The Night Lives On

  Who initiated the step is uncertain, but lawyers for both sides began quietly conferring in an effort to find some acceptable compromise. The claimants gradually scaled down their demands from the original $16 million to less man $3 million, while White Star began inching up the $97,772 it owed under limited liability.

  On December 17, 1915, Burlingham suddenly announced that the parties were near settlement. White Star agreed to pay $664,000, to be apportioned among the claimants according to their scaled-down schedule. In return the claimants agreed to drop all suits both in America and in England, and agreed that the White Star Line had no “privity or knowledge” of any negligence on the Titanic. This last constituted an acknowledgment that the ship’s owners were indeed protected by limited liability and presumably barred any suits in the future. The lawyers for nearly all the claimants went along with the deal. Only a few loose ends remained to be cleared up.

  The loose ends, it turned out, took another six months. Much of the time was spent trying to divide up equitably the $664,000. The maximum allowed, for instance, would be $50,000 for loss of life under certain conditions—which meant that Renée Harris had to come down quite a bit from the $1,000,000 she originally claimed. On the other hand, the cut was far less severe for loss of life in steerage. The average claim had been $1,500; the average award would be $1,000.

  On July 28, 1916, the settlement was formally signed and sealed. In the end, White Star paid six times as much as it argued that it owed under limited liability…but only 22% of the scaled-down claims and less than 4% of the $16 million originally demanded. All in all, C. C. Burlingham had not done badly by his clients. After four years, three months, one week, and six days, the litigation over the Titanic was at last a closed book.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Why Was Craganour Disqualified?

  THE DAMAGE CLAIMS WERE now a closed book, but not the story of the human beings who survived the Titanic. Many would find their lives permanently intertwined with the disaster.

  Bruce Ismay would never live it down. As Chairman and Managing Director of the White Star Line, he was ultimately responsible for the shortage of lifeboats, yet he went off in a boat, leaving hundreds stranded on the sloping decks. Captain Smith, people felt, at least had the good grace to go down with the ship. In Chicago a young newspaperman named Ben Hecht put the contrast into verse:

  The Captain stood where a captain should For the law of the sea is grim.

  The owner romped ere his ship was swamped

  And no law bothered him.

  The Captain stood where the captain should

  When a captain’s boat goes down.

  But the owner led when the women fled For an owner must not drown.

  The Captain sank as a man of rank

  While his owner turned away.

  The Captain’s grave was his bridge, and brave

  He earned his seaman’s pay.

  To hold your place in the ghastly face

  Of death on the sea at night

  Is a seaman’s job, but to flee with the mob Is an owner’s noble right.

  Even the revered naval authority Rear Admiral A. T. Mahan fired a scholarly broadside. Conceding that Ismay was in no sense responsible for the collision, Mahan argued that once the accident had occurred, Ismay was confronted with a whole new condition, for which he (and not the Captain) was responsible—namely, the shortage of lifeboats….

  Did no obligation as to particularity of conduct rest upon him under such a condition? I hold that under that condition, so long as there was a soul that could be saved, the obligation lay upon Mr. Ismay that that one person and not he should have been in the boat.

  The storm of criticism continued. Perhaps the ultimate indignity came when the citizens of Ismay, a new town in Jackson County, Texas, decided to change the name of their community to something—anything—less ignominious. Faced with the same problem, the people of Ismay, Montana, decided to hang on: “None of us,” declared the Ismay Journal, “need be ashamed to register from Ismay, one of the prettiest, cleanest, and most substantial little towns on the entire Puget Sound Road, merely because someone of similar name has not lived up to the high standard of ethics established by some self-appointed critics.” The editor even wondered whether Bruce Ismay had received a fair deal.

  He was in the minority. Far more typical was the yellow press, which began referring to “J. BRUTE Ismay.”

