The Rest Is History - 429. Titanic: Countdown to Disaster (Part 3)

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

The drama and tragedy of the Titanic’s sinking has spawned all manner of myths about those who left Southampton on the 10th of April 1912, and for four days luxuriated in the ship’s modern facilities, extravagant interiors, and plush cabins. Among them were many magnates and tycoons, such as J.J. Astor, the richest man onboard, and the American businessman Ben Guggenheim. Conspicuously absent, however, was J. P. Morgan, who cancelled his booking at the last minute, and five days later would find his greatest business competitors eliminated… Just as intriguing though, and often overlooked, were the Titanic’s second class passengers: middle-aged men with their teenage mistresses, a father who had his kidnapped his children, excited migrant families, and Joseph Laroche, a brilliant engineer and the only black man on board, for whom the Titanic provided the chance to start a new life- the same was true for many others. Join Tom and Dominic as they explore the dazzling, eccentric and endlessly fascinating First and Second Class passengers of the Titanic, whose extraordinary lives shine all the brighter for the terrible danger and tragedy waiting for them on the icy horizon… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. My dear mum and dad, it don't seem possible we're out on the briny writing to you. Well dears, so far we're having a delightful trip. The weather is beautiful and the ship magnificent. We can't describe the tables, it's like a floating town. I can tell you we do swank, We shall miss it on the trains. We go third on them. You would not imagine you were on a ship. There's hardly any motion. She's so large

we've not felt sick. Yet we expect to get to Queenstown today. So I thought I'd drop this with the mails. We had a fine send off from Southampton. Lots of love. Don't worry about us. Ever your loving children. Harvey, Lot and Madge. So that, Tom, is a letter from a chap called Harvey Collier to his parents from the Titanic. And Harvey was a grocer from a place called Bishopstoke in Hampshire. And he was also a big bell ringer in the local church. And he and his family were emigrating to Idaho. When they left, because Harvey was big in the local church,

there was a great send-off for them. They sort of sat them down in the churchyard, and people went up to the tower and rang the bells for them. It was very moving. Harvey loved it. His wife, Charlotte, was sitting there and she was a bit ambivalent about going to America. So she was a little bit tearful or something. They had all their savings with them, which he had in banknotes and the lining of his

jacket. And I don't think it's giving anything away to say that the fate of the Collier family is very poignant. And those are the human details, aren't away to say that the fate of the Collier family is very poignant. And those are the human details, aren't they, that make the story of the Titanic just so incredibly resonant. It is. And the idea of writing back to your loved one saying, don't worry about us. Everything's great. It's all going to be fine. And of course, the reason that we're doing this episode, the reason that the Titanic has the kind of the mythic resonance that it does is the contrast between the confidence and the horror that we know is coming. So before we get to the horror, we're going to look at some of the details of the people who were traveling. And everyone will know that there are lots of millionaires on it, but they will also know, particularly if they've seen Titanic, the film, that there are lots of

people in steerage. And in the last episode, I quoted Francis Wilson making the comment that basically the Titanic is a ship that only seems to be a luxury hotel, but actually it's there to carry poor emigrants. So in these next two episodes, we're going to look at the range of people who are traveling on the Titanic. And as anyone who has seen the James Cameron film will know, there are of course millionaires, and then there are people down in steerage. And we're going to look at both groups of people. And Dominic, we're also going to look at the people who are traveling in second class yes who don't make it into the film and who slightly tend to be written out because we do enjoy the kind of downtown abbey idea of upstairs and

downstairs don't we and the fact that actually there are lots of people kind of in the middle is often written out of the story it is because I think people want to turn it into a parable, don't they? A morality tale about inequality and hubris. Yeah. And so you have, you know, John Jacob Astor, and then you have some very poor guy played by Leonardo DiCaprio or something. Absolutely. But actually we miss in that the complexity of, you know, all these people who were there, many of whom were, as you say,

in the middle and make the story much more complicated. Right. So having said that, should we kick off with the millionaires? Yeah, why not? You know, we're very much a class-based podcast. We are. So let's go in with the millionaires first. So in the last episode, we talked about how the Titanic was a product of the Gilded Age, of the capitalism of the Gilded Age, of the competition between different companies,

British, German, for control of the Atlantic trade we talked about, Belfast, didn't we? And we had the Titanic going through all its tests and then being brought to Southampton and then, of course, sailing out of Southampton Harbour. And you were very rude, if I remember, about Captain Smith, weren't you? Yes, I was. You were accused of incompetence, I think very harshly. Not incompetence, but perhaps not being as fully on the ball as once he was. Well, Dominic, I think the evidence is tough.

Anyone can have a mistake. Anyone can have a mistake in a transatlantic crossing. Come on. He has four mistakes in the space of a year. But anyway, let's not get onto that. He did a lot of very successful voyages. And I think it's harsh to judge him on the... On his last year.

