BY SATURDAY, MAY 1, THE HEAT WAVE HAD DISSIPATED. The morning was cold, the sky pewter. The temperature made it easier for passengers arriving at Cunard’s Pier 54 to transport their belongings, for now they could simply wear their heavy coats, rather than bearing them draped over their arms along with all the other things they carried, their canes, umbrellas, valises, parcels, books, and babies, all in evidence on the sidewalk outside the terminal, as a long black line of taximeter cabs emerged from Eleventh Avenue and pulled close to the curb. Large bags traveled on the floor beside the drivers and were hauled from the cabs by squat, strong-looking men in open jackets and bully caps.
All these things were captured on film by a motion-picture camera stationed just outside the entrance to the terminal. Passengers crossed its plane of view: men in topcoats, fedoras, and snap-brim caps; women with large hats mounded with sewn-on flowers; toddlers bundled as if for the Arctic, one with a knit cap pulled low over the ears. Now and then a face appeared in startling closeup, with that look travelers have always had over time, stern, concentrating, trying to pay the cabbie, hold the cane and gloves—the empty glove fingers flexing like a cow’s udder—and still keep track of the suitcase and trunk receding into the Cunard terminal.
At the far side of the building, the Lusitania’s hull rose high above the wharf in a black wall of steel and rivets. The ship seemed as indestructible as anything that could be imagined, even for an age that imagined well and placed so much trust in immensity and invention.
The furnaces in its boiler rooms flared as firemen raised steam for departure; its funnels exhausted braids of gray smoke into the mist above.
AS ALWAYS there were passengers who had achieved fame, and their arrival created a stir among the thousands of well-wishers, kin, and spectators now gathered along the wharf to see the ship off. Cunard had built grandstands to honor the custom, and these were full as always; they afforded a view not just of the ship but of a portion of Lower Manhattan and the wharves and vessels jutting from the shore on both sides of the Hudson. Just north stood the piers of the White Star Line, which three years earlier, almost to the month, were to have received the Titanic. Among the spectators the attention given to the Lusitania and its passengers was more acute than usual, given the German warning published in the city’s papers that morning.
Here came Charles Frohman, the theater impresario, who had made Ethel Barrymore a star and had brought the play Peter Pan to America, for which he dressed Maude Adams in a woodsy tunic with a broad collar, and in so doing forever engraved a particular image of the boy in the world’s imagination. Frohman also produced the stage show Sherlock Holmes, with William Gillette as its namesake hero, with deerstalker cap and meerschaum pipe. Frohman, wearing a blue double-breasted suit, walked with a marked limp and used a cane. A friend of his also came aboard, Marguerite Lucile Jolivet, twenty-five years old, known universally by her stage and film name, Rita Jolivet. Though she had already performed in Shakespearean plays in London, including a turn as Juliet, and had appeared in several silent films made in Italy, she was still only a fledgling star, but Frohman liked her, and his interest virtually assured her a vibrant career. She was traveling now to Europe to act in several more Italian films.
Another arrival was George Kessler, a wealthy wine importer known the world over as the “Champagne King.” Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst, he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as “freak dinners”—perhaps most notably the “Gondola Party” he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel’s courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.
By far the most glamorous passenger was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son and primary heir of the late Cornelius, whose death in 1899 had left Alfred a rich man. Something of a rake, Alfred was tall and lean, with dark eyes and hair, and a taste for expensive suits. He was a welcome presence on board, especially among the women, despite the fact that he was married and carried with him a history of scandal. His first wife, Ellen French, had divorced him in 1908, charging him, as the New York Times put it, with “misconducting himself with an unknown woman” in his private railcar. The woman turned out to be Mary Ruiz, wife of a Cuban diplomat. The scandal drove Ruiz to commit suicide. Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America’s awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune. She was not on board. Vanderbilt was also a member of what a Minnesota newspaper called the “Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the Titanicbut for one reason or another had changed their minds. Needless to say, Vanderbilt traveled in style, booking one of the Lusitania’s “Parlor Suites.” He lodged his valet two doors down the corridor, in an interior room with neither porthole nor bath. Vanderbilt paid for both tickets in cash, $1,001.50, equivalent to over $22,000 in today’s dollars.
