Voyagers of the Titanic (14 page)

John Simpson, the physician responsible for second- and third-class passengers, who had become a ship’s doctor because the strain of his Belfast practice had injured his health, was supposedly fearful that Imanita Shelley’s tonsillitis would turn to diphtheria, and confined her to her cabin. This cabin, though roomy, was, she claimed, inferior to Cunard cabins, seemed half-finished, and was intolerably cold. When she and Lutie Parrish complained about the chill, the steward replied that the second-class heating system was broken, except in three cabins where the heat was so intense that the purser had ordered the heat to be shut off: “consequently the rooms were like ice-houses all of the voyage, and Mrs. L. D. Parrish, when not waiting on her sick daughter, was obliged to go to bed to keep warm.” This was not the end of the women’s voluble remonstrance. They claimed that fixtures in the women’s lavatories were still in crates, that their stewardess could not get a tray to serve Mrs. Shelley’s meals in her cabin, and brought the plates and dishes by hand one at a time, “making the service very slow and annoying. The food, though good and plentiful, was ruined by this trouble in serving.” Although both steward and stewardess repeatedly appealed for a tray, none was obtained: “there seemed,” said Imanita Shelley, “to be no organization at all.”
12

These complaints were not typical. “It is lovely on the water, & except for the smell of new paint, everything is very comfortable,” wrote Marion Wright (a farmer’s daughter from Yeovil going to marry a fruit farmer in the Willamette Valley, Cottage Grove, Oregon), during the journey from Cherbourg to Queenstown. “The food is splendid . . . the vessel doesn’t seem a bit crowded, and there are dozens of tables empty in the dining saloon.”
13
Most voyagers appreciated that the second-class cabins had been designed to have as much natural light as possible. Their brightness was enhanced by the white enamel walls. Mahogany furniture was covered with hard-wearing, fire-resistant woolen upholstery, and linoleum covered the floor.

Marion Wright saw so many empty tables because the
Titanic
carried only 271 second-class passengers, representing 40 percent of capacity: another sign that the competition between Cunard, the German shipping lines, and Pierpont Morgan’s trust was creating unprofitable duplication. These 271 included hardened travelers who were accustomed to heavy traffic about the world. Hans Givard, aged thirty, son of a Danish crofter, worked in both the United States and Argentina but returned annually to his native Kølsen. Ralph Giles, aged twenty-five, had been a wholesale draper in Exeter, where his father was a bookseller and his mother kept a lodging house, before becoming junior partner in a company importing French millinery to New York: he regularly traveled to and from Paris. A Jewish Russian in his fifties, Samuel Greenberg, who had lived in the Bronx for three years, traveled regularly from New York to South Africa on behalf of his employers. Second-class passengers came from all corners of the globe. A middle-aged civil servant, Masabumi Hosono, was the solitary Japanese. Arthur McCrae, the illegitimate descendant of Scottish dukes, was an Australian mining engineer whose recent postings had been to equatorial Africa and a freezing district of Siberia. James McCrie was a petroleum engineer hastening from Persia (where the first Middle Eastern oil wells had begun pumping crude oil in 1908) to Sarnia, a Canadian port on Lake Huron, where one of his children had grave tuberculosis.

Joseph Laroche was the only black man on the
Titanic
. He had been born in Haiti in 1886, had left in his youth for France, hoping to qualify as an engineer, but had been prevented by racial prejudice from obtaining decent work. In 1908 he had married a Frenchwoman, Juliette Lafargue: they had two daughters, and she had just begun a third pregnancy. The distinct appearance of the children was already attracting objectionable comments and gestures in France. Laroche could no longer face the struggling, screwing, stinting life, so was retreating with his family to Haiti, where he hoped to forget the bigotry and secure remunerative work. The Laroches would not have received exemplary treatment on the
Titanic
. Bertram Hayes recalled an Atlantic voyage on the
Britannic
when the passengers included a black man who was a prizefighter: “he was a decent, self-respecting man . . . and if it had not been for his colour would have been even more popular on board than he was.”
14

