essential. Being of good temper and reliability are vital qualities. A mistress will likely confide in her Maid, a privilege which requires absolute discretion.… A Lady’s Maid shall be expected to dress in a smart and modest manner at all times.¹⁴

There were tips on how to stand—“Your toes should point straight ahead, never toe out.… Hips should be at all times, walking or standing, folded down and under you in the same forward position you would assume to squeeze through a narrow space”—and how to carry one’s chest, “neither thrust forward like a strutting peacock nor caved in like a broken reed.”¹⁵

If manuals like this continued to idealize the relationship between a lady and her maid as something sacred, by 1912 there were a dwindling number of acolytes as the centuries-old idea that a career in service was something honorable and enviable showed the first signs of unraveling. It remained the female occupation with the largest numbers, but in the previous decade there had been a 62 percent drop in the number of young women, over the age of fourteen, who were embarking upon a career as a servant.¹⁶ It became more difficult both to retain and to replace servants, particularly those with the requisite skills for the more prestigious and demanding jobs, leading to a higher turnover in positions like butlers, housekeepers, valets, and lady’s maids. Cissy was a case in point, since she had been with Lady Rothes for less than a year; thus far, it had been a happy relationship and Gladys, whose first real exposure to Cissy was during their time on the Titanic, thought she was tremendous at her job.¹⁷ When she was not working, she loved listening to the ship’s orchestra, struck up an at-sea friendship with an older gentleman traveling alone who, Cissy thought, “seemed to suffer from loneliness,” and even seemed to enjoy a flirtation with a crew member.¹⁸

Lady Rothes, c. 1907, with her eldest son, Malcolm, Viscount Leslie, who fell ill while she was on the Titanic.

The Countess’s three days on board had been quiet, although not without worries. Around the time the Titanic left Queenstown, she had received a telegram bearing the unwelcome news that her eldest son, Malcolm, had fallen ill. Aged ten, Malcolm Leslie had been left at home in Scotland with his toddler brother John in the care of tutors and governesses, since even the most loving of Edwardian aristocratic mothers, which Noëlle seems to have been, did not generally take their children with them on long trips. The extant relevant letters do not specify the nature of Malcolm’s illness, and although it cannot have been particularly serious, nonetheless, it was unwelcome news to his mother.¹⁹ She was confident that the servants at Leslie House would take care of him, and it was a relief that Malcolm was not yet at boarding school. He was due to start at Eton, his father’s alma mater, in two years’ time; Norman’s education there had been comparatively brief, truncated in 1893 when his grandmother’s death brought him the earldom and enough corresponding responsibilities that he left after only three years to return to Scotland, where he was privately tutored.²⁰ That Noëlle’s husband and eldest son were Etonians was a sign of privilege in the twentieth century, but to the careful observer of trends it was yet more proof of how long the rot had been working on the British aristocracy. When first established by Henry VI in the fifteenth century, Eton had been for the education of the poor, later the sons of merchants and then of the gentry. The great families of the nobility had endeavored to teach their children at home, but as the influence of the gentry families grew and the royal court as a center for establishing a network of useful companionship declined, boarding school increasingly became the preferred education for the sons of the aristocracy alongside families with more recently acquired influence. The last bastion of this trend to fall was the British Royal Family, who after 1955 abandoned tutors for the royal children under the modernizing influence of Elizabeth II’s consort, by which time even the most preciously blue-blooded families of the old guard had rebranded boarding school from something gauchely bourgeois into a mark of distinction.²¹ The schools were also part of the reason why nearly all British aristocrats, regardless of their locality, spoke with the same accent. Lord Rothes, with his Scottish peerage, would have been taught the same form of heightened Received Pronunciation sociolect as the Irish dukes of Leinster, the English marquesses of Winchester, and the Welsh viscounts Tredegar.