Reporters came aboard, as usual, looking to interview famous or notorious passengers, only today their interest was more focused than usual. It was a mark of the importance of shipping and the frequency with which transatlantic liners called at New York that every newspaper had a “ship news” reporter. Each paper devoted a page to the arrivals and departures of the great liners and to advertisements and schedules for the many shipping lines with piers in the city. It was on these pages that the German warning had appeared in a number of Saturday morning editions.
The ship-news reporters worked out of a shedlike structure near Battery Park, in Lower Manhattan, adjacent to the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry, where a battered green door gave way to a room full of worn desks and telephones used by reporters for a dozen newspapers and one wire service. The reporters tended to favor certain ships, often for intangible reasons. “Ships do have personalities,” wrote Jack Lawrence, the shipping writer for the New York Evening Mail. Some ships “have character and a warm, friendly atmosphere while others are only steel plates riveted around throbbing turbines.” One of the favorites was always the Lusitania. The ship invariably provided news, because as the fastest and most luxurious ocean liner still in service it tended to draw the richest, most prominent passengers. Part of the ship’s appeal was also due to the fact that its longtime chief purser, James McCubbin, sixty-two, welcomed the reporters’ attention and directed them to passengers likely to be of interest. As purser, McCubbin had the responsibility to make sure all passengers were tucked into their cabins and berths as quickly as possible, to store their valuables, and—no small thing—to compile their bar bills at the end of the voyage. In the words of the Cunard officers’ manual, he was “to give satisfaction to all classes of passengers.”
The reporters met the Lusitania just before its departures, but also upon arrival, when they would sail out to the quarantine station in New York Harbor. A ritual followed. They gathered in McCubbin’s cabin. He would order a cabin boy to bring some ice, club soda, and a couple of bottles of Cunard Line Scotch. He shut the door and handed out passenger lists. The last such session had taken place the previous week, when the Lusitania arrived from Liverpool, and had brought the reporters some unwelcome news. McCubbin announced that his next voyage, the return to Liverpool departing Saturday, May 1, would be his last crossing. Company rules required that he retire. “I’m about to become the most useless mortal on earth,” he told the reporters—“the sailor home from the sea.” He called it a joke. “Sailors don’t have homes,” he said, and added, “When a sailor gets so old he can’t work any more they ought to sew him up in a staysail rag and heave him over the side.”
On Saturday morning, reporter Jack Lawrence went aboard as usual, but now with a particular story in mind. He carried with him a copy of the German Embassy’s warning.
Lawrence stopped by the cabin of Alfred Vanderbilt and knocked on the door. Vanderbilt himself opened it, wearing an elegant suit with a pink carnation in one lapel. In the room beyond, his valet was hard at work unpacking a small mountain of baggage. Lawrence had tried to interview Vanderbilt in the past and had typically found it a pointless exercise because the man rarely had much to say. “Alfred Vanderbilt may have been a riot among the ladies,” Lawrence wrote, “but in the presence of newspapermen he was a shy and shrinking violet.”
Vanderbilt commented that there seemed to be an unusual amount of excitement aboard. “Lots of talk about submarines, torpedoes and sudden death,” Vanderbilt said. “I don’t take much stock in it myself. What would they gain by sinking the Lusitania?”
He showed Lawrence a telegram he had received after boarding. “The Lusitania is doomed,” it read. “Do not sail on her.” It was signed “Mort.” Vanderbilt said he didn’t know anyone named Mort but wondered if it might have been an allusion to death. “Probably somebody trying to have a little fun at my expense.”
Out on deck, Lawrence came across Elbert Hubbard, at this point one of the most famous men in America—the soap salesman turned author who had founded a collective in East Aurora, New York, called the Roycrofters, where men and women built furniture, bound books, made prints, and produced finely crafted goods of leather and metal. As an author, he was best known for his inspirational book, A Message to Garcia, about the value of personal initiative, and for an account of the Titanic disaster that centered on one woman’s refusal to enter a lifeboat without her husband; he was headed now to Europe with the goal of interviewing Kaiser Wilhelm. Hubbard was famous as well for coining crisp aphorisms, including “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” He wore a Stetson hat and a flamboyant black cravat—more like a large gift ribbon—and had long flowing hair. When Lawrence approached him, Hubbard was standing beside his wife and eating a large red apple.
