Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (47 page)

MARIA JOSEFA
(“
PEPITA
”)
PEÑASCO
(1889–1972)

Maria Josefa Perez de Soto y Vallejo Peñasco y Castellana
, to use her full, aristocratic name, was met at Pier 54 by the ambassador of Uruguay at the request of her family, and she and her maid,
Fermina Oliva y Ocaña
(1872–1969), were taken to the Waldorf-Astoria. Pepita’s father soon arrived in New York and took Fermina to Halifax with him in search of his son-in-law’s body, but no corpse identified as being that of
Victor Peñasco
was recovered. Pepita married a Spanish baron six years later and had two sons and a daughter and lived a comfortable life similar to the one she would have had with Victor. Fermina continued to work for her for some years and then retired to live with her sister and work as a dressmaker, dying in 1969, at the age of ninety-six.

ARTHUR PEUCHEN
(1859–1929)

Major Peuchen’s
promotion to lieutenant colonel and commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Rifles went ahead as planned in May of 1912 despite rumors to the contrary. He retired from Standard Chemical in 1914 and for the first year of World War I was commander of the Home Battalion of the Queen’s Own. From 1915 to 1918 he lived in London, where his son was a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery and his daughter married an officer from the same regiment. He returned to Canada after the war. In a family memoir, a nephew recalls that “
the backlash of the
Titanic
disaster played havoc with my uncle’s enterprises.” He further claimed that Peuchen eventually lost most of his money and that even “Woodlands” on Lake Simcoe had to be sold. “Years after, when I would mention my uncle,” he recalled, “people would say, ‘Oh yes, he’s the man who dressed in women’s clothes to get off the
Titanic
.’ ” Peuchen certainly sustained losses in 1924 after the collapse of the Home Bank, and it is believed that for a time he lived in a lumbermen’s dormitory in Hinton, Alberta, where he owned tracts of forest. But he died at his home in a fashionable Toronto neighborhood on December 7, 1929. In 1987 his wallet was retrieved from the ocean floor and inside it were a few business cards and some streetcar tickets.

HERBERT PITMAN
(1877–1961)

In July of 1912
“Bert” Pitman
became the third officer on the
Oceanic
, and later served on the
Olympic
but in the purser’s office, due to his deteriorating eyesight. During World War II he worked aboard the troopship SS
Mataroa
as a purser, and in March of 1946 was given an MBE (Member of the British Empire) award for his wartime service. He retired shortly after this to Pitcombe, Somerset, and died there on December 7, 1961, aged eighty-four.

EDITH ROSENBAUM
(
RUSSELL
) (1879–1975)

“
I’m accident prone,”
Edith Rosenbaum
once noted. “I’ve had every disaster but bubonic plague and a husband.” It took Edith several years to recoup her
Titanic
losses—she submitted a large claim for her missing merchandise but was compensated for only a fraction of its worth. In 1916–17 she became a war correspondent for the
New York Herald
, and after the war changed her name to Russell since the French fashion industry was boycotting those with German-sounding names. During the 1920s Edith continued her fashion importing and writing for magazines. She traveled extensively, weathering other catastrophes, such as car accidents and tornadoes, and once danced with Benito Mussolini and raised dogs for Maurice Chevalier. In the mid 1940s she made London her home base, living at Claridge’s and then at the Embassy House Hotel. She made a lifelong friend in the young actor Peter Lawford and became godmother to the children he had with presidential sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford. Edith, too, befriended Walter Lord, bequeathing him her “good luck” musical toy pig. In 1958 she served as an advisor to William MacQuitty, the producer of the film
A Night to Remember
, and tried to persuade him to allow her to design the costumes. In old age Edith became increasingly eccentric and litigious and died in a London hospital on April 4, 1975, at the age of ninety-five.

LUCY NOËLLE MARTHA, COUNTESS OF ROTHES
(1878–1956)

Noëlle Rothes
(pronounced Roth-ez) was hailed as “the plucky little countess” in the aftermath of the disaster, following tributes to her in the newspapers by Seaman Jones and other survivors from Lifeboat 8. Noëlle and her husband, Norman, escaped from the press attention by traveling across the country to Pasadena, California, where the earl had planned to acquire a citrus farm. It was this prospect that had brought Noëlle and her husband’s cousin,
Gladys Cherry
(1881–1965), to make the crossing on the
Titanic
. In the end, the Earl of Rothes decided not to settle in California and the couple returned to Scotland, where Noëlle had been proclaimed a national heroine by the newspapers. She was sympathetic to the grilling that Seaman Thomas Jones and Steward Alfred Crawford had received at the British Inquiry and sent each of them an engraved silver pocket watch. Seaman Jones eventually gave the countess the brass number 8 from the lifeboat, mounted on a plaque. The Earl of Rothes was wounded twice in World War I, and after the war both his health and finances deteriorated, requiring the sale of Leslie House in 1919. Norman died in March of 1927, and on December 22 of that year, Noëlle married an old family friend, Colonel Claude Macfie, and went to live with him in the village of Fairford, Gloucestershire. In the early 1950s, while corresponding with Walter Lord regarding
A Night to Remember
, she recalled that when dining at a London restaurant in the spring of 1913, she had been suddenly overcome with emotion. Soon she realized that the orchestra was playing the “Barcarolle” from
The Tales of Hoffmann
, a tune she had last heard played in the Palm Room on the night of the sinking. Noëlle died of heart failure on September 12, 1956, at the age of seventy-seven. Her cousin-in-law and traveling companion, Gladys Cherry, married a man named George Pringle and died in Godalming, Surrey, on May 4, 1965.