Although one of her relatives vividly recalled her temper—“She could get quite cross, but she was so charming one soon forgot it”—Noëlle typified much of what was admirable in the British aristocracy, and a glance at those she chose as friends suggests that she preferred to associate with like-minded individuals.²² Two years earlier, when 136 miners were caught inside collapsed coal pits at Whitehaven, the mine’s owner and the Rotheses’ acquaintance Lord Lonsdale had clambered down into the pit himself, refusing to leave until he was convinced that the manager’s assessment was correct and that the men were really dead. Lonsdale had then gone from door to door in the village built for the workers by his ancestors, breaking the news to each affected family. He had successfully petitioned George V to decorate fifty miners for their bravery in trying to free their trapped comrades.²³ Yet there were plenty of others in the British nobilities who behaved like wasps at the end of summer. They were viciously petty, small-minded, mendacious, and steeped in greed, a trend that accelerated as the financial burdens of maintaining a Victorian standard of aristocratic living became difficult, improbable, and finally impossible. In 1910, landowners in Norfolk had complained mightily after concluding that the Royal Family had forced a local wage hike when, upon taking control of his country house at Sandringham that summer, George V had issued a command that for workers on his estate there, “Everything [is] to be fair and more than fair; wages, cottages, everything.”²⁴ It was this kind of myopic selfishness that enabled the aristocracy’s mounting number of critics to present them in their entirety as “cruel, unreasonable, unfeeling and unpitying men.”²⁵ As well as the repulsive, the vile, and the moribund, proximity with the aristocracy also required dodging the ridiculous. When hosting or attending the legion number of dinner parties, guests inevitably included “young chaps,” sent out into Society in search of a wife. Some were charming, some boring, and many were braying incompetents, possessed of volume and intellect in lugubriously inverse proportion.

Both before and after the First World War, as the decline of the aristocracy accelerated, fictitious aristocrats peopled European literature attempting to capture the spectacle of a Götterdämmerung. These literary endeavors often offered readers aristocratic buffoons, loveable eccentrics, and, most frequently, villains. There could be heroes such as the Duke of Dorset, possessor of “Olympian wealth, rank, and intellect,” in Sir Max Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson, published the year before the Titanic set sail; self-acknowledged anachronisms like The Leopard’s Prince of Salina, incapable of competing in a world dominated by gauche homo oeconomicus; or the simply doomed, like the brittle and cruel Marie in Pains of Youth and the exquisitely useless Lord Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited.

Although most of these fictitious nobles are faced with problems created by being born into a class which had passed its prime and which clung to the trappings, if not the substance, of power, their final doom is nearly always a consequence of their own actions, or lack thereof. They are, like Salina and Sebastian Flyte, haunted by a self-fulfilling sense of futility. In this, they mirrored many actual nobles, on either side of the Great War, who would not or could not compete in a changing world and resigned themselves to failure. However, the diminishing of their class did not necessarily spell inevitable ruin for each individual born into it. There were plenty of patricians, like Noëlle, who remained committed to being useful, as shown by her philanthropy and recent training as a nurse for the Red Cross. Some of them could survive, even flourish, in the age of capitalism, if they had sufficient brains and inclination. They could invest in railways, industrial ports, and lead mines, like the late 7th Duke of Devonshire, of whom an admiring Vanity Fair investigative piece concluded, “had he not been a duke, he would have been a rare professor of mathematics.”²⁶ A diverse portfolio was often the key to survival in an age when reliance on the land alone had become suicidal folly, a stark reality in 1912 that explains Lord Rothes’s possible interest in buying fruit farms in the United States. Noëlle and her husband dedicated themselves to increasing their income and reducing the debt of the previous generation, hoping to emulate the Earl of Carnarvon, who had been so successful in the task that he could safely funnel money into a decade-long archaeological dig which eventually uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.²⁷ The Edwardian aristocracy might not have been dealt as strong a hand as some of their ancestors, but that was no reason to fold.