Among the many married women, there was little racking of the brains for something to say at table or in the saloons: their talk was not confined to the exchange of recipes and sewing patterns or anecdotes of children’s illnesses and church outings; they could share their delight in being at sea on an Olympic-class liner and their plans and apprehensions about their new life in the New World. Aloofness or mistrust seems to have been rare among young women at sea. Alice Philips, for example, was a girl of twenty traveling with her father. They came from the Devon coastal resort of Ilfracombe: Robert Philips had been a barman in the Royal Clarence Tap and then a fishmonger there. After his wife’s recent death, he had resolved on a fresh start with a brother in New York. On the first day of the voyage, the Philipses shared a table in the dining saloon with a family called Herman from Castle Cary in Somerset. Sam Herman had been a butcher and proprietor of the Britannia Hotel, and was emigrating to Bernardsville, New Jersey, with his wife, twin daughters of twenty-four, and a fourteen-year-old boy who lived with them. The three young women struck up an immediate shipboard friendship full of prattle and laughter.

One can imagine the docile, inquisitive sympathy between young women sharing a cabin. Nora Keane, Susan Webber, and Edwina Troutt shared a cabin on E deck. Nora Keane ran a shop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her brother, but had spent four months visiting her mother in County Limerick. Susie Webber, a Cornish farmer’s daughter, was emigrating to join her nephew in Hartford, Connecticut, as his housekeeper. Edwina “Winnie” Troutt, aged twenty-seven, came from Bath. After working in her brother-in-law’s tobacconist shop, she had gone to America in 1907, working as a waitress and servant, and was returning to Auburndale, Massachusetts, from a holiday in Bath to help her sister who was heavily pregnant. She had been transferred from the
Oceanic
as a result of the coal strike, and boarded with a ticket costing 10 guineas.

Wage-earning husbands were the unassailable leaders of the family groups on the
Titanic
. Their wives were treated more as their human appendages than as autonomous voyagers. At sea, as on land, patriarchy was the model for families like the Collyers. Harvey Collyer, a grocer at Bishopstoke in Hampshire, was emigrating with his wife and daughter. Several years earlier some friends had gone to Payette, Idaho, where they prospered from the orchards they bought there. In enthusiastic letters to the old country, they urged the Collyers to join them. When Charlotte Collyer evinced symptoms of tuberculosis, she and her husband decided to buy a farm in the same gentle valley as their friends. Payette, with a population of about two thousand, was also known as Boomerang because it was the location of the turntables of the Oregon Short Line Railroad: it was salubrious because it was the end of the line. The leave-takings from Bishopstoke were gratifying for Harvey Collyer but distressing for Charlotte. He had been verger, bell ringer, and sometime parish clerk of the local church; she had been in service in the vicar’s household. On the afternoon before departing for Southampton, their Bishopstoke neighbors turned out to bid them Godspeed. Some of the congregation sat Collyer under an old tree in the churchyard, climbed into the belfry, and rang St. Mary’s church bells with gusto for an hour. He was delighted by the tribute, though his wife felt the poignancy keenly.

Collyer carried all their savings, including the proceeds of his shop, in banknotes secreted in the inside pocket of his jacket. From Queenstown he sent a letter, dated April 11, to his parents, which shows his proud excitement at their coming adventure. If his wife still wore a closed, stricken face, he said nothing of it:

My dear Mum and Dad,

It don’t seem possible we are out on the briny writing to you. Well dears so far we are having a delightful trip the weather is beautiful and the ship magnificent. We can’t describe the tables it’s like a floating town. I can tell you we do swank we shall miss it on the trains as we go third on them. You would not imagine you were on a ship. There is hardly any motion she is so large we have not felt sick yet we expect to get to Queenstown today so thought I would drop this with the mails. We had a fine send-off from Southampton. . .

Lots of love, don’t worry about us. Ever your loving children Harvey, Lot & Madge.
15

By the time that he wrote this letter, Collyer had savored the second-class breakfast served on April 11. It had the range of a Lyons Corner House slap-up.