On one, yeah. So actually, most of the passengers that morning start off in London, and they come from Waterloo. Now, we talked last time about how Southampton had been built up as this great rival to Liverpool, and it's been built up by the Liverpool and Southwestern Railway, among other companies. So at about 7.30, there is a train that will leave Waterloo. It's the boat train, and it will head to Southampton. And there are hundreds of people on this train. And actually, there are paparazzi at Waterloo, aren't there?

Yeah, so that's brilliant, isn't it? Camera fiends, they're called. Yes. I love that phrase. So there are camera fiends there because, as you say, there are so many millionaires. So the train goes off. Waterloo is being redeveloped. So it's kind of very chaotic and messy and sooty and all that sort of stuff.

They head down to Southampton. And at Southampton, 427 passengers in first and second class get on and 495 in third class. And then they pick up more passengers, actually a lot more first class passengers at Cherbourg because they go straight to Cherbourg. And here, clearly, they're picking up Americans, for example, who have been traveling in the continent, who have been in Paris and so on and so forth. And we talked, didn't we, how they have to go out in kind of little boats to take them out because Titanic is so huge, it can't actually get into Cherbourg. And so they finally pull out of Cherbourg at eight o'clock that evening and

they are heading for Queenstown, now Cove, in Ireland. So of those first class passengers, there are 337 of them, I think. I mean, the interesting thing is that there are always different estimates for the numbers. Each book gives you a slightly different figure because we're never entirely sure who turned up and who didn't, which we'll come to in a second. But it's definite that it's not filter capacity, is it? By some estimates, under 50%. Now that is really interesting. And there's a couple of things in that. One of them is that the competition for the transatlantic crossing is so fierce that there was actually a massive overcapacity. So there are more births than there are potential

first-class passengers yeah but the other thing richard davenport hines has a really good section on this i think he says you know it was a great trait of edwardian millionaires it was seen as a sort of badge of their quality that they would change their plans and cancel things and put everybody out yeah at the last minute that was a sign of your status. People were always cancelling things in a way that now I think, well, maybe tech billionaires cancel things. I don't know. I feel bad about cancelling. I mean, I wouldn't book a transatlantic crossing and then just not turn up. I mean, that's the expression of your middle-class bourgeois uptightness. It is. Yes, it is, Tom. Whereas if you're a high-spending,

gilded-age billionaire, there's nothing you'd enjoy more than letting people down. No. I need to be less polite to waiters and things like that. So several millionaires could have been on this maiden voyage of the Titanic. So there's Milton Hershey.

The chocolate. Chocolate millionaire. The chocolate guy. Yeah. To be honest, I mean, he deserved to go down. That's terrible chocolate, isn't it? Hershey's. Yeah, terrible. Terrible chocolate. There's Henry Clay Frick. Yeah. To be honest, I mean, he deserved to go down. That's terrible chocolate, isn't it, Hershey's? Yeah, terrible.

Terrible chocolate. There's Henry Clay Frick, as in the Frick, the art gallery. George Vanderbilt, another very kind of gilded age American millionaire name. He doesn't go. But of course, the famous person who doesn't go is the guy who's behind the whole shebang, who is Pierpoint Morgan. And so he takes over Frick's booking, but then he cancels because he is keen to oversee the movement of his art collection from Paris to America. Or that is what he says, because this

is the focus for some hot conspiracy theories. Are you up to speed with them? I know they exist. I consider them demented, so I haven't really gone into them as much as I should. So the conspiracy theory is that, we talked about how Morgan is basically behind the setting up of the American Central Bank, isn't he? That he kind of comes to the rescue. Yeah. Well, he- He's America's banker. Yeah.

And the conspiracy theory is that John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidore Strauss, all of whom are absolute top league millionaires, are against this. And so Morgan has arranged for them to go on the Titanic so that they can be removed, taken out of the equation. Which I agree, doesn't seem an entirely... It seems a roundabout and expensive way of getting rid of them. An unreliable way. What if they get into the lifeboats? Exactly. But I just mentioned that.

I just put that out there because we don't want people listening to think that we're not acknowledging the conspiracy theories because you particularly had quite a lot of grief for your scepticism

towards JFK conspiracy theories. That's true. I'm actually just part of the conspiracy, to be quite frank. I can admit that now. Okay. So,

Aster is by Father Richard, isn't he? He is. Colonel Jack admit that now. Okay. So Aster is by far the richest, isn't he? He is. Colonel Jack, he's called. John Jacob Aster IV. The Asters are the sort of paradigmatic, dominant family, dynasty of Gilded Age New York. He owns a lot of New York, among other things. It's not just a hotelier. He's a slum landlord. But the hotels are interesting, aren't they? Because they kind of provide the model for the luxury and first class that the Titanic embodies. Absolutely, they do. So the most famous one, of course, is the Waldorf Astoria.

