Lusitania (16 page)
Authors: Greg King
Gorer wasn’t the only art dealer aboard
Lusitania
. Standing nearly six feet tall, thin, balding, and with a distinguished little beard and a mustache whose tips he habitually waxed, Sir Hugh Lane was quiet, charming, and mild-mannered; he was also, as
The Times
of London noted, “generally regarded as one of the soundest judges” of painting. In 1893, when Lane was eighteen, he got a job at a London gallery when his aristocratic aunt Augusta, Lady Gregory, asked the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures to pull a few strings.
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“How can you waste money on dinners when there are such beautiful things to buy?” Lane once asked a traveling companion.
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Frugality allowed him to open his own showroom, and Lane began arranging exhibitions of Irish artists in London, with an eye to establishing a gallery in Dublin.
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“A Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin,” he wrote, “would create a standard of taste, and a feeling for the relative importance of painters. This would encourage the purchase of pictures, for people will not purchase where they do not know. Such a gallery would be necessary to the student if we are to have a distinct school of painting in Ireland, for it is one’s contemporaries that teach one the most.”
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Although named director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1914, the now ennobled Sir Hugh Lane was frustrated in his attempts to establish a permanent modern collection. When it seemed the issue might drag on interminably, he lent his works by Manet, Degas, and Renoir to the National Gallery in London.
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Lane lived in considerable comfort at Lindsey House in Chelsea, surrounded by marbles, silks, Turkish carpets, and rare porcelains; although mild, he had the unfortunate habit of blurting out whatever crossed his mind. He once entered a friend’s drawing room, raced across the carpet, and abruptly pulled down the curtains, crying, “You
really
must not have these in your house!”
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Lane never married: his aunt thought that a marriage would have worked only if he and his wife “had lived in separate houses.”
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Noting his fastidious attention to dress and decoration, his love of art, and his “somewhat effeminate manner,” people speculated that Lane was homosexual.
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He left almost no paper trail to document his private life: given the times in which Lane lived, perhaps discretion was indeed advisable.
Having just sold a Titian and a Hans Holbein portrait to Henry Clay Frick in New York, Lane was now on his way back to Europe.
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He carried a handful of paintings bound for Dublin: there were rumors of watertight lead tubes; of works by Monet, Rubens, Titian, and Rembrandt; and of a $4 million insurance policy should the masterpieces be lost.
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Although he dismissed talk of a possible U-boat attack as “too absurd” for words, Lane worried about traveling on the British liner.
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Before departing New York, he wrote a new codicil to his will, leaving the Impressionist paintings then on loan to the National Gallery in London to the city of Dublin. Lane admitted to being “frightened,” telling a friend he was “going into danger” by sailing aboard
Lusitania.
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“As the days passed,” recalled forty-year-old Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat of this voyage on
Lusitania,
“the passengers seemed to enjoy them more and more, and formed those acquaintances such as one does on an ocean crossing.” Lauriat had crossed the Atlantic twenty-two times before on business, though this was his first trip aboard one of the truly majestic “greyhounds,” and he found the experience exciting as he roamed the decks, doing his best to forget the German notice he had seen in New York.
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By Tuesday, May 4, the earlier, dismal weather had finally disappeared and people took to the decks. It was, wrote Frederick Orr-Lewis, “perfect weather” for most of the voyage, with “scarcely a ripple all the way across and sufficiently warm to go on deck without an overcoat.”
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Lusitania
’s Promenade Deck, a sweeping expanse running the length of the main superstructure, offered both shelter and magnificent views over the sea: it was the perfect place to sit and enjoy the voyage. A deck chair or chaise, a guidebook warned, “is absolutely essential to comfort.” Passengers were advised to apply to the ship’s deck steward, who then assigned chairs at the rate of $1 for the duration of the crossing: once let, passengers should not move deck chairs from their assigned place.
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On this voyage, the most desirable chairs were on the starboard side, where the sun was most likely to shine and the superstructure sheltered them from northern winds.
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Here, passengers could sit, laps covered by warm woolen rugs, as they chatted, read, and enjoyed the passing ocean.
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Emily Post, at least, warned against deck chair friendships: “To have your next chair neighbor on deck insist on talking to you, if you don’t want to be talked to, is very annoying, and it is bad form.” The surest way to ward off the unwelcome was to utter a few “monosyllables” in reply, which “should be taken to mean that you prefer to be left to your own diversions.”
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For the more adventuresome, there were usually plenty of activities to be found on deck. The more energetic might make daily circuits of the ship, while others joined in outdoor games usually arranged by the ship’s quartermaster.
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“Every day,” recalled Toronto department store buyer Robinson Pirie, he joined a group of fellow Canadians, buyers for Eaton’s Department Store, and “played deck quoits, shuffleboard, or something.”
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Deck quoits, a game involving the tossing of rope rings onto a hook, was always popular, as was bull board, where little bags of sand were tossed at a square divided into numbers. Shuffleboard was a perennial favorite, and there were even games of tennis, played using a badminton net stretched across the width of the deck. Ladies who declined to play were advised to bring needlework and embroidery to help fill the hours.
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Some gentlemen took to the deck; others seemed to spend most of their days in the Smoking Room, situated near the aft end of
Lusitania
’s Boat Deck. The First Class Smoking Room was meant to evoke the atmosphere of an exclusive gentlemen’s club in London. Designed in a vaguely Queen Anne style, the roughly fifty-foot-square room featured walls paneled in Italian walnut set between finely wrought Corinthian pilasters. Sofas and chairs covered in red upholstery were scattered atop the Brussels carpet; above the wide, cream-colored cornice adorned with decorative reliefs stretched an immense stained glass barrel-vaulted skylight. To provide just the right atmosphere, the marble fireplace here burned coal to provide dancing flames.
