In one of the many newspaper commentaries to appear when the Titanic went down, GK Chesterton compared “our whole civilisation” to the fatal liner. The “modern state” and the unsinkable ship were alike in their “power and impotence, security and insecurity”, and while both indulged the rich, neither had provision for the poor and needy. Ten years earlier, HG Wells had likened the urban poor to an iceberg, with its submerged mass lying below the surface.
The Titanic as a microcosm of Edwardian society is how Richard Davenport-Hines describes the ship in this eloquent and absorbing book. The story of the Titanic, he argues, as we reach the centenary of her maiden voyage, is one of class consciousness, class discrimination and class rivalry. Davenport-Hines has no interest in romanticising the journey or idealising the various acts of chivalry that took place during her final moments. The Edwardians were “merciless”, “bloodthirsty” and mired in turgid codes of behaviour, the epoch was one of “insecurity, scorn and subordination”. They worshipped speed and luxury at the same time as advocating Spartan values, and life on the Titanic was a typical combination of poodle-parlour pampering and knightly stoicism.
The ship provided a stage on which the various sections of society could perform their mutual contempt. While first class promenaded on the boat deck with “faces set in an expression of unchallenged superiority” the immigrants in the bowels were sorting out their own pecking order, and the contingent of Cornish miners would not have spoken to the “trammers” – the lowly Scandinavians whose job it was to load the coal onto mining cars.
If first-class accommodation was based on the over-upholstered monotony of the Ritz, second class – a place of clergymen, beef and kidney pies and faux gentility – was a “floating Lyons Corner House”. Overlooked in most accounts of the ship, Davenport-Hines describes the goings-on in second cabin as resembling the Christmas episode of EastEnders: adulterers on the run from their wives dine alongside a father kidnapping his two young sons. Here can also be found the Titanic’s only black man, with his white wife and their children, and the sole Japanese passenger, a middle-aged civil servant called Masabumi Hosono who was later sacked by his ministry for the shame of having survived.
While White Star liners were built for splendour instead of speed, “immediacy”, Davenport-Hines notes, was “a keynote of the Edwardian mood”. Life was a race, hence the rapidity with which the Titanic’s millionaires, men whose grandfathers travelled steerage during their own journeys to the New World, had accumulated their fortunes. In 1861 there were three millionaires in the United States; by the end of the century there were nearly 4,000. Together, the Titanic’s 337 first-class passengers were estimated to be worth $500 million. The corpse of the richest passenger, John Jacob Astor IV – whose grandfather made his fortune trading animal pelts – was identified by the $4,000 found in his pocket.
The US Senate Inquiry into the wreck was initially held in John Jacob Astor’s hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria – a Titanic on land – while the shallow world of his mother, Caroline Astor, provided the blueprint for first-class life on the ship. Enthroned on a red velvet divan and raised on a platform above her guests, Caroline Astor would survey the specially selected “four hundred” New Yorkers who regularly filled her ballroom.
Not everyone in first-class was as charmless as Mrs Astor, and Davenport-Hines draws a memorable picture of the bachelor life of Archie Butt, aide to President Taft, and the artist Francis Millett, who, before they went down with the ship, lived together in a house with red and pink rose wallpaper and a staff of Filipino boys.
The men who died on the Titanic were celebrated for their soldierly virtues, but the Irishmen who built the ship also considered themselves soldiers. Sectarian tensions had turned Ulster into a “tinderbox” and the Protestant Harland & Wolff, on Belfast’s Queen’s Island, was “the most violent shipyard in the world”. At the time of the Titanic’s maiden voyage a Catholic workman on the yard had apparently been roasted naked over afurnace.
It is not until the final third of Titanic Lives that the collision with the iceberg takes place, and by then we know exactly who was on board. While Davenport-Hines loathes the lack of “loving kindness” shown by many of these people, he has sympathy for Lord and Lady Duff-Gordon, the couple generally considered the unkindest of all because they were given a lifeboat more or less to themselves.
As well as being a fascinating work of social history, Titanic Lives is a remarkable study of empathy and its absence. As such it will stay afloat long after the armada of other Titanic books have gone down.
*Frances Wilson is the author of How to Survive the Titanic
Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew by Richard Davenport-Hines
400PP, harper press t£18 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 08448711515 (rrp £20, ebook £11.99)