  Across the Atlantic, On April 21 a rumor spread in Liverpool that Ismay, unable to stand the strain any longer, had committed suicide in New York. Shocked at the thought, a local citizen named Charles W. Jones dashed off a bitter protest to the Foreign Office: “…That a British subject and an English gentleman should be put to such indignities is causing much indignation in Liverpool, and I now must humbly beg of you to make some representation to the United States government on his behalf.”

  Actually, Ismay had his troubles with British critics too. In a feisty open letter appearing in the journal John Bull, editor Horace Bottomley asked him, “How is it that you, above all people, were in one of the life boats?…Your place was at the captain’s side till every man, woman and child was safely off the ship.” Most of the criticism, however, was in a lower key. “It is not given to everyone to be a hero,” remarked Nautical Magazine, bible of the merchant service.

  In the end the British Inquiry exonerated him. Lord Mersey found that Ismay was under no moral obligation to stick with the ship. The lifeboat was actually being lowered; no one else was at hand; there was room; so he jumped. “Had he not jumped in, he would have merely added one more life, namely his own, to the number of those lost.” All very well, but many people found it hard to believe there weren’t other passengers nearby. Ismay remained under a cloud.

  For a while he fought back as best he could. Long before the Titanic, Ismay had planned to retire as Chairman of the White Star Line and other affiliated companies. Now that looked too much like a retreat, and he tried to stay on at least as head of White Star. The American owners would have none of it: The most they would give him was a chance to save face a little. “The decision they have reached,” wrote his friend and fellow director Harold Sanderson, “is to be attributed to a considered and settled policy, and not to any personal feeling toward yourself.”

  On June 30, 1913, Bruce Ismay retired as Chairman of the White Star Line and began an ever-widening withdrawal from public life. He remained on a number of boards, but they were mostly honorific, and he spent much of his time at a secluded estate in a remote corner of Northern Ireland. Many writers have called him a “recluse.” His affectionate and devoted biographer, Wilton J. Oldham, takes exception to the term, but it is really a matter of semantics.

  After the Titanic Ismay never participated in public functions. He never attended Mrs. Ismay’s frequent bridge parties and dances. He never traveled to America again. He amused himself sitting on a park bench, chatting anonymously with down-and-outers. He liked to watch passing parades, looking at them alone and lost in the crowd. He died of a stroke at his home in London, October 17, 1937.

  Legends about him lived on. In November 1955, shortly after A Night to Remember was published, a letter arrived from a racing fan in Britain describing the remarkable finish of the 1913 Derby at Epsom Downs. Craganour, the favorite, crossed the line first and was escorted to the winner’s circle. Then, without a protest from the owner or jockey of any other horse in the race, he was suddenly disqualified by the stewards, acting on their own. They awarded the race instead to second-place Aboyeur, a 100-to-l shot, which they claimed had been bumped by Craganour, in the home stretch. Most of the crowd saw no such bumping, and a photograph of the finish shows Aboyeur leaning on Craganour, rather than the other way around. Craganour, my correspondent pointed out, was owned by Bruce Ismay, and the inference was clear: the English racing establishment would never let a horse owned by Ismay win the hallowed Derby.

  This was a story worth checking. Everything turned out to be exactly as
related, except for one important detail. Craganour was not owned by Bruce Ismay. The owner was Bower Ismay, Bruce’s younger brother. Unless the supposed stigma was so great that it affected the whole family, there seems no reason to suppose that Craganour’s disqualification had anything to do with the Titanic.

  In fact, there were other more plausible reasons which might have accounted for the stewards’ unprecedented act. Craganour’s English jockey had been replaced at the last minute by Johnny Reiff, an American rider imported from France. It was an immensely unpopular switch, and when the stewards interviewed some of the other jockeys in the race before announcing their decision, it was an ideal opportunity to discredit Reiff. But the story will not die; letters still drift in, inseparably linking Craganour and Bruce Ismay together. lsmay’s most vocal American defender was First Class passenger Billy Carter of Philadelphia, but this proved a mixed blessing. Carter turned out to be the only other male passenger in Collapsible C.