It has Aster in the name. And the Waldorf Astoria was seen as having set standards in hotels. So it's the Waldorf Astoria really that invents the idea of you going to a sort of downtown city centre hotel and there being a tea room, a bar, a lounge, a sort of gentleman's club atmosphere. Yeah. So in other words, it's not just a place you sleep. It's a place where, you know, all life is there. A range of entertainments are on tap. Exactly. Exactly. place where you know all life is there a range of entertainments are on tap exactly exactly but also the fact that he is this notorious slum landlord while enjoying all this luxury in the luxury

hotels and things i think that that is also something that gets superimposed in the public imagination on the titanic yeah i think so the idea of them sipping cocktails and champagne and things in first class while down in steerage it's all rats and bilge water. I mean, we will come to that and see whether that is accurate or not. Yeah. And he looks, as American millionaires of that era did, they try to be kind of more English than the English. So he's sort of, you know, he wears an overcoat with a velvet collar.

That's actually a bit Nigel Farage, isn't it? He wears a bowler hat and he has an umbrella and he's got this nice moustache and all that sort of thing he looks like the father in mary poppins yes he does mr banks but interestingly he has a child bride doesn't he he does madeline force as was yes madeline force which is slightly more sort of 1970s rock star behavior so she was 18 and this was very controversial because she's decades his junior they had a big reception at fifth avenue where he's going to introduce her to all his sort of friends and all the other society people and lots of people didn't turn up so lots of people would ignore them when they went to the opera and things they have gone off to france and egypt she is

pregnant four months pregnant. And they are now coming back to New York and they have this big retinue. They have a valet. She has a maid. She has a nursemaid. And they have a dog called Kitty. I know you're very keen on the dogs. Yes.

So in Airedale, one of 12 confirmed dogs, Dominic, who were on the Titanic. Confirmed dogs. Yes. So there might have been other dogs, we don't know, whoic, who were on the Titanic. Confirmed dogs? Yes. So there might have been other dogs, we don't know, who kind of got smuggled aboard. So there were several Airedales. There was a King Charles Spaniel, there was a Fox Terrier, there was a Bulldog, and there was a Great Dane. Great Dane? Who takes a Great Dane on a ship? Well, so the Great Dane does not get into the lifeboat.

Right. And nor, I'm afraid, does Kitty. So Kitty drowns. Right. But there are three that do get onto the boats in due course. There are two Pomeranians. One of those is called Lady, and she gets smuggled on, wrapped in a blanket. And then there's a Pekingese called Sun Yat-sen. Wow.

Who also makes it on. So Sun Yat-sen is the Chinese leader. Yeah. So people who listen to our Top Dogs episode, there was Luti the Pekingese. So clearly Pekingese are given not entirely politically correct names. This is very much a Victorian and Edwardian thing. So Sun Yat-sen gets away as well. And there's also the ship's cat, Jenny, who sadly doesn't make it.

Jenny doesn't make it? No. Oh, sad. So there are animals as well as millionaires and so on. But back to the humans for a second, Tom. Yes, back to the human story, yes. So other millionaires, there's a chap called, you mentioned him already, Ben Guggenheim.

So the Guggenheim family, again, an art gallery name, the Guggenheim Gallery and so on. The Guggenheims had made their money out in Colorado in the silver mines in Leadville. They are notorious kind of stripe breakers, very hard-nosed sort of business tycoons. Ben Guggenheim, I think, is generally thought the sort of most attractive of them.

He's actually left the family business. He lives on Fifth Avenue. He sees himself, as so many people did, he's a bit like a character in a Henry James novel or something. They all are, aren't they? Yeah, they are. They go off to Europe and they hang around in Venice and Paris. He's got a lover, hasn't he?

He has married a bride who is only 18 years old. It's all that kind of thing. It is. Was that Gillian Anderson or somebody there joining us joining us yeah we will not be receiving that uh so ben guggenheim has a mistress in paris called leontine obar who is a singer she's traveling with him again he's got a big entourage she's got a maid he's got a valet uh they have a chauffeur called renee renee pernaud he's got the ultimate French name. So he's down in second class, isn't he?

Yes. So they're all there. And again, probably because he's with his mistress, they probably keep themselves to themselves and don't mix. We don't know, but there are senses that they would not have mixed that closely with the other millionaires because they would have been horrified at the thought of him with his French mistress. Then there's the Wideners. So we mentioned them, didn't we, in the first episode? because they would have been horrified at the thought of him with his French mistress.

