Voyagers of the Titanic (33 page)

From dawn on Tuesday, White Star’s offices by the waterside at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan were besieged by clamoring relations and prying onlookers. Long lines of motorcars crawled along the curbside, and richly dressed citizens hurried into White Star’s building. Robert Cornell, the Manhattan magistrate, burst through the crowd into the office, frantic for news of his wife, and collapsed on being told that nothing was known of her.
31
When Edward Frauenthal was told that the
Carpathia
’s list of survivors included the names of his two brothers, he was so overcome that he could hardly lurch to the telephone. When his wife answered he broke down and sobbed, “I tell you they are saved! Yes! Yes! They are safe!” Then the telephone receiver fell from his hand, and he sank to the floor, completely overcome.
32

A journalist described the Tuesday scene: “The offices of the White Star Line are the focal point of woe and despair. Since last night, multitudes of pallid men and women with swollen eyes have stood in front of the stone building at 9 Broadway . . . Those who took up their vigil last night are there tonight. Fashionably gowned women whose friends rode in the deluxe state rooms of the liner are mingling with and confiding their grief to women in shawls and shabby bonnets.” The names of third-class passengers were omitted from survivors’ lists. When a new name of a survivor was posted, it was read aloud by those nearest to the bulletin board and repeated back through the crowd. The streets were awash with newspapers, for new editions were issued after the receipt of every new bulletin. On Broadway, the theaters were open, but the actors could not hold the small audiences, who kept rushing out to buy an “extra” edition.
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The maddening blur of facts, the dreadful ravage of suspense, was evoked by Sid Blake, the manager of New York’s Star Hotel. He knew several
Titanic
passengers from previous crossings and was expecting Cornishmen coming to welcome their wives and children to America. While preparing for their arrival, he heard the stunning news that the
Titanic
had struck an iceberg. William Drew, a Cornishman, arrived from Long Island. Before Christmas he had sent his young only son, Marshall, with his brother and sister-in-law, the James Drews, to meet the boy’s grandmother at Constantine. “Wireless messages said that only Mrs. Drew was saved. Mr. Drew paced the office for 20 hours out of the 24 for three days. I thought he would go out of his mind. ‘My poor brother; my poor son,’ was all you could hear. Such suffering I hope never to see again.” Nellie Hocking’s fiancé, George Hambly, Sib Richards, Abednego Trevaskis, Arthur Wells, and Sidney Hocking came together from Akron to meet their women from the
Titanic
: they heard “pretty cheering news that all had been saved.”
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All large New York hotels had a steamship agent sitting at a desk arranging transatlantic passages. These men were besieged by anxious questioners, while elsewhere in the lobbies small groups loitered to debate the tragedy. George Boldt, manager of the Waldorf-Astoria, who had over thirty reservations from
Titanic
passengers, sat at his desk in suspense between the arrival of bulletins. At the Ritz-Carlton, Lord Rothes waited patiently for tidings of his wife. William Graham of the American Tin Can Company waited at the Plaza for news of his wife and daughter. The Gotham Hotel received telegraphic inquiries from Björnström-Steffanson’s father. Waiting in the hotels were hundreds of shipping agents who had crossed America to attend the gaudy rejoicings that were planned on board to mark the maiden voyage.
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On Wednesday a weeping girl asked if the name of her brother, Vivian Payne, Charles Hays’s secretary, was among the list of survivors. She had come from Montreal, where her widowed mother was “insane with grief and her life despaired of,” and broke down when Payne’s name was not on any list. Anderson Polk, of Dayton, Ohio, brother of Lucile Carter, swayed and nearly fell when given his good news. A plainly dressed woman with her daughter came timidly forward. A millionaire stood aside for her and retrieved her bag when she dropped it. She asked after her brother, Walter Bishop, a bedroom steward, and received a reply that made her turn away with a sob. There were hysterics who wanted to aggrandize themselves by making bogus claims for attention. Joseph Marrington of Philadelphia maintained a ceaseless vigil for two days seeking news of William Lambert of Greensboro, Pennsylvania. “He was my closest friend on earth,” said Marrington, “and as dear to me as a brother. He saved my life several years ago in the jungles of Ecuador while we were searching for rubber.” There was no such man on the ship: Marrington seems to have been indulging in a cheap fantasy. A young man who said he was called Long created an uproar by rushing through the throng screaming that his sister was lost. “When handed a list of survivors he scanned it hurriedly, and found the name of Long. He began laughing hysterically until it occurred to him to ask if the name was that of a steerage passenger. When he was informed that the Long was a first-cabin passenger he fairly shrieked his woes in English and Italian, and became so frenzied that it was necessary to lead him into the street.”
