Free Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster Page A

with rose-patterned paper that Archie claimed made him feel like Heliogabalus, the Roman emperor who smothered his guests in roses. Despite these hints of domesticity, there is no evidence that the relationship extended beyond companionship. A young naval lieutenant who roomed for a time with the two men would only remember their unusual sympathy of mind and that “on the older man [i.e., Millet] Major Butt leaned for advice and took it.”

     
    W. T. Stead (photo credit 1.35)
    AS MILLET WAS writing about the “queer lot of people” on the Titanic , the man who had spurred an act of Parliament that outlawed homosexuality in Great Britain was also dashing off final notes to family and friends in his C-deck cabin. William Thomas Stead was a trailblazing investigative journalist, known to all as W. T. Stead and often hailed as “the Napoleon of newsmen.” Over the past thirty years, Stead had tackled issues that had both outraged and mobilized people in Britain and abroad. In 1890, the New York Sun claimed that Stead, “between the years 1884 and 1888 came closer to governing England than any other man in the kingdom.” Over the last fifteen years, the veteran journalistic crusader had made world peace one of his causes and this had earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1903. He was now on his way to New York to give a talk on “Universal Peace” at the Men and Religion Forward Movement Congress in Carnegie Hall on April 21.
    At sixty-two, Stead was three years younger than Frank Millet but looked older due to his furrowed brow and snowy Old Testament beard. The prophetic look was appropriate to another of Stead’s pursuits—communing with the spirit world. He had become the medium for a spirit named Julia, who communicated through automatic writing and séances. Stead had compiled Julia’s messages in a book entitled After Death and had also set up a psychic institute called Julia’s Bureau. Julia had not communicated any Titanic forewarnings to Stead, however, and in a letter sent at Queenstown to his daughter Estelle he enthuses about the size and magnificence of the ship and his “love of a cabin … with a window about 4 ft. by 2 ft. looking out over the sunlit sea.” He also describes the Titanic as “a splendid, monstrous, floating Babylon.” The “Babylon” metaphor significantly invokes Stead’s most famous—and most notorious—journalistic campaign, a series of articles he wrote in 1885 entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” As the editor of the London daily newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette , Stead had been approached in May of 1885 by a prominent anti-vice campaigner to help rouse public opinion in support of a bill that was stalled in Parliament. The Criminal Law Amendment Act, which proposed measures to combat child prostitution and white slavery, had gone down to defeat three times in the House of Commons. The anti-vice advocate’s stirring stories of exploited children fired Stead’s reformist zeal and he plunged into an investigation of London’s seamy underworld, interviewing everyone from procurers and pimps to rescue workers and jail chaplains. He even arranged for one of his female staffers and a Salvation Army lass to pose as prostitutes and penetrate brothels, with the assumption that they could make an escape before service was required.
    When the first installment of “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” appeared on July 6, 1885, it caused a sensation. Victorian London had never seen such frank sexual content in print. Headlines like THE VIOLATION OF VIRGINS , THE CONFESSIONS OF A BROTHEL-KEEPER , and HOW GIRLS WERE BOUGHT AND RUINED both titillated and outraged. When W.H. Smith & Son, London’s largest distributor to newsstands, refused to sell the papers, volunteers, including members of the Salvation Army, stepped in to help. Even George Bernard Shaw telephoned with an offer of assistance. Over the next four days the Gazette ’s offices