Voyagers of the Titanic (35 page)

London held a
Titanic
memorial service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral on April 19. Thousands were turned away. The nave, aisles, transepts, and galleries were crowded with people dressed in black—the only bright color coming from the procession of the lord mayor. The altar was draped in black and white and stripped of its usual ornaments, except a crucifix between two tall candlesticks. The service opened with the vast congregation singing “Rock of Ages” in slow, subdued voices—the effect was overwhelming. After the dean read the lesson, all rose and stood in solemn silence. Then, after a tense pause, the silence was broken by the subdued sound of drums. Almost imperceptibly, the drums grew louder, until their solemn rolling filled the church and reverberated like thunder to its dome. Then the drums gradually diminished until they had died away. There was another silence until trumpets sounded the first notes of that stately dirge, the “Dead March” from
Saul.
Women were led out fainting; and Pirrie’s brother-in-law, Alexander Carlisle, collapsed before the first roll of the drums was done. The simple singing by the whole congregation of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” was the final act of this intensely moving service. After the band played Beethoven’s funeral march, the vast congregation silently dispersed.

A pall of gloom was cast over the nation. Asquith, the prime minister, and his family moved into a new house on the Thames at Sutton Courtenay in the week the
Titanic
sank. Three thousand pounds to buy and decorate the house had been advanced to his wife by Pierpont Morgan, who could see the advantage if they were obligated to him. Friday morning’s newspapers carried reports of the
Carpathia
’s docking, and Asquith and his wife, Margot, cried together after breakfast. That evening, when the adult Asquith children gathered for a housewarming party, one son read aloud new survivors’ stories from late edition newspapers: the prime minister was deeply moved. On Saturday morning Margot sobbed again over the
Times.
Then her daughter Elizabeth, “white & dark-ringed round the eyes & tears rolling down her distorted face,” interrupted as she was dressing. “Oh! Mother,” Elizabeth wailed, “those poor poor people, all the young married women having to leave their husbands, & some of the boats half-full, & that wonderful Phillips & Bride going on to the end at the wireless telegraphy, & then Phillips dying of exposure—I can’t, I
won’t
hear it.’”
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The calamity also touched Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s other daughter. “The man
Guggenheim
! who changed into his dress clothes to die is one of the most funny & pathetic touches. The cruelty of the separations is almost unbearable—19 widows under 23—& one honeymooning couple of 18 & 19—torn from each other & the one drowned & the other saved.” She despised the American harassment of Ismay. “I suppose he was wrong to leave the ship—but no-one has a right to arraign him for it . . . he is probably going through hell enough to atone for anything he has done.”
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Once the
Carpathia
docked and solid facts emerged, journalists could have adjusted their coverage. It was clear that women
had
died and men from first class
had
survived in greater numbers than initially reported: 201 out of 324 first-class passengers survived, 118 out of 277 second-class passengers, 181 out of 708 third-class passengers. Gender was more decisive than class in determining the survival of passengers: 74.3 percent of female passengers survived, 52.3 percent of children, and 20 percent of men. Women traveling third class were 41 percent more likely to survive than men from first class. When interpreting the survival rates of the different classes it must be remembered that 44 percent of first-class passengers were women, but only 23 percent of third-class voyagers. In first class, a third of the men (57 out of 175), 97 percent of the women (140 out of 144), and all but 1 of the 6 children (little Lorraine Allison) survived. In second class, 8 percent of the men (14 out of 168), 86 percent of the women (80 out of 93), and 100 percent of the 24 children survived. In third class, 16 percent of the men (75 out of 462), 47 percent of the women (76 out of 165), and from a total of 79 children, 27 percent of the boys and 45 percent of the girls survived.

Of the crew, 24 percent (212 out of 885) survived, including 65 percent of the Deck Department, 22 percent of the Engine Department, and 20 percent of the stewards; 87 percent of the female crew members were saved (20 out of 23) but only 22 percent of the male crew (192 out of 885). The interpretation of these statistics has been stormily debated for a century—and always unproductively if gender is not weighed in the balance with class. One question deserves prominence, even if it cannot be answered definitively. The men in second class had easier access to the boat deck than those in third class, yet only 8 percent of them survived: were they more unselfish, stoical, self-consciously well-behaved, or conformist to rules than those above or below them?

