The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell

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 unasked the quarters of an inferior class … the third-class passengers would be within their rights in objecting to their presence … they expect to have the privileges and privacy of their quarters respected also.’[21]

      Unlike passengers who could afford to cross the ocean annually or travel far and wide for their holidays, a third-class ticket was usually a one-way experience, a fact which produced particularly heartrending scenes on the dock. While viewing the boarding process of another of the ‘floating palaces’ in 1912, the contemporary travel writer R. A. Fletcher asked one of the crew for the reasons behind a much longer embarkation window for Third Class, which the latter explained had something to do with how often immigrants ran back across the gangplank to embrace loved ones who had come to wave them off. ‘It’s a nuisance, you know,’ the crew member remarked,

      when you want to be off, but after all its [sic] human nature and you can’t blame them. If I were a woman I’d be as bad myself. You see, it comes harder to a married woman to pull up stakes and to make a new home in a new country than it does to a man or children. A man makes a new home and the children grow up in new surroundings and become accustomed to them; but God help most of the mothers. They go for the sake of husbands and children, but they leave their hearts behind them, in another sense, as often as not.[22]

      For the Countess of Rothes, the purpose of her transatlantic jaunt was also for the sake of her husband, albeit in happier and less permanent circumstances. The Earl had been in the United States since February, when he had sailed from Liverpool on the Lusitania, to go on a fact-finding mission, comparing the efficiency of the privately operated American telegraph system with that of its publicly owned British equivalent. After his work was finished, Norman took the opportunity to tour and he had invited Noëlle to join him in the United States to celebrate their twelfth wedding anniversary with a visit that would culminate with a stay in a rented cottage on an orange grove in Pasadena, California, one of the properties Norman was allegedly interested in purchasing.[23]

      Trading the inconsistent loveliness of an English spring for the beautiful monotony of California’s had not presented Lady Rothes with an easy task when it came to packing. She had been piecing together a new wardrobe for her American sojourn up until the day before she left London, including a last-minute dash to Zyrot et Cie, a milliner’s near her townhouse on Hanover Square, where she picked out some new hats and motoring veils.[24] Most of those would go into one of the two steamer trunks that Noëlle would not need during the voyage, slumbering in the cavernous chill of the hold until they reached Manhattan. London was wrapped in its own brand of unseasonable frigidity with the result that most of Noëlle’s fellow passengers had boarded the train that morning wearing top coats and hats.[25]

      Noëlle was boarding en famille in a travelling cabal held together by affection, vaguely complementing itineraries and curiosity about the Titanic. Her companion as far as New York was her husband’s cousin Gladys, a vivacious and unmarried fixture of the London social scene who had decided to keep Noëlle company for the voyage and visit her brother, Charles Cherry, an aspiring theatre actor who had moved to New York two years earlier. Gladys and Noëlle were friends and, following the convention of most families at the time, referred to each other as ‘my cousin’ after Noëlle and Norman’s marriage. They were joined by Noëlle’s parents, Thomas and Clementina Dyer-Edwardes. Thomas had taken long voyages before – indeed, arguably one of the longest possible when he had sailed from England to Australia in the 1860s to spend ten years increasing the family’s fortune – but this trip on the Titanic was not to add to the roster of his far-flung travels. He and Clementina were only going as far as the Titanic’s first port of call, the town of Cherbourg in north-western France. From there, they would travel to Château de Rétival, their eighteenth-century house in Normandy, which they were opening up for the summer. Since they usually made the first annual trip to expel Rétival’s dust covers in spring, the Dyer-Edwardeses had decided to combine their cross-Channel trip with Noëlle’s departure for America. It would be a chance to wish their only child Godspeed before she was gone for several months, with the added attraction of travelling, however briefly, on the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest liner. There seems to have been a slight delay with the boat train from Waterloo, which did not reach Southampton until about 11.30, thirty minutes before the ship’s scheduled departure.[26]

      When the train came to a halt on tracks running parallel to the Titanic’s towering hull, the Countess’s party stepped out into a large shed, nearly 700 feet in length, where a small industrious army of porters were dealing with the last of the ship’s cargo and luggage.[27] Noëlle’s steamer trunks were added to their task as she, her parents, Gladys and Noëlle’s lady’s maid, Cissy Maioni, crossed under the skylights and up the stairs to an enclosed balcony, where they presented their tickets.[28] They were ushered over the 28 feet of the gangplank from which, turning right, they could see the second-class walkway, on the same level but 500 or so feet aft, and one of the third-class gangways, three decks below.

      The view from the first-class gangplank on departure day. Those used by Second (above) and Third Class (below) can be seen in the distance.

       View from the first-class gangplank of the RMS Titanic at approximately 11.30 a.m. on Wednesday 10 April 1912, as photographed by passenger, Father Francis Browne, SJ (Science & Society Library/Father Browne Collection)

      They arrived to see crew members waiting for them in a white-panelled vestibule with a black-and-white-patterned floor, which had such a gleaming finish that some passengers initially mistook it for marble.[29] Several of the Titanic’s officers were required to be on meet-and-greet duty for the first-class passengers, a piece of etiquette that had survived in transmogrified form from the days of sail when the owners of ships had often escorted prominent passengers on board themselves.[30] However, it was the stewards and stewardesses, not the officers,