Hubbard hadn’t seen the warning. “When I showed it to him he merely glanced at it and went right on chewing his apple,” Lawrence wrote. Hubbard took another apple out of his pocket and gave it to Lawrence. “Here, have an apple and don’t bother your head about those Potsdam maniacs. They’re all crazy.”
Lawrence pressed him. What if the German navy really was planning an attack?
“What’ll I do?” Hubbard said. “Why, I’ll stay on the ship. I’m too old to go chasing after lifeboats and I never was much of a hand at swimming. No, we’ll stay by the ship.” He turned to his wife. “Won’t we Ma?” It was Lawrence’s impression that Mrs. Hubbard did not share his view.
Lawrence discovered that very few passengers had read the German warning. He did not find this surprising. “When you are getting ready to sail on a transatlantic liner at noon,” he wrote, “you seldom have time to sit down and peruse the morning papers.”
Even those who had seen the warning paid little attention. The idea that Germany would dare attempt to sink a fully loaded civilian passenger ship seemed beyond rational consideration. And even if a U-boat did try, common wisdom held that it would inevitably fail. The Lusitania was simply too big and too fast, and once in British waters would doubtless be too well protected by the British navy.
Only two passengers canceled because of the warning itself, a wealthy shoe dealer from Boston, named Edward B. Bowen, and his wife. They did so at the last minute. “A feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen to the Lusitania,” Edward said, later. “I talked it over with Mrs. Bowen and we decided to cancel our passage—although I had an important business engagement in London.”
A few others canceled for reasons of illness and altered plans, or because they had resolved, warning aside, that sailing on a British ship in wartime wasn’t prudent. The famed Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry planned initially to travel with producer Frohman on the Lusitania, but well before the warning appeared she canceled her booking and switched to an American ship, the New York. She encouraged Rita Jolivet to do likewise, but Jolivet kept her original booking. One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes. Second class was so full that a number of passengers learned to their delight that they had been given first-class rooms.
For those passengers who did feel unsettled by the German warning, Cunard offered comforting words. Wrote passenger Ambrose B. Cross, “From the very first the ship’s people asseverated that we ran no danger, that we should run right away from any submarine, or ram her, and so on, so that the idea came to be regarded as a mild joke for lunch and dinner tables.”
Moreover, a conviction existed among passengers that upon entering the waters off Britain’s west coast, the so-called Western Approaches, the ship would be met by the Royal Navy and escorted to Liverpool. Cunard encouraged this belief, and may have believed it as well, on the basis of the Royal Navy’s past efforts to direct and escort the company’s ships. Long before the sailing, Oscar Grab, twenty-eight, a newly married clothing importer from New York, made an appointment to talk with a Cunard representative about submarines and the overall safety of transatlantic crossings. Grab’s wife of thirty-nine days had begged him to take an American ship. Grab and the Cunard official had a long talk, during which Grab was told that steps would be taken to protect the ship during the crossing. He felt reassured enough to buy a first-class ticket, although he waited to do so until the day before departure.
Any passenger who read that morning’s edition of the New York Times would have found explicit reassurance. In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone “there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.”
The Times reporter said, “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?”
“Yes,” Sumner replied; “as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.”
Passenger Ogden Hammond, a real-estate developer and a member of the State Assembly of New Jersey, asked a Cunard official if it was safe to cross on the ship and got the reply, “Perfectly safe; safer than the trolley cars in New York City”—a possibly ill-advised answer, given the high frequency of fatal trolley accidents in the city.
Aboard the Lusitania, there was a good deal of gallows humor, but it was spoken from a position of comfort and confidence. “Of course we heard rumors in New York that they were going to torpedo us, but we didn’t believe it for one moment,” said May Walker, one of the ship’s stewardesses. “We just laughed it off, and said they would never get us, we were too quick, too speedy. It was just the same kind of trip as it was any other trip.”
