First class, but not too posh to perish

HISTORY:Many falsehoods persist about the fatal voyage of 'Titanic', including the notion that all first-class passengers were upper class

IN 1888 A 24-YEAR-OLD draper’s daughter, Edith Barber, married her former employer, William Bowerman. More than twice his bride’s age, he owned a string of shops and rental properties in the Sussex towns of Hastings and St Leonard’s. The couple had one child, a daughter named Elsie, and following William’s death both women became heavily involved in the nascent suffragette movement. As an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, in 1910 Edith accompanied Sylvia Pankhurst’s deputation to the British Houses of Parliament and got into a scuffle with one of the police on duty.

Two years later, Edith and Elsie decided to take a holiday in the United States, travelling across the Atlantic in first class on board a new ocean liner. The vessel they chose for the voyage collided with an iceberg and sank. Fortunately for mother and daughter, the ship’s staff insisted women be given precedence over men and both of them were placed in a lifeboat, thereby ensuring they survived the ordeal.

The lost liner was, of course, Titanic, and the history of Edith and Elsie demonstrates how many of the anecdotes that have grown up around its fatal maiden voyage are false. There is, for example, a popular notion that everyone who travelled in first class had to be, for want of a better word, posh. Edith Barber’s story proves this was far from being the case. Her circumstances were extremely modest until she made an advantageous marriage and was left a wealthy widow. Thereafter she was able to lead a comfortable existence, but this did not mean she moved in the upper strata of English society. On the other hand, it did allow her to pay for the best accommodation Titanic provided; when it came to selling tickets what concerned the vessel’s owner, White Star Line, was not Edith’s pedigree but her bank balance.

Then there is the matter of both Edith and Elsie, two ardent suffragettes, accepting that they should be placed in a lifeboat ahead of men. Understandably, in some quarters it was proposed that the slogan “Votes for Women” should be changed to “Boats for Women”. Edith’s fellow first-class passenger and survivor, Margaret Brown, posthumously nicknamed the Unsinkable Molly Brown, later argued that while the concept of “women first” was deep-rooted, “to me it is all wrong. Women demand equal rights on land – why not at sea?”

Why not indeed. Almost 75 per cent of the ship’s female passengers and crew survived, compared with a figure of just over 20 per cent for their male equivalents. These figures conformed to expectations of Anglo-Saxon chivalry and gentlemanly decorum, and encouraged stories of men donning evening dress and gazing nobly into the distance while they stood ramrod straight on a rapidly tilting deck.

Were they actually inspired by noble instincts? Another first-class passenger, Ella White of New York, testified at the American senate inquiry into the disaster: “They speak of the bravery of the men. I do not think there was any particular bravery, because none of the men thought it was going down. If they thought the ship was going down, they would not have frivoled as they did about it.” According to Mrs White, some of the male passengers mockingly told women climbing into lifeboats: “When you come back you will need a pass.” Yet at a church service in Canada the following weekend, the clergyman in charge pronounced: “The men of our race have not forgotten how to die . . . sacrifice for a chivalrous ideal is one of the finest features of our history.”

Attitudes of this sort meant men who did survive the sinking faced opprobrium and even accusations of cowardice, especially if they had travelled in first class. Scottish baronet Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon was crossing the Atlantic with his wife, Lucy, a successful dress designer with premises in New York. The couple climbed into one of the first lifeboats to be lowered; although it could carry 40, the boat held just 12 people, the majority of them crewmen. Yet while the latter group’s behaviour was not subject to public vilification, Duff Gordon was damned for his actions, something which, his wife said, “well-nigh broke his heart and ruined his life”.

The rich, it seems, are different from the rest of us not only in having more money but also in being expected to maintain higher standards of behaviour. When they fail to do so, outrage follows. This is the principal lesson to be drawn from Hugh Brewster’s book about Titanic’s first-class passengers, although I doubt that was the author’s intention. Despite a prose style sometimes leaden enough to sink a liner, he tries to entertain by including as much gossip and tittle-tattle as can be found. The trouble is that almost every aspect of the Titanic story has been gone over many times before and there is nothing new to say. As might be expected, when the ship hit the iceberg some people behaved well, some people badly. Some people displayed courage despite themselves, others did not despite their desire to do so. This, I suppose, is one of the reasons why the Titanic story continues to engage our interest and why writers such as Brewster continue to produce books on the subject.

As for mother and daughter Edith and Elsie, they returned to England, where the former died in 1953 at the age of 89. Elsie, meanwhile, had joined the Women’s Emergency Corps in the first World War, got caught up in the Russian Revolution, cofounded a right-wing league opposed to communism in the 1920s, worked for the ministry of information and the BBC during the second World War and also became one of England’s first women barristers. Now that sounds like a life worthy of a book.

Robert O’Byrne is a writer and critic. His most recent book is a biography of Desmond Leslie, published by Lilliput Press