Voyagers of the Titanic (12 page)

Then there was “Mrs. Candee’s Coterie,” as it described itself. Helen Churchill Candee was an American writer and decorator who boarded at Cherbourg. Friends in England had recommended her to the care of Colonel Gracie, who sought her out and paid her the compliment of attention. She gathered a group of male adherents: Gracie, his friend James Clinch Smith, together with a Buffalo architect named Edward Kent, a roly-poly Irish-Canadian engineer named Edward Colley, a young Swede named Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, and Hugh Woolner. The last two men were alert, inscrutable, and predatory—quick to scent a game, and always ready to play.

James Clinch Smith had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday a few days before embarkation. His family had been the chief proprietors of Smithtown, on the North Shore of Long Island, since the seventeenth century. He was thus born into the fast-vanishing American ruling class: “A gentleman with his mansion, coach-houses, stables, hunters even and plantations on Long Island,” as Ford Madox Ford recalled, “presented to the rest of his nation an image for emulation such as no class of person could lately, in spite of Standardisation, aspire to being.”
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Smith’s parentage showed the social flux of nineteenth-century America, for his mother’s uncle was Alexander Stewart, owner of New York’s first department store and builder of a stupendous marble house on Fifth Avenue that had exemplified nouveau riche euphoria. Smith graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1878 and practiced law on Wall Street and in the Stewart Building at Broadway. He was elected to smart clubs, was an expert yachtsman, won prizes at the New York Horse Show, and built his own racetrack at Smithtown. In 1895 he married Bertha Barnes of Chicago; in addition to New York and Long Island, the couple had a Newport home, the Moorings, overlooking the harbor. His wife was musical, and in 1904 they moved to Paris, where she organized an all-women orchestra and he was popular with compatriots who savored his dry humor. Smith returned to America at least once a year, and in 1906, while attending a musical comedy at Madison Square Garden, witnessed the murder of his brother-in-law, the architect Stanford White, by Harry Thaw. Strains developed in the Smith marriage, and he returned to Smithtown; but in January 1912 he backtracked to Paris, where the couple were reconciled. They agreed to return to live together at Smithtown: he was returning to make improvements in the amenities there before her arrival.

Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson was a twenty-eight-year-old chemical engineering graduate of Stockholm Institute of Technology and the son of a leader of the Swedish wood pulp industry. He was a sharp, determined young man who knew how to advance his interests in a balanced manner and had first crossed the Atlantic in 1909 intent on becoming a rich, well-placed New Yorker. In this he succeeded, for in 1917 he was to marry Mary Eno Pinchot, heiress of a New York wallpaper and timber fortune, to whom he had reportedly been introduced by Helen Candee. The marriage fixed him in a political and business nexus including Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist governor of Pennsylvania, and the English diplomat Lord Colyton. Björnström-Steffansson’s cold pursuit of money elbowed aside mellower traits or more sensual appetites. During the 1920s he amassed holdings in the Canadian paper and pulp sectors and bought real estate around Park Avenue in New York before its remunerative redevelopment with apartment buildings and hotels.

