CHAPTER 21 The Spinner of the Years
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
THE TRAVEL BACK AND FORTH between Europe and America that had formed such a part of their parents’ year was again possible for the Strauses’ children and grandchildren once peace returned. To compensate the shipping lines for their vessels lost in military service, the Allied governments stripped the defeated Germans of theirs. The Imperator became Cunard’s Berengaria, the Vaterland became the United States Line’s Leviathan, and the just completed Bismarck was reborn as the White Star’s surrogate Britannic, a new Majestic. As American and British society continued to change and diversify, those ships were spitefully nicknamed the Bargain-Area, the Levi-Nathan, and the Ma-Jew-Stick because of the number of American Jews who, in the 1920s, had been able to rise quickly from the poverty of immigration to the kind of prosperity once enjoyed by the Strauses, and who now often traveled in First Class.1 In 1933, Ida’s eldest son, Jesse, with whom she and her husband had exchanged telegrams on the Titanic’s last day afloat, crossed the Atlantic again after his appointment as US Ambassador to France, from where he was well placed to watch Europe’s drift towards fascism. Like his father, Jesse Straus remained opposed to Zionism, and he even initially remained uncomfortable with German Jewish organized opposition to the new Nazi government in Berlin, fearing that it would only lead to more trouble. Already weakened by cancer, he died of pneumonia in October 1936, before seeing where the ascent of fascism in his parents’ homeland would lead.
Dorothy Gibson did not share the Strauses’ worries about European fascism. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, she regarded it with approval. Her career was, of her own volition, long since over. After the reunion dinner organized by her stepfather when he escorted her and Pauline from the Cunard docks, Dorothy had picked up the little gray car she had spent so much time worrying about while the Titanic sank in front of her and drove it to a New York hotel where Jules Brulatour was waiting for her. The fright of nearly losing Dorothy had apparently spurred him genuinely to consider initiating divorce proceedings against his wife, Clara, and at their reunion on April 18, 1912, he presented Dorothy with a diamond engagement ring worth, she estimated, about $1,000. His joy at her safe return had not, however, completely sedated Brulatour’s business acumen. His company had been one of those benefiting from the cameras filming the Titanic’s survivors as they disembarked; he spliced the footage together with some of the Olympic and Captain Smith on the latter’s Bridge, released it with Animated Weekly, an early American equivalent of the Pathé newsreels that was owned by Brulatour, and even hired a Titanic survivor, third-class passenger Olaus Jørgensen Abelseth, to attend several showings, regaling audiences with his memories of the disaster. It may have been during this stint of employment that Abelseth, one of the alleged sources for the legend that third-class passengers had been deliberately locked below during the sinking, began to change his story, since he made no such claims in correspondence with his family in the days immediately after reaching America.
Dorothy was disseminating her own curious cocktail of half-truths, as she granted interviews to Variety, Moving Picture News, Billboard, the New York Dramatic Mirror, the New York Sun, and the New York Morning Telegraph. Although she had left the Titanic in the first boat to be lowered away, Dorothy strongly implied that she had stayed on board for longer and witnessed more. In her interview with the New York Dramatic Mirror, she described how “a panic broke out on the Titanic after the first boats left, and men had been shot to keep them from filling the remaining boats. The steerage had broken loose and swept things before them. The women who were saved after that owe their lives to the sublime heroism of the men among the passengers.” She dismissed the Titanic’s crew as “wretched” and elsewhere waxed loquacious about their “deplorable lack of discipline.” She fudged the details of her own behavior immediately after the sinking, as much from concern for her reputation as from seemingly heartfelt guilt at how many lives had been lost by the lifeboats’ refusal to return to those crying for help in the water. Sensing the tingling anti-Europeanism, the leaning among many American citizens towards cultural as well as political isolationism, Dorothy insisted that “Europe offers no inducements now that can drag me away from the Western shore of the Atlantic.” She charmed some of the journalists who interviewed her, at least one of whom was impressed by her chutzpah when she announced at the beginning of their meeting, “These aren’t my clothes at all. I was fortunate enough to have a chum just my size who fitted me out as soon as I landed in New York. A white silk evening dress will do to escape in from a sinking liner, but it would look rather queer in the street in the afternoon.” The journalist who thought Dorothy was “pretty and cheerful beyond the average lot” was amused when she then corrected her focus by announcing, “But that is the wrong end of the story. Suppose we begin at the beginning.”2
Although Dorothy concluded one of her post-disaster interviews with the observation that “the whole adventure was so unreal that it seems more like a story I have read, but I don’t care to read any more like it,” Abelseth was not the only Titanic survivor recruited by Jules Brulatour. He also wanted to utilize Dorothy’s experiences for Éclair’s benefit. Years later, Dorothy claimed that the idea to produce a movie based on the disaster, with herself as the star, had been hers. It is impossible to verify or dismiss that particular detail. What is undeniable is that production of Saved from the Titanic began only a few days after Dorothy left the Carpathia. The studio entrusted the task of directing the picture to the Frenchman Étienne Arnaud, who had directed one of Dorothy’s previous projects, The White Aprons; her boss Harry Raver served as producer, with Brulatour as a silent partner, and the story line was allegedly provided by Dorothy, who preferred to insert a fictional romantic arc, which had her falling in love with a handsome naval officer who, to increase the patriotic appeal of the movie, was presented as one of those who first heard the Titanic’s distress call, rather than the civilian wireless operator on the Carpathia.