One of her tasks was to help manage passengers’ children. “There was all sorts of deck games. Quoits. And they had fancy dress parades for them,” Walker said. Children whose birthdays happened to fall during a voyage were given a party—“a little private party,” Walker said—and a birthday cake, with their names on it. “They had the time of their lives, and the run of the ship.”
On this voyage, she would have her hands full. Many British families were now returning home to do their part in supporting the nation in time of war, and the ship’s size and speed provided a degree of reassurance. The passenger manifest listed ninety-five children and thirty-nine infants.
Whole families came aboard. Cunard set aside a group of first-class staterooms for Paul Crompton of Philadelphia and his wife and their six children—one “infant” included—and their nanny, twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy Allen. (Cunard tickets did not identify babies by name, possibly out of quiet resentment that they traveled free.) Crompton was a cousin of Cunard’s chairman, Alfred Allen Booth, whose Booth Group owned the steamship line. Crompton headed the group’s leather-goods subsidiary. Cunard’s New York manager, Sumner, greeted the family just before boarding and “looked personally after their comfort for the voyage.” On the opposite side of the ship, one deck down, the Pearl family of New York took three first-class staterooms, E-51, E-59, and E-67. Frederic Pearl was headed to London for a posting at the American Embassy, and brought his wife and four children: a five-year-old son, two daughters under the age of three, and one infant. The Pearls brought along two nannies. The children, including the baby, stayed with their nannies in E-59 and E-67; the parents lounged in comparative bliss by themselves in E-51. Mrs. Pearl was pregnant.
William S. Hodges, en route to Europe to take over management of the Paris office of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, was traveling with his wife and two young sons. When a Times reporter on the wharf asked Mrs. Hodges if she was afraid of making the trip, she merely laughed and said, “If we go down, we’ll all go down together.”
There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.
AMONG THE less well-known, but still prominent, passengers who came aboard Saturday morning was a forty-eight-year-old woman from Farmington, Connecticut, by the name of Theodate Pope, Theo to her friends. She was accompanied by her mother, who came to see her off, and by a man twenty years her junior, Edwin Friend, with whom she was traveling to London. Prone to wearing a velvet turban, Theodate was an imposing figure, though she stood only a little over five feet tall. She had blond hair, a blunt chin, and vivid blue eyes. Her gaze was frank and direct, reflecting the independence that she had shown throughout her life and that had caused her to reject the path expected of women raised in high society. Her mother once scolded, “You never act as other girls do”; her contemporaries referred to her by that newly coined descriptive label feminist.
Theodate counted among her friends the painter Mary Cassatt, William James, and his brother, author Henry James, with whom she developed a particularly close friendship, to the point where she named a new puppy after him, Jim-Jam. She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead. When Henry James first saw the house, even before he came to know Theodate, he crafted one of the more novel analogies of architectural criticism, likening the joy he felt to “the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition.” Theodate had a competing passion, however. She was a spiritualist and served from time to time as an investigator of paranormal phenomena. Belief in such things was widespread in America and Britain at the start of the twentieth century, when an Ouija board was a regular fixture in drawing rooms, to be brought out after dinner for impromptu séances. With the advent of war, belief in an afterlife was poised for a resurgence, as Britons sought comfort in the idea that their dead sons might still be present, in some way, somewhere in the ether. It was Theodate’s interest in “psychical” research that explained why she and Edwin Friend were sailing to London.
As the sole child of a wealthy Cleveland couple, she had spent her early life mostly alone. Her father, Alfred, was an iron tycoon; her mother, Ada, a socialite. They lived on the city’s Euclid Avenue, better known as Millionaire’s Row. “I have no memory at all of ever sitting in my mother’s lap,” Theodate wrote. “My father was so occupied with [business] affairs that I was fifteen years old before he realized he was losing his child.” She described her youth “as the extreme of what the lives of only children usually are” but credited this solitary time—punctuated by bouts of crushing boredom and depression—as instilling in her a strong sense of independence. From the age of ten on, she drew plans for houses and sketched their facades, and dreamed of one day building and living in a farmhouse of her own design.