If Björnström-Steffansson was hawklike, Hugh Woolner was vulpine. Aged forty-five, he was the son of an eminent sculptor and a cousin of Evelyn Waugh. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1888 and was elected a member of the London Stock Exchange in 1892 at the age of twenty-six. In 1893, using £7,000 inherited from his father, he founded the firm of Woolner & Company in the City and dealt chiefly in mining shares. His interests included Kalgoorlie Electric Power & Lighting Corporation, which was promoted to supply electricity to gold mines in Western Australia, and Sterkfontein Gold Estates, which found lime rather than gold in its Transvaal properties. In 1905, together with George Baker, Woolner formed Great Cobar, a mining company with copper and coal properties in New South Wales and nominal capital of £1.5 million. By way of promotion profit, Woolner’s firm received shares and debentures worth £34,110 and was lifted from insolvency to affluence.
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In March 1907, in Woolner’s words, “one Montmorency, notorious in the City but unknown to me, known also as Nassif, placed orders with us for purchase of Great Cobar shares to the extent of over £70,000 for which he paid & gained my confidence.” A month later Montmorency telephoned from Paris with further orders: as a result Woolner bought Great Cobar shares worth £122,473 (the equivalent a hundred years later of nearly £10 million computed from the retail price index). These lavish purchases may have been a “ramp” intended to boost the value of the shares before dumping them. Woolner paid about £11 per share, but when Montmorency defaulted and never paid a sixpence, he could not settle the debts. Although Baker of Great Cobar promised to aid Woolner as the stockbroker unloaded shares in small parcels, he joined a bear market against Great Cobar shares, the price of which fell. Woolner sold at an average price of about £4½ per share sustaining a loss exceeding £70,000. In November 1907 he and his partner were hammered on the Stock Exchange, where their debts were about £5,600, with assets of around £2,000.
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Now, whichever way he turned, Woolner saw the smirking face of trouble. Baker sued his firm and obtained a judgment for £11,702 (the equivalent of nearly £1 million in 2008 values). In 1908 Woolner became chairman of the New Gutta Percha rubber company, but had to borrow money from his mother and spinster sisters secured on shares in Gutta Percha and the Bohemia Mining Corporation—another of Baker’s companies, promoted to mine tin and wolfram, but where the mineshafts were flooded after the pumps failed. In 1908–1909 Woolner borrowed £9,600 from Elizabeth Forster, a rich old spinster living in Palace Green, Kensington. He visited Cheyenne, Wyoming, and became chairman of Casper & Powder River Oilfields, which held oil rights in the state; but he was stuck in a glutinous mass of debt. In July 1909, at the instigation of his enemy Baker, he was adjudged bankrupt, with assets of £21 and liabilities of £65,417 (the equivalent of £5 million a century later), and forced to resign from Gutta Percha and Casper & Powder. He was discharged from bankruptcy on payment of just £1,000 in 1910, and thus freed to become a company director again.

Woolner was a towering, suave man who evidently coaxed old Miss Forster into signing a new will in January 1912. Under its provisions, she bequeathed a quarter of her estate to him, £400 to his soldierly son, Christopher, and £200 each to his daughters. After her death in 1915, her estate was proved at £369,566 net. Her nieces, legatees of an earlier will, contended that because of senile decay, she was incapable of comprehending the contents of her will and had been influenced by Woolner. The case was settled in 1917 with the 1912 will upheld.
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After inveigling Elizabeth Forster into signing her will, Woolner in February 1912 went to New York on the
Baltic
. The attraction in New York may have been Mary “Maisie” Dowson, widow of an American, whom he was courting and was to marry in August. She was the eldest daughter of Lucas Ionides, a London stockbroker and art connoisseur: the marriage may have improved his credit if not his reputation. His mother died on March 9, and he hurried back from New York to attend her funeral. His return to the United States was on a first-class ticket costing £35 10s. Woolner, then, when he boarded the
Titanic,
was the victim of his own temerity, an ex-bankrupt who had learned in hard times to dive beneath insults.

For every Widener or Hays on the
Titanic,
there were half a dozen pretenders whose silky assurance was a precarious facade. Woolner had a Californian counterpart in Washington Dodge, a physician who had entered San Francisco politics in the 1890s and served four terms as assessor of the city. Dodge had been president of the Continental & Building Loan Association “when that concern stirred up Californian politics in 1905 by setting a trap which involved many members of the legislature in bribery charges.”
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When he boarded the
Titanic
he was on the brink of leaving politics, at the age of fifty-two, to become president of the Federal Telegraph Company and vice president of the Anglo-London & National Bank. There was as much devious business in telegraphs as in city politics. Dodge was forced to resign from his Federal Telegraph presidency in 1919 and was being sued for Stock Exchange manipulations when some months later he shot himself. In 1912 he was traveling with his young wife, Ruth, and their four-year-old son, “Bobo,” Washington Dodge Junior.