After the
Carpathia
survivors began to recount their stories of confusion and fear during the loading of the lifeboats, newspaper editors continued to give a version of events that emphasized masculine chivalry, selflessness, and duty. A century after the
Titanic,
tutored by two world wars and several genocides, we are accustomed to the random causation of events and haphazard consequences; but in 1912 most people could only envisage what had happened in terms of personal codes and social rules. If American journalists, politicians, and public opinion soon began to criticize the English crew for bungling, funk, and self-preservation, their English equivalents adulated them for their composure, courage, and sacrifice. Somehow, the English imagined the
Titanic
’s sinking into a counterpart of Drake’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 or Nelson’s victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805. Journalists everywhere transmuted the dead—the captain, the bandsmen, Ida Straus, Phillips the Marconi operator—into legendary creatures. They ended up duped by their own sentimental inventions and weepy over sob stories that they had concocted. The tales that Captain Smith had swum with a child in his arms to a lifeboat and after handing it to safety had been swept away by a wave, or that he had shouted at the last, “Be British, boys, be British!,” were absurd and vulgar. To celebrate such fantasies, sand models were sculpted on Bournemouth beach, entitled “Britannia Mourns,” “Captain Smith and Baby,” and “The Plucky Little Countess,” guarded by imitation life jackets inscribed “Women and Children First” and “To the Heroes of the Titanic.”
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The string trio playing in the Café de Paris had been led by twenty-three-year-old Georges Krin, who had been born in Paris and grew up in Liège, accompanied by twenty-year-old Roger Bricoux, who had been born in Lille and worked in Monte Carlo before going to sea. The valor of all the bandsmen was saluted in France. “During the protracted agony of the sinking, the musicians played polkas and waltzes with redoubled brio,” opined
Le Matin
. “Perhaps it was a poor choice of music: Beethoven would have been more sublime. Blowing hard into a cornet, flattening the keys of a piano, striving for exquisite pitch, avoiding flat notes, all the time knowing that you’re going to die in the black and icy waters—this is heroism at its most stirring . . . the polkas helped to maintain calm and discipline on board during the evacuation. Often, during blazes in music halls, orchestras obey the example of their leader: their oompahs subdue panic and save life. Honor to the musicians of the
Titanic
who stayed at their music stands till the death! One can wield a clarinet as bravely as a sword.”
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On Sunday came the pulpit oratory. Charles Parkhurst, who claimed Isidor Straus and William Stead as his friends, preached a
Titanic
sermon in the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on April 21 that was reproduced across America and publicized in Europe, too. “The picture which presents itself before my eyes is that of the glassy, glaring eyes of the victims, staring meaninglessly at the gilded furnishings of this sunken palace of the sea; dead helplessness wrapt in priceless luxury; jewels valued in seven figures becoming the strange playthings of the queer creatures that sport in the dark depths. Everything for existence, nothing for life! Grand men, charming women, beautiful babies, all becoming horrible in the midst of the glittering splendor of a $10,000,000 casket!” He upheld the disaster as “the terrific and ghastly illustration of what things come to when men throw God out of the door and take a golden calf in at the window.” He inveighed against Ismay and his codirectors: “the vivid drama of men leaping to their death, bidding long goodbyes to their loved ones, and all to the accompaniment of the infernal music of the orchestra, ought to give them a foretaste of the tortures of the damned.”
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A similar line was taken by Edward Talbot, bishop of Winchester, preaching in Southampton on April 21. A congregation of over a thousand was headed by Lord Winchester, lord lieutenant of the county. No one could recall “such a plunge from ease and security to darkness and destruction,” preached the bishop. “It was a thing to darken the imagination, to turn the brain, and crush the nerves.” He believed God meant that “the cruel and wanton waste of money, which was needed on every hand for the help of the needy,” should be rebuked by such a catastrophe. It was “a mighty lesson against our confidence and trust in the strength of machinery and money” and in the iniquity of “hyper-luxuries . . . The
Titanic
in name will stand for a monument of warning to human presumption.”
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On Wednesday, April 17, William Alden Smith, Republican senator from Michigan, had proposed a subcommittee to investigate the disaster. Three Democrat and three Republican senators were appointed alongside him. Smith consulted the attorney general to confirm that he had powers to prevent British visitors from leaving the United States, visited Taft at the White House, and went to New York on Thursday. Ten minutes after the
Carpathia
docked, Smith, the Senate master-of-arms, and a sheriff hustled their way on board and into Ismay’s cabin.