A promotional still for Saved from the Titanic, with Dorothy posing in the actual outfit she wore when she boarded her lifeboat.
Filming Saved from the Titanic was taxing for Dorothy. The studio had bought a decommissioned cargo ferry in upstate New York to stand in for the sinking Titanic, and Dorothy, despite being unsettled when she first saw the set, offered to wear the exact same clothes she had worn on the night of the sinking. Several times she could be seen on set in her black pumps, white evening dress, and long cardigan, shaking and crying. Her studio pumped a huge amount of money into the production, which, as they had all predicted, was a runaway success. It hit cinemas just as the Senate inquiry into the loss of the Titanic was closing and Britain’s was gathering momentum. Cinemas began to rerelease Dorothy’s earlier movies as part of double- or triple-ticket events. Initially, many movie-review magazines buzzed with accounts of the tragic quasi-autobiographical flick from “a heroine of the shipwreck.” The Moving Picture News praised the movie’s “wonderful mechanical and lighting effects, realistic scenes, perfect reproduction of the true history of the fateful trip” and described it as “magnificently acted. A heart-stirring tale of the sea’s greatest tragedy, depicted by an eyewitness.” It was also a great commercial success upon its release later that summer in France and the United Kingdom.
Inevitably, Saved from the Titanic did not impress everybody. There had already been moral qualms over silent movies based on recent real-life traumas—the assassination of the Tsar’s uncle in a Moscow bomb attack had inspired 1905’s Assassination of the Grand Duke Sergius—but discomfort at the Romanov movie paled in comparison to the opprobrium generated in some circles by Saved from the Titanic.3 In Britain, the Spectator thundered,
The bare idea of undertaking to reproduce in a studio, no matter how well equipped, or re-enacted, sea scenes of an event of the appalling character of the Titanic disaster, with its 1,600 victims [sic], is revolting, especially at this time when the horrors of the event are so fresh in the mind. And that a young woman who came so lately, with her good mother, safely through the distressing scenes can now bring herself to commercialize her good fortune, is past understanding.
As Saved from the Titanic delighted and divided, Dorothy ended her own moribund marriage with her Southern pharmacist husband, George Battier, while Jules once again began to drag his feet over his own divorce. Now, at the height of her career, Dorothy’s ennui returned. Neither her holiday to Europe nor the success of Saved from the Titanic could restimulate her love for the movie industry, and the Titanic film, which unfortunately for historians of cinema has since become one of the Silent Era’s “lost movies,” was her last because she resigned from the Éclair studios later in 1912.4 That summer, despite her assurances to the press that nothing could entice her back to decadent Europe, Dorothy sailed on the French liner La Provence for an extended, discreet vacation with Brulatour. Upon their return to the United States, she embraced her earlier love of singing, with Brulatour funding her professional singing lessons, which culminated with her moderately well-received debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1915. Given how her short career in opera was to be traduced later, it is worth noting that the chorus, in which she first appeared, was singled out for its excellence by a reviewer from Vogue.