Fruit

Rolled Oats • Boiled Hominy

Fresh Fish

Yarmouth Bloaters

Grilled Ox Kidneys and Bacon

American Dry Hash Au Gratin

Grilled Sausage, Mashed Potatoes

Grilled Ham, Fried Eggs

Fried Potatoes

Vienna & Graham Rolls

Soda Scones

Buckwheat Cakes, Maple Syrup

Conserve • Marmalade

Tea • Coffee

Watercress

There was no one on the second-class decks sulking and railing at life’s hardships, especially after such a breakfast. The lower echelons of second-class passengers, when they were working in their hometowns, often endured aching, jostled journeys on public transport, but here on the
Titanic
there was none of the buffeted, shabby side of life. These were people with clothes that were neatly mended and brushed. Commuters faced every day, in cramped proximity, insulting evidence of their limitations, but the
Titanic
opened to them a world of expansive possibilities. There were people in second class, beneath the status of Hull Botsford or Denzil Jarvis, for whom life had brought disappointments and those quiet little successes that no one else noticed. They were covered with an enamel of good humor and equipped with different appearances for different times. Second-class saloons on Atlantic liners had a magnanimous temper. They were not places for mean-minded types who stayed in their old districts, peering over fences with envious eyes, relishing their neighbors’ misfortunes as visitations intended to keep uppity people in their place, and resolving to show their superiority in the pettiest ways.

After the first breakfast, Samuel “Jim” Hocking, a confectioner from Devonport, who at the age of thirty-six had determined to join his brother in Middletown, Connecticut, sat down to write a letter to his wife, Ada, who intended to follow him with their children when he was settled: “It is a lovely morning with a high wind but no heavy seas, in fact it has been like a millpond so far but I expect we shall get it a bit stiffer in the Bay of Biscay if this wind continues. This will be the ship for you, you can hardly realize you are on board except for the jolting of the engines that is why it is such bad writing. I am longing already for you to have a trip. I wish it had been possible for us all to come together, it would have been a treat.” But he was sure that “when you come out, and I hope it will not be long, you will be able to manage with the two children splendid” if they traveled on the
Titanic
. A married couple from Cornwall had struck up a shipboard friendship with him. “I am pleased I have met someone nice, in fact you don’t meet anyone rough second-class. I have a bunk to myself which is pretty lonely but still I would rather be alone than have a foreigner who I could not talk to.” He missed his Ada and “the kiddies. I suppose they ask for me? You must get out a good bit and the time will pass quicker. Tell Penn his fags are my only comfort and I am smoking a few!” The close of his letter is particularly touching:

We are getting pretty close to Queenstown and I am afraid of missing the post, so with heaps of kisses to you and the children, and best respects to Mabel and all at home.

I am your ever loving husband, Jim

xxxxxxxxxxxxx divide these between the three

Everybody tells me I shall not regret the step I have taken so buck up and we shan’t be long.
16

Henry Hodges, aged fifty, a Southampton dealer in musical instruments traveling on a £13 ticket, sent a postcard from Queenstown to a friend in the local Conservative Association: “You don’t notice anything of the movement of the ship. Up on top deck there are twenty boys marching round and singing. Others are playing cards and dominoes; some reading and some writing. Everything is quite different from what we thought to see at sea.”
17
Hodges was the type of passenger—an ample, cigar-smelling man traveling alone—who spent a lot of his evenings in the fusty smoking room playing cards. The second-class smoking room on the
Titanic
’s B deck, with its oak furniture and paneling and dark green morocco upholstery, met the standards of first-class accommodation on the previous generation of Atlantic liners. “The card room is sought because it suggests the sea less than any place else on the ship,” Theodore Dreiser wrote after his Atlantic crossing in April 1912. Its air was stale and smoky, the bids, wins, and throw-ins of the gamblers all made in subdued voices, while outside the foghorn mooed like “some vast Brobdingnagian sea-cow wandering on endless watery pastures.” Even under electric lamps, with attentive stewards serving relays of drinks, it was hard for passengers to forget “the sound of the long, swishing breakers outside speaking of the immensity of the sea, its darkness, depths and terrors.”
18