Traveling with artifacts accumulated by their past was always a risk, which is why every evening Cissy made a trip to the Purser’s Office and collected some of the jewels Lady Rothes had deposited in the Purser’s safe at the start of the voyage. Conveniently, the Purser’s Office was located at the end of the C-Deck cabin corridors and, on most evenings, Cissy would return the jewels for safety’s sake. The Countess preferred more conservative gowns; part of her preholiday shopping had involved a trip to the premises of Francis, a dress designer on Grafton Street, where she had picked up several new dresses and a feather boa, then the height of fashion rather than the trough of whimsical kitsch. After helping the Countess into her dress for the evening, Cissy styled her mistress’s hair and helped fasten on the jewelry selected for the evening. The Countess had come well equipped with pieces that would complement most of her seven evening gowns for the crossing and any dinners she might have to attend in America. She could choose from six rings, one a diamond marquise cut, one plain diamond, two in diamond and ruby, one pearl, and one emerald; two diamond brooches, one butterfly and the other spray; another brooch, crafted with diamonds and emeralds; and three pairs of earrings, one in diamond and pearl, and two of amethyst.²⁸

The Countess, with Gladys, proceeded in the same direction as the Thayers and the Strauses down a flight of stairs to the Reception Room and from there into the Dining Saloon. The grande descente to dinner was a staple vignette in the romance of the transatlantic crossing, and decades later, it inspired one of the most memorable scenes in motion picture history, when James Cameron had his two fictional lovers meet for dinner at the base of the cherub-sporting Grand Staircase. In fact, that particular space on the Titanic would never have featured in the descent to dinner, since the dome-capped section of the stairwell was actually the entry from the Boat Deck and swooped down to A-Deck, where the first-class accommodation began. To descend by passing the clock, showing the allegorical figures of “Honour and Glory Crowning Time,” and then the cherub at the bottom of the stairs would have required passengers to dress for dinner in their rooms and then go up to the elements on deck and re-enter. The particularly beautiful cinematography of the scene, however, might argue for appreciation rather than pedantry when viewing it.

The Countess, the Strauses, and the Thayers instead made their grande descente past the D-Deck staircase candelabra, while Dorothy ascended from her cabin on E-Deck. There was no tradition of a Captain’s Table on White Star ships and Captain Smith had been placed at a small four-person table with the Thayers. History is full of the agony of the almost, and that the Titanic’s first voyage was intended to be Smith’s last before retirement provides an enduring anecdote of the maybe. At sixty-two, he was the right age to retire, even if White Star had not emulated Cunard in setting a limit for its commanders to retire at sixty, which had caused confusion in a New York Times article of the previous year when it described Smith as having “reached the age limit.”²⁹ With a career distinguished by its unremarkable character, Smith was a popular commodore who had seen the Olympic through her first year of service, and some thought that he would be kept on until the maiden voyage of the Britannic in 1915.³⁰ However, the White Star Line did not request a retraction from newspapers that suggested Smith had been due to retire in late 1911 and his retirement had thus probably been postponed for him to guide the Titanic through her inaugural season. Considering that Smith lived in England, he would presumably have been asked to captain the Titanic on her first return trip from New York and potentially for several other voyages, since no record survives of any officer or commander having received news that they would replace Smith on the Titanic in the near future. At the very most, the trip on which he lost his life would have been his penultimate voyage, and more probably, the opening scene of the final act in his career.

No menu for dinner on Saturday, April 13, remains extant; those for the day before and the day after have survived only because a passenger accidentally folded them up in the pocket of an outfit later worn in the evacuation or because they were among items retrieved later from the coats of several recovered corpses of the Titanic’s victims. The meal seems to have passed much as on the other evenings. Elmer Taylor, a successful paper manufacturer from Delaware, was entranced by what he saw in the “beautifully lighted dining room.… A smooth sea, clear skies and low temperature outside gave women passengers an opportunity to get out their latest Parisian gowns, their most brilliant jewels.… It was a brilliant assembly—contentment and happiness prevailed. Conversations were perhaps animated by a social cocktail or two.”³¹ After dinner, the passengers decamped into the Reception Room, which, of all the public rooms on the Titanic, was the one referred to by the greatest number of alternative names by passengers: its decoration inspired several travelers to use the phrase the “Palm Room”; it was also sometimes called the “Lounge” (a name that properly applied to a different room on board), sometimes the “Music Saloon” or the “Ballroom” thanks to the after-dinner concerts performed there every evening, which proved extremely popular with first-class passengers.³² The Strauses’ Southern friend Colonel Gracie thought that one of the daily highlights of the voyage was when “we adjourned to the Palm Room, with many others, for the usual coffee at individual tables where we listened to the always delightful music of the Titanic’s band. On these occasions full dress was always en règle; and it was a subject of both observation and admiration that there were so many beautiful women—then especially in evidence—aboard the ship.”³³

