Voyagers of the Titanic (18 page)

For months the nine-year-old had been elated about going to America, a land that he had been imagining from years of letters sent by an aunt in Michigan. His mother bought Eno’s Fruit Salts and Gibson’s Fruit Tablets as preventives of seasickness. Though the boy was not unwell on the trip, he guzzled the delicious patent remedies. It was thrilling on board. “Not only were we going to America, we were going to another land, France! Then bonus wise, we would also be going to Ireland next, two ‘fairy-tale’ places that tripled the joy in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.” On the afternoon of their second day at sea, he stood with his mother near the stern rail, watching Ireland recede from view: “with a thumping heart I cried, ‘Mummy! At last we are on the ’lantic.’”
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In Detroit, Emily Goldsmith’s father had an English neighbor who, hearing that the Goldsmiths were coming out, sent the cost of the fare to his kid brother, Alfred Rush, and arranged for him to travel with them. The party also included Thomas Theobald, a friend from Strood. Sunday, April 15, was Alfred Rush’s sixteenth birthday, which he celebrated by donning his first pair of long trousers. To his delight, he was refunded sixpence by the purser, who had overcharged for his baggage. “Look, Mrs Goldsmith! I’ve got a birthday present!” he exclaimed in delight. Rush was small for his age, and might have passed for a child when the lifeboats were being filled. Instead, proud of his birthday, he declared, “I am staying here with the MEN!” and hung back with Mr. Goldsmith.
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John and Annie Sage were traveling with their nine children to Jacksonville, Florida, where he had paid a deposit on a citrus farm. He had been born in Hackney in 1867; his early work as a corn grinder and barman had led him to become a pub landlord in Norfolk and the proprietor of a baker’s shop in Peterborough. Then he had gone with his eldest son to Canada, where they are said to have worked as dining-car attendants on Charles Hays’s Canadian Pacific Railway, and was returning to America with his extensive family to begin a new life. Similarly, Frederick Goodwin was a forty-year-old electrical engineer from Fulham, whose brother had previously settled at Niagara Falls and encouraged him to obtain a job at the power station there. Goodwin booked a third-class passage for the entire family—his wife, Augusta, and their six children—on a cheap steamer out of Southampton; but its sailing was canceled because of the coal strike, and they were transferred to the
Titanic
. All eleven of the Sages and all eight of the Goodwins perished at sea. Bertram Dean, a twenty-five-year-old London publican, was moving to Wichita, Kansas, where he had relations who had written encouragingly of the life there. He intended to open a tobacconist’s shop. He was traveling with his wife, their two-year-old son, and a two-month-old daughter called Millvina: she had been born in February, was the youngest passenger on board, the smallest of the babies with their hunger, squalls, and smells; and when she died in 2009 was the last survivor of the
Titanic.
The Deans, too, had transferred to the maiden voyage because of the coal strike.

The Sages, Goodwins, and Deans were making their first Atlantic crossings, but another large family party were Swedish sojourners: William Skoog, aged forty, a mining laborer from Hällekis, Västergötland, had lived for some years with his wife, Anna, in Iron Mountain, Michigan, where he labored in the Pewabic Mine. They left Iron Mountain in 1911, but soon regretted their decision, and reached the
Titanic
via Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Hull with their four small children. The Skoogs were related to two young women who had long debated going to America together but hesitated until they seized the chance of accompanying the Skoogs to Iron Mountain. Both they and all six of the Skoogs perished: large, adhesive families who would not be separated had no chance of entering a lifeboat together.

A few third-class passengers acted as couriers for inexperienced groups of immigrants. Olaus (“Ole”) Abelseth, aged twenty-five, from Ørskog, a Norwegian fishing village east of Ålsund, had first gone to America at the age of sixteen or seventeen and had worked as a farm laborer at Hatton, North Dakota, an agricultural community on the Red River flowing toward Lake Winnipeg. He then started his own livestock farm in Perkins County, South Dakota: a remote, backward area where the little townships had names like Antelope, Bison, Horse Creek, Lone Tree, Rainbow, and White Butte. Abelseth had revisited Norway in the winter of 1911–1912 and was leading a group from Ålsund to Bergen, Newcastle, and Southampton, comprising his cousin Karen Abelseth, aged sixteen, also from Ørskog; another cousin, Peter Søholt, together with his brother-in-law Sigurd Moen (a carpenter-joiner of twenty-five from Bergen); Anna Salkjelsvik (twenty-one, from Skodje, near Ålsund, heading for Proctor, Minnesota); and Adolf Humblen (forty-two, a farmer from Ålsund).