Then there's the Wideners. So we mentioned them, didn't we, in the first episode. So the grandfather of it all, the patriarchal figure, Peter Widener, he joined with Morgan in setting up American Steel and all kinds of things like that. Yeah. And his son and his grandson are on the Titanic. Yes. So George and Eleanor are his son and daughter-in-law. And they have gone to Paris to buy the stuff, the trousseau, for their daughter's wedding.

And they've taken their son with them. Their son is Harry. He's a very attractive person, I think, Harry. Yeah, he is. Because he's a great bibliophile. Yes. So he's in his mid-20s, isn't he? And since he first went to Harvard, he has become an addict of first editions. So he's got loads of Dickens first editions, Ben Johnson.

Yeah. And he's got a Shakespeare first folio. Yes. Very impressive. And with him on the ship, he's carrying a 1598 edition of Francis Bacon's essays. Yeah. Which he'd bought for 260 pounds. Yeah. essays yeah which he'd bought for 260 pounds yeah uh his mother's pearls were insured for 150 000

pounds so that gives you yeah some sense you're going to be adding multiple notes to that to make the modern equivalent yeah but people who've seen titanic the film will remember that uh rose the character played by kate winslet in her cabin She has the Demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso. I think she has a Degas. I think she has a Monet, all of which obviously didn't sync, but in the film do sync and people always kind of laugh about that. But it does reflect the fact that, of course, all these treasures, you know,pieces of european art that are now in american art galleries most of them were transported on ships like the titanic they were yeah how did they get there yeah exactly exactly and that these are precisely the people who are

transporting them yeah you know this is what they do this is compared to the sort of the henry james characters this is absolutely that world that they will have you know folios of bacon stuffed into their pockets and yeah because I think I think there's a library at Harvard isn't the Widener Memorial Library which was set up right after his death by his his family so yes I mean obviously they didn't take that was a davenior because it still exists but um yeah there are masterpieces of art I I guess, down there on the ocean bed. There must be. There must be. So there's finance, there's railroads, the railroads are represented. There are two family parties that are related to railroad

tycoons. There's the Thayer family. They're the owners of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which is the biggest in terms of traffic and revenue in the United States. The Hayes family, so they are the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada. And Dominic, are there any gay couples? Yes, there is a gay couple. And this is the world of politics. And they're an extraordinary pair. So there's a guy called Francis, I would call him Francis Millet,

but I guess Americans would call him Millet. They'd call him Francis Millet. He's a painter. He's a very impressive man. He'd served with the Union troops in the Civil War. He'd been a war correspondent in Russia when the Russians fought the Ottomans in the 1870s. He was brilliant at sort of sketching those beautiful sketches of public buildings in Boston. And he is the head of the American Academy in Rome, this guy Francis Millet. And he lives with a man in Washington, a much younger man. Archie Butt. Archie Butt, exactly, who is the military advisor to President Taft.

Slimmer of the year. Slimmer of the year, right. And their household is full of Filipino boys, which kind of gives a, you know, might have some listeners raising their eyebrows. Archie Butt is also a sort of quite a jolly and an impressive kind of person. He had served in the Spanish-American War, and he made himself indispensable to Theodore Roosevelt and then to his successor, William Howard Taft. And there's a lovely description in Richard Davenport Hines's book Titanic Lives he says why Taft liked Archie Butt around him and he says Butt misplayed shots to revive the golf mad president when he was disheartened sat up late playing bridge with

him laughed at his dull legal jokes mitigated his boredom at the horrible meals which the obese president liked and these meals yeah broiled chicken hominy and melon for breakfast fish chowder mustard pickles baked beans and brown bread for lunch yum and then he would mollify the president when people shouted hello fatia he's he sounds a wonderful man doesn't he yeah? Yeah. He sounds great fun. Yeah. And in due course, because he drowns, I mean, spoiler alert. Yeah. And Taft is devastated, really devastated. Taft is absolutely devastated. Yeah.

So there's this couple. It's pretty clear they were a couple, I think. Yeah. Francis Millay and Archie Butt. So that's kind of interesting. And then, Dominic, are there any kind of major underwear entrepreneurs? There are. There are, yes.

So obviously the British aristocracy is there in alliance, Tom, with big underwear. Well, it's actually, it's big lingerie, isn't it? It is big lingerie. Yeah, it's not just underwear. It's sexy lingerie. So there's a guy called, with the splendid name of Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon. So Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon is like a sort of Englishman from a parody. He plays bridge and he fences and he's lost an eye in a shooting accident.