The eight-man band was headed by its lead violinist, Wallace Hartley, a thirty-three-year-old Lincolnshire native and devout Methodist. Three cellists, a pianist, a bass player, and two more violinists joined him for an hour and fifteen minutes, before they and their instruments went back over to Second Class to play for an hour. The musicians spent their days at sea moving between the two classes, playing in the second-class Entrance Foyer at ten o’clock every morning, then at the Grand Staircase’s vestibule leading to the Boat Deck for First Class immediately afterwards, and at four o’clock in the Reception Room for tea, followed by another performance in Second Class, after which they ate dinner in the second-class Dining Saloon prior to their evening concert. On Saturday, as there had been every evening since Southampton, there was the possibility of dancing in First Class, and passengers, who had been provided with a White Star company song book listing each piece in the band’s repertoire numbered for convenience, were encouraged to request tunes, which was the origin of referring to a song as a “number.”³⁴

Observing the collective bonhomie in the Reception Room that evening, the fashion designer Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, accompanied by her magnificently staid husband, Sir Cosmo, was as captivated as Elmer Taylor and Colonel Gracie. Lady Duff Gordon, creator and proprietor of the eponymous fashion house Maison Lucille, was one of the most innovative and influential designers of her era. Along with easing the restrictiveness of corsets, which later led to their elimination as a staple in female wardrobes, she had also designed the trousseau for two British princesses, Margaret of Connaught and Victoria-Eugenia of Battenberg, whose weddings respectively made them Crown Princess of Sweden and Queen of Spain.³⁵ Jack Thayer’s mother was a friend and a client of Lady Duff Gordon’s, whose fame had increased significantly on the heels of her success in opening the new Parisian branch of her fashion house and following rave profiles in the pages of American Vogue. Another Vogue article, covering her Paris opening, was due to be published while she was still on the Titanic.³⁶ She and her husband were traveling to New York to open her first American store and, so that they could avoid the press attention while they worked for a few days after they disembarked, they were using the aliases of Mr. and Mrs. Morgan. Her initial reluctance to sail on the Titanic because it was a maiden voyage and “I should not care to cross on a new ship” had been eased by the smoothness of the journey; she had enjoyed her trip tremendously, especially her “pretty little cabin, with its electric heater and pink curtains,” and breakfast, which prompted her to remark to her husband, “Fancy strawberries in April, and in mid-ocean. The whole thing is positively uncanny. Why you should think you were at the Ritz.”³⁷ Despite their aliases in the Passenger Manifesto, nearly everyone in First Class knew who the Duff Gordons were. Even without her own prestige as a couturier, Lady Duff Gordon was also known for being the elder sister of the bestselling novelist Elinor Glyn, whose stories were both lambasted for, and hugely popular because of, their romantic and erotic scenes.