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He, too, was an attention-seeking impostor.

It was not until Wednesday that Arabic newspapers in New York reported that the
Titanic
had carried scores of passengers from the Turkish province of Syria. The English listings of Arabic names were so misspelled that they raised a thick haze of apprehension in communities from Canada to Texas. It took time for reliable lists of passengers and survivors to be compiled by Lebanese community newspapers. In the interval, heartbreaking fears were aroused: a delegation of a dozen men from Wilkes-Barre was in New York ten days after the accident trying to establish who from Hardin had been on the liner, who was lost, and who still lived. Syrian immigrants in the United States were divided by politics and religion, but this disaster briefly united them. The Syrian-American Club of New York and the Lebanese League of Progress raised $307 for Mayor Gaynor’s relief fund; a Syrian hotelier provided rooms for survivors; and Bishop Rafa’el Hawaweeny of Brooklyn conducted a dignified memorial service in the Orthodox Cathedral.
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On Thursday, the largest crowds of all thronged White Star’s offices. Broadway was choked by cars and taxicabs discharging woeful passengers—mainly women. Weary, haggard clerks shook their heads and despondently pointed at rosters of survivors. “There were many pathetic scenes as the harrowed inquirer turned away from the counters and stumbled, sobbing, to a chair . . . Men and women from distant cities kept coming in even greater number, many of them hysterical and scarcely able to articulate their inquiries, some so feeble they had to be supported to the counters and then almost carried out to waiting vehicles.” Several Washington women came in a limousine to ask for Archie Butt, and swooned or wept, clinging to one another, when they heard there was no hope. Telegrams poured into the offices from almost every city in America, and the telephones were taxed to the limit. Family and friends of third-class passengers—Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Transylvanians, Russians, Poles, Germans, and French—“came in a swarm to fight their way into the jammed offices and wail for information.” Without interpreters, “they chattered and wept and wailed in vain.”
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Never in the history of ships had so many lives been lost except in battle; and the
Titanic
death roll was greater than the British death roll of any battle in the South African War. The whole of England was sorrowing: London had not been so somber since the “Black Week” of December 1899 when news arrived of three separate military defeats of the British Army by Boer irregulars with the loss of about twenty-eight hundred lives. Then sorrowing, fearful crowds had surrounded Cumberland House, the old War Office building in Pall Mall, seeking news of the dead and wounded. White Star’s head office, Oceanic House, was a short distance away in Cockspur Street, which joins Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square (the building is now the Texas Embassy steakhouse). Again, sad, fearful men and women thronged Pall Mall. The crowd outside Oceanic House, although orderly, became so big that the police had to marshal them. Early reports stated that George Vanderbilt and Lord Ashburton were on board, although denials came speedily. It became clear that “the majority of the well-known people on board belonged to New York rather than to London.”
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On Tuesday, Sir Courtenay Bennett, British consul-general in New York, telegraphed a coded message to London: “Consular uncollated hipponax moramenti lives romanized eperlano fewtrils,” which was deciphered as “No hope that any more lives will be saved except by means of fishing-smacks.”
40
In Cockspur Street, on Tuesday, there was a pathetic crowd outside the building waiting for lists to be pinned on the bulletin board. Men wearing silk hats and frock coats came and went in motorcars. Shabby women from back-to-back terraced housing walked up with defeated steps, and left with drawn faces. A smartly attired lady who found that her husband was not listed among the survivors and regained her taxicab, leaned forward with her despairing face buried in her hands. When a new list was affixed to the board, there was a frantic rush to scan the names, and dejection on people’s faces as they turned away.