He'd fenced for England. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oswald Mosley, of course, former Reston's History associate, also fenced at the highest level, didn't he? But he didn't marry a lingerie pioneer like sir cosmo did but actually i mean dominic there is a kind of link between um oswald mosley and lingerie because um he provides the model for sir roderick spode in the pg woodhouse novels and his terrible secret is that he runs

eulalie doesn't he which is um a lingerie company so maybe there was a kind of knowing a riff on sir cosmo duff gordon who knows yeah i hadn't thought of that i hadn't thought of that tom because sir cosmo had married this woman called lucy wallace who was the world's greatest entrepreneur of sort of lacy underwear yeah so she was a distressed gentlewoman she was poshh, but she'd lost all her money. And so she goes into business and makes a tremendous success of it. Yeah. Yeah. And people sort of looked down on her, I suppose, because she was in trade. But she gets sponsored by duchesses. So duchesses start buying her corsets and things, and then it becomes very socially exclusive. And she had, everything connects in this world

of the millionaires, because she had gone to New York and she had stayed at the Waldorf Astoria while she had been opening her shop in New York. So she is, you know, one of these great pioneers who has shops both in London and New York. This isn't like Victoria's Secrets or something. This is stuff that is being bought, as you say, by duchesses and whatnot. Rigby and Pella, I believe. Right. Rigby and Pella is exactly the comparison, Tom.

Very good. Corsetier to the late queen. Yeah. Very good. So Corsetiers would appeal to our next first class passenger, who I would say is the greatest newspaperman who's ever existed, Tom. Yeah, I would not disagree he is wt stead and he he is the great populist newspaper editor of the late victorian period he's the person who really

invents populist newspapers i would say so wt stead listeners are very long standing will remember that he is the man behind the sending of general Gordon, the ultimate friend of the rest of history, to Khartoum. Do you remember that, Tom? I do, yeah. Back in the 1880s? Yeah. It was W.T. Stead who then kicks up a huge fuss about dreadnoughts and all that stuff.

You know, the Germans going to overtake Britain. His most famous thing, of course, was when he bought a prostitute, a young girl, didn't he? Yeah, to demonstrate how easy it was. Yes. What is it? The maiden tribute of the modern Babylon or something? Exactly.

Exactly. And he was prosecuted. And he became a huge hero to the sort of British working classes because he was seen as having sort of lifted the lid on the seething underbelly, Tom, of the white slave trade, as it was called. And he's a complete mountebank, isn't he? He's a sensationalist. Very entertaining. Brilliantly entertaining.

And I imagine would have been a tremendously entertaining company on the ship. I imagine so, yeah. Can I tell you an interesting fact about his, I mean, he does die on the ship. Yeah. He's a committed spiritualist as well mean, he does die on the ship. Yeah. He's a committed spiritualist as well. So he's into all that kind of stuff. And his house in London is in Smith Square, just down from the House of Parliament. And his daughter, Estelle, lived with him there before he drowned.

And before he left, one evening, she's in her bedroom bedroom when a man walks in to her room takes off his hat sits down at the desk and starts writing poetry oh my word it's unusual so she goes over and has a look and says what are you doing he doesn't say anything but she can see that it's poetry he just completely ignores her yeah and then he vanishes and then the same thing happens the night after and the night after and the night after that. So she mentions it to her father and her father draws the obvious conclusion that this guy is clearly a ghost. And he has a bit of kit called a spirit indicator. Is that real?

Does that work? So it's a device for communicating with the dead. Right. So it's a device for communicating with the dead. And so Estelle uses it. And it turns out that this guy who's been coming in is a poet and he's called Gordon Knight. And he had specialised in rollicking songs of the sea. And now that they've made contact, he and Estelle get on really, really well. You know, they have an absolutely brilliant time. And when Wednesday dies on the Titanic, it's very touching because Gordon Knight, this minor poet, is able to make contact with her father in the afterworld and pass on messages so they can stay in touch. Oh, that's nice, isn't it?

Yeah. That's a lovely detail. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there's a lot of tragedy in this story. Yeah. But it's nice to know that ghosts... Great behavior from ghosts. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there's a lot of tragedy in this story, but it's nice to know that ghosts... Great behavior from ghosts. Yeah. Which may be to do with the fact that he's a minor poet.

Do you think so? If he'd been a more successful poet, he'd be ahead of other things on his mind. I think by and large, if you meet the ghost of a minor poet, he's probably going to be all right. Yeah. Kind of a decent, quiet, retiring kind of person. Yeah. Not seduced by worldly success because they haven't had much success in their life no they're only a minor poet no although possibly the whole walking into you know a girl's bedroom yeah is i mean it's a bit odd but you'd be gutted if the person who communicated you from the afterlife was t.s elliott or somebody wouldn't you i mean

a sort of chilly austere difficult person oh i think personally i quite like to you'd like it yeah i think so. Okay. Yeah. Well, on that bombshell, Tom, I think we should take a very quick break and then we'll come back and we'll continue talking about first-class passengers.