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The effect, wrote one periodical, was of a room “of quiet repose and richness, in pleasant contrast to the brightness of the white and gold of other public apartments.”
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Beneath a fine haze of blue cigarette smoke and against the sound of ice clinking in tumblers of whiskey, passengers whiled away pleasant afternoons over games of bridge, whispered racy stories, or exchanged business cards and cemented potential deals. A liner typically carried thousands of cigars, numerous brands of cigarettes, and a variety of tobacco for pipes, but travelers were generally warned that it was better to bring their own supplies, carefully wrapped in tinfoil and waxed paper to avoid disintegration in the sea air.
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Michael Byrne must have liked to smoke: he boarded
Lusitania
with three hundred cigars and eleven pounds of tobacco for his use.
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Even if one didn’t resort to Cunard’s supplies, a passenger who frequented the Smoking Room was advised to tip the steward 50 cents at the end of the voyage.
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Playing cards at sea was always a risk. “A curious, but none the less dangerous, type of adventurer known as the ocean gambler and sometimes less politely as a sea-going sharper and swindler,” warned one guidebook, “crosses the North Atlantic with great regularity.”
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In theory, gambling of any sort was not allowed on passenger liners; in practice, however, stewards tended to look the other way, especially as so many travelers seemed intent on violating the rule. It remained in force mainly to protect the shipping line if a disgruntled losing passenger attempted a lawsuit.
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Professional gamblers, cardsharps, and confidence tricksters were usually ingenious, charming, and well mannered. Some made their entire living crossing and recrossing the ocean, swindling the unsuspecting out of small fortunes. Passage on a liner like
Lusitania
was almost tailor-made for their activities. Few people knew each other, and circumstance brought together a heady mix of businessmen, industrialists, millionaires, and wealthy politicians, all relaxed, accustomed to striking up conversation with casual acquaintances, and all ripe for the picking. There was just enough time to mix and mingle, play out their games, and escape before suspicions were aroused.
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Passengers were warned to be particularly careful if approached by several men and asked to join a game already in progress.
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To avoid unpleasant situations, most liners posted prominent notices alerting passengers to the danger of professional gamblers.
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Shipping lines kept lists of such troublesome adventurers; some even denied passage to those who had previously been embroiled in a shipboard scandal. To thwart this, some relied on false identities, while others, fearful of being identified by watchful stewards, grew or shaved beards and mustaches and tried to alter their appearance. A seasoned and diligent Smoking Room steward was the naive traveler’s best defense against such characters. Once, a steward spotted just such an adventurer sitting smugly at a table and wrestled him to the carpet before his fellow startled passengers; on another occasion, a steward walked up to a well-known gambler and loudly asked, “What name
this
time, Sir?”
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Two forms of gambling, though, were deemed safe: the Ship’s Daily Run, and the Pool Auction, operated by the Smoking Room steward. The Daily Run was a long-established source of diversion for many travelers who, for minimal sums, could place bets as to how far
Lusitania
had traveled in the past twenty-four hours. The person with the closest number won the small pot.
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The Pool Auction was a more expensive—though potentially more rewarding—affair. The day’s previous run was posted and tickets were sold covering a range of some twenty numbers high and low of this. If the number was close to the run, a passenger might keep it; if he wanted a different number, he could place his up for auction, and bid on a ticket offered by a fellow traveler. Numbers closest to the average went for the highest amounts; a ticket might cost as little as a few dollars, or as much as $100, depending on its popularity. Storms, fogs, or other unsuspected delays could throw the system into disarray, and bidders often chased down officers, attempting to gain any inside information that would give them an edge. Every day at noon, a slip of paper, signed by an officer on the bridge, arrived in the Smoking Room and gave the run for the past twenty-four hours. The passenger with the closest number to this in the Pool Auction then won the previous day’s pot—a prize that could be upward of a thousand dollars.
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Such conventional distractions didn’t hold much appeal to Margaret, Lady Mackworth; her entire life had been a gamble, with higher stakes than the wagers exchanged in any smoking room. Like her fellow traveler Theodate Pope, Margaret exemplified a struggle against expectation. It was the age of the New Woman. By turns scorned and celebrated in popular works like Henry James’s
Daisy Miller,
Henrik Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House,
and Elinor Glyn’s
Three Weeks,
she was willing to defy tradition for personal happiness. It was no accident that, as with Theodate and Margaret, most of these adventurous women came from wealthy backgrounds: money afforded them education, allowed them to travel, and exposed them to new ideas where marriage no longer defined feminine opportunity. In the last few decades, they had entered the workforce, not as servants or seamstresses but as journalists, doctors, and lawyers. Increasingly, they marched through the streets of London and New York, demanding the vote as onlookers both applauded their efforts and assaulted them with derisive shouts and hurled tomatoes. Margaret Mackworth had dodged her fair share of tomatoes. Born the only daughter of Welsh coal magnate David Thomas and his wife, Sybil, in 1883, Margaret later complained that her early education had been filled with useless “trifles.”
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She rectified this with diligent study that eventually led her to Somerville College, Oxford, but chafed at the restricted opportunities allowed to young ladies of her time and class. Hers was a childhood of conflicted influences. Her tall, imposing father, who served as a Liberal Member of Parliament for Wales, was “imperious” and temperamental, yet “honest and straightforward.”
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“I don’t see what difference it makes what other people think of me,” he once said. “I have a very good opinion of myself.”
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He derided the “groveling snobbery” surrounding the royal family, yet secretly yearned for a title.
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