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Lord Winterton traveled up to London on Tuesday from Sandwich, where he had been staying with Nancy Astor, with whom he was in love. “The news of the
Titanic
disaster, in which about 1,500 persons (including Jack Astor, Stead & others) have lost their lives is just to hand, and is too terrible to think of. Everyone talking about it in the trains.”
42
Arnold Bennett heard a newspaper vendor complaining in Brighton: “They mucked up this
Titanic
disaster for us. They put on the bills, ‘
Titanic
sunk’. That was no use to us. They ought to have put ‘Hundreds drowned’. Then we should have made a bit.”
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In Cockspur Street, on Wednesday, the early buses brought City workers, who broke their journey in the hope of allaying their fears for loved ones. Some, who had kept vigil at the office for thirty-six hours, fell asleep where they sat. Others paced the streets, too agitated to sit still, returning to check the bulletin boards. A young wife, awaiting news of her husband, dissolved into wild tears. Another young woman, after scanning the list of third-class survivors, burst into loud crying and was consoled by a clerk. As in New York, there were impostors claiming a part in the tragedy under false pretenses and playing their part as melodrama. A demented youth, who asserted that he had four sisters and a brother among the passengers, bit his lip until it seemed that blood must flow.
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“There has been an astonishing disaster at sea, the
Titanic,
the largest vessel ever built, wrecked in mid-Atlantic by collision with an iceberg,” the radical-minded, aristocratic libertine Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote. “It was her first voyage, and she was carrying over a thousand passengers to New York, many of them millionaires. Most of the women and children seem to have been put in boats and picked up by a passing steamer, but the rest have perished, over 1,000 souls.” Blunt gloried in the retributive justice visited on lazy, rootless epicureans and their insatiable, dolled-up harpies. “One thing is consoling in these great disasters, the proof given that Nature is not quite yet the slave of Man, but is able to rise even now in her wrath and destroy him. Also if any large number of human beings could be better spared than another, it would be just these American millionaires with their wealth and insolence.”
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Other members of the English upper classes, for whom fortitude was the greatest virtue, were unmoved by the deaths of soft-living parvenus. Lady Dorothy Nevill, the aged High Tory daughter of the Earl of Orford, had once defined the art of conversation as not only saying the right thing at the right time but leaving unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. She failed her own criterion when, at a women’s luncheon, she told the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes that “the wreck was a judgement from God on those idle rich people who want all earthly luxuries even on the water.” The artificiality of the floating Ritz was detestable. Lady Dorothy, who was a famous horticulturalist, snapped with disgust, “I am told they even had a garden!”
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Scawen Blunt and Lady Dorothy Nevill believed in discipline, resilience, and the fulfillment of hereditary responsibilities, and doubted if American millionaires knew much about these qualities.

Everywhere it was said that the craze for speed and the vanity of breaking records were endangering shipping and life, although, of course, White Star liners were not built for speed like Cunarders or German ships. “These big steamers,” the
Economist
judged, “to save a mere five hours on the voyage, take a dangerous course through the ice, and a liner travelling at 20 knots through an ice region is infinitely more likely to cripple herself than an old tramp doing her 8 knots, and careless of time.”
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Porter McCumber, Republican senator from North Dakota, was one of the few American politicians to deplore the blackguarding of Ismay and condemn the lust for speed. “The American people are as much to blame for this catastrophe as anyone,” he courageously told the Senate on April 19. “We seek and encourage people to push those vessels to the very test of endurance and speed. When the
Lusitania
was launched and made her record trip the whole country . . . clapped our hands and cheered.” Neither the equipment nor the route of the
Lusitania
excelled those of
Titanic
—only the latter’s luck was worse. There was too much of the competitive sportsmen’s bravado about American attitudes to speed, said the senator. Rash young aviators were incited to soar above the clouds and ascend thousands of feet. Elated by applause for his derring-do, a pilot attempts to go yet higher, “and the following day we bury a mass of flesh and we call for another victim to satiate our thirst for the spectacular. We demand the highest limit of speed and are always ready to take the chance.”
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