Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (45 page)

LÉONTINE PAULINE “NINETTE” AUBART
(1887–1964)

Several Guggenheim family members awaited the arrival of the
Carpathia
, and it is believed that they arranged accommodation for
Ninette Aubart
and her maid in New York and kept the news of her existence hidden from
Ben Guggenheim
’s widow, Florette. Ninette and her maid took the
Adriatic
to Liverpool on May 3 and proceeded from there to Paris. She filed a claim of $12,220 for her belongings and $25,000 for injuries against White Star, though like most claimants, she received far less. Ninette Aubart married three times and had at least one child, a son, before her death in October of 1964, in Paris. One of her husbands was believed to have been a member of the French Cabinet, and René Harris recalled in her 1932
Liberty
article that on a visit to Paris she was invited to tea by her
Carpathia
roommate, who was by then married to “
one of the outstanding figures in the French capital.”

LAWRENCE BEESLEY
(1877–1967)

Lawrence Beesley
wrote a successful book,
The Loss of the SS Titanic
, that was published in late 1912. A devout Christian Scientist, he also wrote in a church journal about how his faith had sustained him during the disaster, as did another Christian Scientist on board, Second Officer
Charles Lightoller
. Beesley corresponded with Walter Lord while he was researching
A Night to Remember
and visited the set during the filming of the 1958 movie based on the book. He died on February 14, 1967, at the age of eighty-nine.

KARL BEHR
(1885–1949)

Karl Behr
and
Helen Newsom
were married in March of 1913 and had three sons and one daughter. Karl continued to play tennis through 1915, competing with
R. Norris Williams
and being ranked in the top ten of U.S. players. He later went into banking and became vice president of Dillon, Read & Co. of New York and was also on the board of several companies, among them Goodyear Tire and Rubber and the National Cash Register Company. After his death, on October 15, 1949, Helen married Dean Mathey, a tennis player and friend of Karl’s; she died in 1965.

JOSEPH BOXHALL
(1884–1967)

After testifying at both the U.S. and British inquiries,
Joseph Boxhall
became the fourth officer on the
Adriatic
. During World War I he served on cruisers and a torpedo boat and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander. After the war, he married Marjory Beddells, the daughter of a Yorkshire industrialist and the marriage was a happy one, though they had no children. Boxhall returned to the merchant service in 1919, became a chief officer, though never a captain, and retired in 1940. He served as a technical advisor on the film
A Night to Remember
, to the surprise of those who knew him since, until then, he had been reluctant to talk about the
Titanic
. He died at the age of eighty-three, on April 25, 1967, the last of the
Titanic
’s surviving officers, and his ashes were scattered over the ocean near where the
Titanic
had gone down.

GEORGE BRERETON
(1874–1942)

Professional gambler
George Brereton
(also known as Brayton, Bradley, etc.) befriended passenger
Henry Stengel
on board the
Carpathia
and later tried to involve him in a horse-racing scam in New York. Brereton died of a gunshot wound to the head in 1942 and is believed to be another of the
Titanic
’s suicides. His cardsharp companion
Charles Romaine
died after being hit by a New York taxi in 1922. What became of
Harry Homer
is unknown.

HAROLD BRIDE
(1890–1956)

Harold Bride
was still in the
Carpathia
’s wireless room with
Harold Cottam
when Guglielmo Marconi came on board at Pier 54 to personally congratulate the two operators. Bride sold his story to the newspapers, and a photograph of him being carried off the
Carpathia
with bandaged feet was widely printed. After returning to England, he resumed work as a wireless operator and during World War I served on the small steamer
Mona’s Isle
as a telegraphist. He married in 1919 and had three children, and later moved to Scotland, where he worked as a salesman and died at the age of sixty-six, on April 29, 1956.

MARGARET BROWN
(1867–1932)

Margaret Brown
continued to travel and work on behalf of the issues she supported, such as women’s suffrage, literacy for children, historic preservation, and the
Titanic
Survivors’ Committee. During World War I, she worked with the American Committee for Devastated France to rebuild damaged towns on the Western Front and also helped provide care for wounded soldiers, which resulted in her being awarded the French Legion of Honor. Her husband, J. J. Brown (who had said of his wife after the disaster, “
She’s too mean to sink”) died in 1922, and legal wrangles over his will consumed much of her time and money over several years. Always fascinated by the theater, Margaret began studying acting in the Sarah Bernhardt tradition in her late fifties and even toured in a play made famous by “the divine Sarah.” On October 26, 1932, while staying at the Barbizon Hotel in New York, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-five. An autopsy revealed that she had a significant brain tumor. After her death, a
Denver Post
reporter named Gene Fowler wrote a highly fanciful account of her life and dubbed her “Molly” Brown, which later led to the Broadway musical
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
, which became a movie starring Debbie Reynolds.

FRANCIS M. BROWNE
(1880–1960)

Francis M. Browne
became Father Browne SJ after his ordination in 1915, at which time he was immediately assigned as chaplain to the Irish Guards who were serving on the Western Front. There he was wounded several times and his lungs were damaged by mustard gas. After the war he was sent to Australia so his health could recover, a trip he documented carefully with his camera. On his death in 1960, an archive of more than forty-two thousand photographs was left to the Irish Jesuits, and this extraordinary legacy has since been featured in books and exhibitions.