EMILY RYERSON
(1863–1939)

On April 22, 1912,
Emily Ryerson
, her three daughters, and son John attended a funeral service in Philadelphia for the two
Arthur Ryersons
, father and son. Emily soon devoted herself to charity work, and during World War I worked on a fund for French orphans and wounded soldiers which won her the Croix de Guerre. She also traveled with President Herbert Hoover on a goodwill tour of South America. On a visit to China in 1927, the sixty-four-year-old Emily met and later married forty-five-year old Forsythe Sherfesee, a financial advisor to the Chinese government, and the couple made their home in Cap Ferrat. While traveling in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1939, Emily suffered a fatal heart attack and her body was brought back to Cooperstown for burial in the Ryerson family plot overlooking Lake Otsego.

WILLIAM SLOPER
(1883–1955)

William Sloper
went home to New Britain, Connecticut, and became a managing partner in a private investment firm. He married a widow, Helen Lindenberg, in 1915 and helped raise her three daughters. In 1949 he published a biography of his father,
The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson Sloper
, which is today most noteworthy for its chapter on his own
Titanic
experiences. William died on May 1, 1955, and is buried in Fairview Lawn Cemetery, New Britain.

ELEANOR WIDENER
(1861–1937)

After returning to Philadelphia by private train,
Eleanor Widener
, like
Emily Ryerson
, had to prepare funerals for both her husband and her son. At the dedication ceremony for the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard in June of 1915, she met Dr. Alexander Rice, a physician and keen explorer. They married that same year and on their honeymoon embarked on a five-thousand-mile expedition in a steam launch deep into South America. The couple mapped and explored much of the Amazon wilderness and they returned to South America several more times in search of the source of the Orinoco River. They also traveled in India and Europe, and Eleanor died in Paris of a heart attack on July 13, 1937.

RICHARD NORRIS WILLIAMS
(1891–1968)

R. Norris Williams
recuperated well from being half-frozen in a submerged lifeboat. He went to Harvard that fall and soon won several national singles and doubles tennis championships, a doubles trophy at Wimbledon, and a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics. When Collapsible A was recovered by the
Oceanic
in mid-May 1912, Williams’s fur coat with a whiskey flask in its pocket was recovered and returned to him. He served with distinction during World War I and was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. He later became an investment banker in Philadelphia and died on June 2, 1968, aged seventy-seven.

HUGH WOOLNER
(1866–1925)

Only four months after the
Titanic
disaster,
Hugh Woolner
married Mary Alaia Dowson, the widow of an American. The couple had a son the next year and went on to have five daughters. Woolner’s reputation for unsavory financial dealings was reinforced by a 1916–17 court case in which he was accused of exerting undue influence in the drawing up of the will of an elderly woman with a large estate. Woolner and his wife later divided their time between Hungary and England after they inherited a home in Budapest belonging to one of Hugh’s relatives. He died there on February 13, 1925, of respiratory failure, at the age of only fifty-eight. Woolner’s
Titanic
sidekick,
Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson
(1883–1962), stayed in America and in 1917 married Mary Pinchot Eno, a young woman introduced to him by
Helen Candee
. The couple had no children and lived in a large Manhattan town house. On his death, on May 21, 1962, Björnström-Steffansson left behind a sizeable fortune from his father’s pulp empire and his own investments.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

ET: Encyclopedia Titanica website

FDM to CWS: Francis Davis Millet letters to Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Warren Stoddard Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

TDH:
The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation
, edited by Tom Kuntz

OBT:
On Board RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage
, edited by George M. Behe

ST:
The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors
, edited by Jack Winocour

TIP: Titanic Inquiry Project website

PROLOGUE: A RARE GATHERING

  1
“a noble apartment” The Shipbuilder
, 1912, in Foster,
Titanic Reader
, p. 32.

  2
“the unsinkable subject”
Lord,
Night Lives On
, p. 1.

  3
“a rare gathering”
Futrelle, in OBT, p. 288.

  4
“a small world bent on pleasure”
Duff Gordon,
Discretions
, p. 162.

  5
“an exquisite microcosm”
Lord,
Night Lives On
, p. 6.

  6
“as if some great”
Strange [Oelrichs], in King,
A Season of Splendor
, p. 439.

  7
“The thought occurs that the
Titanic
is”
Lord, in Ballard,
Discovery of the Titanic
, p. 7.

CHAPTER 1: AT THE CHERBOURG QUAY

  1
“the porters scurrying around”
Williams,
“CQD.”

  2
“made a god of punctuality”
Lehr,
“King Lehr,”
p. 164.

  3
“Obnoxious, ostentatious”
Sharpey-Schafer,
Soldier of Fortune
, pp. 130–31. See full text
this page
.

  4
“Millet,” he once wrote
Twain, in Sharpey-Schafer,
Soldier of Fortune
, p. 16.

  5
“Millet was an artist”
Charles Francis Adams, in Sharpey-Schafer,
Soldier of Fortune
, p. 16.