Voyagers of the Titanic (16 page)

There were three American missionary parties, too. The largest, and most stressed, was led by Nellie Becker, the wife of an American missionary who was working with orphans in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. The wives of American missionaries led abject, desperate, lonely lives. They were exiled in hostile climates, terrains, and populaces, enduring the stink of sewage, bad food, and filthy laborers, with the constant fear of losing their children in epidemics. “I have no more children to give away to God now,” cried the wife of an American missionary in China after losing four children to diphtheria or cholera.
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Nellie Becker was gripped by well-grounded fears for her children. Her little son Luther had died in Guntur a few years earlier, and with her surviving one-year-old son, Richard, whose deteriorating health had alarmed her, and daughters aged four and twelve, she was scuttling back to her hometown, Benton Harbor, built on swampland reclaimed from the Paw-Paw River, outside Kalamazoo in Michigan.

The missionary Albert Caldwell was strikingly handsome. He had been born in an Iowa settlement, Sanborn, in 1885, and attended a college in Kansas City where students received free tuition and board in return for working half days on its farm, electrical workshop, or printing press. There he met Sylvia Mae Harbaugh. After graduation, they married in 1909 in a teetotal resort town, Colorado Springs, and went to Siam under the auspices of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions to teach in the Bangkok Christian College for Boys. Their son, Alden Gates Caldwell, was born in Bangkok in 1911. Early in 1912 the Caldwells left Siam with their baby, heading for a tiny place called Roseville, Illinois. In Naples, on their journey through Europe, they saw an advertisement for the
Titanic
and determined to buy tickets on it—costing £29. Caldwell in old age recalled the second-class saloons as thronged with carefree passengers. He recalled no apprehensions or anxiety: the calm sea helped everyone to enjoy their Atlantic crossing; and after years in Siam, he appreciated the abundance and quality of the meals.

Finally there was Annie Clemmer Funk, a Mennonite missionary returning on her first furlough after five years in the Jangjir-Champa district of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (often called the “Heart of India”). Miss Funk had been born in Pennsylvania in 1874. Her father was deacon at his local Mennonite church. She attended the Mennonite Training School in Northfield, Massachusetts, before toiling in the immigrant slums of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Paterson, New Jersey. In 1906 she was sent to India as the first female Mennonite missionary, serving in Janjgir-Champa, where she learned to speak Hindi and taught girls in a one-room school. Mennonite tenets required literal obedience to New Testament commandments and strict adherence to the ethics of Christ, especially self-denial, self-renunciation, and sacrificial martyrdom. They renounced aggression and violence; were active in humanitarian works; and shunned Catholicism, worldliness, and luxury. Mennonite women wore austere dresses with modest bonnets, shawls, and veils.

In 1912 Miss Funk was summoned home by a telegram announcing her mother’s illness. She entrained for Bombay, where she embarked on the
Persia,
a P&O steamship plying between England and Australia, which was torpedoed by a German submarine off Crete three years later. The
Persia
carried her to Marseille, from where she hastened by trains to Liverpool. There she was booked on the American Line’s
Haverford,
which ran the Liverpool-Philadelphia route. As its crossing was delayed by the coal strike, she transferred to the
Titanic
on a second-class ticket costing £13. The Friday of her voyage marked Miss Funk’s thirty-eighth birthday.
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Annie Funk was an inspiring woman with a creed of personal service and sacrifice. She was surely unaware that in second class there were several adulterers, a child kidnapper, and a handsome bachelor with his Ganymede. There were doubtless tricksters, too, seeking targets. They seem to have missed Leopold Weisz, aged thirty-three, who had left the Jewish quarter of Budapest to study ornamental stone carving in England, before moving in 1911 to Montreal where he was employed to carve friezes on newly built bank and museum buildings. He had returned to Europe to collect his Belgian wife and begin a new chapter in Montreal, and he was carrying a fortune in life savings. Tens of thousands of dollars were sewn inside the lining of his suit, and gold bullion secreted in his black Astrakhan coat with its fur collar.