Less amenable press coverage had made Dorothy’s affair with Brulatour a matter of public knowledge following her appearance in a New York court, where she was charged with a hit-and-run. She had been driving her gray car out of the city for a weekend in the Hamptons when her concentration lapsed, causing her car to mount the pavement, where it struck a young married couple, killing the husband and seriously injuring the wife. The car she had been driving was a gift from Brulatour and had been purchased in his name. In one particularly painful exchange, a lawyer for the prosecution asked Dorothy, on the stand, if she was acquainted with Mrs. Brulatour. Mortified, she eventually replied, “No.” The ensuing scandal persuaded Clara Brulatour to initiate divorce proceedings herself. When these were finalized, Dorothy became the second Mrs. Brulatour in a union that lasted until 1919, when it was dissolved on the grounds that Jules’s first divorce had been applied for in Kentucky but never approved in New York. In reality, a wedding ring had staled Brulatour’s passion for Dorothy. Anxious to limit the fallout at a time when he was considering trading the movies for a career in politics, he offered Dorothy an extremely generous alimony payment, which she accepted before escaping yet more uncomfortable media attention by moving to Paris. She was joined, as ever, by her mother. There was an extended trip back to America in 1928 and a shorter visit, Dorothy’s last, in 1933. Neither she nor her mother returned for her stepfather’s final illness or funeral in 1938.
Dorothy Gibson, photographed in 1930.
Wealthy and still in love with what she had once called “the pleasures of this lovely world,” Dorothy divided her time between Paris and Italy, particularly Florence, where she took a villa. She enthused to a journalist about “what a time I am having! I never cared much for motion pictures, you see, and I am too glad to be free of that work. I tell you it was an immense burden. I have had my share of troubles, as you know, but since coming to France, I have recovered from that and feel happy at last. Who could not be deliriously happy in this country? I have such fun.” In 1930, a Society columnist praised Dorothy as “one of the smartest women arriving in the capital for the summer season.” Among her new friends were members of the Italian aristocracy, and she attended parties where guests included fellow Titanic survivor, the couturier Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon; American expatriate socialites; Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, one of millions of Russians who had fled after the Revolution; and another exiled royal in the form of a Spanish prince. Five years after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII in 1931, Spain slid into a civil war from which the ultraconservative General Francisco Franco emerged victorious, inaugurating a crypto-fascist regime that endured until his death and the ensuing restoration of the monarchy in 1975. Dorothy’s longest romantic relationship after Brulatour was with Emilio Antonio Ramos, an attaché at the Spanish embassy in Paris and a prominent Francoist. Ramos accompanied General Franco’s brother to the 1937 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. Whether Dorothy went with Ramos on that trip to Germany is unknown, and although Ramos was privately unimpressed and unconvinced by Adolf Hitler, Dorothy’s mother was enraptured. In her conversations, Pauline frequently embarked on “a tirade of laudatory comments regarding Nazi concepts and actions.… She expounded on her hatred of Jews and sympathy with Hitler’s goal of a ‘permanent solution.’ ”
Dorothy’s modern biographer, Randy Bryan Bigham, has suggested that subsequent allegations made against Dorothy and her mother concerning their spying activities for fascist governments may be more plausible than slanderous. It seems unlikely that either woman ever passed on particularly useful information, but Bigham’s theory is lent further credence by the research of the late Philip Gowan into the extremity of Pauline Gibson’s political views and the contemporary suspicions of the British secret service, which closely watched the Gibsons’ circle of acquaintances in Florence, where they were living when Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940. The following year, Dorothy was horrified to learn that the character of the talentless opera singer Susan Alexander, propelled onto the stage by her wealthy lover in the new Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane, was partly inspired by her, partly by Jules Brulatour’s third wife, and partly by William Randolph Hearst’s long-term mistress, Marion Davies. Welles only ever denied the Davies comparison, and the Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons recalled him telling her that Susan Alexander was “not so much about Hearst as it was old Brulatour and his sad gals.”
More pressing concerns arrived following the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war against the Axis powers. Dorothy missed the train evacuating Americans from Florence because her mother’s health collapsed. Unlike Pauline, Dorothy had come to regret her previous sympathy for fascism and befriended an anti-Mussolini journalist, Indro Montanelli, in 1943. In her days as an actress, Dorothy had gamely admitted to allowing her mother to organize her life. During the Second World War, she began to understand what a mistake that had been when she remarked, “I have brought myself nothing but unhappiness and have perhaps completely ruined my life to do the best—as I thought—for my mother.” Yet, as Germany became the clear dominant partner in the alliance with Italy and as the Gestapo’s presence in Florence increased, Dorothy once again passed on an opportunity for escape—this time to Switzerland—in order to stay with the ailing Pauline. In April 1944, her friendship with Montanelli and her changing political views caught up with her, when she received a tip that she was about to be arrested and transported to the Fossoli internment camp, from where thousands of Italian Jews were sent north to the German extermination camps. It was a system her mother had long applauded, and in 1944 it threatened to seize her daughter. Faced with the possibility of dying in a concentration camp, Dorothy fled, but German soldiers identified and detained her before she made it to the Italian border with Switzerland. She was sent to the San Vittore political prison in Milan, where her friend Montanelli was also held. She described it as “a living death. You can speak to no one—and if you try and are caught the punishment is awful.”
Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, Archbishop of Milan, paid public lip service to fascism while providing aid to the Resistance, and it was thanks in no small part to him that Dorothy escaped San Vittore. A young priest, Father Giovanni Barbareschi, was assigned by the Cardinal to the mission that had Dorothy, Montanelli, and another prisoner driven out of San Vittore with paperwork implying they were on their way to interrogation by SS officers, when in reality they were driven north to Switzerland. They walked the last leg of the journey, over what Montanelli called “the blessed little hill that separated oppression and liberation,” where Dorothy, sobbing, told Father Barbareschi, “God has saved my soul and you have saved my life.” When interviewed decades later about his actions, Barbareschi was self-effacing: “Consider that I was twenty-two years old at the time and what everyone calls heroic deeds were normal actions for young people. Although the risk was really great, I felt a deep need to help prosecuted politicians and my Jewish brothers, and to continue on the path to spread the values of liberty and democracy.” Father Barbareschi died, aged ninety-six, in October 2018, a recipient of honors from the Israeli and Milanese municipal governments and a few years after sharing his recollections of rescuing Dorothy from San Vittore with her biographer, Randy Bryan Bigham. Barbareschi was also a survivor of San Vittore since, a few months after helping her, he had been imprisoned there himself for helping a local Jewish family evade capture by the Gestapo. Apparently, in her determination to save herself, Dorothy had once again been economical with the truth. For decades, Father Barbareschi believed Dorothy had been related to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a lie which apparently explains why the Cardinal and the Resistance believed her removal from Milan should be a priority before her prominence could be exploited by the Axis.
Father Giovanni Barbareschi, the priest who rescued Dorothy from the San Vittore prison.
Away from Italy, Dorothy was exonerated from the suspicion of espionage for the fascist powers by the US consulate in Zurich, whose staff concluded that “the accused hardly seems bright enough to be useful in such capacity.” Her health deteriorated and she was still unwell when she returned to Paris after the end of the war in 1945. There, she took a suite at the Ritz and was reunited with her lover Emilio Antonio Ramos. There were visits with her mother, who chose to stay in Florence, but Dorothy admitted to Montanelli that she now found her mother’s views and prejudices difficult to understand. She did not, however, update her will, which had Pauline and Ramos as the chief beneficiaries, as they discovered when a long holiday to Lake Geneva with Ramos to ease her cardiac problems failed and Dorothy died of a heart attack in her rooms at the Ritz in Paris on February 17, 1946, at the age of fifty-six. When asked years later about her, her friend Montanelli delivered eloquent evidence that affection need not always trump brutal conversational vigor, when he described Dorothy as “stupid as a goat,” and “very gullible” but with a “big heart.” It was Montanelli who provided Dorothy with her last silver-screen appearance, of sorts, when his bestselling novel Il Generale Della Rovere, based on his experiences at San Vittore, was adapted for the screen in 1959. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, the movie Il Generale Della Rovere features a character named Carla Fassio, played by French actress Anne Vernon and allegedly inspired by Dorothy Gibson. Dorothy’s mother, Pauline, died two years after its release and was buried next to her daughter at the Saint-Germain-en-Laye cemetery in Paris.5
Through her experiences in the San Vittore prison, the Second World War had indirectly killed Dorothy Gibson, and the conflict arguably did the same to Jack Thayer. He had volunteered after American entry into the First World War in 1917, serving in the 79th Infantry Division on the Western Front. Speaking of her father’s military career, Jack’s daughter Julie remembered, “I don’t think he talked much about it. Like he never talked about the Titanic. In those days, a man did not talk about his feelings. In fact, nobody really talked about emotions at all.” After marrying Lois Buchanan Cassatt, Jack became a banker, as he and his father had planned for him before the Titanic, and in 1937 he stepped down to become treasurer and then financial vice president of their alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. He and Lois had six children together—Edward, John Thayer IV, Lois, Julie, and Pauline (their son Alexander tragically died shortly after his birth in 1920). Jack’s love for athletics did not diminish—he was apparently an excellent ice skater, became president of the local racket club, and joined the Rose Tree Fox Hunt. On the surface, this was a life of achievement and privilege broadly similar to his father’s. Yet if Jack Thayer seldom spoke about the Titanic, it does not seem to have been far from his mind. His conversation with Charles Lightoller on the Oceanic in 1914 witnessed the two men rehashing, in detail, their memories of the sinking, and in 1932, for the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Jack wrote a short piece narrating his experiences on board for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.6