To her parents, tuned to the high-society mores of the day, Theodate was doubtless a chore. At nineteen she changed her birth name, Effie, to Theodate, her grandmother’s name, out of respect for the woman’s devout belief in the Quaker principle of emphasizing the spiritual over the material. She had little interest in “coming out” as a debutante, and none in marriage, which she perceived to be a wall that foreclosed any future ambitions she might have. She called it the “gold collar.” Her parents sent her to a private school in Farmington, Miss Porter’s School for Young Ladies, expecting that once her education was completed she would return to take her place among Cleveland’s upper crust. Theodate liked Farmington so much, however, that she decided to stay. She became a suffragist; at one point she also joined the Socialist Party, and she loved riling her father with her talk of socialism.
On a lengthy journey through Europe in 1888, when she was twenty-one, she grew closer to her father. He was devoted to travel and to collecting art and was among the first collectors to fully embrace the impressionists, at a time when their work was widely deemed eccentric, even radical. It was he who suggested she consider architecture as a profession. They spent time together scouring art galleries and artists’ studios for works to bring back to Cleveland; they bought two paintings by Claude Monet. Theodate sketched elements of structures she found appealing, a pilaster here, a chimney there. She had little interest in Paris, which she described as “the greatest blot on the face of the earth,” but she adored England, in particular its cozy country homes with sagging roofs, half-timbered walls, and welcoming doorways. She drew sketches of her vision of the ideal farmhouse.
Architecture being a field then largely barred to women, Theodate created an architectural education for herself, first through private studies with members of Princeton University’s art department. With her father’s support she bought a house in Farmington with 42 acres. Her parents, at her urging, resolved to retire to Farmington and build a house that would showcase Alfred’s art collection, which, in addition to the two Monets, included works by Whistler and Degas. Her father suggested she design the house, under the supervision of a practicing architect. She chose the firm of McKim, Mead & White, which, no doubt because of Alfred’s wealth, agreed to the plan. Theodate’s subsequent letter to founding partner William Rutherford Mead revealed her to be a woman of strong if not imperious character. She wrote, “As it is my plan, I expect to decide in all the details as well as all more important questions of plan that may arise.… In other words, it will be a Pope house instead of a McKim, Mead and White.”
The design and construction of the house became for Theodate an architectural apprenticeship. But the project, completed in 1900, exhausted her. That fall she wrote in her diary, “I have wrung my soul dry … over father’s house.”
By 1910 she was a full-fledged architect, soon to become the first female architect licensed in Connecticut. Three years later, in August 1913, her father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. It was a shattering blow, and in her grief she resolved to build a preparatory school for boys in his memory—a school, however, that would be very different from any then in existence. She envisioned a campus structured to mimic a small New England town, with shops, town hall, post office, and a working farm. Her plan was to emphasize the building of character by requiring that students devote a significant portion of their days to “community service,” helping out on the farm and in the shops, where they would learn such arts as carpentry and printmaking. In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution. By 1910 the movement had swept America, yielding collectives, like fellow passenger Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters, and a new and simple approach to design, evident in the furniture of Gustav Stickley and in the simple, well-made homes of the so-called Craftsman style. It inspired as well the founding of magazines likeHouse Beautiful and Ladies’ Home Journal.
By Saturday morning, May 1, 1915, Theodate was again in the grip of a profound weariness. The past winter had been difficult, professionally and emotionally. One incident in particular underscored the challenge of being a woman in a male profession: a publisher, thinking the name Theodate was a man’s, asked to include her photograph in a book on leading architects in New York. Upon learning in a phone call that she was female, he withdrew the offer. She also suffered one of her periodic descents into depression, this one sufficiently severe that she needed the assistance of a home nurse. In February 1915, she wrote, “I am having such persistent insomnia that my nights are waking nightmares.”
She believed, however, in the regenerative power of setting off on a journey. “There is nothing like the diversion of travel for one who is mentally fagged.”
Once aboard the Lusitania, Theodate was led by a steward to her cabin, a stateroom on D Deck on the starboard side. She deposited her hand luggage and made sure her cabin bags had arrived. If she hoped to sleep well that night, she was soon to be disappointed.
