Voyagers of the Titanic (11 page)

President Taft had invited Stead to address a pompous conference on peace to be held in Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1912; and it was for this reason that the old mountebank booked passage on the
Titanic
—doubtless also to write a sensational account of its maiden voyage. The liner seemed as firm as a rock, and the sea was as flat as a millpond, he reported in a letter sent from Queenstown. He spent productive hours working in his cabin beyond reach of time wasters with their pesky telephone calls and disruptive visits. At mealtimes, though, while businessmen at adjacent tables shoved along the talk as if they were straining to shift heavy boulders, he held his table spellbound with anecdotes of great men and views of great events told in his loud, cheery voice. Stead’s puritanism, as well as his radicalism, would have made him anathema to some English passengers, who “cut” him. Certainly, his views were at odds with those of the Duff Gordons: the incarnation of worldly duplicity, he would have thought them; and a self-centered, verbose old bore they would have found him.

Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon was a baronet who fenced for England in Lord Desborough’s Olympics of 1908, played excellent bridge, had a fine singing voice, and seemed valiant for having lost an eye in a shooting accident. He was a tall, clean, well-groomed Englishman, but so drilled in the stiff conventions of his set as to have shed any originality. Oscar Wilde quipped that originality means concealing your origins, but those of Sir Cosmo—schooling at Eton, inheriting estates in Scotland and Wales when he was barely thirty—were indelible.

During the 1890s Sir Cosmo had wished to marry, but his mother opposed the match because his prospective bride, Lucy Wallace, ran a Mayfair shop that sold sexy lingerie and, worse still, was a divorcée. He contented himself with investing in her shop, and married her in 1900 after the old lady’s death. Lucy Duff Gordon boasted of her conception early in her parents’ marriage while her father was working as a bridge builder in Rio de Janeiro. “In the glamour and wonder of the first love of these young, vital beings, I was conceived. The torch they handed to me was lighted at the flame of passion, and the rapture and the joy of their romance was rekindled in my own eagerness for emotional experience. This, I think, is the only way in which children should be brought into life; there are too many mediocre, colourless men and women about the world to-day, born of a union which was neither that of passion nor of great love.”
41
Few first-class White Star passengers would have admitted to such incendiary sentiments. After her father’s early death, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents on a ranch near Guelph, Ontario. Grandmother Saunders, in her stiff black silk dresses and snowy lace caps, was a terrifying antiquity who instilled severe rules of etiquette. “Ladies,” she would say, “do not show emotion or cry. The common people can find that a relaxation.”
42

At the age of eighteen, in Europe, Lucy married James Wallace, but after six years of marriage he absconded with a girl who danced in pantomime. Family friends tut-tutted when she insisted on a divorce, after which, penniless, she became a dressmaker in Mayfair. “I was one of the first women . . . of my class to go into the business world, and I lost caste terribly in doing so.”
43
Her standing only rose when it became known that an ultrarespectable dowager, Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, had bought her satin corsets and introduced clients with resonant names, the Countess of Dudley, the Countess of Clarendon.

Until the advent of Maison Lucile, a Mayfair dressmaker provided a few hard chairs, some unflattering mirrors, and a tight little fitting room hidden away. The dresses were displayed on models stuffed with sawdust and sporting gruesome wax faces. When live models were introduced from Paris, the models stood still in fixed poses because it was thought indecent for them to parade about. As a guarantee of respectability, ambulant models were chosen for their plain looks. To prevent them from showing their inflammatory ankles, necks, or forearms, they were encased in dingy black satin smocks stretching from chin to feet and then displayed delicate evening dresses over the puritanical black. On their feet were black laced boots. Lady Duff Gordon was the insurrectionist who determined to have “glorious, goddess-like girls” parading in her designs on a stage hung with olive chiffon curtains as background, showing off the dresses to an admiring audience of women. She taught good posture to her models by making them walk with books balanced on their heads. “I watched them develop a hundred little airs and graces, watched them copy the peeresses and actresses who came into my saloons.”
44
She gave each of her dress creations an individual name: “ ‘When Passion’s Thrall is O’er’, ‘Give Me Your Heart’, ‘Do You Love Me?’, ‘Gowns of Emotion’, ‘The Sighing Sound of Lips Unsatisfied’, I called them, and they caught the fancy of all those women who sat and watched the girls from Balham and Bermondsey showing them how they ought to walk.”
45