As he grew older, Jack increasingly came to feel that the modern world of terrifying changes and rapidly eroding certainties was somehow ineluctably tied to the tragedy he had witnessed with the Titanic. In 1940, he penned a short memoir, The Sinking of the S.S. Titanic, which was printed privately and distributed to family friends and interested acquaintances. It has since become one of the most beloved and trusted survivors’ accounts of the disaster. It was Jack’s fourth Titanic testimony—along with the 1932 article, he had made statements to some of his father’s colleagues in 1912 and then, briefly, at a 1915 insurance hearing—and it is only by comparing all four that one is able to piece together the story of his escape. Those familiar with the 1940 account may notice that no mention has hitherto been made here of Thayer’s recounting of a conversation, by turns chilling and moving, between his father and Thomas Andrews during the stage of the evacuation when passengers were congregating near the Grand Staircase and the first-class Lounge:
It was now shortly after midnight. My father and I came in from the cold deck to the hallway or lounge. There were quite a few people standing around questioning each other in a dazed kind of way. No one seemed to know what next to do. We saw, as they passed, Mr. Ismay, Mr. Andrews, and some of the ship’s officers. Mr. Andrews told us that he did not give the ship much over an hour to live. We could hardly believe it, and yet if he said so, it must be true. No one was better qualified to know.7
Not only is this report difficult to square with what multiple other eyewitnesses remembered of Thomas Andrews’s movements that night—he had, for instance, not yet delivered the news to Captain Smith at the time Jack recalled him imparting it to the Thayers—but in his 1932 account Jack attributed the same conversation to Bruce Ismay rather than Andrews, after Jack had gone to the Swimming Pool and the Mail Room, where he witnessed water “coming in very rapidly,” a dramatic claim which he did not repeat in the 1940 memoir. More glaringly, in the 1940 testament Jack described in detail his memories of boarding the Titanic with his family at Southampton and then of witnessing the near-collision with the New York, the name of which he misremembered as the St. Paul. This was despite the fact that the Thayer party had boarded at Cherbourg and thus it was impossible for Jack to have rememberd the moment the New York “almost hit us.”8
In trying to explain this particularly baffling mistake, mention should be made of how preoccupied Jack had remained with the Titanic, despite seldom discussing it in his conversations. His memoir contains a lengthy list of facts about the Titanic’s construction, dimensions, and passenger capacity, which would require a level of research beyond what a passenger might remember at the distance of a quarter of a century. Five years earlier, Charles Lightoller had, on his wife’s advice, written his own autobiography, Titanic and Other Ships, in which he described the New York incident and also incorrectly gave her name as the St. Paul.9 It seems unlikely almost to the point of impossibility that Jack Thayer’s account of the Titanic’s departure from Southampton, which contains the same error of referring to the New York as the St. Paul, was not influenced by his reading of the former officer’s account. Elsewhere in The Sinking of the S.S. Titanic, it is clear that Jack had, over the years, been impressed and moved, and had his memories changed, by testimonies of other survivors and accounts of the sinking by historians. It speaks to years of sustained, inescapable, and ultimately deeply damaging fascination with the night he lost his father.
He remained close to his widowed mother, although his children were less enamored with their grandmother, whose grief at her husband’s death conspired to push her interest in spiritualism into an obsession. Jack’s daughter Julie later referred to Marian as “a spooky old lady” and as a child she remembered that her grandmother “kept all these books full of handwriting, mirror writing, which she believed came from her late husband’s spirit. She thought she was in touch with him.”10 To Marian, it would have seemed no coincidence that she died on April 14, 1944, the thirty-second anniversary of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg. To Jack, it was simply devastating. Writing and recalling his time on the Titanic for his memoir had given voice to extremely painful memories, and his mother died only a few months after Jack’s son, Second Lieutenant Edward Thayer, was shot down and killed while on active service in the Pacific. The impact of that terrible event decimated Jack’s already fragile mental health.
