SOUTHAMPTON

Number 44 Berth at Southampton, the new White Star deepwater dock, had been opened successfully on June 14, 1911, with Olympic’s maiden voyage to NewYork. Now it was Titanic’s turn. From the morning of April 4 (Maundy Thursday) until her departure, though, she was the focus of continuous work—right through the Easter holidays—as Andrews, Smith and their teams strove to get her ready for the passengers who would be boarding throughout the morning of April 10. There were 4,427 extra tons of coal to be shipped, and the crew to be interviewed and signed on. Food and drink had to be loaded and stowed (in great

Andrews was everywhere in his untidy suit, enthusiastic, tireless and usually good-tempered.

Quantities), as did the general cargo, the mails (at the last minute) and so forth.

Andrews can barely have slept, what with supervising the finessing of the liner, showing groups of bigwigs around, and having meetings with agents, subcontractors, fitters, officers and managers. Uniforms were commissioned from Millers, flowers from Bealing’s, coal from Rea’s and beer from Hibberts—and Andrews was everywhere in his untidy suit, enthusiastic, tireless and usually good-tempered. His Southampton secretary noted later: “Through the various days that the vessel lay at Southampton, Mr. Andrews was never idle. He generally left his hotel about 8:30 a. m. for the offices, where he dealt with his correspondence, then went on board until 6:30 p. m. . . . He would himself put in their place such things as racks, tables, chairs, berth ladders, electric fans, saying that except he saw everything right he would not be satisfied.”

And in the usual way of these things, miraculously, by the evening of Tuesday, April 9, all was settled—pretty much! Andrews wrote to his wife Helen that night: “The Titanic is now complete and will I think do the old firm credit tomorrow when we sail.”

John Jacob Astor IV and others prepare to board the Titanic Special at Waterloo Station, bound for Southampton.

From 9:30 a. m. on the following day many second - and third-class passengers began to arrive and board. From 11:30 a. m. the first-class passengers began to arrive, all brought down by special LSWR trains from London. Among them was W. T. Stead, the sixty-two-year-old pioneering journalist and social reformer who campaigned against child prostitution, and who was traveling first class at the invitation of President William Taft to take part in a peace conference to be held at Carnegie Hall. But Stead went down with the ship, having bravely

Francis Browne as a young seminarian in 1900. The photographs he took while sailing from Southampton to Queenstown— including the one of the Marconi room on page 166— provide the most important surviving photographic record of the Titanic.

Helped women and children to lifeboats, and was reputedly last seen calmly reading a book in the first-class smoking room. It’s interesting to note that Stead wrote a story, “From the Old World to the New,” in 1892, in which the RMS Majestic (White Star) rescues survivors of a ship that has crashed into an iceberg, an interesting parallel to Morgan Robertson’s prescient novella of 1898—The Wreck of the Titan. Stead left a widow and five children at home.

Another interesting passenger was the Jesuit priest Francis Browne, who traveled from Southampton to Queenstown. He was a keen amateur photographer, who took photos to a professional standard, and it is to him that we owe some of the pictorial record of Olympic and Titanic. A former classmate of the writer James Joyce, he was thirty-two at the time of his trip, and took first-class stateroom A37 across the deck from Thomas Andrews. Over the first two days at sea he made the acquaintance of a rich American couple who offered to stand him his fare to New York in exchange for his company. However, when Browne telegraphed his superior for permission, he got an unambiguous reply: “get off that ship.” He spent the First World War as an Irish Guards chaplain, and in later life his ministry took him all over the world. He died in Dublin in 1960, and his library of more than 42,000 photographs lay forgotten until it was rediscovered in 1986 by a fellow priest who was aware of the photographs’ worth.

Finally, no short passenger list for Titanic would be complete without mentioning Michel Navratil, who sailed on the liner with his two young sons, ages three and four. The boys were put into Collapsible D, the last lifeboat successfully launched from the stricken ship, but Navratil himself went down with Titanic. His body was recovered by CS Mackay-Bennett, and among his effects was a loaded revolver.