  There were raised eyebrows about him too, and speculation increased when Mrs. Carter sued for divorce in January 1914. Every effort was made to keep the details secret, but it was rumored that the Titanic played a part in the case.

  Then, on January 21, 1915, somebody—no one is sure who—released Mrs. Carter’s testimony. The grounds for her suit were “cruel and barbarous treatment and indignities to the person,” and one passage in particular caught the public’s eye:

  When the Titanic struck, my husband came to our stateroom and said, “Get up and dress yourself and the children.” I never saw him again until I arrived at the Carpathia at 8 o’clock the next morning, when I saw him leaning on the rail. All he said was that he had had a jolly good breakfast, and that he never thought I would make it.

  Carter denied all charges, stressing that he had had his wife and children placed in one of the boats before he and Ismay jumped into Collapsible C to help with the rowing. A shadow of doubt hovers over this version, since the British Inquiry established that Collapsible C left the Titanic some 15 minutes before Mrs. Carter and the children went in Boat 4.

  After the divorce, Mrs. Carter married George Brooke, and lived a happily uneventful life until she died in 1934. Billy Carter, vaguely described at the time of the disaster as a polo player and clubman, continued playing polo and going to his clubs, ultimately dying in Palm Beach in 1940.

  William T. Sloper of New Britain, Connecticut, was another First Class survivor who had some explaining to do. On April 19, the day after the Carpathia reached port, the New York Journal identified Sloper as that instant Titanic celebrity, “the man who got off dressed as a woman.”

  Actually, there’s no supporting evidence whatsoever. Sloper left the Titanic in No. 7, the first boat lowered. At that time few thought the danger was serious, and First Officer Murdoch had difficulty filling the boat at all. Sloper later recalled Murdoch saying, “Any passengers who would like to do so may get into this lifeboat.” While it’s hard to believe he went that far—“women and children first” was clearly the rule—certainly he let in couples and parties of gentlemen and ladies traveling together. Sloper entered the boat with his companions at bridge that evening: Fred Seward, screen actress Dorothy Gibson, and her mother. Even then, the boat was lowered with only 28 persons—less than half its capacity. For a man to go in Boat 7, there was no reason to dress as a woman.

  What, then, was the source of the story? The explanation does not lie in anything that happened on the decks of the Titanic; rather, it can be traced to an incident that happened in the corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel the night the Carpathia got back to New York.

  Sloper was met at the pier by his brother Harold and his father, Andrew Jackson Sloper. They whisked him by taxi to the Waldorf-Astoria, where he was the first survivor to register. Word quickly spread, and soon the corridor outside his room was packed with reporters clamoring for a story. Sloper didn’t want to see them, mainly because he had already scribbled an “exclusive” for his friend Jack Vance, editor of his hometown paper, the New Britain Herald. When Harold Sloper tried to get rid of the reporters, they made a rush at the door, which Harold repelled perhaps a little too forcefully. In any event, the Journal’s man decided the time had come to teach the Slopers a little respect for the press: his story put William Sloper in women’s clothing.

  For a while Sloper debated whether to sue for libel. His father counseled against it, arguing that a good lawyer would cost more than any damages he could collect. Besides, all his real friends knew what had actually happened, and if anyone else preferred to believe some vindictive reporter, there was nothing anybody could do about it.

  It didn’t quite work out that way. William Sloper spent many an hour in the years ahead explaining how he really escaped from the Titanic. But at least he faced the matter squarely. Others, too, have been positively identified as “the man who got off dressed as a woman.” All are in the clear, but none fought back, and a cloud hovers over them even today.

  Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon also lived in the shadow of the Titanic for the rest of their days. They had left the ship in Boat 1, capacity 40, which pulled away with only 12 people, then failed to heed the cries that went up from the water after the ship sank. It was rumored that Sir Cosmo had bribed the boat crew not to row back.