Ten of the Titanic’s survivors are known to have committed suicide. The first had been the stewardess Annie Robinson, one of those whom Thomas Andrews spoke with during the loading of the lifeboats. A year after the sinking, she had been presented to King George V and Queen Mary during a royal visit to Liverpool, where, on finding she had survived the Titanic, the “very interested” King asked Robinson so many questions that she eventually had to violate etiquette by politely telling him that she found it too painful a topic to discuss for long.11 A few months after that, Robinson was immigrating to Massachusetts to live with her daughter when her ship, the Devonian, entered a thick fog. The sound of the ship’s whistle seemed to trigger something in Robinson, who walked up onto the deck and threw herself overboard.12 On September 18, 1945, in Philadelphia, Jack Thayer became another of the Titanic’s suicides when he left his office at the University of Pennsylvania, drove to 48th Street and Parkside Avenue, smoked a cigar, removed a razor, slashed both his wrists, and then slit his throat. His body was found in his car a few days later, with its hat still on. The depression that had taken their father to Switzerland in 1911 may have been hereditary, because in 1962 one of Jack’s sisters, Margaret Talbott, also took her own life, by leaping from her twelfth-story apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
Within a few years of Jack Thayer’s death, interest in the Titanic revived and expanded. 20th Century Fox produced a 1953 romance, Titanic, with Barbara Stanwyck as a millionaire’s estranged wife returning to raise her children in America, away from European decadence. At the same time, a young author from Baltimore, Walter Lord, conducted impeccable research for his forthcoming book, A Night to Remember. As a child in the 1920s, Lord had traveled to Europe on board the Titanic’s only surviving sister, the Olympic. Back in commercial service after the war, the Olympic had continued her glittering career as one of the most successful transatlantic liners, until the Great Depression knocked the bottom out of the industry and the Olympic was among many older ships that were retired and scrapped, in her case in 1935. The British government had encouraged the two old rivals to merge as the Cunard–White Star, presenting a united front to the challenges of the Depression. As a compromise, they abandoned their respective traditions of naming their ships with names ending in -ia or -ic, which is how the Queen Mary came into being in 1936. There was, however, no question of who the dominant partner was, given the Cunard red used to paint the new flagship’s funnels. The suffixed White Star was quietly dropped by the company in 1949. With White Star gone and the survivor roster dwindling with the passing years, Lord’s desire to write an accurate account of the sinking led him to contact many of the remaining survivors, including the Dowager Countess of Rothes.
Lord RothesI had died in March 1927. The wounds he received in the war contributed to his early death a few months before his fiftieth birthday. Having lost Leslie House, the Dowager Countess also lost the expected inheritance of her childhood home at Prinknash Park when her father, following his conversion to Catholicism, willed the entire estate to the Benedictines, hoping to right the historical wrong he felt had been inflicted when Henry VIII confiscated the monastery from the order in the 1530s. Lady Rothes and her mother had attempted to halt Thomas Dyer-Edwardes’s bequest, yet both the Countess’s husband and her eldest son felt it would be wrong to go against Thomas’s final wishes, and the order took control of Prinknash again in 1928. A relic followed with them in the form of the bones of Richard Whiting, the beatified abbot who had been martyred in 1539 for his refusal to surrender his monastery to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Whiting’s bones and the Benedictine brothers are still at Prinknash, now Prinknash Abbey.
Only a few months after Lord Rothes’s death, his widow married a long-standing family friend, Colonel Claud Macfie, and the couple spent much of their time at Fayre Court, his country house in her home county of Gloucestershire. If it lacked the passion of her first marriage, it had all of the friendship. It was a comfortable and apparently happy union that lasted for the next thirty years. The Dowager Countess was close to her two sons and remained active with the Red Cross. When Walter Lord contacted her, asking if she would mind answering some of his questions about the Titanic, she was in her seventies and suffering from heart trouble. Her reply to Lord began with an apology for her tardy response, explaining that she had been in hospital. As with Jack Thayer, the Dowager Countess’s account contained one or two errors, mainly in her brief confusion over a conversation with the Captain and the words said to her by Purser McElroy.II Apart from that, her correspondence with Walter Lord is to the point and only occasionally interrupted by apologies for anything she considered potentially irrelevant or dull. She told him of how she had kept María-Josefa de Peñasco in her care in America until her relatives could make the journey from Spain to collect her, and in gratitude María-Josefa’s “father sent me a most wonderful letter later & a lovely sapphire ring, which I always wear.” Unlike her husband’s cousin and her friend Gladys, who had detested the media’s intrusiveness after the Titanic, Lady Rothes had kinder memories of the press, after her meeting with them at the Ritz to answer their questions about the sinking. She revealed that she had maintained her friendship with Able Seaman Thomas Jones since 1912; she had sent him a silver pocket watch and he had removed the number plate from their lifeboat to give to her as a token of his admiration for her bravery that night. He had framed it for her and sent it with an accompanying note:
My Lady,
I beg to ask your acceptance of the number of my boat from which you were taken on board SS Carpathia.