By the fourth night of the voyage, many of the more famous faces on board had become familiar to passengers who, like Elmer Taylor, confessed to “indulging in gossip”—an Edwardian travel journalist joked that “there is more gossip in a large passenger ship than at a parish sewing meeting”—and the best chance to see the noted names was during the after-dinner concerts, when most of the passengers congregated in the Reception Room.³⁸ Along with Lady Duff Gordon and Dorothy Gibson, the traveling celebrities included Karl Behr, the third-highest-ranked tennis player in the US and a veteran of Wimbledon and the Davis Cup; Jacques Futrelle, author of a successful series of murder mysteries; and William Stead, a British newspaper editor and author with a wide range of passions, including spiritualism and pacifism, who, eleven years earlier, had published The Americanisation of the World, which, as its name suggested, correctly predicted that the twentieth century would “belong” as much to the United States as the nineteenth had to the United Kingdom. However, even at the distance of a quarter of a century from the act, Stead was far more famous, or infamous, for a series of articles he had penned in 1885, collectively entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” While researching his story, Stead had gone to the East End of London, where he had purchased the virginity of a thirteen-year-old girl from her mother. Stead briefly went to prison for this, even though he had entrusted the young girl, Eliza, unmolested, into the care of an adopted family in France, via the Salvation Army, who became his main supporters in the quest to raise awareness of child prostitution. Prior to Stead’s devastating articles, many Victorians, particularly the middle classes, seemed to believe that such things did not happen in England, and the resulting outcry was considered so damaging to public morale that the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, begged Stead to desist from publishing any more, a plea he politely rejected. The momentum generated by the case resulted in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent in Britain from thirteen to sixteen. Popularly nicknamed the “Stead Act,” to Stead’s mild distress the legislation was also harnessed by the Liberal MP Henry Labouchère to include an amendment criminalizing all male homosexual activity in the British Isles, the legal noose that later destroyed the lives of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. Full sex between two adult males had been made a capital crime in England for the first time during the reign of Henry VIII and, although almost never enforced, the law had lasted until 1861. Even the Henrician legislation of 1533 had not criminalized other acts of homosexual intimacy, as the Labouchère Amendment did from 1885 until 1967, with the final flotsam and jetsam tidied up in 2003.

A less diligent publisher traveling on the Titanic was Henry Harper, indifferent heir to the Harper & Brothers publishing house, later to become HarperCollins. Harper and his wife were recognizable on board because they were frequently accompanied by their dragoman, Hamad Hassam Bureik, whom the couple had retained following their recent holiday to Egypt and who was generally agreed to be one of the most handsome men on the ship, and because they hated to be separated from their Pekingese Sun Yat-sen, named in honor of the republican politician who, a year earlier, had overthrown the Qing monarchy to become China’s first president.³⁹ Victor de Peñasco, nephew of the Prime Minister of Spain, was on board with his wife, María-Josefa, as part of an impromptu extra leg of their honeymoon. The newlyweds had been in Paris when they spotted an advertisement for the Titanic and decided on a whim to buy tickets. They planned to tell Victor’s mother by telegram only once they reached New York, since she was nervous about long journeys by sea. The couple were very obviously besotted with one another.⁴⁰ A passenger who had contacted the Purser’s Office to pay for an upgrade from Second to First Class early in the voyage called himself “Baron Alfred von Drachstedt,” although the name on his Dutch birth certificate identified him as Alfred Nourney, who on land worked as a car salesman for Daimler-Benz in Germany. Others who had made themselves known to their fellow passengers by virtue of a memorable appearance included the six-foot-one Clarence Moore, a DC-based banker returning from a trip to buy hounds for the hunt he mastered on his family’s estate in his native Virginia, and Quigg Baxter, a twenty-four-year-old Canadian sporting an eye patch after unintentionally offering up an eye in sacrifice to his national sport. An errant ice-hockey puck had exacted the tribute at a game in Montreal five years earlier, prompting Quigg to redirect his talents to coaching and promoting. He had organized one of the first international hockey tournaments during his recent stay in France. He, his younger sister, and their Quebecois mother were occupying one of the most luxurious of the Titanic’s suites on B-Deck. A level below in C-90, unbeknown to his mother and sister, traveled Quigg’s Belgian girlfriend, the cabaret singer Berthe Mayné. There had been a whirlwind romance during Quigg’s visit to Brussels, where a local newspaper reported that Berthe was “well known in Brussels in circles of pleasure, and was often seen in the company of people who like to wine and dine and enjoy life.”⁴¹ Like the Duff Gordons, if for different reasons, Berthe Mayné was using an alias on the Titanic, “Mrs. de Villiers,” a precaution likewise taken by Léontine Aubart, also a singer, from Paris rather than Brussels, and also involved in a covert romance.⁴² In Aubart’s case, she was the long-term mistress of Benjamin Guggenheim, a Philadelphian millionaire via an inheritance from his father’s mining empire. If Guggenheim’s extramarital liaison was known to the Thayers or any of his other fellow Philadelphians on the Titanic, there was a polite code prohibiting anyone from mentioning it, and he and Aubart too had taken the precaution of reserving separate cabins.⁴³