DANIEL BUCKLEY
(1890–1918)

After his testimony before the U.S. Senate Inquiry,
Daniel Buckley
was assailed as a coward for hiding under a woman’s shawl in a
Titanic
lifeboat. Yet during World War I he served his adopted country as an infantryman and was killed in 1918. He is buried in his hometown of Ballydesmond in County Cork.

EMMA BUCKNELL
(1852–1927)

At the age of eighteen,
Emma Ward
, the daughter of a clergyman, had become the third wife of William Bucknell, a wealthy Philadelphian who was forty-one years her senior. The marriage produced a son and three daughters, but in his seventies Bucknell became irascible and stingy toward his wife and family, despite his considerable wealth, which had provided the principal endowment for Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Fortuitously, Bucknell died in 1890, leaving Emma a wealthy widow and allowing her the time and means to travel. After the
Titanic
disaster, Emma was outspoken about the ill-prepared crew and poor lifeboat provisions, and she was reportedly affected by the trauma of the disaster for the rest of her life. She divided her time between a home in Clearwater, Florida, and her Adirondack retreat on Saranac Lake, where she died of heart failure on June 27, 1927.

HELEN CANDEE
(1859–1949)

Helen Candee
recovered from the broken ankle she received while climbing into Boat 6, although she had to walk with a cane for a year. After publishing “Sealed Orders,” her account of the disaster, in
Collier’s
magazine in May 1912, she tried to put the
Titanic
behind her, though she requested $10,000 for personal injury and $4,646 for lost possessions in a class-action lawsuit against the White Star Line. In October of 1912 her large and lavish book on tapestries, simply called
The Tapestry Book
, was published and became her best-known work. In 1917, at the age of fifty-eight, she became a volunteer nurse with the Italian Red Cross and tended wounded soldiers in field hospitals just behind the battle lines. In Milan she helped care for a wounded young American ambulance driver named Ernest Hemingway, whose love affair with one of Helen’s coworkers helped inspire his novel
A Farewell to Arms
. In the 1920s Helen was drawn to travels in the Far East and wrote two acclaimed books,
Angkor the Magnificent
and
New Journeys in Old Asia
. In 1930 she returned to her love of textiles for her eighth and final book,
Weaves and Draperies: Classic and Modern
. During her seventies she continued to travel and often wrote articles for
National Geographic
. By age eighty, as she became physically weaker, she lived with her daughter Edith and in the summers visited her cottage in York Harbor, Maine. It was there, on August 23, 1949, at the age of ninety, that her productive, event-filled life drew to a close.

CHARLOTTE CARDEZA
(1854–1939)

The largest claim for lost possessions was made by
Charlotte Cardeza
, who submitted a detailed inventory of the vast wardrobe she had brought on board, which she valued at £36,567 2s ($177,352.75). Charlotte continued to travel the world until the 1930s, when declining health caused her to settle in at Montebello, her Main Line mansion. When she died at the age of eighty-five, on August 1, 1939, the bulk of her estate was left to her son,
Thomas Cardeza
(1875–1952), who in his mother’s name endowed a foundation to study blood diseases at Thomas Jefferson University.

PAUL CHEVRÉ
(1866–1914)

The official opening of the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa was postponed due to the death of
Charles Hays
, and a rather subdued ceremony was held on June 12, 1912. Sculptor
Paul Chevré
’s bust of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier was installed in the lobby though Chevré himself would die less than two years later. His obituary claimed that he survived the sinking of the
Titanic
but never recovered from the shock of it.

EUGENE DALY
(1883–1965)

Irish bagpiper
Eugene Daly
retained his love of music throughout his life, later taking up the flute when his wife objected to the sound of the pipes. He arrived penniless off the
Carpathia
and worked at various jobs in New York before going to war in 1917. His Irish girlfriend accepted his proposal and married him before he left for France. The couple returned to Ireland in 1921 when Eugene’s mother was dying and stayed on in Galway, where their only daughter, Marion (Mary), was born. Mary and her husband emigrated to America in 1952, and after his wife’s death in 1961, Eugene came over to join them and died in New York on October 30, 1965.

ELIZA GLADYS
“
MILLVINA
”
DEAN
(1912–2009)

Two-month-old
Millvina Dean
, her mother
Eva Georgetta “Ettie” Light Dean
(1879–1975), and two-year-old brother
Bertram Dean
(1910–1992), returned to England aboard the
Adriatic
, where Millvina became the “pet of the liner,” with passengers vying to be photographed holding her. The family moved in with Ettie’s parents near Southampton, where Millvina and Bertram were educated with the support of a small stipend from a survivors’ fund. Millvina did not discover that she had been on the
Titanic
until she was eight and her mother was planning to remarry. Millvina herself never married; she was a cartographer’s assistant during World War II and later worked in the purchasing department of a Southampton engineering firm. In her seventies she became a
Titanic
celebrity and was in great demand to appear at conventions, exhibitions, and on radio and TV programs. During the final years of her life she became the last
Titanic
survivor and continued to graciously sign autographs and tell her story. She died on May 31, 2009, after a short illness, and her ashes were scattered in Southampton harbor, the scene of the
Titanic
’s departure ninety-seven years before.

MAHALA DOUGLAS
(1864–1945)

Mahala Douglas
continued to live in Walden, the large house she and her husband
Walter Douglas
had built on Lake Minnetonka, and at her winter home in Pasadena, until her death at the age of eighty-one, on April 21, 1945. Her husband’s body was recovered by the
Mackay-Bennett
, and she is buried next to him in the Douglas family mausoleum at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.