Another guide for a Swedish traveling party was Oskar Hedman, who originated from Umva and had emigrated to the United States in 1905 at the age of twenty-one. Initially he worked at a hotel in Bowman, North Dakota, and as a motorcar driver for local businesses in Bowman, and saved enough money to buy land outside the town. By 1912 he was working for a realtor (based in Saint Paul, Minnesota), recruiting immigrants and chaperoning them on their journeys from Scandinavia. On the
Titanic
he was accompanying a group of about seventeen Swedes, few of whom had more than a few words of English. One of those who could speak English was Edvard Larsson-Ronsberg, a cook in the logging town of Missoula, Montana. Aged twenty-two, a farmer’s son from Ransbysäter, Lysvik, Värmland, he had returned to collect his fiancée, Berta Nilsson, aged eighteen, from Ransbysäter.

Several Lebanese women were returning to America after visiting their home villages: Mary Abrahim, or Abraham, aged eighteen, of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, had been to see her parents; and Catherine Joseph, whose husband pushed a pedlar’s cart collecting scrap iron and junk in Detroit, had taken their two children to visit the old country. Most is known about a thirty-eight-year-old Lebanese woman originally called Shawnee or Shawneene Abi Saab. She had married George Whabee, but they used the surname of George after moving to the United States, where she adopted the nickname Jenny when consorting with Americans. The couple had hoped to amass enough money to buy land in Lebanon, but he died in 1908. She went door-to-door doing laundry and housework with her rough, capable hands, and brought over her three sons and two daughters to live with her in Youngstown, Ohio. Her teenage son Thomas became dangerously ill in 1910, mountain air was recommended, and he was helped back to Lebanon by another son. She rushed to Lebanon in 1911 when his condition deteriorated, but arrived after the funeral. For several months she grieved in Lebanon before embarking at Cherbourg on a 4-guinea ticket. It was as a bereft mother that she was returning to America, where her future work lay in a steel mill in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and later in an ice-cream-cone factory started by her children.

Other wives were bringing out their children to join husbands who were already settled in the United States. The Lebanese Latifa Baclini, aged twenty-three, was joining her husband in New York together with her three daughters, aged five, three, and nine months; she was also chaperoning a fifteen-year-old girl on her way to New York to marry. Alma Pålsson, aged twenty-nine, was wife of Nils Pålsson, originally a miner in Gruvan, Skåne, Sweden. After a mining strike had disillusioned him with life in Sweden, he had gone in 1910 to Chicago, where he worked as a tram conductor and saved money to bring over his family. Two of Alma Pålsson’s brothers worked there, too. She was traveling with two sons aged six and two, and two daughters aged eight and three, to join her husband. Her body was recovered wearing a brown skirt with a green cardigan and boots but no stockings, for she had dressed in frightened haste. Her effects included sixty-five kroner and a mouth organ.

A glimpse of third-class shipboard life is provided by that mouth organ. A good number of passengers wandered the decks with accordions, mouth organs, even fiddles in their hands or pockets. The sound of cheerful, amateurish music was often heard in third-class corridors or decks. After crossing from New York to Southampton after the war, scrutinizing every move and attitude of his fellow first-class passengers, Sinclair Lewis depicted an old man, taking the sea air on the promenade deck, “commenting on the inferiority of the steerage passengers who, on the deck below, altogether innocent of being condescendingly observed by the gentry-by-right-of-passage-money, jigged beside a tarpaulin-covered hatch to the pumping music of an accordion.”
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Arnold Bennett, crossing the Atlantic in 1911, found the starboard deck crowded with third-class passengers after breakfast. It was a playground studded with “entrances to paradises forbidden to them.” He noticed a “natural brazenness” about some young women, “girls who would not give and take to me in passing.”
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The deck was certainly a playground for carefree gangs of boys. Frankie Goldsmith, then aged nine, explored the ship with half a dozen other boys, improvising games on deck, clambering over bollards and ventilators. After leaving Ireland, the children chose Goldsmith to try a trick. He climbed a baggage crane, clutched the cable under its arm, and then hoisted himself hand over hand to the end of the arm, before dropping down onto the deck. The cable proved to be coated with grease to protect it from corrosion, and a gaggle of nearby sailors roared with laughter as he struggled to keep hold of the cable. His mother subjected him to robust scrubbing before she was satisfied that he was clean.