Lady Duff Gordon was the pioneer of sexy underwear. She hated the thought of her creations being worn over “the ugly nun’s veiling or linen-cum-Swiss embroidery which was all that the really virtuous woman of those days permitted herself.” Instead she made underclothes “as delicate as cobwebs and as beautifully tinted as flowers, and half the women in London flocked to see them, though they had not the courage to buy them at first . . . Slowly one by one they slunk into the shop in a rather shamefaced way and departed carrying an inconspicuous parcel, which contained a crêpe-de-Chine or a chiffon petticoat, although one or two returned to bring the new purchases sorrowfully back because a Victorian husband had ‘put his foot down.’”
46

At Christmas 1909, Lady Duff Gordon went to New York, staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, and arranged to open a shop there. Her title ensured its immediate success. “The one thing that counts in America is self-advertisement of the most blatant sort . . . Impress them with your ancestry, impress them with your possessions, with your bank-book, with the price you paid for your car, or your dog.”
47
She booked orders for a thousand gowns and was stunned by the amounts that Americans would pay. “I was invited to every ball and party given by members of ‘The Four Hundred’ . . . I could hardly put my nose outside my hotel without encountering pressmen and photographers; my telephone kept ringing all day.”
48

In 1911 Lady Duff Gordon opened her Paris shop, and launched a fashion for wearing colored wigs,
têtes de couleurs,
as they were called, to match evening dresses: a rose pink wig for a dress of deeper pink, a jade green wig with a dress of emerald. This innovation she recalled as “a folly . . . in keeping with all the extravagances and exaggerations of a pre-War Paris basking in the sunshine of its last seasons of brilliance.”
49
She bestowed professional names on her models: Gamela, Corisande, Phyllis. When they strolled in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées or lunched at Voison’s, a crowd of rich men admired and petted them. They could ask for anything. “Be sure of what you want,” she advised them. “If you want to marry, be as good as gold. If you don’t, be expensive.”
50

A different type of modern young woman from Gamela or Corisande was sharing cabin E33, at a cost of £55, with her mother. Elsie Bowerman, who was twenty-two, had recently graduated in medieval and modern languages from Girton College, Cambridge, and had previously been a pupil in the early years of a great pioneering girls’ boarding school, Wycombe Abbey. The school was renowned for producing cheerful, dauntless, productive, and fulfilled young women: Elsie Bowerman conformed to type. She had joined the suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union while at Girton, and carried a Pankhurst banner in the great Hyde Park demonstration for women’s votes. Her mother (the widow of a Hastings property landlord) was also a campaigner for women’s political emancipation, and ran her local branch of the Women’s Tax Resistance League. Elsie Bowerman was to be the first woman election agent at the earliest general election at which women were permitted to be parliamentary candidates—for Christabel Pankhurst, at Smethwick, in 1918. After the enactment of laws suppressing sexual bars in the professions, Bowerman became one of the first Englishwomen to qualify as a barrister in 1924. She was, among other distinctions, the inaugural woman barrister to plead at that historic London court, the Old Bailey.

H
ow did first-class passengers fill their time at sea? On the first day they made exploratory forays about the first-class decks to orient themselves. They called at the post room to inquire of the postmaster about postal arrangements. They established how to send Marconigrams, scanned the shelves of books in the library, and enjoyed the comforts of their cabins. After the first hours’ novelty, they ambled about, lounged in chairs, listened to the bandsmen, chatted and gossiped with old friends and shipboard acquaintances, eyed potential business contacts, wrote letters, ate gargantuan meals, looked at the sea and the weather, and took bets on the exact time of arrival. Fitness fiends used the gymnasium, steam baths, racquets court, and swimming pool. In the evening there were concerts in the lounge on D deck. There was heavy use of the Marconi telegraph facilities: messages were sent predicting arrival times, extending salutations from passengers proud to show their friends that they were on the
Titanic,
and forwarding business instructions. On Sunday afternoon, Isidor and Ida Straus exchanged Marconigrams with their son and his wife, who were passengers on the
Amerika,
as it passed near the
Titanic
on its way to Europe.

