Free Voyagers of the Titanic by Richard Davenport-Hines Page A

was the largest room afloat, seating 532 diners, running the full 92 feet of the ship’s width and 114 feet in length. Its style was Jacobean, but instead of the somber oak panels found in great English houses, the walls and ceilings were painted a shiny, hygienic white. Oak furniture was meant to heighten the Jacobean air, but the effect was marred by patterned linoleum floor tiles. The separate restaurant on B deck, measuring sixty by forty-five feet, was in a fake Louis XVI style, with fawn-colored walnut paneling, gilded moldings, brass and gilt light brackets, a long buffet table with a marble fleur de pêche top, and fawn silk curtains across the bay windows, with flowered borders and embroidered pelmets. The plaster ceiling was patterned with trellises and garlands, the Axminster carpet was of Louis XVI design, the walnut chairs upholstered in tapestry of a treillage of roses; and there was the inevitable bandstand.
    The reception room extended the width of the ship. It, too, had white paneling in Jacobean style, hung with Aubusson tapestry work. The first-class lounge situated on promenade deck A was derived from the style of the Palace of Versailles. The reading and writing room was in the Georgian style of the 1780s. The smoking room, where convivial men foregathered in sprawling apathy, was mahogany paneled, supposedly in the Georgian style of the 1720s. There was a French café with little tables, cane settees, wicker easy chairs, and climbing plants trained on green trellises to create the illusion of being ashore. The Turkish baths were designed in seventeenth-century Moorish style, tiled in blue and green. It was “all very marvellous,” declared a Philadelphia journalist, “the luxurious hotel transferred to the ocean; the glittering lobster palace afloat.” 14

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    Sailors
     
It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of
All one’s friends and relations.
    —A RTHUR H UGH C LOUGH, “A MOURS DE V OYAGE ”
     
    T he Titanic was the greatest steamship in the world, but its officers were called sailors for a reason: they were all men who had been trained at sea under sail. Herbert Pitman, its third officer, who had sixteen years’ experience as a mariner before joining the Titanic, had four years as an apprentice under sail followed by three years on sailing ships before serving on the Blue Anchor Line steamships running to Australia. The fifth officer, twenty-eight-year-old Harold Lowe, had been seafaring half his life, having run away from his apprentice master at the age of fourteen and served on seven schooners and several square-rigged vessels before graduating to West African steamships. William Murdoch, the Titanic ’s first officer, had left school at fifteen to become an apprentice seaman on a barque plying between Liverpool and the Pacific Coast of America. Neither their pride nor their sentiment let White Star officers forget that they had learned seamanship in the days of rigging, not funnels. The components of the rigging, with such names as buntlines, gooseneck, halyard, parrel beads, and stay mouse, and the varieties of sail, including crab claw, laleen, moonsail, spanker, and topgallant, already seemed picturesque in the age of the Titanic . The dangers and hardships of sailing ships were extreme: the men who had served on them were not prone to idealize or prettify past conditions, but most regretted the obsolescence of sail and hankered for the old days. With little prompting, they shared hair-raising memories of typhoons, accidents, and privations, as incontrovertible proof of the masculine hardiness they had shown when young.
    Arthur Rostron, born in 1869, apprenticed in 1887 to the full-rigged ship Cedric the Saxon, spent eight winters in the South Atlantic and ten years under sail. He recalled with pride, not loathing, being “up aloft for hours on end, very often all through the raging night; six or eight hours on a foreyard trying to furl the foresail, the