Free Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic by Daniel Allen Butler

station with as much determination as the aristocracy did their own, whose class was obsessed with respectability—always watchful never to say or do something that even hinted at a lack of good manners or proper breeding, or would somehow suggest that the individual involved was actually nothing more than a puffed-up member of the working class.
    As a result they embraced the values of patriotism, education, hard work, and piety, and were as prim and proper as the upper classes were prof ligate. But while they might appear to be stolid and unimaginative, they were hardly docile: the Liberal party, which had just forced passage of the Parliament Bill that emasculated the House of Lords, had won its overwhelming majority in the Commons in 1908 because the middle class had wholeheartedly endorsed the Liberals’ program of social reforms at home and imperial reforms abroad—reforms that the upper classes had doggedly opposed. They inhabited row upon row of neat, tidy townhouses, each with its own back garden, where in April the narcissus, daffodils, and tulips would be in bloom, the hedgerows in leaf, and the cherry trees in blossom. Spring had come early in 1912, and the whole country seemed to burst with shades of green and bright colors.
    Before long, the train rolled into the Surrey countryside; the brick and slate of the suburbs gave way to dressed fieldstone, half-timbering, and thatch. It was the world of the landed gentry; of the manor house, the village church, and the clusters of cottages; of vast fields of grass and heather, broken by stands of spruce and beech, birch and oak. Here men would listen for the call of the blackbird and the cuckoo, and sharpen their long-bladed scythes in anticipation of the thick spring grasses. Here life moved to a rhythm little changed for centuries, in a world of farmers, shepherds, blacksmiths, weavers, and tanners—men who rose with the sun and retired with it. Their work was hard, for mechanization was still a dream for most. They worked the land and tended their animals much as their great-great-grandfathers had. Occasionally a stolen afternoon would be spent fishing for trout in the Itchen, and most evenings would find the men rewarding themselves with a well-earned pint at the local pub, but always there would be an ear cocked to the wind, an eye glancing at the sky, for all it took was one of those terrible North Sea gales to roll in from the east and wash away an entire spring’s planting or sweep away a flock of sheep in a sudden flood. It was a world undisturbed by the comings and goings of the rich and powerful, and it had precious few summers left.
    There was a third landscape that existed outside the windows of the Boat Train, but it was far removed from the gently rolling countryside of Surrey, both in geography and character. To the north were the industrial cities of the Midlands, where the vistas were of apparently endless corrugated-iron factory roofs, forests of belching smokestacks, and endless warrens of sooty red-brick row houses that gave shelter to the men, women, and children who toiled their lives away in the textile mills or the steel works. This was the economic heart of the British Empire, and like its counterparts in the Ruhr, Le Creusot, or Pittsburgh, it was the home of passions, hopes, and hatreds that would soon reshape Western society.
    Many of these row houses had deteriorated to slums, where a family of eight might share two beds and a pair of thin blankets among them, with little or nothing in the way of sanitary facilities, and subsist on an inadequate diet that left the children stunted, pale, and apathetic. Few children completed even the most basic education: by the age of eight they would be working, usually in a textile mill, where their small and nimble fingers were best suited to work amid fast-moving mechanisms. Wages were rarely more than a few shillings a week, and injuries and fatalities involving a child snatched into the maw of a