Probably not so much about ghosts and poets. And we'll also move on to the second-class passengers. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the passengers on the Titanic. Tom, one of the things that strikes me about so many of these first-class passengers is that it's often seen as, you know, you've got first-class on one side, all millionaires. Yeah. Kind of Boston Brahmins and Gilded Age American plutocrats.

Yeah. And on the other side, you have all the immigrants. But actually, a huge proportion of these millionaires are themselves the sons or daughters or whatever of immigrants, aren't they? I was looking at the list of names that Richard Davenport Hines gives in his book. Henry Stengel, John Baumann, Jacob Birnbaum, William Greenfield, Samuel Goldenberg, Adolf Saalfeld, Abraham Lincoln Salomon, Martin Rothschild, George Rosenschein. An awful lot of these people in first class are actually first, second, third generations

who are Jewish German-Americans, aren't they? It's really remarkable how many of such people there are. That is the melting pot of Gilded Age America, right? Yeah. Well, that's a lovely profound insight there. That had left you completely kind of...

I wasn't expecting that. It's your period, Dominic. Well, Richard M. Boyne says, he says, first class was only steerage twice removed. Very good. Which is true.

Well, because we talked about this in connection with Andrew Carnegie. Yeah, we did. Who, of course, doesn't drown on the titanic but is going out and then going backwards and forwards logan roy type figure very logan roy so what's it like being a first class passenger the guy we're talking about before frank millay he wrote about this he said of titanic she has everything but taxi cabs and theaters table dote restaurant a la carte gymnasium turkish bath squash court palm garden smoking rooms for ladies and gents

and that's just some of the public rooms they had riding machines in the gym wow a riding machine they should bring those back i'd love that yeah i know i mean not that i go to the gym but i mean i'd like the thoughts of other people going on them. Apparently very good for the thighs. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. So they have dining saloons. They have lounges. They have cafes. There are quarters for the first class dogs. Yes.

Sun Yat Sen and Lady. Yeah. They have the first swimming pool on a ship. They have an operating theater in the sick bay. And the private rooms are very, very fancy. So Millais again, as for the rooms, they're larger than the ordinary hotel room, much more luxurious with wooden bedsteads, dressing tables, hot and cold water, electric fans, electric heater. The suites with their damask hangings and mahogany oak furniture are really

very sumptuous. And they're done in a great sort of medley of architectural styles. Some of them are kind of Regency Queen Anne. Some of them kind of Louis Caz, Louis Cez, Tudor, Georgian. You know, you choose what kind of style you like. But having said that, Dominic, there is a kind of integrity to the design because the white star logo is everywhere, isn't it? So all the cro it yeah so all the crockery all the plates and everything they're all stamped with the white star logo all the cutlery

everything it's the comparison that you made before with the world of historia yeah it's exactly the right comparison i think i mean for these guys it's not an immigrant ship it's a floating hotel they go to the gym. They go to the steam bath. They play poker all the time. I mean, the food, they obviously spend an enormous amount of time in this big Jacobean dining room. And the list of food is kind of mind-boggling. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

Oysters, salmon, lamb, roast duck, beef. And this, of course, is maybe there'll be people who've done cruises and things to sell this is you know that's nothing on the cruise we had much better than that but this is you know more than 100 years ago when refrigeration techniques and all these kinds of things are in their infancy and it's a tremendous enterprise to get all this stuff ready to have the huge armies of cooks and chefs and whatnot but i I think for two other people who are traveling first class, Ismay and Andrews, who are responsible for the design, for the conception of the Titanic, for the attention to detail, looking around and seeing how everything is perfect. I mean, that's why they're going there. So when Ismay went previously, he went on the

Olympic and he was checking to make sure things that could be improved. And these improvements are now manifest on the Titanic. Yeah. They've got the right fish knives or whatever, the things that were missing, potato peelers. Everything is just so, just so. Yes, exactly. And obviously, that is something that they are incredibly proud of and that people are responding to. So whether it's the millionaires or whether it's the guy that we began with writing back and saying, it's amazing. Everybody is saying this is incredible. Yeah. And interestingly, the millionaires say it's incredible. So Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, he says, it's like a summer palace on the seashore surrounded with every comfort.

There's nothing to indicate that we're on the stormy Atlantic Ocean. Lady Duff Gordon. So lingerie. Lingerie. I was entranced with the beauty of the liner. Fancy strawberries in April and in mid-ocean. Why you would think you were at the Ritz. You know, again, the comparison with the hotel.

Yeah. So that's first class. Now, the one thing that people probably will be thinking if they've seen the film is, this is all hermetically sealed off from the rest of the ship because there are barriers. And there are actually locked barriers, aren't there? Metal barriers between first class and second class. But the reason for that is not the snobbery of White Star.