This number is the original taken from the boat by myself. In asking you to accept the same I do so in respect for your courage under so terrifying circumstances.
Trusting you are now fully recovered to health, I am,
Your obedient servant,
Tom Jones AB Late SS Titanic
Despite answering Lord’s questions, the Dowager Countess was unsure of how useful her recollections would be or why interest in the Titanic was reviving: “I am afraid this is a terribly long & discursive letter & may not be at all what you want. I have of course many newspaper accounts, some not very accurate, but the Press were very kind to us & I much appreciated their consideration. Can you tell me anything more about yr. book & the reason you are interested in the Titanic disaster?” She signed it off with “every good wish” and a brief postscript praising the Carpathia’s captain and doctor. She died at her country house at Hove, Sussex, aged seventy-seven, on September 12, 1956, a few months after publication of A Night to Remember but before the acclaimed film adaptation of the same title. It was assumed by journalists and historians, although unconfirmed publicly by the family, that the Countess’s body was taken north to rest at the Leslie family mausoleum near their former home, while her second husband erected a memorial plaque to her in the Church of St. Mary, Fairford, the pretty fifteenth-century parish church where Noëlle had been an active member of the congregation since moving to the village; it commemorated her as “the Widow of the 19th Earl of Rothes, and Beloved Wife of Col. Claud Macfie D.S.O. of Fayre Court, Fairford, At Rest 12 Sept. 1956. Holiness is an infinite compassion for others. Greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them. Happiness is a great love and much serving.” Her grandson, the 21st Earl, remembered her for her wit, strength of character, devout Christian faith, and “warm understanding of humanity.”13 It was, however, the Countess’s association with the Titanic that kept her name alive. A Night to Remember was one in a long series of dramatizations of the disaster, and interest surged again upon the discovery of the shattered wreck in 1985. Submariners who braced themselves for hundreds of bodies were, however, relieved if confused to find none. Conditions on the Atlantic floor had preserved some of the Titanic’s material, its half-shattered chandeliers, the Turkish Bath’s tiles, unopened bottles of champagne, even the hat of a first-class passenger still resting on its bedpost, but the same conditions had rotted away the bones of its victims entirely. It was only when one observer spotted many matching pairs of shoes in the debris field, some with their laces still tied, that they realized they had found where some of the Titanic’s dead had come to rest.14
In the immediate aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking, Christian homilies, sermons, and reflections on the disaster frequently pointed both to the heroism or piety of many on board and to the moral issues which, they felt, were highlighted by the catastrophe. For some, the latter clearly pointed to the sins of materialism—a sermon, delivered in New York by Rev. Dr. Charles Pankhurst, warned, “Grand men, charming women, beautiful babies, all became horrible in the midst of the glittering splendor of a ten million dollar casket!” More, however, saw the Titanic as illustrative of human arrogance and several secularly minded observers felt the same way, for whether one viewed nature as an independent, powerful, impersonal agent or as the strong arm of God, it seemed clear that in the Titanic man’s confidence, to the point of arrogance, had hurled itself against nature and, as always in a contest between the two, the former had lost spectacularly. Preaching in Southampton in the aftermath of the disaster, Edward Talbot, the newly appointed Bishop of Winchester, reflected, “Titanic, name and thing, will stand as a monument and warning to human presumption.”15
It has been argued here that of the many myths which have attached themselves to the Titanic, and the new ones yet to be conjured, which seek to explain why she sank—inferior steel, subpar rivets, malign capitalist conspiracy, dire boiler-room conflagrations—all are, in their way, inadequate and incorrect, and in some cases they are utterly divorced from reality. At every stage of her construction and her voyage, the Titanic marched in step with her age. The disaster was the fault of everybody and thus, potentially, of nobody. She was one of the best-built ships of the era; she actually exceeded the (ludicrously low) lifeboat requirement for ships of her size, and even if she had carried enough for her passengers and crew, they likely would have made no significant reduction to the death toll. There was insufficient time to launch the few lifeboats the Titanic had. Officers, crew, and volunteering passengers were still struggling to free collapsibles when the Titanic began her final plunge.16 The only aspect of her management that contributed shamefully and disastrously to her fate was the speed with which she ran, despite the number of ice warnings she had received. Although some contemporary observers pointed out that it was standard practice to run liners at speed through any obstacle save fog, there were plenty who were stunned by Captain Smith’s failure to slow down on Sunday, April 14. The American Rear Admiral French Ensor Chadwick, who wrote in to the New York Evening Post, was almost completely correct when he concluded that “the Titanic was lost by unwise navigation, by running at full speed.”17 It is hard to disagree with the pained, confused queries of Gladys Cherry in the letter she wrote to her mother from the Carpathia: “Isn’t it awful? Why did we go at that pace when they knew we were near ice bergs?”18
