The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell

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СКАЧАТЬ and her interior arrangements and appointments were so palatial that one forgot now and then that she was a ship at all. She seemed to be a spacious regal home of princes.

      Ernest Townley, interview given to the Daily Express (16 April 1912)

      ONE WEEK AFTER HER MIDNIGHT ARRIVAL AT Southampton, the Titanic’s main mast ran the company’s red flag with its eponymous white star, fluttering over final preparations for her first commercial voyage.[1] The day of departure, Wednesday 10 April, was overcast in the south of England, with the sun occasionally appearing from behind the scudding clouds to provide a mild temperature of about 9 degrees centigrade as the crew, numbering about 900, were divided into three groups for the muster. Firemen, seamen and those assigned to care for the soon-to-board passengers went through their final medical checks and a head count, carried out under the watchful eye of another representative of the Board of Trade, who then proceeded to observe as two of the ship’s twenty lifeboats were lowered down the side with eight trained crew wearing their lifejackets. Typically, this inspection would involve the tested lifeboats unfurling their sails, but an uncooperative breeze put pay to that, so the white-painted wooden craft were successfully raised back on to deck and into their davits, with their virgin sails left unfurled. Vast quantities of luggage were being manoeuvred on board. Pieces bound for the first-class quarters bore White Star-provided labels with variants of ‘CABIN’ or ‘STATEROOM’, to indicate that they should be taken to the passenger’s bedroom; ‘BAGGAGE ROOM’ or ‘WANTED’, if they were not to go immediately to their accommodation but contained items which might be required later in the voyage, a helpful utilisation of space given the upper classes’ minimum requirement of three outfit changes daily; and ‘NOT WANTED’, if the pieces were to go into the hold until disembarking.[2]

      Thomas Andrews had arrived on board half an hour or so after dawn that morning, checking out from his interim accommodation at the nearby South-Western Hotel, where he had stayed in the week since leaving Belfast.[3] The days in between had been spent overseeing the last touches to the Titanic’s accommodation, which produced the kind of productive mania at which Andrews excelled. The ship’s schedule had already been altered, and then squeezed, by her elder sister’s accident in the Southampton waters a few months earlier when, moments after departure, the Olympic had collided with the British warship Hawke.[4] Mercifully, there had been no serious injuries, but a trip to Belfast for repairs was required, with the result that construction on the Titanic temporarily halted for a few days, tightening the preparation time allowed for the maiden voyage. Andrews himself did not doubt that ‘the ship will clean up all right before sailing on Wednesday’, but with the door hinges and paint still being applied to the Titanic’s Parisian-style café on Wednesday morning, White Star had ordered in vast quantities of fresh flowers which went straight into Titanic’s cold storage to be brought out over the course of the voyage to disguise any lingering smell of varnish.[5] Fixtures in some of the second-class lavatories needed to be attached, furniture bought from firms in England had to be delivered, the furniture in the Café Parisian still was not the right shade of green, and the pebbledashing in two of First Class’s most expensive private suites was too dark.[6] Andrews had overseen everything he could. His secretary, Thompson Hamilton, who had joined him from Belfast for the week, noticed, ‘He would himself put in their place such things as racks, tables, chairs, berth ladders, electric fans, saying that except he saw everything right he could not be satisfied.’[7] Meanwhile, a hose was working away on the contained fire in one of Boiler Room 5’s coal bunkers, with the source expected to be extinguished in the next few days.[8] By the evening of the 9th, everything of note had apparently been taken care of and Andrews could write to his wife, ‘The Titanic is now about complete and will I think do the old Firm credit to-morrow when we sail.’[9]

      With their tasks accomplished, Andrews said a temporary farewell to colleagues, like Edward Wilding, whose work on Titanic ended in Southampton, and his secretary, Thompson Hamilton, who was travelling back to Belfast to handle any correspondence during Andrews’ absence. ‘Remember now,’ Andrews told Hamilton, with that second word ubiquitous to an Ulster dialect, ‘and keep Mrs Andrews informed of any news of the vessel.’[10] From the deck, Andrews could see other ships, moored together in greater numbers than usual. The British Miners’ Federation had voted to end a six-week strike only four days earlier and the impact on an industry as dependent on coal as shipping had been temporarily significant – many smaller liners had their voyages rescheduled to facilitate coal being reallocated for the on-time departures of the leviathans.[11] The red-, white- and blue-capped funnels of the American Line’s St Louis, Philadelphia and New York were moored next to White Star’s Majestic and Oceanic. After twenty-two years at sea, the Majestic had been withdrawn from regular service and designated a reserve ship, while the Philadelphia and New York were about to have their first-class quarters removed entirely for an increase of second- and third-class, as the drift of first-class clientele to larger, more modern ships had rendered them superfluous.[12] For Andrews, the most significant of the slumbering ships in the harbour was White Star’s former flagship, the Oceanic, berthed alongside the New York. After working his way up from his post-school apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff, Andrews had first been given charge of a design for the White Star Line in the late 1890s, helping to produce the Oceanic, praised then and later as a ‘ship of outstanding elegance both inside and out’.[13] The Oceanic was still in service in April 1912, but shipbuilding’s technological strides in the thirteen years since her debut had left that pretty ship far behind; the Titanic was nearly three times heavier than Andrews’ first ship, with room for almost twice as many passengers and crew.

      Far below, the process of boarding the third-class passengers began shortly after the crew’s muster was completed. Since many in Third Class travelled as emigrating families, there were usually more children, necessitating a longer boarding process, combined with the delay-inducing medical inspections required by American immigration authorities.[14] Those on the dock that day were a few hundred of the 23,000 immigrants who would sail on White Star ships to America over the course of 1912–13.[15] Although it was, and is, often used to describe this collective, the word ‘steerage’ did not apply to those in Titanic’s Third Class. The noun sprang from the earlier days of mass migration to the United States and it could still in 1912 apply to the cheaper class of accommodation offered by other, often less prestigious travel companies, but there was an appreciable difference. Hamburg-Amerika’s soon to be launched Imperator would provide four classes of travel, delineating Third and Steerage as two different sections of the ship.[16] To qualify as steerage, there had to be communal dormitories, something that the Titanic did not offer. Every third-class passenger was in a cabin, albeit with bunk beds and, if travelling on their own, typically shared with others of their own gender. The White Star Line had a reputation for offering the best third-class accommodation then available, with the result that tickets on the Titanic or the Olympic could cost as much as Second Class on other liners.[17] Thus a contemporary travel guide could confidently assert that the White Star Line carried ‘a better class of emigrant’.[18]

      Nonetheless, following a cholera epidemic among immigrants at the German port of Hamburg twenty years earlier, the United States had introduced firm policies on who could be admitted at Ellis Island.[19] This meant that all third-class passengers had to undergo medical examinations at embarkation and that there could be no contact between them and the two more expensive classes, because if there was, those passengers would also have to be inspected before leaving the ship in New York.[20] For first- and second-class passengers this meant that barring any glances from their promenade decks down to the outdoor areas at the stern for Third Class, boarding was likely to be the only time they had a sustained opportunity to see third-class passengers. Even leaving aside the quarantine issues set by the American government, contemporary travel guides insisted that it was the height of bad manners for a first-class passenger to play the tourist by asking to see the third-class public rooms during the voyage: ‘it cannot be urged too strongly that 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 СКАЧАТЬ