The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell

was tied inextricably to mastery of the sea lanes, which had as much to do with their passenger and cargo ships as it did with their dreadnoughts and destroyers. During the Second Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, the White Star Line had donated several of its ships to temporary military service with the Royal Navy, which, combined with unease at the success of the German greyhounds, helps explain the British reaction when White Star was purchased by J. P. Morgan’s conglomerate in 1903.[30]

      A few years earlier, the writer and apostle of British imperialism J. A. Froude had sounded like the voice of Cassandra when he warned his compatriots, ‘Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that guards them; her empire will come to an end; her colonies will fall off like leaves from a withered tree; and Britain will become once more an insignificant island in the North Sea.’[31] In 1903, despite assurances that it was only White Star shares and not her ships that were passing into American control, the sale was sufficiently worrying to inspire speeches in Parliament, a mood turned brilliantly to their advantage by White Star’s main British competitors, the Cunard Line, who intimated that they too were considering joining Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine. Suppressing the news that they had in fact already passed on a too low offer from Morgan, Cunard presented themselves as the firm who could gladly recapture Britain’s seagoing pride if only they had sufficient funds to prevent the ugly necessity of selling out to an American.[32] The government and the press took the bait. To help with their plan to outshine the Kaiser-class, Parliament voted Cunard a £2.5 million loan to be repaid over the next twenty years at 2.75 per cent interest, materially and obviously below the base rate of 3–4 per cent, coupled with an annual £150,000 operating subsidy.[33] In the autumn of 1907, Cunard delivered on the investment with the creation of the Scottish-built Lusitania and then her English-constructed sister, the Mauretania.[34] The latter was marginally larger and ultimately proved slightly faster as well, but with both sisters weighing in at about 32,000 tons, each was almost twice as heavy as the largest of the German greyhounds.[35] For the next three years, the Lucy and the Maury, as they were nicknamed by their legions of loyal customers and ship enthusiasts, cheerfully passed the Blue Riband between them until, in 1910, the Mauretania decisively took the prize with a crossing time of four days, ten hours and forty-one minutes, a record she would hold for the next nineteen years.[36]

      Outflanked by the Germans and then by Cunard, Morgan and the White Star Line felt called upon to respond in similarly bombastic fashion, with three floating palaces to Cunard’s two, each of which was to be half as heavy again as the Mauretania. Thus were the Olympic-class born. In retaliation, Cunard had ordered a third behemoth, the Aquitania, due to sail from Liverpool to New York for the first time in 1914. Piqued and hitherto overlooked, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique was preparing to unveil their ‘château of the Atlantic’, the France, on her maiden voyage a few weeks after the Titanic’s, around the same time as the Kaiser planned to travel north to Bremerhaven to launch the Imperator which, a year later, would pluck the sobriquet of ‘world’s largest ship’ from the Titanic by a margin of 6,000 tons, a development that had forced a change of name for the Titanic’s youngest sister, even as she was being built in Belfast. Just as the names of Cunard ships, prior to the 1930s, ended with -ia thanks to the company’s policy of making use of provinces of the Roman Empire, White Star vessels were typically branded with an adjective transformed into a noun, ending with -ic. The Titanic and her two sisters were called after great species in Greek myth, respectively the gods of Olympus, the titans and the giants. However, the original name of Gigantic for the third sister never made it past a few provisional poster ideas and excitable press articles. In May 1912, the White Star Line filed the necessary papers to reserve the off-theme but patriotic name Britannic for their forthcoming flagship.

      For decades, this shift has popularly been attributed to White Star’s desire to distance the third sister from the tragedy of the second by abandoning a too similar name. This is a logical explanation for how the Gigantic became the Britannic, especially in light of White Star officially filing for the new name a few weeks after the Titanic sank, but it is also incorrect. The alternative name of Gigantic seems to have been genuinely considered by the White Star Line only at the earliest stages in the vessel’s development and some of their contractors continued to use it, even after it had been abandoned – the order books for the English firm that made the liner’s anchors referenced her as Gigantic as late as 20 February 1912 – as did several Harland and Wolff employees, who remembered the original name in interviews given in the 1950s. Rumours that the ship was to be christened Gigantic were current and firmly denied by the White Star’s Managing Director, both in his testimony to the American inquiry into the loss of the Titanic and subsequently in a letter to a British newspaper.[37] Those printed denials may have been the company’s response to letters they had received from concerned members of the public, begging them not to tempt fate by giving the new ship a name so similar to the Titanic’s, although at least one of the latter’s survivors was sufficiently hardy to dismiss that as superstitious nonsense, ‘almost as if we were back in the Middle Ages’.[38] More prosaically, it was almost certainly the Imperator that prompted the rechristening. Since, by 1915, the Britannic would ‘only’ be the third largest ship afloat, behind the Imperator and her 1914-projected running mate, the Vaterland, to call her Gigantic under those circumstances seemed foolhardy.[39]

      The Titanic’s looming black-painted hull, summoned into being by capitalist competition and the diplomatic thrombosis of pre-war Europe, greeted the Thayers as the Nomadic at last docked alongside the Titanic. The tender’s gangplank could not safely reach the B-Deck embarkation doors used at Southampton and so Tommy Andrews had designed another, two decks lower, reaching a vestibule which opened on to the first-class Reception Room, where stewards waited to guide first-class passengers to their cabins and second-class aft to their section of the ship. Standing in front of the Thayers as they boarded was J. Bruce Ismay, son of the White Star Line’s late founder and Managing Director since its merger with the IMM. If the Titanic’s legend has a two-dimensional caricature, it is Ismay, cast as both vulpine villain and a serial weakling in the hysterical aftermath of the sinking. So complete was Ismay’s historiographical evisceration that when a consultant first saw the script for what became a multi-Oscar-winning cinematic romance set on the Titanic and queried the characterisation of Ismay as a megalomaniacal moron, butt of penis-envy jokes he cannot understand and shameless manipulator of the Captain in the dangerous quest for more speed, he was told there was no point in changing it because ‘the public expects’ a heinous Ismay.[40] That is not to say that Ismay was incapable of moments of mind-boggling stupidity, but he was also astute, devoted to his company and, like Tommy Andrews, obsessed with detail.[41] A complex man whose inherent shyness produced acts of great kindness and flinch-inducing obtuseness, Ismay’s thoughtfulness had won out on 10 April as he bore down on the Thayers’ travelling companions and lifelong friends, Arthur and Emily Ryerson, who were returning home to America unexpectedly after hearing that their son, Arthur Junior, had been killed in a car accident during his sophomore spring at Yale. He had gone home to Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania for the Easter weekend where he had died, along with his classmate, John Hoffman, two days before the Titanic sailed.[42] Ismay took over from the Thayers as temporary chaperon of the grief-stricken by informing the Ryersons, who were travelling with their three younger children, a maid and a governess, that he had arranged for them to be given an extra stateroom adjoining those they had already booked, along with a personal steward to look after them during the voyage.[43] A broken Emily Ryerson intended to spend the trip in her cabin with her family, avoiding everyone else on board except the Thayers.

      Less solemnly, a middle-aged New York widow, Ella White, was carried past the boarding passengers. She had fallen and sprained her ankle as the gangplank swayed in the winds.[44] A few stewards had been summoned to help Mrs White’s chauffeur lift her to her C-Deck stateroom, the same deck where the Thayers were also settling into their accommodation on the opposite corridor to the Strauses and the Countess of Rothes. The latter escorted her parents down to the Reception Room to see them off on to the Nomadic. Noëlle, Thomas and Clementina descended the staircase into the Reception Room. Directly ahead of that, they turned left at a wall mounted with a reproduction