  Lord Mersey exonerated him completely, but did observe that Sir Cosmo might have shown a little more initiative. Instead of doing nothing, he could have led an effort to rescue some of the swimmers.

  He just wasn’t the type. Naturally reticent, the last thing Sir Cosmo wanted was to be conspicuous. An old Eton boy, he never went to a university, but settled into a quiet life of comfort and privilege. He seemed totally oblivious of the ordinary people around him. It never occurred to him that somebody might misinterpret the £5 gift he presented to each member of his boat crew. (When servants do a good job, you tip them.) Nor did he remotely understand that it might frighten the already jittery survivors when, during the trip back to New York, the boat crew was reassembled in their life jackets for a “team picture.” Nor did he have any inkling that it might be in bad taste to have a festive champagne supper at the Ritz after the Carpathia landed.

  Still, one must carry on. Sir Cosmo became no recluse; he lived the life he had always led—proud, aloof, aware that he was the target of much scorn but never condescending to lower himself to the point of arguing about it. He did not talk much about the Titanic, but his wife felt that the storm of censure and ridicule that swirled around him “well-nigh broke his heart.” He died in April 1931.

  Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, was a very different case. A high-priced dress designer, she had scrapped her way to the peak of the intensely competitive fashion industry. On top of that she had landed Sir Cosmo, and now she wasn’t about to give up any of the ground gained. She met her critics with bravado, almost defiance. What about the £5 that Sir Cosmo gave each member of the boat crew? Her answer was easy: the other Titanic passengers should have been as generous.

  She remained peppery to the end. By 1934 her business had fallen apart, and she was a faded old lady confined to a tiny house on Hampstead Heath. But when a New York correspondent, seeking an anniversary story, asked her if she had any regrets about the Titanic, she shot back: “Regrets? I have no regrets. The Titanic disaster made me and my fortune. Look at the tremendous amount of publicity it gave me…. When I opened my dress establishments in New York and Chicago, people mobbed the places. I made thousands and thousands of dollars.”

  She did indeed make a lot of money, but it had nothing to do with the Titanic. World War I had closed the great couturier houses of Paris, and wartime austerity had overtaken London. The only people left with spendable money were the rich Americans, and they had no place to spend it. Lady Duff Gordon had the good sense to see this, and opened up new outlets in New York and Chicago. She prospered greatly for a while, but by the end of the war nobody had the kind of money her designs required (one of her dresses used 30 yards of silk at the hem), and th
e slim, boyish look of the 20’s spelled bankruptcy. Broke, but still defiant on the subject of the Titanic, she died in April 1935.

  For Mrs. Henry B. Harris, the disaster led to a whole new life. “Henry B.,” as she always called her lost husband, had been one of Broadway’s most successful producers. But the money was current income, not the settled wealth of the Astors or Wideners. When he died, the dollars stopped. Hence her $1,000,000 claim for the loss of his “services.” When this was whittled down to $50,000, her prospects looked bleak, since it was generally understood that women had no place in the business end of the theater.

  But why not? Henry B. had often depended on her quick, intuitive mind. Moreover, she already had a theater—the choice Hudson on West 43rd Street. So she blazed a trail and became Broadway’s first woman producer.

  She did very well at it too, backing good plays while developing such stars as Ina Claire and Charles Coburn. She also discovered the playwright Moss Hart and produced his first play, The Beloved Bandit. In his autobiography Act One, Hart painted a memorable picture of Renée Harris as an unquenchable optimist in the face of first-night disaster.

  In World War I she turned her energies to the cause, and did yeoman service staging entertainments for the doughboys in France. General Pershing sent her a personal note of thanks, and she delightedly put it on her wall, where it hung incongruously with the more gushy tributes of other theater people.

  The 20’s were all velvet. As the money rolled in, she picked up an apartment overlooking Central Park…a house in Florida…a camp in Maine… a yacht…and four more husbands. The latter were all just dalliances, she always insisted. Henry B. remained the only man who meant anything, and, in fact, she used the surname “Harris” for the rest of her life.