Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (49 page)

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the limits of Western Europe’s feudal society could no longer confine the energies that the Industrial Revolution had generated, and the institutions that such a society had evolved over the past five centuries could no longer cope with the demands being placed on them. The Victorian Age and the Edwardian Era had transformed both the aristocracy and the masses in ways that neither readily perceived, and only an event that so starkly highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of both would demonstrate how great those changes were. For the generations to follow, the years of 1914 to 1918 would seem to stretch across the landscape of the past like a curtain, closing them off from the years before, but for those who lived through those days, the turning point would always be the Titanic. Many years later, Jack Thayer would remember it this way:

But what really struck home for most people was not that the disaster had occurred, or even the magnitude of it, but the sheer inevitability of the thing. Suddenly everyone knew that there could be no such thing as the “unsinkable ship,” and a few hours’ observation at any major seaport, combined with some simple arithmetic, would show anyone so inclined to spend the time that there were no ships on the North Atlantic that carried enough lifeboats for everyone on board. But it took the Titanic to make them realize that.

Pressing on with all possible speed regardless of weather or sea conditions may have been the standard operating procedure for crack liners on the North Atlantic run, but that didn’t reduce the hazards of such practice. Yet because for forty years before April 15, 1912, there had never been a serious loss of life on the North Atlantic caused by such perilous habits, no one realized the danger that such a practice presented. Admittedly, the ramming and sinking of the Republic in 1906 should have served as a warning, but the drama of the thirty-six-hour struggle to save the stricken liner overshadowed everything else at the time. It took the tragedy of the Titanic to alert people to the danger.

The lack of any clear-cut procedure for getting warnings of ice or other obstacles properly posted on the
Titanic’s
bridge so that all the officers knew of them wasn’t peculiar to just the
Titanic-it
was the order of the day on the North Atlantic. William Alden Smith may have looked like a bumptious fool when he decided that the transatlantic passenger trade needed a healthy dose of the same type of regulation that he had brought to America’s railroads, but he was merely the point man for an entire populace that realized that a disaster like the Titanic would have happened sooner or later.

Though Senator Smith may have made himself the object of ridicule in Britain and come under harsh criticism from certain special interests in the United States, his inquiry had the lasting beneficial effect of no longer permitting shipowners to conduct “business as usual” on the North Atlantic. All the old regulations and Board of Trade formulas would be thrown out, and the question of sacrificing deck space to make room for enough lifeboats to hold everybody on board become moot.

It was true that, as Second Officer Lightoller maintained, the exact circumstances that brought the ship and the iceberg together might never be duplicated in a hundred years, but the popular sense was that the time would have come when the Titanic would strike that iceberg, or be rammed, or hit an uncharted rock like the Great Eastern did. Or if not the Titanic, then the Gigantic would, or one of the German leviathans being built even when the Titanic sailed, or one of the Titanic’s British successors. To most people, sober reflection led to the conclusion that such a disaster was indeed inevitable. In the case of the Titanic, it was the glamour of her passenger list, the thrill of her maiden voyage, the sheer breathtaking beauty of the ship itself, and the appalling death toll that combined to heighten the sense of tragedy and loss. All of it underscored the deadly triumvirate of arrogance, vanity, and “o’erweening pride” that led to her destruction. If only the ancient Greeks had known of her, they would have understood the Titanic perfectly, for if ever there was a physical expression of hubris, it was she.

It took the genius of Thomas Hardy to put such thoughts in terms that many felt but could not express. Hardy had lost a good friend, William T. Stead, on the Titanic, and though Hardy didn’t share Stead’s fascination with spiritualism, he did sense some moving force beneath the surface of the whole affair. With his fine sense of divine inscrutability, he produced the one piece of poetry that among all the reams of literature produced by the loss of the Titanic most directly drives to the heart of the tragedy:

EPILOGUE

NEARLY ALL THE PLAYERS HAVE LEFT THE STAGE NOW. ONE BY ONE, THE PASSENGERS and crew have gone, until only a handful are left, and with their passing, along with their contemporaries, go the last living memories of an age when the future still beckoned hopefully, and the skies, while never cloudless, at least were bright.

Lawrence Beesley would publish a book in 1913 about the Titanic. It was to be an obsession of his until his death in 1967 at the age of eighty-nine.

The Bishops divorced less than a year after the disaster, in part due to a vicious rumor claiming that Mr. Bishop escaped dressed in women’s clothing. After the divorce the former Mrs. Bishop vanished, while Mr. Bishop died in relative obscurity in 1961.