Emily Post described a familiar type of Atlantic voyager who conned the passenger list with the avidity of a bird pecking at worms. “You have scarcely found your own state room and had your deckchair placed, when one of them swoops upon you: ‘I don’t know whether you remember me? I met you in 1902, at Contessa della Robbia’s in Florence.’ Your memory being woefully incomplete, there is nothing for you to say except, ‘How do you do!’ If a few minutes of conversation, which should be sufficient, prove her to be a lady, you talk to her now and again throughout the voyage, and may end by liking her.” If these overfriendly pests proved objectionable, well-bred Americans should engross themselves in a book, or confine their replies to monosyllables.
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Dawn Powell also described a midwestern American determined on scraping shipboard acquaintance with “the best names in the traveling universe.” In
A Time to Be Born
she depicted a mother and daughter who were social masochists: “it gave them a feeling of accomplishment and progress to wear down snubbing, and they felt there was something secretly the matter with someone who did not make use of his or her position to be arrogant. The merest Astor had only to step on them firmly to utterly enslave them.”
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Some passengers did not want to pick up new acquaintances, or pay attention to others: the honeymooners and mourners, especially. Perhaps the saddest
Titanic
party were the Ryersons. Arthur Ryerson, of Haverford, Pennsylvania, an attorney and steelmaker aged sixty, who boarded at Cherbourg with his wife, Emily, was hurrying to Cooperstown, New York, after their eldest son, Arthur Learned Ryerson, was killed in a motoring accident at Bryn Mawr. (He was being driven by a college chum on the Chester Road when a front wheel hit a stone, so that the car swerved suddenly: both youths were thrown out and fatally injured.
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) The Ryersons were accompanied by their surviving children, aged between twenty and thirteen, Suzette, Emily, and John, and by Mrs. Ryerson’s maid, Victorine Chaudanson, from Le Teil, a little port on the river Rhône specializing in the transit of chestnuts out of Ardèche. A railway station had opened there in 1876, a year after Chaudanson’s birth, and the de luxe carriages of the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits flashed through Le Teil on their journeys between Paris and the Riviera. Now the maid was experiencing first-class luxuries herself.

Three American sisters, originally named Lamson, boarded at Southampton, having attended the funeral on April 9, at nearby Fawley, of their eldest sister, Elizabeth: she had died a fortnight earlier at her home, 60 Avenue Victor Hugo, in Paris, and was the widow of Sir Victor Drummond, a diplomat attached to the Courts of the Kings of Bavaria and Wurttemberg at Munich and Stuttgart. The sisters—Caroline Brown, Malvina Cornell, and Charlotte Appleton—were in their fifties and accompanied by a considerate spinster in her thirties, Edith Evans. Colonel Gracie put all four women under his ocean-bound protection.

Lady Duff Gordon took her evening meal in the first-class dining saloon on Sunday night. “We had a big vase of beautiful daffodils on the table which were as fresh as if they had just been picked. Everyone was very gay, and at the neighbouring tables people were making bets on the probable time of this record-breaking run.”
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The repast, indeed, was enough to make any diner sanguine:

Hors d’Oeuvres Variés • Oysters

Consommé Olga • Cream of Barley

Salmon, Mousseline Sauce, Cucumber

Filets Mignon • Sauté of Chicken Lyonnaise

Vegetable Marrow Farcie

Lamb with Mint Sauce

Roast Duckling with Apple Sauce

Sirloin of Beef with Chateau Potatoes

Green Peas • Creamed Carrots • Boiled Rice

Parmentier & New Potatoes

Punch Romaine

Roast Squab & Cress

Cold Asparagus Vinaigrette

Paté de Foie Gras

Celery

Waldorf Pudding

Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly

Chocolate & Vanilla Éclairs

French Ice Cream

The à la carte restaurant was favored by those old-money Americans who viewed with barely dissimulated repugnance the upstart Americans who populated the dining saloon. George and Eleanor Widener’s last dinner party was served there by discreetly flitting waiters; Captain Edward Smith, Harry Widener, Archie Butt, William and Lucile Carter, and John and Marion Thayer were their guests. People like the Wideners and Thayers recognized each other’s passwords: the men spoke the same language, drew on the same stock of ideas about business, politics, and recreations, used the same weights and measures to value men and events. They were America’s self-renewing ruling class.