No such politesse prevented opinions being discreetly shared about another Pennsylvanian, Mrs. Charlotte Drake Cardeza, the kind of person who felt the need to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Possessed of impressive presence and volume, Mrs. Cardeza was almost the archetype of the passenger warned against in traveling journals: “It is necessary to remember that the ship’s servants are human beings and need a little rest sometimes, and that a kindly word will do wonders; no one receives better attention by being ill-natured or swearing at them. If you have a sharp tongue and think you are witty when you are only unkind, just take that little weakness and drop it overboard.”⁴⁴ “Dropping overboard” was a phrase dancing through the heart of the stewardess Violet Jessop when she realized she had been assigned to wait on Mrs. Cardeza’s suite. She had barely recovered from the experience of dealing with her when she had crossed over to Europe on the Olympic a few months earlier. Two decades later, when she came to write her autobiography, Jessop had not forgotten—she referred to Cardeza, “a certain well-known society woman,” under a false name, but gave the game away, perhaps deliberately, by including a description of “Miss Townsend’s” Pekingese, Teeny Weeny. Jessop included the tidbit that, despite her wealth and frequent custom, Cardeza had “been blacklisted by another famous shipping line because of her utterly unreasonable behaviour and her demoralising effect on other passengers.… Probably her happiest moments were spent watching the agonised struggles of a couple of perspiring stewards tackling the job” she had set them of rearranging her parlour’s furniture within minutes of boarding.⁴⁵ As the aforementioned travel guide warned, “People whom you offend have the knack of ‘getting their own back,’ and it is as easy to do this at sea as anywhere else, perhaps easier to those who know their way about. Besides, if you are selfish and want your own way badly, even if you inconvenience other people in the process, it is easier to get it by being polite, and you are less likely to experience revenge.… It is necessary to treat your fellow-passengers with courtesy and civility.”⁴⁶ When private dinner and bridge parties were organized on board for those who knew each other from Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, Charlotte Cardeza was pointedly excluded.

The antithesis of Mrs. Cardeza could be found in Helen Churchill Candee, a respected art historian after her recently self-published book on the history of interior design had won praise from relevant experts, as well as commissions to decorate from President Roosevelt and his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.⁴⁷ A prominent presence in DC circles, Mrs. Churchill Candee had kept her married name following her divorce from her physically abusive husband, an experience that had inspired her to write her most popular book, How Women May Earn a Living. It was unsurprising that, like the Countess of Rothes, Helen Churchill Candee was an enthusiastic supporter of the suffragettes, serving as a board member for the national organization’s Washington chapter. Both intellectually and physically attractive, she was traveling by herself though not alone, having attracted a small coterie of admirers who joined her for walks on deck and dancing in the evening, including Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, whose father owned most of the Swedish pulp industry and who was en route to Washington to study business. He was constantly attempting to quash rumors, on board and in the press, that he was in fact traveling to serve as a military attaché at the Swedish embassy in Washington. When she was not good-naturedly teasing her “attaché,” Churchill Candee often enjoyed the company of Hugh Woolner, a tall, charming, good-looking if questionably honest former broker who was emigrating to America after receiving a lifelong ban from the London Stock Exchange for illegal trades, part of a series of professional failures that had culminated in him declaring personal bankruptcy, which he had shed only in 1910.⁴⁸