Michel Navrátil, the kidnapper, had been born in Sered, a market town in southern Slovakia. From Sered there was a railway running to Bratislava, Slovakia’s major city, with its multifarious population of Austrians, Czechs, Germans, Jews, and Slovaks. Sered, too, had a busy traffic of barges and rafts carrying timber and salt along the river Váh, a tributary of the Danube. These easy transport links perhaps induced Navrátil to travel, first into Hungary and then to the French Riviera, where at Nice he became a women’s tailor with an elegant clientele. This was not an end to his journeying, for in Westminster, on May 26, 1907, he married an Italian, Marcelle Caretto. They had two sons, Michel and Edmond, known as Lolo and Momon, born at Nice in 1908 and 1910. His wife found that he had an odd temper, and he accused her of having a lover. The couple separated, and while they were in the process of divorcing, the boys lived with a cousin of their mother’s. At the start of April 1912, Navrátil collected the boys from this cousin and absconded with them. He left his wife a cruel note—“You will never see the children again: but never fear about them, for they will be in good hands”—and sent a further letter posted in Austria to mislead her, but she knew that he had fled to London. He had often spoken of going to America and bought second-class
Titanic
tickets costing £26 under his assumed name of Louis Hoffman, taken from the
copain
who had helped him to vanish.
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This tailor, accustomed in boyhood to Danube barges, boarded the great liner at Southampton with his two stolen boys. The elder child always remembered his thrill at playing on deck and looking down the awesome length of the ship—and eating eggs for breakfast with his father. Navrátil implied to fellow passengers that he was a widower, and seldom relaxed his control of his sons. He was armed with a revolver. On one occasion, he diverted himself by playing cards and left the boys in the charge of Bertha Lehmann, a Swiss waitress who ate meals at the same saloon table. She was on her way to join her brother in grandiloquently misnamed Central City, a hick settlement on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

As to the adulterers, Henry Morley, aged thirty-nine, was a citizen of Worcester, England, a confectioner with branches in Worcester, Birmingham, and Bristol—as well as a wife and child in Worcester. He eloped on the
Titanic
with a nineteen-year-old Worcester girl, Kate Phillips: they traveled under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall. Similarly, Harry Faunthorpe, also aged about forty, a Lancashire carrot and potato salesman, was heading for Philadelphia with “Lizzie” Wilkinson, aged twenty-nine, his mistress rather than wife. They seem to have told fellow passengers that they were recently married and honeymooning or starting a new life in California.

Joseph Fynney, principal of the firm Joseph Fynney & Company, rubber merchants, of Brown’s Buildings in Liverpool, was on one of his recurrent visits to his widowed mother in Montreal. He was a handsome, dark-haired bachelor in his midthirties with a keen, alert expression and shrewd eyes who enjoyed the company of youths and worked with delinquent youngsters. “Well-known and highly respected in Liverpool,” reported an obituarist, “his cheery and bright disposition endearing him to all who knew him. Mr Fynney took an interest in the work of St James’s Church, Toxteth, particularly in connection with the Young Men’s Club, and matters appertaining to the welfare of boys and young men.”
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On each visit to his mother in Canada, he took a teenage companion: in 1912 it was a sixteen-year-old apprentice cooper, Alfred Gaskell, of 20 Dexter Street. In other circumstances, Fynney might have been a first-class voyager, but it was impossible for him to bring a working-class lad onto the same decks as Astors or Cardezas. The incongruity between the past experiences, future prospects, physical grace, and easy manners of young Jack Thayer and Alfred Gaskell would have been too pointed. Each second-class ticket bought by Fynney cost £26.

There were several traveling parties on the second-class decks, notably groups from Hampshire, Guernsey, and several from Cornwall.

From the hamlet of Fritham in Hampshire came three Hickman brothers and four of their friends. There was little at Fritham except ancient woodlands and the Schultze gunpowder factory, which had been located deep in the New Forest so as to limit loss of life in any accidental explosions. At the age of twenty Leonard Hickman had emigrated in 1908 to Neepawa, Manitoba, where he prospered working as a farmhand on a mixed-grain farmstead called Eden. He returned to Fritham for Christmas of 1911, intent on persuading the entire Hickman family of eleven to move to Eden. Because of the coal strike, only three brothers could get an immediate passage: Leonard, his elder brother Lewis (who worked in the gunpowder factory), and twenty-year-old Stanley. They traveled with four young companions from Fritham on a single ticket costing £73 10s—all of them upgraded from third class on another ship to second class on the
Titanic
. All seven Fritham men perished.

