Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (8 page)

Not all those aboard the Boat Train were wealthy or influential. In one of the Second Class cars, for example, Mrs. Allen Becker was keeping a careful eye on her three children, Ruth, Marion, and Richard. Ruth, a tall, pretty, but serious-looking girl of twelve, was less than thrilled at the prospect of another ocean voyage: she, along with her brother, sister, and mother, had just spent a month making passage from India. Allen and Nellie Becker were missionaries in India, and there all three Becker children had been born. But little Richard, just twenty months old, was a sickly child, and his parents had been told that the only way the boy would survive would be to take him away from the harsh Indian climate. So Mrs. Becker made arrangements for herself, Richard, Marion, who was just four, and Ruth to go home to Benton Harbor, Michigan. For her it would be a homecoming; for the children, America was a foreign land.

Another family traveling Second Class was Thomas William Brown, his wife Elizabeth, and their fifteen-year-old daughter Edith. Mr. Brown had been a real-estate broker and land speculator in South Africa. The Browns had left Capetown because the real-estate market there had gone into a serious decline and now were bound for Seattle, Washington. Traveling Second Class was something of a novelty for the Browns, who were affluent enough to travel First Class anywhere, but in this case there were no more First Class bookings available on the
Titanic.
⁹

The Boat Train rolled out of London and through the slate-roofed, red-brick buildings of Surbiton, Woking, Winchester, Eastleigh, and Southampton ; a world that Stead knew intimately, but would have been completely alien to men like Astor, Hays, or Guggenheim. It was the world where the small businessmen, bank clerks, accountants, brokers, bookkeepers, merchants, and shopkeepers who worked in the city lived with their wives and families. They were men and women who guarded their social station with as much determination as the aristocracy did their own, whose class was obsessed with respectability—always watchful never to say or do something that even hinted at a lack of good manners or proper breeding, or would somehow suggest that the individual involved was actually nothing more than a puffed-up member of the working class.

As a result they embraced the values of patriotism, education, hard work, and piety, and were as prim and proper as the upper classes were prof ligate. But while they might appear to be stolid and unimaginative, they were hardly docile: the Liberal party, which had just forced passage of the Parliament Bill that emasculated the House of Lords, had won its overwhelming majority in the Commons in 1908 because the middle class had wholeheartedly endorsed the Liberals’ program of social reforms at home and imperial reforms abroad—reforms that the upper classes had doggedly opposed. They inhabited row upon row of neat, tidy townhouses, each with its own back garden, where in April the narcissus, daffodils, and tulips would be in bloom, the hedgerows in leaf, and the cherry trees in blossom. Spring had come early in 1912, and the whole country seemed to burst with shades of green and bright colors.

Before long, the train rolled into the Surrey countryside; the brick and slate of the suburbs gave way to dressed fieldstone, half-timbering, and thatch. It was the world of the landed gentry; of the manor house, the village church, and the clusters of cottages; of vast fields of grass and heather, broken by stands of spruce and beech, birch and oak. Here men would listen for the call of the blackbird and the cuckoo, and sharpen their long-bladed scythes in anticipation of the thick spring grasses. Here life moved to a rhythm little changed for centuries, in a world of farmers, shepherds, blacksmiths, weavers, and tanners—men who rose with the sun and retired with it. Their work was hard, for mechanization was still a dream for most. They worked the land and tended their animals much as their great-great-grandfathers had. Occasionally a stolen afternoon would be spent fishing for trout in the Itchen, and most evenings would find the men rewarding themselves with a well-earned pint at the local pub, but always there would be an ear cocked to the wind, an eye glancing at the sky, for all it took was one of those terrible North Sea gales to roll in from the east and wash away an entire spring’s planting or sweep away a flock of sheep in a sudden flood. It was a world undisturbed by the comings and goings of the rich and powerful, and it had precious few summers left.

There was a third landscape that existed outside the windows of the Boat Train, but it was far removed from the gently rolling countryside of Surrey, both in geography and character. To the north were the industrial cities of the Midlands, where the vistas were of apparently endless corrugated-iron factory roofs, forests of belching smokestacks, and endless warrens of sooty red-brick row houses that gave shelter to the men, women, and children who toiled their lives away in the textile mills or the steel works. This was the economic heart of the British Empire, and like its counterparts in the Ruhr, Le Creusot, or Pittsburgh, it was the home of passions, hopes, and hatreds that would soon reshape Western society.

Many of these row houses had deteriorated to slums, where a family of eight might share two beds and a pair of thin blankets among them, with little or nothing in the way of sanitary facilities, and subsist on an inadequate diet that left the children stunted, pale, and apathetic. Few children completed even the most basic education: by the age of eight they would be working, usually in a textile mill, where their small and nimble fingers were best suited to work amid fast-moving mechanisms. Wages were rarely more than a few shillings a week, and injuries and fatalities involving a child snatched into the maw of a great weaving or spinning machine were commonplace and considered unremarkable by management, since replacements were always readily at hand.