Woolner’s embarrassment had been relatively public—his late father, Thomas, had been a famous sculptor—and the path from Marlborough College, a boarding school, to Cambridge to the Stock Exchange had hardly been bereft of a network of privileged or influential acquaintances. Far more famous, if equally undesired, was the notoriety of James Smith, whose dinners on the Titanic had, so far, proved far more peaceful than the supper he had grabbed six years earlier at a rooftop restaurant in Madison Square Garden. There he had been approached by his acquaintance Harry Thaw, a millionaire and functioning cocaine addict who had offered to procure a prostitute for Smith as part of a ménage à trois. Whether Thaw intended to appear as the third starring party or to introduce two sex workers to the tryst is unclear. Smith icily refused this apparently unprompted suggestion and the conversation petered out. Thaw left the table, pulled out a gun, and fatally shot Stanford White, an architect famous for designing the Fifth Avenue mansions of the Astors and the Vanderbilts. The ensuing trial turned into a circus, with Thaw’s family utilizing their considerable wealth to destroy White’s reputation. Central to the defense’s case was Thaw’s insistence that, years earlier, White had sexually assaulted Thaw’s future wife, the then model Evelyn Nesbitt, and their claim that discovery of this tragedy had caused temporary insanity in Thaw. Under the guise of concern for moral rectitude, the newspapers provided salacious details of unorthodox heterosexuality, including sex swings and bejeweled sadomasochistic whips in White’s studio, all of which was used to paint a picture of depraved libidinousness at the heart of the artistic New York set. The media frenzy reached such a pitch that it was the first time in American history that a jury had to be sequestered. As the last person to speak to the accused before he murdered Stanford White, James Smith found himself the recipient of fevered interest from the press, something which was both distasteful and distressing to him. Thaw was found guilty but received a reduced sentence by reason of insanity, and Smith had spent much of the ensuing years living in Paris, returning home infrequently to visit his family on Long Island.⁴⁹

There were also secrets that either were not discussed or could not be acknowledged in 1912. In the course of the voyage, John Thayer befriended Algernon Barkworth, a forty-seven-year-old unmarried squire from Yorkshire. Barkworth had championed improving the infrastructure in his home county, particularly through his service as a justice of the peace for his home country the East Riding of Yorkshire. Family memories and the research of Northern Irish historian Gavin Bell confirm that for years Algernon Barkworth was romantically involved with his gardener, Walter, who later moved into Barkworth’s ancestral home at Tranby House. One of Barkworth’s collateral descendants recalls that no one assumed there was a platonic reason for inviting the gardener to live at the main house and “people who worked at Tranby House were all aware of the situation there, though it wasn’t talk[ed] about as many things weren’t in those days.”⁵⁰ Harriette Crosby, in cabin B-26, had left her illegitimate daughter, Andrée-Catherine, at a boarding school in Paris until she could form a plan to bring her to live respectably with her in Michigan. Also hidden or at least covered in the silence of manners was the agony of Marie-Eugenie Spencer, a retired opera singer traveling in cabin B-78 and struggling with an opium addiction that would kill her a year later. Her British husband, William, was having an affair with one of her maids.⁵¹

