Voyagers of the Titanic (21 page)

Firemen and trimmers on an Edwardian liner often came on board careening drunk. They went to work immediately, raising steam before the ship put to sea. Every day at sea, they labored in two stints lasting four hours each. Coal was spaded from the bunkers into barrows, which were hurtled to the furnaces by trimmers running at full tilt. Gathering momentum, the trimmers dared not abate their pace, for their mates were running hard at their heels with more heavy barrows. This furious clattering convoy swerved through the ship as trimmers dodged the blistering steam pipes and furnace casings, especially when the liner rolled or pitched. Firemen in their way had to jump aside or be hurt. The leading firemen, known as “pushers,” had been promoted from the ranks of ordinary firemen. They monitored steam pressure, kept the coal at maximum heat, struck the stokehold floor with a shovel to signal when a furnace needed to be fired or stoked, and yelled at slackers among the firemen. The firemen spent seven minutes shoveling coal into the scorching furnaces, seven minutes clearing white-hot clinkers with long slicers, and another seven raking over the ashes. Every twenty-one minutes, after these three seven-minute bursts of work, the firemen rested and recuperated briefly until a gong signaled the beginning of another twenty-one minutes of strenuous exertion. This was the fireman’s cycle of work for four hours on end, twice a day, for the duration of the voyage. They wore gray flannel undershirts, which they would pull off to wring out when they were drenched in sweat and then put back on. They also wrapped a sweat rag around their neck, clenching its moist end between their teeth to stop their urge to gulp water, which caused cramp and stomachache. Little wonder that after this frenetic, dangerous, overheated work, they got drunk as soon as they went ashore and often stayed sodden until they had to reembark.
14

“No men have ever had such hard and brutalizing work as the firemen and the trimmers in the big coal-burning steamers in the early years of the twentieth century,” wrote the Cunard officer James Bisset. “I felt pity for them as I saw them coming off watch and trudging wearily to their quarters, utterly done in, sweat squelching in their boots. Their faces, blackened with coal dust, and streaked with sweat, had a dulled animal-like look, and they seldom smiled. It was killing work.”
15
Sixty-four firemen slept in one room lined by two-tier bunks, with just enough space for men to bend to tie their bootlaces. Their sweating was so profuse that most of them were lean and complained that they were underfed. A meal called “oodle” was their preference: large joints of beef, with diced carrots and onions, were put in water-filled buckets and simmered for hours until the soup could be ladled into plates for the twelve-to-four watch when they finished their night’s toil. Few firemen or trimmers ate their midday meals, which were slopped down the swill chute. “Men dared not risk a heavy meal prior to going down the stokehold to manoeuvre slice bars, wrestle molten clinkers out, inhale sulphur fumes and sweat non-stop,” recalled George Garrett, a fireman on the
Mauretania
. “The afternoon watch was relieved at 4
P.M
. By the time all had queued their turn in the wash house, peeled off soaking clothes, swilled and tidied up, five o’clock was near. The ship’s tea, hash, made them long for their ‘oodle’ at 4
A.M
. Those with pals in the four-to-eight room headed there at eight-thirty to bum some gubbins off the Black Pan. These black oblong trays placed on the floor were jumbled up with food remainders from the saloon tables. Chicken frames, scraps of meat, ham, chops, and assorted cakes, no longer presentable to passengers, were a colourful change from hash.”
16
No wonder that under such conditions there was a receptive audience on board ship for a so-called sea-lawyer, defined as a sailor combining “a discontented disposition with a passion for grumbling, an uncanny knack of finding something to grumble at, the gift of the gab, and an elementary knowledge of a few of the legal points which may arise under the articles.”
17

The crew of the
Titanic
was overwhelmingly British. The chief exception was the restaurant staff, many of whom were Italian: White Star’s great maiden voyage of 1912 was to provide a dark moment in the history of the Anglo-Italian community; over forty Italian restaurant staff perished. They had been recruited by Gatti, the à la carte restaurant manager, who ran two London restaurants named Gatti’s in the Strand and nearby Adelphi, hard by White Star’s Cockspur Street office. Gatti was the surname of the man who first imported ice from Norway to London and thus established the Italian dominance in the English ice-cream trade. White Star’s Luigi Gatti came from Montalto Pavese, south of Milan: after he had been awarded the catering contract for the
Olympic
and the
Titanic,
he took a house—which he named Montalto—in suburban Southampton for his family, and drew staff from his London restaurants to work on the liners. The original “Little Italy” in England was centered on the Clerkenwell district of London and comprised organ grinders and street hawkers with braziers selling hot chestnuts, potatoes, and peas and playing mouth organs to attract attention. In the 1890s a new Italian community—composed of people like Gatti from the northern provinces of Piedmont and Lombardy—settled in Soho. They became kitchen hands, porters, cooks, and waiters in the hotels, restaurants, and gentlemen’s clubs of central London. It took many years’ patience for an Italian boy of twelve or thirteen arriving in Edwardian London to rise from the back kitchens to serve in the salons and dining rooms; but the climb could be accomplished. Many good hotels preferred to employ Italians (although London was full of German waiters until 1914), and those like Gatti who climbed high in the hierarchy liked to employ compatriots.
18

Although three of the
Titanic
’s five postal clerks were American, few if any of the crew were. Americans were reputed to be unsatisfactory as liner stewards. “Our boasted democracy,” Theodore Dreiser reflected after crossing the Atlantic in 1912, “has resulted in little more than the privilege every living, breathing American has of being rude and brutal to every other, but it is not beyond possibility that sometime as a nation we will sober down into something approximating human civility.” When he traveled by Cunard to Liverpool, he appreciated the English stewards. “They did not look at one so brutally and critically as does the American menial; their eyes did not seem to say, ‘I am your equal or better’, and their motions did not indicate that they were doing anything unwillingly.” In his experience American hotel staff were grudging in their service, and American stewards were despots who treated him as an interloper to be repulsed; but the crew on his English ship proved conspicuously civil. “They did not stare me out of countenance; they did not gruffly order me about . . . I didn’t catch them making audible remarks behind my back . . . in the dining saloon, in the bath, on deck, everywhere, with ‘yes, sirs’, and ‘thank you, sirs’, and two fingers raised to cap visors occasionally for good measure. Were they acting? Was this a fiercely suppressed class? I could scarcely believe it. They looked too comfortable.”
19
Dreiser’s low opinion of his fellow Americans is endorsed by a historian of Atlantic liners who judged that the ships of the United States Line lacked panache. “ ‘Standards maintained by the United States Line,’ said one of that line’s brochures, ‘are American standards.’ That was always the trouble.” The service manual compiled for United States Line stewards had to specify that stewards must not be unshaven, reek of alcohol or tobacco, wear scruffy shoes, pick their teeth, snap their fingers or hiss to attract attention, solicit tips, or count tips in front of passengers. Waiters taking orders must never, the manual stressed, lean their arm on the chair or passenger.
20

That English stewards were less contented than Dreiser imagined is clear from
Titanic
stewardess Violet Jessop, who compiled informative memoirs that were edited with sympathy by John Maxtone-Graham. Jessop, who was aged twenty-four in 1912, had been born in the Argentine pampas, the first child of Irish emigrants. After the death of her sheep-farmer father, the family returned to England, where her mother took work as a Royal Mail Packet Line stewardess. When her mother’s health failed, Jessop left convent school to become a Royal Mail stewardess on the routes to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. When she switched to White Star’s
Majestic,
working seventeen hours a day for a monthly pay of £2 10s, she was shaken by the battering of North Atlantic storms and needed all her willpower to remain at work. Conditions for stewards were hard, she recalled. “Men worked sixteen hours a day, every day of the week, scrubbed and cleaned from morn till night, moved mountains of baggage, carved and served food, cleaned a host of apparently useless metalwork until their very souls seemed permeated with metal polish, and kept long watches into the night, all for hasty meals standing up in a steamy pantry where decks were awash with the droppings of the last meal.”
21
Jessop felt that White Star’s managers were remiss. “Had employers consciously set themselves to kill the spirit of their men, they could not have succeeded more effectively . . . because there was too much regimentation and too little consideration for the dignity of the individual. Any initiative was usually quashed.” Although stewards at sea had to be strenuous, resilient, forbearing, and flexible, they were shunned when they applied for jobs ashore. This gave them “an inferiority complex,” she said, which they sheltered behind a false exterior of bravado: they were “the kind of man who, on the slightest provocation, gets up and shouts, ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!’ and then flops back into apathy.” The liners’ officers, “often mediocre themselves,” regarded stewards with “undisguised contempt.”
22

