of the voyage.[49] Meals in the Saloon were run on the same lines as they might be in a country house on shore, with limited options, generous portions, set times for each course every evening except the first, and placement decided by the host – in this case, the ship’s Purser, who assigned passengers to one of the 115 tables which variably sat two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten or twelve. His decisions with this social roulette could introduce a passenger to delightful week-long shipboard acquaintances or purgatorial companionship in a multi-course dinner that moved with the sprightliness of a state funeral. You could, of course, ask the Purser’s Office to move you to another table if you found the company particularly stultifying but, as a passenger on the Queen Mary noted later, ‘the cost of [which] would be the contempt of those still seated at the table you had spurned, and the frozen stares with which they’d greet you on deck for the rest of the trip’.[50]
Where to put a countess and her companion would have been one of Purser McElroy’s main priorities and it seems, from a letter sent by one of their stewards, that they won the lottery in their three gastronomic companions. A steward was assigned to every three diners and it was considered proper for those in his care to leave a gratuity at the end of the voyage, the amount of which very often outpaced his wages. The Countess’s Steward, Ewart Burr, described her group as being ‘very nice to run’. He was particularly pleased to have an aristocrat at his table and he made a point of mentioning it in the note he penned to his wife that evening, writing, ‘I know, darling, you will be glad to know this. I have got a five table, one being the Countess of Rothes, [who is] nice and young.’ Burr predicted that they would be generous at journey’s end or, as he put it, ‘I shall have a good show.’[51]
The decor in the Dining Saloon was loosely inspired by Elizabeth I’s childhood home at Hatfield Palace and the dukes of Rutland’s house at Haddon Hall. Despite both those buildings being Elizabethan and the Tudor roses in scrollwork on the Saloon’s roof, trade journals described the Titanic’s Saloon as reflective of ‘early Jacobean times’.[52] The green-leather chairs with their oak frames were heavy enough for White Star to do away with the bolted-to-the-floor chairs used on the Kaiser-class and the Cunard sisters. This was the only significant innovation in a room that several industry experts dismissed as conventional almost to the point of staid. One admittedly biased observer was Leonard Peskett, designer of the Lusitania and Mauretania, whose disapproval was laced with a vigorous dose of delight when he saw the near-identical Dining Saloon during his tour of the Olympic in 1911. The Titanic’s Dining Saloon may have been the largest room afloat but it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the finest, at least not in Peskett’s view or that of many of his colleagues, especially when compared to the two-storeyed domed Rococo equivalent on the Lusitania.[fn1] There was also a problem of over-heating caused by the Saloon’s 404 light bulbs, although the chill outside meant that this was unlikely to be a problem on 10 April.[53]
Stewards served the first course on the fine bone-china plates, edged with 22-carat gold and bearing the White Star logo at the centre, setting them down amid the small forest of silver-plated cutlery, while water was poured and wine decanted into crystal glassware.[54] At ten minutes past eight, some diners began to debate when they would leave Cherbourg; their Steward leaned in to inform them politely, ‘We have been outside the breakwater for more than ten minutes, Sir.’[55]
And doesn’t old Cobh look charming there
Watching the wild waves’ motion,
Leaning her back up against the hills,
And the tip of her toes in the ocean.
John Locke, ‘Morning on the Irish Coast’ (1877)
TO REDUCE THE DELAY CAUSED BY THE LONDON BOAT trains and then by the New York, the Titanic’s speed was increased as she made her night-time crossing of the Celtic Sea from France to Ireland.[1] Twenty of her twenty-nine boilers were eventually operational that evening, during which the Captain stayed on the Bridge, rather than make an appearance at his table in the Dining Saloon.[2] He did not, apparently, miss much. Even the smoothest of travel days are liable to produce their own special brand of fatigue and many passengers retired early, abandoning the Titanic’s main after-dinner haunts like the Reception and the Lounge, three decks above, long before their respective closing times of 11 and 11.30 p.m.[3] One passenger recalled later that their day had been spent ‘unpacking, making the cabin homelike, getting the lay of the public rooms, trying to determine fore and aft, port and starboard [and] getting the feel of the ship … many passengers are so exhausted with farewell parties and preparations for the voyage’.[4]
At bedtime, those who wanted a restored shine on their shoes left them to be collected from the stateroom corridors, a service that was not required by Ida Straus’s husband as he was travelling with his own valet, Farthing, a man with several years’ service to the Strauses.[5] Such familiarity was not yet possible for Ida with her maid, Ellen Bird, who had celebrated her thirty-first birthday two days earlier while packing for a new chapter of her life, in America, after Ida’s maid, Marie, had quit to marry a barber she had met during the Strauses’ winter holiday on the French Riviera. The weeks during which Marie served out her notice had not apparently been pleasant for anyone involved and the normally magnanimous Isidor was offended on his wife’s behalf since, as Ida told a relative, Marie had begun ‘behaving very badly over here. When Papa sours on a girl you know there is good cause, and he is disgusted with her.’[6] She had intended to replace Marie with another French lady’s maid, but none could be found by the time the couple left for Britain, where, after another was retained and quit upon changing her mind about moving to America, Ida had hired Ellen on the recommendation of the housekeeper at Claridge’s, their hotel during their London stay. Like the Countess of Rothes’ maid, Cissy Maioni, Ellen came from a family with a history in domestic service and she had been a maid in various households since her early twenties. Although Ida remained worried, as she had been with Marie, about ‘whether I can count on her’, so far she was pleased with Ellen, whom she described in a letter home as a ‘nice English girl’.[7] Ellen helped prepare Ida for bed, then left for her own cabin which was in First Class and on the same corridor as the Strauses’.[8]
The Strauses’ bedroom, located between their parlour and private bathrooms, was decorated in the style of the First Napoleonic Empire, to which any curve left ungilded was regarded as a curve wasted. They slept in two single beds on opposite sides of the room, separated by the door to the parlour and a marble washstand; there was a dressing table on the other side of the room, along the wall that led to their wardrobe and bathrooms. At sea, as on land, many upper-class couples had separate bedrooms and so to put them in a double bed when they were travelling was considered infra dig. The Strauses’ decision to share a cabin, if not a bed, thus emphasises their closeness rather than the opposite. They had shared a room on their previous crossing on the seven-year-old Caronia, which still had bunk beds in some of its best first-class accommodation. Isidor had taken the top berth and, one morning after he had risen, its corner fell missing Ida’s head by inches. The ship’s Purser attributed its collapse to ‘some peculiar bend or twist of the ship’, although the fact that bunks existed at all on the Caronia showed how far ocean liners’ accommodation had evolved in a relatively short period.[9]
Their mattresses on the Titanic were firm, on the instructions of J. Bruce Ismay who had ordered a change throughout First Class after sailing on the maiden voyage of the Olympic, when he had observed, ‘The only trouble of any consequence on board the ship arose from the springs of the bed being