Stephen Graham’s estimate of the third-class Englishwomen was mixed: “There are the women who are going out to their sweethearts to be married, and the wives who are going to the husbands who have ‘made good’; there are the girls who have got into trouble at home and have slid away to America to hide their shame; there are girls going to be domestic servants and girls doomed to walk the streets.”
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There were also wives whose marriages had collapsed. Margaret Ford was a Scotswoman of forty-eight whose husband had left her after the birth of their fifth child in 1904. She reared chickens to keep her family; the two eldest daughters became domestic servants, her son of eighteen was a blacksmith, and her boy of sixteen was a messenger. The eldest daughter was working in a household on Long Island, and Margaret Ford had decided to join her in America. She traveled with her four children, a servant girl whom her daughter knew, her sister-in-law, and the latter’s husband, a Scottish-born plumber, with their son of eight and daughter of seven. All ten of Margaret Ford’s party died.

Rhoda Abbott was another mother making her way in life after the collapse of her marriage. She had been brought up in the southern English market towns of Aylesbury and Saint Albans. She had left for Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893 and two years later married a middleweight boxing champion, Stanton Abbott. They had two sons, Rossmore, born in 1896, and Eugene, born in 1899; but she had separated from her husband by 1911, when she and her two sons had crossed on the
Olympic
to test life in Saint Albans with her widowed mother. There she supported herself as a seamstress, while Rossmore Abbott is said to have worked as a boot maker or for a jeweler, and Eugene attended Priory Park School. After six months in Saint Albans, the two American boys were homesick, and Rhoda Abbott determined to return to Rhode Island. After buying three tickets, the Abbotts were transferred to the
Titanic
because of the coal strike. It is said that she and her sons—by then aged sixteen and thirteen—were Salvation Army workers. Once embarked, she befriended Amy Stanley, Emily Goldsmith, and May Howard, who all had cabins near her. Her sons roamed the ship, and doubtless gorged themselves like all hungry boys at mealtimes when confronted by a breakfast menu of oatmeal porridge with milk, liver and bacon, Irish stew, bread and butter, marmalade with Swedish bread, tea or coffee followed by a main meal of vegetable soup, boiled mutton with capers, green peas, boiled potatoes, cabin biscuits, and plum pudding.

Few third-class passengers were negligent of their clothes, though none, of course, dressed like Lady Duff Gordon’s mannequins. Bridget McDermott from Addergoole in Ireland had lately been into the market town of Crossmolina to buy clothes for her journey, and others no doubt had spent money to look their best. The Croatian laborer Josip Drazenovic wore a striped green and gray suit, brown striped shirt, and black boots—carrying his pipe and a set of rosary beads. His fellow Croatian Ignjac Hendekovic wore a white shirt with an embroidered front above his blue striped trousers and leather sandals. We know about the clothes only of those whose possessions were methodically noted when their bodies were recovered from the ocean. The inventory makes poignant reading. A Jewish Russian, Sinai Kantor, carried a pocket telescope in his gray and green suit. Mansour Hanna from Lebanon had dressed in a hurry and went into the freezing water wearing only gray flannel underpants and undershirt, clutching amber beads. Sixteen-year-old Rossmore Abbott wore whatever he could swiftly lay his hands on: gray trousers, green cardigan, blue jersey, black boots, and a brown overcoat containing an empty wallet and two little knives. Mary Mangan from Addergoole dressed methodically in a black skirt, blouse, coat, and boots, with a red cardigan and green raincoat, and all her treasures—rosary beads; medallion; gold bracelet, locket, watch, and brooch; and her diamond solitaire ring. Will Sage, aged fourteen, was found in gray knickerbockers. Shortly before his death, Sidney Goodwin, aged nineteen months, had been lovingly coddled in a gray coat with fur on its collar and cuffs, a brown serge frock, a petticoat, a pink woolen undershirt, brown booties, and stockings. These are the clothes of the poor and striving. One unidentified corpse is described thus: “four feet, six inches, about fourteen-years old, golden brown hair, very dark skin, refined features. Lace-trimmed red-and-black overdress, black underdress, green striped undershirt, black woollen shawl and felt slippers. Probably third-class.”
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