The adults fared little better, often working in mine shafts or before open-hearth steel mills for as little as four pence an hour, in a twelve-hour shift with no lunch break (lunches were eaten at the workplace), seven days a week. Taking a day off without permission in advance could result in a worker being jailed in some industries. Disease was rife among them, chiefly tuberculosis, and limited and meager diets often resulted in stunted bodies and minds. (It is a matter of official record that the minimum height requirement for the British Army was of necessity reduced in 1900 from five feet, three inches to five feet.)

Labor unions had made some inroads in alleviating the worst of the workers’ lot, but poverty and its accompanying deprivations were still the rule in the life of most industrial workers’ lives. A blacklist even existed in some industries: a worker dismissed for labor agitation could be barred from rehire, sometimes just within the industry, sometimes in the entire city. To souls such as these, hopelessness was a permanent condition, and the idea of paying £1,000 to rent a suite of rooms on a steamship for five days was beyond their comprehension. Somehow, all the great material and technical progress that had been the hallmark of the Victorian Period had done little to ameliorate the lot of the people whose labors had made them possible. It was a social and economic imbalance that would produce pressures on society which, like a head of steam in an overheated boiler, would one day blow that society apart.

There had been warnings, for those observant enough to take note of them, the most recent being the Great Coal Strike, which began in January 1912 in the coalfields of Wales. By March more than a million miners from Glasgow to Newcastle had walked out of the mines. The basic issue was pay, when the average wage for a miner was less than £1 ($4.80) for a sixty-hour week. The labor was backbreaking, with the men working doubled over or lying on their sides, covered with coal dust, in temperatures usually well over 100°F., sometimes working in two or three inches of water, with poor light and little ventilation. Ultimately it was killing work—most miners died from some form of lung disease before the age of fifty if they weren’t killed by an explosion or a cave-in first. Believing they could break the back of the Miners’ Union, the mine owners refused to bargain, deciding instead to wait the miners out.
¹⁰

It was a disastrous decision for both sides. The whole of the British economy was dependent on coal, from the steel industry to shipping, not to mention the basic requirements for heating and cooking in nearly every home. As the weeks passed, supplies ran short and prices rose astronomically until only the upper-class and the wealthiest middle-class households could afford to buy what little coal remained. Far from generating sympathy among the working class, as the Transportation Strike had done in the fall of 1911, the Coal Strike created bitter resentment toward both sides.

Hardest hit of all was the shipping industry. In 1912 fully half of all the gross registered shipping tonnage in the world was British, some ten million tons in all. As coal became more and more scarce, more and more ships were tied up at dockside, their cargoes rusting or rotting in warehouses on the piers, their crews sent ashore, idle, unemployed. In Southampton alone more than 17,000 stokers, trimmers, firemen, greasers, seamen, and stewards were out of work by mid-March. With the unions’ emergency funds rapidly being drained, many families were beginning to wonder how they would be able to put food on their tables. Already some landlords, with an almost Dickensian lack of sympathy, were beginning to serve eviction notices on those families whose rent was in arrears. Though the strike was actually settled on April 3, it would be nearly two weeks before coal reached the cities and seaports and the hardships would begin to ease.

Ironically, the disruption caused by the strike had touched the lives of the upper classes hardly at all, while it had caused innumerable problems for most of the people it had been meant to benefit. Ultimately all the Coal Strike had done was to underscore the near-total lack of understanding the two sides had for each other. In hindsight it was quite clear that the strikers had no real idea how little sympathy the mine owners and their peers had for the laborers. For their part, the Astors, Guggenheims, and Hays of the world—or the Pirries, Morgans, or Ismays, for that matter—would have found it nearly impossible to comprehend the reasons behind the strike in the first place, just as surely as they never would have understood the stolid life of the suburbs or the pastoral life of the country, and would have been utterly incapable of imagining a Birmingham, a Manchester, or a Sheffield.
¹¹

The Boat Train sped across the great moors of northwest Surrey toward the long ridge of the Hog’s Back, reaching the high plateau beyond Basingstoke. Beginning the long downward incline toward Eastleigh and rushing through the chalk cuttings and short tunnels of the Hampshire Downs, the train was now approaching speeds close to seventy miles an hour. It passed by Winchester and at the end of its eighty-mile run from Waterloo station, it coasted into Southampton, through the Terminus Station, and across the Canute Road. A few hundred yards beyond, it came to halt at the platform built on the White Star Line’s Ocean Dock. There, just a short distance away, lay the Titanic.

For more than a week now the ship had been the center of attention in Southampton Harbor, the scene of almost constant activity. First came the provisions and foodstuffs for the voyage, being delivered daily in almost staggering quantities. For the five-day voyage to New York, the Titanic required the following supplies for her galleys: