Voyagers of the Titanic (13 page)

In dress, too, the Wideners and Thayers respected strict conventions. They thought of how they would look to other people rather than of their own selfish comfort. “On the de luxe steamers,” Emily Post wrote, “nearly every one dresses for dinner; some actually in ball dresses, which is in the worst possible taste, and, like all overdressing in public places, indicates that they have no other place to show their finery. People of position never put on formal evening-dress on a steamer, not even in the
à la carte
restaurant, which is a feature of the
de luxe
steamer of size. In the dining saloon they wear afternoon house dresses—without hats—for dinner. In the restaurant they wear semi-dinner dresses. Some smart men on the ordinary steamers put on a dark suit for dinner after wearing country clothes all day, but in the
de luxe
restaurant they wear Tuxedo coats.”
67
It is easy to bridle or scoff at these dress codes, but they were part of the curbs and conventions that America’s East Coast social leaders upheld as part of their discipline, cohesive identity, and self-respect.

Thayer junior was seventeen years old, a slim boy with good skin who expected to have a smooth, seamless life. He spent part of Sunday on deck with his parents enjoying the Atlantic billows. They stopped to talk to Bruce Ismay and Charles Hays. In the evening, too, while his parents dined with the Wideners, he took a few turns on deck. “I have never seen the stars shine brighter; they appeared to stand right out of the sky, sparkling like cut diamonds. A very light haze, hardly noticeable, hung low over the water. I have spent much time on the ocean, yet I have never seen the sea smoother than it was that night; it was like a mill-pond, and just as innocent-looking, as the ship rippled through it. I went onto the boat deck—it was deserted and lonely. The wind whistled through the stays, and blackish smoke poured out of the three forward funnels . . . It was the kind of a night that made one feel glad to be alive.”
68

7

Second Class

In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant or a nobody.

—P
AUL
V
ALÉRY,
A
NALECTS

I
f first class on the
Titanic
resembled a floating Ritz designed to gratify American millionaires, second class was a floating Lyons Corner House designed to soothe the English genteel. The first Lyons Corner House—the brainchild of Montague Gluckstein—had opened in 1909 just east of Piccadilly Circus, near his famed Trocadero Restaurant. Gluckstein aimed to provide restaurants offering a wide range of comforting food at low prices in agreeable surroundings. Theodore Dreiser, venturing into the first Lyons Corner House in 1912, was “struck with the size and importance of it even though it was intensely middle class. It was a great chamber, decorated after the fashion of a palace ballroom, with immense chandeliers of prismed glass hanging from the ceiling, and a balcony furnished in cream and gold where other tables were set, and where a large stringed orchestra played continuously during lunch and dinner. An enormous crowd of very commonplace people were there—clerks, minor officials, clergymen, small shop-keepers—and the bill of fare was composed of many homely dishes such as beef-and-kidney pie, suet pudding, and the like—combined with others bearing high-sounding French names.” In the early years the waitresses in starched uniforms were all called Gladys and moved with stately dignity so that Dreiser found the service slow by American standards; it was only in the 1920s that a friskier generation of Corner House waitresses became known as “nippies” because they darted about so sharply. He enjoyed listening to the music, watching the customers being led to their tables—the English curate under his shovel hat and the tightly buttoned clerk—and analyzing the social spheres that Lyons Corner Houses represented.
1

Second-class passengers on the
Titanic
were like a sample of Dreiser’s fellow diners: clergymen, teachers, hoteliers, engineers, shopkeepers, shop assistants, clerks. In second class there were chauffeurs whose employers were traveling first class—one of them was an instigator of pillow fights on F deck. There were workmen, such as a glassblower from the lower-middle-class London suburb of Forest Gate, heading for New York, and a young bricklayer from Catford heading for Detroit. Harry Rogers, aged nineteen, formerly a waiter at the Bedford Hotel, Tavistock, and the Angel Hotel, Helston, “was sailing for Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he has several uncles and aunts, and intended to turn his hand to anything that came along. He was a smart and steady young fellow. He had intended to travel by another liner, but the sailing was canceled on account of the coal strike.”
2
Second-class passengers in White Star’s oceanic Lyons Corner House were seldom hectoring or braggart people. Some of them stood at the furthermost brink of gentility: the parties of Cornish migrants, for example, could easily topple into the abyss of poverty.

“The second cabin,” Robert Louis Stevenson had reported after his Atlantic crossing in 1879, “is a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement.”
3
The improvements in transatlantic conditions that were achieved in the next quarter century owed much to White Star, which unlike Cunard and the Germans gave priority to shipboard amenities rather than speed. Their second-class accommodation was situated atop rather than amid the steerage and was gentrified to the Lyons Corner House standard. Arnold Bennett, who crossed the Atlantic as a first-class passenger in 1911, found the second-class accommodation impressively spacious. Propellers and engines were audible, but otherwise second-class resembled a reduced first class, with “many obviously well-to-do men” in the smoking room.
4
A guide to Atlantic liners published in 1913 noted that the demarcation between first-class and second-class passengers was less sharp than that between second class and third class. Second-class saloon comforts tempted travelers who might have traveled first to economize on their fares: moreover, in second, “certain established conventions, such as dressing for dinner, are not observed.”
5

Bennett’s descent into second class was exceptional. “It is a gross breach of the etiquette of the sea life, and a shocking exhibition of bad manners and low inquisitiveness, for passengers to visit unasked the quarters of an inferior class,” the 1913 guide insisted.
6
There were indeed signs on the
Titanic,
at the doors connecting the second- and third-class decks, prohibiting people from moving between their classes.
7
The condescension of passengers on slumming expeditions had been resented by Stevenson when he traveled steerage. “There came three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air,” he wrote. “We were in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their squire. Not a word was said; only when they had gone . . . we had been made to feel ourselves a sort of comical lower animal.”
8

In second class on the
Titanic
there were a good number of “well-to-do men,” to use Bennett’s phrase, who had not needed to shove and squirm their way forward in life. These included Erik Collander, the young technical director of a Helsinki paper mill, and Hull Botsford, of Orange, New Jersey, a graduate of the Cornell School of Architecture, designer of railway stations and railway bridges, who had been studying European styles and construction techniques. Denzil Jarvis, originally from Breconshire in Wales, managing partner of an engineering firm, Wadkin and Company, of North Evington, employing about a hundred people, was embarking on a six weeks’ business trip to America: he lived with his wife and two adolescent sons in Stoneygate, the most expensive suburb of Leicester, in an imposing modern villa, the Crest, an airy three-story redbrick building with big bay windows, turreted balconies, and high chimneys. He was an ambitious, striving man, who had given his younger son the first name of Wellesley in honor of his great military hero, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.
9
Ernst Sjöstedt, a Swede who had worked for the great steelworks of Schneider-Creusot in France and Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania, had been a senior manager at the Lake Superior Steel Company at Sault Sainte Marie in Ontario since 1904. The inventor of the Sjöstedt sulphur roaster and the Sjöstedt electric smelting furnace, he was returning from Gothenberg, which he had visited at the request of the Canadian government’s Mining Department, to report on methods of extracting copper sulphite ore. Denzil Jarvis and Ernst Sjöstedt were just the type to feel uncomfortable dressing for dinner, impatient of gushing, overemphatic millionaires’ wives, and disgusted by their painted faces.

Lower in the social scale were the sort of men whom Somerset Maugham had encountered after he crossed the Atlantic on the Cunarder
Caronia,
in 1910. Maugham stayed initially in the exclusive purlieus of the St. Regis Hotel before visiting other cities and backwaters. “I often asked myself what sort of men those were whom I saw in the parlour-cars of trains or in the lounge of a hotel, in rocking-chairs, a spittoon by their side, looking out of a large plate-glass window at the street . . . In their ill-fitting, ready-made clothes, gaudy shirts and showy ties, rather too stout, clean-shaven, but wanting a shave, with a soft hat on the back of their heads, chewing a cigar, they were as strange to me as the Chinese.” This category of
Titanic
second-class traveler—men determined not to stay where they started economically—included Frank Maybery, a realtor at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Thomas Myles, in a similar business in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Maugham decided, after several visits to the United States, that the common notion that the great republic was free of class distinctions was “hokum.” One day, out West, he was asked to lunch with a woman worth $20 million. “I have never seen a duke in Europe treated with such deference as she was. You might have thought that every word that issued from her opulent lips was a hundred-dollar bill that the guests would be allowed to take away with them.” The American notion that one man is as good as another was “only a pretence,” he felt. “A banker will talk in the club car of a train to a traveling salesman as though they were equal, but I am not aware that he will dream of asking him to his house. In such communities as Charleston or Santa Barbara the traveling salesman’s wife, however charming and cultivated, will never succeed in making her way into society. Social distinctions in the final analysis depend upon money.”
10