CHARLES LAURIAT, the Boston bookseller, now climbed the gangway, accompanied by his sister, Blanche, and her husband, George Chandler. “I was surprised that access to the steamer was allowed so freely,” Lauriat wrote. He found it odd that his sister and brother-in-law “were allowed to pass aboard without question.” Other passengers likewise noted the ease of access for friends and family who came aboard to see them off.
Chandler carried Lauriat’s briefcase and valise; Lauriat carried the extension suitcase containing the drawings and Dickens’s Carol. Chandler joked that the contents of that one were so valuable he “preferred not to touch it.”
The three walked to Lauriat’s room, B-5, the cabin closest to the bow on the starboard side of B Deck. Though seemingly a prime location, it was an interior stateroom, with no portholes. Lauriat was accustomed to traveling like this. One of the first things he did was place a matchbox in his room within easy reach, in case the ship’s electric dynamo failed. He had crossed the Atlantic twenty-three times so far, mostly on Cunard ships, but this would be his first voyage on one of the celebrated “greyhounds.”
Lauriat saw that the trunk and shoe case that he had checked at the station in Boston were already in his room. He tested the locks on his various bags, and then he, Blanche, and Chandler went back out on deck, where they remained until all visitors were asked to leave the ship. When Lauriat returned to his room, he took the drawings from the extension case and put them in the top tray of his shoe box, which was easier to lock; he put Dickens’s Carol in his briefcase.
Before boarding, Lauriat had read about the German Embassy’s warning but had paid little attention; the idea of canceling never entered his mind. He wore his Knickerbocker suit, and that new innovation, a stem-winding wristwatch, which he kept set to Boston time, always, no matter where he was; it was his way of grounding himself in the world. He told no one about the drawings.
DWIGHT HARRIS, the New Yorker with the engagement ring and custom life belt, took his valuables to the purser’s office for safekeeping. These included a diamond-and-pearl pendant, a diamond-and-emerald ring, a large diamond brooch, $500 in gold, and of course the engagement ring. He took a few moments before sailing to write a thank-you note to his grandparents, who had given him a bon voyage present. He used Lusitania stationery. The German warning seemed not to have given him pause. His mood was full of exclamation points.
“A thousand thanks for the delicious Jelly Cake and Peppermint Paste!” he wrote. “I can hardly wait for tea time to come!” He noted that the weather had begun to improve. “I am glad it has cleared!—my cabin is most comfortable—and I shall proceed to unpack after lunch!” He added that his Cousin Sallie had sent a basket of fruit and that another family member, Dick, had sent a large supply of grapefruit. “So I am well supplied!”
His note was among those that made it into the last bag of mail to leave the ship before departure. The envelope was postmarked “Hudson Terminal Station.”
THE STEWARDS announced that all visitors had to disembark. Ship reporter Jack Lawrence left without even trying to talk to Captain Turner. The captain, he wrote, “was of that brand of deep sea skipper who believes that a newspaperman’s place is at his desk on Park Row or in Fleet Street and that there ought to be a law to prevent him from prowling around the decks of ships.” On every prior encounter, Turner had been cold and unfriendly. “He seemed to me to be an austere, aloof sort of a man who knew his business and didn’t wish to discuss it with anybody.”
Lawrence admired Turner, however. He saw him on the ship’s main stairway, talking to another officer, and noticed “what a splendid figure he made.” His uniform was dark blue, double-breasted, with three-inch lapels and five buttons on each breast, only four to be actually buttoned, as specified in the Cunard officers’ manual. The jacket cuffs—the real show—were each edged with “four rows of gold wire navy lace ½-inch wide,” according to the manual. Turner’s cap, also dark blue, was trimmed in leather and black mohair braid, fronted with the Cunard badge: the Cunard lion, mocked gently by crew as the Cunard “monkey,” surrounded by a wreath of gold stitching. “When a British skipper knows how to dress, and he usually does, he is the very last word in what the well-dressed merchant captain should wear,” Lawrence wrote. “He knows not only what to wear but how to wear it. He achieves a jauntiness that is incomparable. Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic—and looked the part.”