“Life on the
Titanic
,” Renée Harris recalled, “was expensive and gay.”
51
She and her impresario husband belonged to a set that played cards, so she did not see any dancing. Unless onboard dancing was sedate, it attracted scowls. On the
Olympic
in 1912 the Duchess of Sutherland, Lord Winterton, several young blades, and some pretty Americans improvised a party displaying a new dance, the Turkey Trot. Their tough, smart exclusiveness excited the envy of other travelers, who were made to feel their inferiority: as Winterton noted the next day, “the ‘Turkey Trot’ party has rather offended the rest of the first-class passengers, which is regrettable!! Nevertheless, we had another one after dinner, and followed it up with a supper in the restaurant.”
52

There is unanimity about the
Titanic
’s calm seas and deceptive lulling comforts. “At all times,” recorded Dr. Washington Dodge of San Francisco, “one might walk the decks, with the same security as if walking down Market Street, so little motion was there to the vessel. It was hard to realize, when dining in the large spacious dining saloon, that one was not in some large, sumptuous hotel.”
53
Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, after whose family Gracie Mansion in New York is named, enjoyed himself as if he were in “a summer palace on the sea-shore, surrounded with every comfort—there was nothing to indicate that we were on the stormy Atlantic Ocean.”
54
Frank Millet was delighted by his first-class cabin: with its walk-in cupboard in which to hang his suits it was “the best room I have ever had in a ship.” Luxury liner travel, he added, was “not like going to sea.”
55

“Like everyone else I was entranced with the beauty of the liner,” recalled Lady Duff Gordon, who felt gleeful when strawberries were served for breakfast. “Fancy strawberries in April, and in mid-ocean,” she told her husband. “Why, you would think you were at the Ritz.”
56
Other women had similar reactions. “Once off, everything seemed to go perfectly,” Mahala Douglas stated afterward. She was traveling with her husband, Walter Douglas, owner of a starch works in Cedar Rapids, Iowa: he had retired on January 1, 1912, having reached the age of sixty, and they marked this event with a three-month, once-in-a-lifetime European tour. “The boat was so luxurious, so steady, so immense, and such a marvel of mechanism that one could not believe one was on a boat—and there the danger lay. We had smooth seas, clear, starlit nights, fresh favoring winds; nothing to mar our pleasure.” The Douglases had recently built a Frenchified mansion at Lake Minnetonka, for which they had bought objects during their European tour, and they were looking forward to retirement there. Sunday was “a delightful day; everyone was in the best of spirits; the time the boat was making was considered very good, and all were interested in getting into New York early.”
57

It was the practice for first-class men to attach themselves as shipboard protectors to women who were traveling without husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons. They ate with them, strolled on deck together, attended concerts, and made amiable talk. On the
Titanic,
where her friends the Astors were aloof and preoccupied with one another, Margaret Brown spent hours with Emma Bucknell, the widow of a Pennsylvania land speculator and projector of gasworks and waterworks, whose benefaction saved the university outside Lewisburg, which was renamed Bucknell in his honor. Emma Bucknell built a Greek Revival house in Clearwater, Florida, where she wintered, and spent her summers at her private camp in Upper Saranac Lake, a village in the Adirondacks. She boarded the
Titanic
at Cherbourg after visiting her daughter Margaret, who had married Daniel, Count Pecorini, an intrepid Oriental traveler who collected jade and wrote a monograph on Japanese maple. Her maid, Albina Bazzani, was a servant supplied by the Pecorinis in Italy. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Bucknell were often squired by Arthur Jackson Brewe, a Dublin-trained physician specializing in nervous diseases with a practice in Philadelphia.