Who was this new actor in the
Titanic
drama? Smith had been born in 1859 in Dowagiac, a hamlet near Lake Michigan, where in 1912 the first-class passenger Dickinson Bishop was kingpin. Smith’s poverty-stricken family moved to the furniture-making town of Grand Rapids when he was twelve. As a boy he delivered newspapers and telegrams, sold popcorn on the streets with the help of a friend who drew attention by playing “Camptown Races” on a banjo, became a pageboy in the state legislature, a janitor for a law firm, then an attorney, joined the Republican Party, was rewarded with a sinecure as Michigan’s first game warden, married the buxom daughter of a Dutch lumberman, and served in the House of Representatives for eleven years before his election as senator for Michigan in 1906. Smith was a populist who roused voters against big business with rhetorical alliteration and longed to injure Pierpont Morgan’s interests. He was all rush and humbug, prone to sum up situations on scant facts.

The senator, who held his first interrogations on April 19 at the Waldorf-Astoria, issued subpoenas to the four surviving officers and to twenty-seven crewmen—all of whom were itching to return home to England. They were so affronted when Senator Smith moved the hearings to Washington, D.C., at being herded into a second-rate boardinghouse that they refused to cooperate with an inquiry intended, they believed, to discredit British seamanship. Only the intervention of Lord Eustace Percy, an attaché at the British embassy, deterred the seamen from defying the senatorial summons. The embassy attested to Lightoller’s “tact, capability and good sense in handling a trying situation.”
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Smith was an incoherent, unsystematic questioner, who hated the Demon Drink and hoped to elicit that Captain Smith or other officers had been drunk. He also cross-examined Henry Stengel, in Ismay’s presence, to elicit if Smith, Ismay, and the ship’s officers had participated in the pool betting on the ship’s speed and arrival time. His implication was that Smith or Ismay had ordered the ship to race into the ice zone to win a bet. The senator’s firm, mellifluous voice uttered clichés that managed to seem both incontrovertible and inflammatory. He hunted clues to Ismay’s accomplices with all the salivating doggedness and random sideways lunges of a young basset hound tracking hares.

White Star’s sailors resented the grating stupidity of Senator Smith asking Fifth Officer Lowe what an iceberg was composed of: “Ice, I suppose, sir,” was Lowe’s rejoinder. Third Officer Pitman was quizzed about exploding icebergs and the reliability of seals as guides to icebergs’ whereabouts. Smith asked Lightoller whether crew or passengers might have sought refuge in the ship’s watertight compartments. He demanded of Captain Stanley Lord whether the
Californian
had dropped anchor when it stopped overnight in midocean. Smith also inquired if the great funnel crashing into an ocean full of desperate people in life jackets had injured anyone. He persisted, too, in chivvying a reluctant, distressed Pitman into describing the cries of the people freezing to death in the ocean: an unforgivable act of cheap-thrills emotional voyeurism.

Absurd allegations were made and left unchallenged. Imanita Shelley swore, for example, that Hélène Baxter, the Canadian millionairesse had told her on the
Carpathia
that she had sent her son, Quigg Baxter, for advice from Captain Smith after the ship stopped, “that her son had found the Captain in a card game, and he had laughingly assured him that there was no danger and to advise his mother to go back to bed.”
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Yet even the bumptious senator was stunned into respectful silence by the bald, unadorned recital of horrific experiences by the South Dakota homesteader Olaus Abelseth, a brave, clear-headed witness, an unexceptional man who did exceptional things, and brought discomforting authenticity to the proceedings.