Silence also cocooned the wealthiest couple on the Titanic, if for markedly different reasons. Almost no one was unaware of the honeymooning Colonel Astor and his wife. Astor’s flamboyant fortune was not matched by his personality; he was a devout worshipper of the “god of punctuality” according to the crushingly underwhelming compliment of his acquaintance Elizabeth Wharton Drexel.⁵² He and his first wife, Ava, had gained freedom from their miserable marriage through their divorce in November 1909, following the death of Astor’s redoubtable mother, to whom divorce had been anathema. The Astors’ separation had shocked New York Society, although not nearly as much as the Colonel’s subsequent marriage to Madeleine Force, a seventeen-year-old graduate of Miss Spence’s School in Manhattan whom he had met at the upper-class summer retreat of Bar Harbor, Maine, a few months after his divorce had been finalized. Madeleine had allegedly been in love with a twenty-two-year-old family friend, William Dick, but once her name had been linked to Astor’s her parents’ ambition and genuine concern about their daughter’s reputation resulted in her becoming the second Mrs. Astor with a quiet ceremony in the ballroom at Beechwood, the Colonel’s summer house in Newport, Rhode Island. Collective viciousness, expressed in silence, washed over the couple, with most of the Colonel’s friends avoiding them, on their wedding day and after. To escape, they had embarked upon an extended honeymoon to Europe and Egypt from which they were returning on the Titanic after Madeleine had discovered she was pregnant. Once home, the Colonel planned to rewrite his will to provide for his on-the-way third child. Madeleine had spent much of the voyage so far in their suite on B-Deck, which, given the agony she had endured as a result of the observations of the serially unkind about her marriage, was probably a shyness born from painful experience. She had been regarded as a vivacious and intellectually precocious student during her time at Spence, traits which had been subsumed or hidden after her wedding. May Futrelle, traveling with her novelist husband, left a particularly sad recollection of the Astors’ time on the Titanic: “Every other woman on board was curious about them.… Perhaps they would have been rather glad to scrape up a few acquaintances. I used to think so when I saw her glance up from her reading at every one who passed. But, of course, the rest of us felt that it would have been rather presumptuous to make the first move.”⁵³ One of the ship’s stewardesses, Violet Jessop, shared this curiosity but “instead of the radiant woman of my imagination, one who had succeeded in overcoming much opposition and marrying the man she wanted, I saw a quiet, pale, sad-faced, in fact dull young woman arrive listlessly on the arm of her husband, apparently indifferent to everything around her.”⁵⁴

One of the Astors’ friends, Margaret Brown, was there to provide company. Occasionally known in her lifetime by the nickname of Maggie, she is better known today as Molly Brown, partly due to the success of the Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown and its subsequent film adaptation, for which Debbie Reynolds was nominated for an Academy Award.⁵⁵ As the title of the biographical musical suggests, Brown has become inextricably linked with her five days on the Titanic, frequently cast in dramatizations of the disaster as a breath of fresh air in the stultifying milieu of entrenched elitism. The hail and hearty Molly functions in the Titanic’s myth as the fun face of warmhearted and carefree “New Money” against the dour insularity of the Old. In fact, Maggie Brown was anything but indifferent to the nuances of Society. She was close enough to the Astors to have joined them briefly for a cruise up the Nile when their honeymoon took them to Egypt at the same time she was vacationing there, and, in her own words, she gravitated towards “exceedingly intellectual and much travelled acquaintances.”⁵⁶ As a young woman in Colorado, she had intended to marry for money, but changed her plans when she fell in love with Jim Brown, a struggling mining engineer. A few years after their wedding, Jim struck a thread of gold and the couple moved with their two young children into a mansion in Denver, with summer spent at a lodge just outside the city. Where the portrayal of Maggie as something of an outsider does hold true is in the way she was treated by the “Sacred Thirty-Six,” which was smaller Denver’s equivalent of Manhattan’s Astor-blessed Four Hundred. They refused to invite the Browns to their bridge or dinner parties, which understandably upset Maggie, although she soon eclipsed them all through her philanthropy. She was compulsively useful—founding, funding, and serving in soup kitchens for the families of her husband’s miners, working with local judges to help destitute children by establishing a juvenile court, and, as a practicing Catholic, raising money for the construction of Denver’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, due to celebrate its inaugural Mass that autumn, by which time Maggie would be back in Denver after another winter spent in Europe and the Middle East.

As the music and dancing came to an end, passengers finished their drinks and made their way back to their cabins. In his white tie and fronted piqué shirt with its imperial wing-tipped collar starched to a degree that would have won applause from an Elizabethan courtier, Tommy Andrews returned to his cabin and continued to work, poring over blueprints and his notes from that day’s inspections. Elsewhere, most of the first-class passengers retired, as one of them put it, after another evening surrounded by “the hum of the voices, the lilt of the German waltzes, the unheeding sounds of a small world bent on pleasure.”⁵⁷