The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell

the earth and the Strauses had emigrated once more, this time trading Georgia for New York. Since then, there had been numerous trips across the Atlantic for the couple, initially because of Isidor’s desire to remain in touch with his German relatives and to visit London, a city he had fallen in love with during his time there in the 1860s.[40] Ida preferred Paris, partly thanks to her love of shopping; her husband tolerated rather than enjoyed their stays there.[41]

      Isidor remained fascinated by liners and their technology, so the couple made their way on deck for the send-off, stopping at the end of their corridor to chat with a stewardess, who had once attended to them on the Olympic and thought them ‘a delightful old couple – old in years and young in character – whom we were always happy to see join us’.[42] When they reached the deck, they fell into conversation with their friend Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, who like Isidor came from Confederate stock – his father, General Archibald Gracie III, had been killed by a Union shell at the Siege of Petersburg in 1864.[43] Knowing that mail would be taken off the ship at Cherbourg in a few hours’ time, Ida wanted to make sure she sent a prompt thank-you note to Lilian Burbidge for the flowers and, since the Strauses had been spending the winters in Europe away from their New York home every year since 1899, the anchors-away moment no longer held much of a thrill for Ida.[44] While Isidor stayed up top with Gracie, Ida, by 1912 plump and elegant with a cloud of dark hair beginning to show streaks of grey, with a prominent flesh-coloured mole on the lower left-hand side of her face and a warm smile which many people considered her best feature, made her way back to their suite, sitting at its little escritoire beneath one of the portholes, while her new maid, Ellen Bird, and Isidor’s English valet, John Farthing, began the long process of unpacking.[45] Ida was a particularly hands-on housewife, who was almost alone among the wealthy women of Manhattan in never having hired a housekeeper; Isidor was constantly urging her to take on fewer responsibilities.[46] It had been a series of nervous complaints and then problems with Ida’s heart, flaring up with regularity over the previous three years, that had turned their annual migration to the French Riviera into something approaching a necessity. When they could not spend too much time away from America, Ida had gone to relax at their beach house in New Jersey and once to California.[47] That year, they had left New York in January aboard the Cunard Line’s Caronia, which plied the route from Manhattan to the Mediterranean, and spent most of their holiday at a quiet hotel in Cannes, which Ida in a letter home to her married daughter, Minnie, had described as ‘a lovely spot for old people’.[48] But Ida had made something of a poor swap, since New York had one of the mildest winters that anyone could remember, while the Riviera was pelted by rain for most of February and March.[fn2]

      From five decks beneath her, the Titanic’s engines roared to life, producing a quiet hum beneath Ida’s feet and in the walls around her. Many of the passengers would remark later that the ship was so well designed that they were barely aware of the vibrations, although they certainly noticed them when they stopped, since the engines muffled much of the noise flowing between the relatively thin walls of the cabins.[49] The Strauses’ rooms, like the Countess’s, were on the Titanic’s starboard side, facing away from the pier, but the noise would have given Ida a general idea of what was going on. Far above her, the scream of the ship’s whistles and the cheers of the crowd announced that it was time for the Titanic to make her midday departure, only a few minutes late.[50] Then, a silence fell as the engines cut out and the Titanic floated adrift in the River Test, until the reassuring growls of the machinery eventually returned and the journey continued.

      An explanation for this arrived when her husband returned. Sixty-seven years old, bald, with a well-trimmed white beard and occasional pain in his legs, Isidor told Ida that, as the Titanic set off, the suction from her three enormous propellers had caused the New York to break free from her moorings and drift towards her. A quarter of a century earlier, Isidor had sailed on the New York’s maiden voyage from Liverpool, when she had been considered ‘the last word in shipbuilding’.[51] In a harbour overcrowded by ships laid up by the miners’ strike, the coils of the ropes mooring the New York had snapped with a noise like gunfire, whipping back on to the docks to lacerate a woman in the crowd who had to be rushed away to receive medical attention. For one horrible moment, it looked as if there would be a repetition of the Olympic’s accident the previous year, with a smaller ship sucked into a voyage-cancelling collision.[52] The Titanic’s Captain had moved quickly to halt the churning of the propellers, giving those in the guiding tugboats time to manoeuvre the New York back to safety.[53]

      This photograph caught from the pier shows just how close the New York came to colliding with the Titanic.

       The near-collision of the RMS Titanic and the SS New York, 10 April 1912 (Trinity Mirror/Mirropix/Alamy Stock Photo)

      The Titanic’s schedule had been dented before she even left her home waters, but she was intact. Later, many chose to reinterpret the near miss as an omen, such as the large flock of seagulls that Cissy Maioni noticed following the Titanic overhead as the ship resumed her journey.[54] Ida, however, turned back to her letter to Lilian Burbidge, as the waters of the Test became the Solent and then the Channel:

      On Board R.M.S. Titanic

      Wednesday

      Dear Mrs Burbidge,

      You cannot imagine how pleased I was to find your exquisite basket of flowers in our sitting-room on the steamer. The roses and carnations are all so beautiful in color and as fresh as though they had just been cut. Thank you so much for your sweet attention which we both appreciate very much.

      But what a ship! So huge and so magnificently appointed. Our rooms are furnished in the best of taste and most luxuriously and they are really rooms not cabins. But size seems to bring its troubles – Mr. Straus, who was on deck when the start was made, said that at one time it stroked painfully near to the repetition of the Olympian’s [sic] experience on her first trip out of the harbor, but the danger was soon averted and we are now well on to our course across the channel to Cherbourg.

      Again thanking you and Mr. Burbidge for your lovely attention and good wishes and in the pleasant anticipation of seeing you with us next summer. I am with cordial greetings in which Mr. Straus heartily joins,

      Very sincerely yours,

      Ida R. Straus[55]

       4

       A Contest of Sea Giants

      To the battle of Transatlantic passenger service, the Titanic adds a new and important factor, of value to the aristocracy and the plutocracy attracted from East to West and West to East. With the Mauretania and the Lusitania of the Cunard, the Olympic and Titanic of the White Star, the Imperator and Kronprinzessin Cecilie of the Hamburg-Amerika, in the fight during the coming season, there will be a scent of battle all the way from New York to the shores of this country – a contest of sea giants in which the Titanic will doubtless take high honours.

      The Standard (5 April 1912)

      PASSENGERS WAITING TO BOARD THE TITANIC AT Cherbourg, the first of two European ports of call after Southampton, were told of the delay that had arisen as a result of the New York incident by Nicholas Martin, Manager of the White Star Line’s main French office, who had accompanied the firm’s boat train from Paris earlier that day.[1] He broke the news in an uncomfortably pitching tender, the Nomadic, built in Belfast two years earlier and boasting several decorative features like bronze grilles on the doors as aesthetic anticipations to the interiors of her destinations – either the Olympic or Titanic, both too large to dock in Cherbourg’s harbour. First- and second-class passengers were ferried to the waiting liners on the Nomadic;