It is demanded by U.S US immigration authorities, isn't it? It is. US immigration demands that there must be barriers on the ship because they are terrified of contagious diseases. Right. And they want to limit the spread of disease. And so people have had to be checked before they board the ship. Yeah.

And all that kind of thing. So that's an important point because I think that's often seen as this is the snobbery of the millionaires or the snobbery of the company, but that's not right at all. It's the bureaucratic demands of the immigration service. So second class, it's a smaller group than first or third. And as you said, Tom, they are totally missing, aren't they, from the film? And I actually think from most popular accounts of the Titanic disaster, don't you? Yeah. Because as you said, the power of the Titanic is that it serves almost everybody as a metaphor. And so certainly for left-wing critiques of British American Atlantic society, the idea of haves and have-nots doesn't really have place for

people who are in the middle. It's plutocrats or paupers, but that's not the case with this. Yeah. And of course, the nature of industrial society at the beginning of the 20th century is there are tens of millions of people who don't fit into those categories. And these are the people in second class. So they are clergymen, teachers, people who own shops, clerks. There are some chauffeurs. There are some up, there are kind of establishments now that are catering for the middle classes. And that's effectively the vibe that is being replicated on the Titanic. So Lions, what is it? Lions Corner Houses and things. Tea shops.

Yeah. It's a respectable boarding house kind of atmosphere, isn't it? Don't you think? Yes. So films about the Second World War, the nippies, and civil servants will meet their wives when they're having domestic problems. Yeah. And they'll kind of hide behind menus and things like that. That's the kind of the mood that you're getting in the second class quarters. Yeah. It was the sort of a hotel that would feature in an Agatha Christie novel.

Exactly. You know, not super swanky. And the characters. So as you said, clergymen and doctors and so on. Yeah, absolutely. Interestingly, the single biggest group in the second class decks is Cornishmen. So there are several dozen Cornish miners who are going out to the Michigan Copper Belt. And they are very introverted, the Cornish miners. They don't really mix with other people.

There is a hotel in Southampton that caters specifically for Cornish voyagers. And there's one in New York, isn't there? There is indeed in Brooklyn, run by John and Sid Blake, the Star Hotel, if anybody's thinking of checking in. Anybody from, I don't know,

Mullion or whatever, thinking of traveling to New York. But Second Class has really fun characters, I think. So there's a couple of people who've run off with their mistresses. There's a man, a confectioner called Henry Morley from Worcester. He has run off with a 19-year-old girl called Kate Phillips. So kind of middle-aged men running off with teenage girls. This is quite a theme, isn't it?

Totally. And there's another one, a Lancashire carrot and potato salesman called harry form thorpe is running off with lizzie wilkinson well she's not a teenager she's 29 she's 11 years his junior but still what would the clergyman be making this well he'd very disproved of this man michelle navratil oh yes this is the guy who's kidnapped his children from his wife he's kidnapped his children so he he was from Slovakia originally, what became Slovakia. He had married an Italian woman and they lived in Nice. They had a very acrimonious divorce. He accused her of having run off with somebody else. He collects his boys and then runs

off with them. He leaves a note for his wife that says, you will never see the children again, but never fear about them. They will be in good hands he buys second class titanic tickets and the boys and this bloke this bloke is by the way carrying a revolver they get on the ship so he's there with his boys do you know what tom this is a big spoiler he lives and you know what happened to him no i don't he became a french philosophy professor later later life. Did he? Yeah. And he lived until like the 1960s or 70s or something.

Goodness. I mean, who would have guessed? French philosophers do have kind of exciting personal lives. They do. Yeah, they definitely do. Foucault. And who was the guy who strangled his wife? Althusser, I think.

Oh, really? I didn't know he strangled his wife. Yes. Anyway, could I just mention two travellers from outside Europe? Two. So one of them is the only black man travelling on the Titanic. And he is from Haiti. And he's a guy called Joseph Laroche. He's a very brilliant engineer. And he's gone to Paris, aged 15, to study engineering. He lived there. He's married a French woman. They have two

daughters who are aged three and two, but he suffers from discrimination in France and he's fed up with this. And he's had an offer from his uncle, who is president of Haiti, to go back and he can have a job as a maths teacher. Wow. Are they given out by the president, maths teaching jobs? Yes. So he's going back and they were going to go later in the year, but because his wife is pregnant and they want to get to Haiti before she is due to give birth to the baby, they decide that they'll go early, second class on the Titanic. And that's what they're doing. So they're on second class. And another guy from outside Europe is a Japanese, the only Japanese person who is, he's called Masabumi Hosono.