In the eleventh century, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, hoped to prove the seafaring might of his country, to which end he allegedly commissioned a fleet of ships to explore “the expanse of the Northern Ocean.” This fleet set sail in 1040 and soon passed, in a chronicler’s words, “beyond the limits of the land.” It journeyed north, until, staring out over pack ice, some of it up to ten feet thick, the King and his expedition halted. At the sight of the field ice, the story had Harald writing, “There lay before our eyes, at length, the darksome bounds of a failing world,” and he gave the order to abandon the mission on the grounds that no man could overcome such obstacles put in their way by nature and he must bow to forces he could not defeat.19 For those inclined to pillage the Titanic for lessons, one of the most frequently cited is modernity’s failure to heed warnings of the power of nature. For others, like Jack Thayer, the disaster had been the harbinger of a collective shattering, a horrible prologue to an ensuing age of instability. Undoubtedly, Jack’s memories of the Edwardian age were shaped in part by his privileged position within that society, by his youthfulness in 1912, and by the horrors that had followed in the decades after it:
I want to emphasize some of the everyday conditions under which we were then living, to show how much humanity was shocked by the approaching disaster.
These were ordinary days, and into them had crept only gradually the telephone, the talking machine, the automobile. The airplane due to have so soon such a stimulating yet devastating effect on civilization, was only a few years old, and the radio as known today, was still in the scientific laboratory.… The safety razor had just been invented, and its use was gradually spreading. Upon rising in the morning, we looked forward to a normal day of customary business progress. The conservative morning paper seldom had headlines larger than half an inch in height. Upon reaching the breakfast table, our perusal of the morning paper was slow and deliberate. We did not nervously clutch at it, and rapidly scan the glaring headlines, as we are inclined to do today.… These days were peaceful and ruled by economic theory and practice built up over years of slow and hardly perceptible changes. There was peace, and the world had an even tenor to its ways.
He continued:
True enough, from time to time there were events—catastrophes—like the Johnstown Flood, the San Francisco Earthquake, or floods in China—which stirred the sleeping world, but not enough to keep it from resuming its slumber. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event, which not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since, with less and less peace, satisfaction, and happiness.
Today the individual has to be contented with rapidity, of motion, nervous emotion, and economic insecurity. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.20
Jack Thayer’s assessment can of course fairly be accused of gross exaggeration, in seeing the Titanic as a cause rather than simply a reflection of the changes that would end the Edwardian era. His was the most moving of such exaggerations, yet it was by no means the last. One of the most palpably absurd distortions of the disaster’s historical importance was the claim made by one maritime historian that it was “so shattering, so demoralizing that it was looked upon as the beginning of the end of the British Empire.”21 Truthfully, the Titanic disaster had no real political impact, beyond perhaps mildly exacerbating resentment in certain left-wing circles against the wealthy. The story that the steerage passengers were deliberately prevented from having a fair chance at escape fueled, but did not create, a conspiracy-heavy view of social relations on the eve of the First World War. In 1912, the recently formed British Seafarers’ trade union had seen in the Titanic proof that “the ruling class rob and plunder the people all the time, and the Inquiry has shown that they have no scruples in taking advantage of death and disaster. Who needs sharks?”22 Yet socialist criticism of societal inequality and tensions between conservatism and radicalism had existed for decades before 1912.
Its true significance was what the Titanic’s survivors and contemporaries endowed it with and which we continue to bestow upon it. Her Edwardian sobriquet of “the ship of dreams” has become true, if transmogrified, by her century-long fame. The Titanic remains a story from which we can extract lessons on hubris, folly, greed, love, class, magnificent courage, and pitiable weakness. The iceberg that pierced her gave her an immortality that no other ship, no matter how large or luxurious, can ever hope to emulate. It does not matter that the Titanic is now rotting away two and a half miles beneath the Atlantic swell, consumed by rare marine bacteria that feed on the iron ore in her hull. She is one of the greatest examples in history of the convergence of the twin forces of fate and free will, of circumstance and human decisions.
I. Despite her remarriage, Lady Rothes continued like many aristocratic widows to use her title from her first marriage.
II. 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, in which she omitted to reveal that she had been traveling as a lady’s maid.