The pretense that one man is as good as another led Americans to treat liner crew members with a politeness that was applauded by Violet Jessop, stewardess to second-class passengers on the New York run of the White Star’s
Majestic
. American passengers, although demanding, were appreciative. “Even those I learnt on better acquaintance to dub ‘holy terrors’ were somehow approachable and human. They acknowledged you as an individual, invariably gave you your name, even went to the trouble of demanding to know it at the first moment of meeting.” Americans expected her to make their trip comfortable, but recognized that her work was arduous. “Most Americans want to absorb every new fad as soon as it appears,” Jessop recalled. “As a result, they are often left in a state of hectic unrest which naturally transfers itself to those around them.” When liners reached their destination, Americans rang to bid good-bye to the steward or stewardess, tip them well, and shake hands heartily. Passengers of other nationalities, by contrast, expected stewards “to hang about like beggars outside a church, waiting for alms,” and usually proffered a niggardly tip.
11

On the
Titanic’
s maiden voyage, two cranky American women, claiming to be mother and daughter, chided and vexed the stewards. Perhaps they were plaintive eccentrics rather than troublemakers trying to extort compensation, but their protests on the first day of their voyage were discordant and relentless. The elder woman had been born Lucinda (“Lutie”) Temple in 1852 in Lexington, the “Horse Capital of the World,” in Kentucky’s Bluegrass Country. In 1870 she had married Samuel Parrish of Lexington. They lived there and in the nearby horse-breeding center of Versailles for many years. In her fifties, she became an inveterate globe-trotter, often accompanied by Imanita Shelley, aged twenty-five in 1912, who was described as her daughter, although her maiden name was Hall. Mrs. Shelley hailed from Deer Lodge, Montana, a junction of the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul, and Pacific Railroad system, where life was dominated by long trains lumbering through and by the overcrowded, squalid state prison. An older woman from a milieu of stables and racetracks traveling with a younger woman from the drabbest of convict settlements should arouse mistrust. One imagines Lutie Parrish with a rasping voice and skin like dirty leather, and Imanita Shelley with a sharp pixie face and lashing tongue. There were surely paltry scams lurking in their history. Lutie Parrish, the older woman, died in Hawaii in 1930, but Imanita Shelley continued to shift around the country, living successively in Montana, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii.

The two women boarded together at Southampton on a ticket costing £26. Unlike other passengers, they did not find the
Titanic
all shipshape. Instead, they were contentious and disobliging. This is clear from an affidavit that Imanita Shelley later tendered to the Senate investigation of the sinking, in which she recounted her grievances against White Star. She and Lutie Parrish had embarked on April 10, “having purchased the best second-class accommodation”; but instead of being assigned commodious berths, “were taken to a small cabin many decks down in the ship, which was so small that it could only be called a cell. It was impossible to open a regulation steamer trunk in said cabin. It was impossible for a third person to enter said cabin unless both occupants first of all crawled into their bunks.” The two women sent their stewardess to the purser entreating transfer to the accommodation for which they had paid. He responded that nothing could be done until the ship had left Queenstown with its full load of passengers. After Queenstown, Lutie Parrish made eleven trips to the purser demanding transfer: he must have been in turn solicitous, numbed, and exasperated by her importunities. At nine that evening, no one having taken them to better quarters, Imanita Shelley sent a note to the purser declaring that “she was very ill and, owing to that freezing cold of the cabin, was in great danger” and if neither the purser nor Captain Smith would help, “she would have to wait until reaching America for redress, but most assuredly would claim damages if she lived to reach her native land.” Four stewards, fervent with apologies, then appeared to carry her to a better cabin.