Over a dozen passengers from Guernsey traveled second class on the
Titanic
. There was a party led by William Downton, a well-established quarryman of Rochester in upstate New York. Downton was chaperoning his young ward, Lillian Bentham, who was heading for Holley, a village on the Erie Canal in the northwest corner of the state. The other Guernsey party members were another quarryman; a carpenter-joiner, who had made an earlier trip to the United States in 1907, with his wife and her two younger brothers, who were both carters; a young man who worked on his father’s smallholding; and the young daughter of a railway man, heading for Wilmington, Delaware, where her uncle was a grocer. Three men in their early or midtwenties were leaving Guernsey for a new life in America: a quarryman’s driver, a young ledger clerk at a general store, and a horse trainer who had transferred from the
Olympic
and was heading for a horse breeders’ in Minnesota (there was a demand for English grooms as horse trainers and riding instructors on American stud farms). Lawrence Gavey, aged twenty-six, was returning to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he had settled five years earlier: he was a traveling fitter employed by a Rockefeller company, known for “his unfailing bonhomie and cheerful spirit.”
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An older Guernsey man was a sixty-eight-year-old farmer, trustee of the Ebenezer Wesleyan Chapel, member of the
Central Douzaine
of Saint Peter Port, and visiting his daughter in Rhode Island. He was traveling with a widower aged seventy-three, retired as both coach painter and boot shop proprietor, who was going to visit his sister in Toledo, Ohio. They were both Lyons Corner House sorts. None of the Guernsey men in second class survived.

The largest grouping of all on the
Titanic
’s second-class decks was Cornish. They banded together, looked askance at the English, and, with impassive faces, subjected them to banter. The route from Cornwall was well trekked, with recognized staging posts on the way. At Southampton there was Berriman’s Hotel, run by a friendly Cornishwoman and catering to Cornish voyagers, while in Brooklyn, John and Sid Blake ran the Star Hotel as a hospitable halt for Cornish coming in and out of America. “We were expecting to be very busy when the
Titanic
docked as there would be quite a number of Cornish people who would wait for the honour of traveling on her for her maiden trip,” Sid Blake recorded. “We had received personal letters from several people requesting us to meet them on their arrival, and assist them through the Customs. I meet all steamers sailing from Southampton, and whenever possible I see that Cornish passengers are looked after properly, baggage labelled right, etc., and that they are placed on their proper train for the West in good time. Besides, I always meet old friends who have gone home a few months before on a visit. It feels good to shake hands with them again, and hear them say, ‘There is no place like Cornwall.’”
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Two separate parties were traveling from Penzance to Akron—a boomtown of the epoch, prospering since the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company had been founded there in 1898, and thriving after Firestone Tire & Rubber had opened its plant two years later. The pervasive smell of rubber was unpleasant after the sea breezes of Penzance, but rubber connoted modernity and good money. Often Cornishmen went out to the United States alone, sending for their wives and children when they had saved enough money for tickets. Arthur Wells and his brother-in-law Abednego Trevaskis had migrated to Akron two years earlier. Now Addie Wells, daughter of a blacksmith and fish packer, wife of Arthur Wells, and sister of Trevaskis, was joining them with her two toddlers and household linen. A larger party was led by George Hocking, originally a Penzance baker, latterly a watchman in a rubber factory in Akron, who had returned home to collect his mother, Eliza Hocking, his sisters, Nellie Hocking and Emily Richards, together with his small nephews, William and George Richards. Nellie Hocking was on her way to marry a man in Schenectady. Emily Richards was joining her husband in Akron. George Hocking had sung in the YMCA choir in Penzance, which turned out to sing the party joyously on their journey. No doubt the provident Cornishwomen had packed the ingredients for a picnic fit for Cornish travelers, with pasties and the brightly colored, aromatic saffron buns relished by the Cornish.