And he's a civil servant who's been in Russia. So he studied Russian in Tokyo. He's then gone to Russia to study the railway system there. And he is traveling back to Japan across the Atlantic over America. And then he'll go to Japan from the Pacific coast. So both of these men will feature in due course when we look at what happens yeah when the titanic hits the iceberg but i just wanted to flag them up i mean there's so many interesting characters in second class there's a guy who's a rubber merchant from liverpool

called joseph finney and he has a teenage companion with him, slightly dubiously. Richard Davenport describes him as a handsome bachelor with his gainy mead. Oh, right. More middle-aged men traveling with teenagers. Exactly. Exactly. He's traveling with a 16-year-old apprentice cooper called Alfred Gaskell. Right. Then there's a, this should appeal to you, Tom, a Mennonite missionary with the splendid name of Clemmer Funk. You wouldn't believe that if you read it in a novel. No. So Clemmer Funk, she's from Pennsylvania.

Oh, it's a woman. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're not obvious with a name like that. I thought, imagine Clemmer Funk with a massive moustache. Right. Clemmer Funk could be the sheriff of some, I don't know. Hard boiled, hard drinking. But no, a M a mennonite missionary i imagine not hard drinking mennonite missionary who taught girls in

a one-room school out in india in madhya pradesh and she is traveling home to see her father who is ill and she's gone all the way from rural india she had to go to bombay then she went from bombay all the way to london i guess and then she has got on the titanic oh so she's been on quite a journey yeah she has so another possibly same-sex couple who claim to be mother and daughter but clearly aren't they are called lucy temple and imanita shelly lucy temple is from the bluegrass country of kentucky and uh richard devonport heise is very funny about them and he says an older woman from a milieu of stables and racetracks traveling with a younger woman from the drabbest of convict settlements should arouse mistrust one imagines lo Lutie Parrish with a rasping voice

and skin like dirty leather and Imanita Shelley with a sharp pixie face and lashing tongue. Does he actually have any evidence for this? No, no. And then he says, there were surely paltry scams lurking in their history. It seems a bit harsh.

It's harsh, but it kind of makes sense, though. It's funny. It's insightful, Tom. That's the insides of a top historian. Yes, sharp pixie face and lashing tongue. Yeah. Okay. So actually, generally, we should say of the second-class passengers,

they love it, don't they? They think it's brilliant. Yeah. They're having an absolute whale of a time. Yeah. And the thing about the second class is second class on a titanic is as good as first class on any other ship you should be writing advertising copy for i should i love the titanic i think it should be pretty clear to the listeners now i'm very much on on white stars team and if

they're still around if they have a successor company and they're interested in sponsorship deals i'm there i'm absolutely they're all over it so they have a successor company and they're interested in sponsorship deals, I'm there. I'm absolutely there. We're all over it. So that is second class. It's absolutely wonderful. I think they get a very bad rap. Well, they don't get a rap at all, do they? The second class passengers.

No, I think White Star are getting a bad rap, Tom. I think people judge it harshly on the last day or the last few hours of the voyage. But the rest of it was brilliant. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. A lovely time apart from the last two hours right we should end with lawrence beasley they're sailing past the isle of wight and another guy called lawrence beasley he's a widower from second class he sits down to write a letter to

his son to tell him what it's like and he says uh the ship is like a palace there's an uninterrupted deck run of 165 yards for exercise and a ripping swimming bath, gymnasium and squash racket court and a huge lounge and surrounding verandas. My cabin is ripping hot and cold water and a very comfy looking bed and plenty of room. I would like to see ripping. Yeah. Ripping come back as a word of praise. To be honest, that's why I liked that quotation. It was just for that.

It's a ripping quotation. Thank you, for that. It's a ripping quotation. Ah, thank you, Tom. It's been a ripping voyage. It's been a ripping voyage so far. Let's hope it carries on. But the next episode, we will be looking at steerage. Third class. Which will be familiar to all viewers of the film as a place where there's endless Irish dancing.

People have a great time yeah and uptight millionaires daughters get to meet people who you know have won their place by playing cards but also excitingly tom we won't just be talking about third class we'll also be introducing not a friend of the rest is history, the iceberg, which will be striking at the end of the next episode, very excitingly. I mean, I just want to stand up for the iceberg community. I mean, the iceberg is doing what icebergs do, which is to float. And I don't want to be prejudiced against it. And if it hadn't been there, then we wouldn't be doing this episode. We wouldn't be doing the story. No, because we haven't done other transit landing voyages, have we?

Except for Columbus, of course, and, and Ann Cortez. So if you would like to join our steerage community at the rest is history club. No, we think of,

of everyone in a club as, as millionaires, don't we? We do. They're millionaires to us. Anyway, the rest is history.com. You get all kinds of benefits.

Crucially, you get to hear the whole of this Titanic series right away. If not, you will have to wait till next time. So on that bombshell, thank you very much. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.