Jack Thayer would go on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and make a career in banking. Eventually he would return to the university and serve as treasurer and later as a vice president. But the events of April 14-15, 1912, left a mark on his spirit, until in 1945, still haunted by the Titanic, and deeply depressed by the death of his son in World War II, he took his own life. He was 50 years old.

Kate Buss did finally reach San Diego, where she and Samuel Willis were married on May 11, 1912. Their daughter would be named for Lilian Carter. Kate, who was widowed in 1953, would never be able to talk about the Titanic without breaking into tears. She died in 1972, at the age of ninety-six.

Billy Carter, like Dickinson Bishop, was divorced by his wife after a similar rumor started that he too had boarded the lifeboat in a woman’s clothes. The quintessential “polo player and clubman” died in Palm Beach in 1940.

Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, though exonerated by Lord Mersey of any impropriety, spent the rest of his days in the shadow of the Titanic and Boat 1. Proud and aloof as ever, he refused to respond to the continuing criticism of his actions on April 14-15, 1912, right up to his death in 1931. However unlikable he may have been, at worst Sir Cosmo was guilty of a monumental lapse into bad taste.

His wife, Lady Duff Gordon, prospered for a while longer in her dress-making business, but World War I spelled the end of the style of fashion “Lucile’s” was founded on, and the business folded. Lady Duff Gordon remained spirited right to the very end, continuing to defend her husband, who she finally followed to the grave in 1935.

Rene Harris, the widow of Henry B. Harris, would know incredible prosperity after taking over her late husband’s theatrical enterprises, only to lose everything in the Crash of 1929. But her “sunny disposition” never failed her, as Walter Lord put it, and “poor as a churchmouse but radiantly blissful, she died quietly in September, 1969, at the age of 93.”
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Nellie Becker and her three children, Marion, Richard, and Ruth, found a home in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they were joined the next year by Mr. Becker. The disaster wrought an emotional trauma on Mrs. Becker, who became nervous and withdrawn, and would never be able to even mention the Titanic without bursting into tears. She died in 1961.

Marion contracted tuberculosis and died of complications, just thirty-six years old, in 1944.

Richard went on to live a colorful life, first as a popular singer then as a social worker. He would be twice widowed before his own death in 1975 at the age of sixty-five.

Ruth eventually became a schoolteacher, married and divorced, and never talked about the Titanic until her children were almost grown. In March of 1990, at the age of ninety, she again went to sea, taking a cruise to Mexico, the first time she had set foot on board a ship since 1912. She died later that same year.

Helen Churchill Candee would go from strength to strength, becoming a noted author, world traveler, and lecturer—active and feisty until just months before her passing at the age of ninety at her home in York Harbor, Maine.

Mrs. Goldsmith and her son Franky finally reached Detroit, where Mrs. Goldsmith would eventually remarry, finally passing on in 1955.

Marion Wright’s marriage to Arthur Woolcott took place as planned on April 20, 1912. They lived in Cottage Grove, Oregon, where they would raise three sons. Marion would only talk about the Titanic with her family or close friends, and only on the anniversary of the disaster. She died in 1965.

Colonel Gracie never fully recovered from his ordeal that April night. He wrote The Truth About the Titanic in late 1912 and, his health broken, died a few months later, just as the book was going to press.

Mrs. J. J. Brown became known as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown,” her sometimes uncouth behavior suddenly becoming charming individualism. She would die in 1942, having become more and more eccentric with each passing year, still not giving a damn if she didn’t want to, as colorful and genuine an American article as ever there was.

Eva Hart, deported from the United States because she was indigent—she and her mother had lost everything they owned in the wreck—returned to Great Britain. Evas mother Esther never remarried and died of cancer in 1928. Eva grew up to become a British magistrate and was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth for her charitable work. She never forgot her father, and for a long time kept the recollections of that April night locked away in her memory, rarely to be discussed. In her later years, recalling the Titanic became easier for her, though she was bitterly outspoken in her opposition to salvaging artifacts from the wreck, calling the expeditions that did so little more than common grave robbers. She died at the age of ninety-one in a hospice in England in February 1996.

During World War I Edith Russell became one of the first female war correspondents, and over her long life, survived automobile accidents, another shipwreck, fire, floods, tornados, and war. Rather than tempt fate any further she refused to ever set foot in an airplane, and maintained to her dying day, in April 1975, that she had survived everything except a plane crash, a husband, and bubonic plague.