“Even the worst kind of ship has some advantages over the best kind of hotel,” Evelyn Waugh wrote after a trip on a Mediterranean liner in 1930. “As far as I can see, a really up-to-date ship has every advantage over a hotel except stability and fresh meat.”
23
The avarice was less obtrusive in shipboard culture than in a hotel. White Star did not count the number of hot baths and cups of tea taken during a voyage and add them to the bill, as hotel managers did. Having paid for their tickets, passengers were not caught by cunning additional expenses. Hotel employees were always soliciting tips, even when their attention had been as brief as swinging open doors or summoning taxis. But at sea, there was one grand reckoning for tips at the end of the voyage. The avidity of servants was less dispersed and harassing, for individual stewards had more direct personal responsibility for passenger comfort than hotel staff, and everyone knew that dues would be paid in the hours before docking.

With monthly pay of only £3 15s, stewards depended on their tips and were quick to appraise the passengers’ worth and likely generosity. “Sweetheart,” a young
Titanic
bedroom steward named Richard Geddes wrote to his wife in a letter sent from Queenstown, “there won’t be much made on the outward journey but it won’t matter so long as we get something good on the homeward one.”
24
Jack Stagg, a saloon steward, was also preoccupied with tips when he wrote to his wife as the liner approached Ireland: “What a day we have had of it, it’s been nothing but work all day long, but I can tell you nothing as regards what people I have for nothing will be settled until we leave Queenstown . . . we have only 317 first, and if I should be lucky enough to get a table at all it won’t possibly be more than two that I shall have, still one must not grumble for there will be plenty.” In a postscript he added, “I made sixpence today. What luck.”
25
The violinist-bandleader Wallace Hartley was also thinking of tips when he wrote home before Queenstown: “this is a fine ship and there ought to be plenty of money around.”
26
Ten years after the
Titanic
’s maiden voyage, Emily Post’s handbook of etiquette guided first-class passengers on tips. Separate tips of ten shillings ($2.50) each were recommended for the room steward or stewardess, the deck steward, and the lounge steward. It was unnecessary to tip the head steward unless he had performed a special service. Passengers who took their meals in their cabin were enjoined to give at least twenty shillings to the steward or stewardess. Any steward who had exerted himself to please should be rewarded with careful words of thanks as well as a generous tip before disembarking.

Stewards’ thoughts were obsessed by the jingling of coins, Jessop thought, because they felt so hopeless and futile. “One rarely heard them complain that they found their work—years of bell-answering, slop-emptying, floor-washing, bed-making, tea-carrying or the trundling of baggage—monotonous or distasteful. They never realized that the very monotony had eaten like a canker into their souls, killing ambition and leaving them content to get along without exerting their minds, their bodies racked with fatigue.” On the
Titanic
there was a telephone in every first-class cabin, and passengers could telephone, from the seclusion of their bed if they wished, to order breakfast, book a bench in the Turkish bath or a barber’s shave, or arrange a card game. Passengers wanted extraordinary things at odd moments and complained if their whims were not satisfied. Jessop saw colleagues “snarl and snap without provocation at someone who wanted to help them, simply because they dared not do so to the one who really hurt them, those who held out the almighty tip.”
27