France, Noëlle’s parents had a ticket which entitled them to lunch and afternoon tea, but no cabin. Noëlle herself and Gladys were to spend six or seven nights as roommates in cabin C-37.[31]
The Titanic’s decks were labelled with alphabetical efficiency. Unlike many other liners, where decks were often given a name indicating their purpose, like ‘Shelter’, ‘Saloon’ or ‘Upper’, the Titanic’s top deck, which was open to the elements and housed her lifeboats, was called the ‘Boat Deck’, but after that her levels were ranked in consecutive descent from A- through to G-Deck, the final point accessible to passengers, below which were the boiler and engine rooms.[32] A common misconception about the allocation of space for the respective traveller classes was that the liners’ architecture directly replicated the concept of social hierarchy, with First Class occupying the top decks and Third spread over the lowest. In reality, the most stable parts of a liner are amidships, since they are the least prone to pitching during inclement weather. On Titanic, First and Second Class were located amidships, running downward through the ship and linked for the crew by various corridors. Both classes had access to the air on the Boat Deck, with a low dividing rail separating Second Class’s aft promenade from First’s more expansive, forward-facing space. First-class cabins, generally referred to by the slightly grander adjective of ‘stateroom’, ran from A- to E-Deck, while the public rooms were dotted around from the Gymnasium, through a door off the Boat Deck, to the Swimming Pool, Racquet Court and Turkish Baths down on F-Deck. Their public rooms generally lay on either side of the two sets of staircases, one forward and one aft, running through every level of first-class accommodation. The space between the staircases was connected by the stateroom corridors.
Every passenger with a first-class ticket had access to the same amenities and food included in the tariff, but there were significant gradations of luxury and corresponding cost when it came to the staterooms. The most expensive single class of ticket on the Titanic, one of the two suites with their own private verandahs, were located on B-Deck, and it was on B- and C-Deck that the ship’s most lavish accommodation was located. The only noticeable difference between the two decks’ staterooms was their windows – B-Deck was the lowest level of the Titanic’s white-painted superstructure, enabling her cabins and suites to offer rectangular windows. Immediately below and also painted white, C-Deck was the highest deck in the Titanic’s otherwise black hull; all cabin windows in the hull were the more traditional nautical portholes.
At Southampton, the Countess of Rothes and the other first-class travellers boarded straight on to B-Deck and, having confirmed their cabin numbers, were escorted by stewards from the vestibule, immediately turning right. They would then either have walked down the stairs or, less probably given how short the distance was, taken one of the three lifts to C-Deck. It was possible for first-class passengers travelling with their own servants, as Noëlle was with Cissy Maioni, to book them into cabins in Second Class, but Noëlle had evidently decided that that was rather mean-spirited, with the result that Cissy was to occupy a first-class cabin of her own, two levels below, on E-Deck.[33]
Between the train and the gangplank, the Countess had been asked for a comment by the English correspondent of a foreign gossip column, who wanted to know what the doyenne of the beau monde felt about ‘leaving London Society for a California fruit farm’. With her imperturbable no-nonsense cheer, the Countess had smiled back, ‘I am full of joyful expectation.’[34] Unfortunately, joyful expectation experienced its first stutter when the door to C-37 was opened for them. The Titanic’s surviving deck plans give several possible reasons for Noëlle’s request to be moved – the first being C-37’s location so close to the stairwell and lifts. It was located in the corridor immediately leading off from them, which may have made Noëlle worry unnecessarily about possible noise and disturbance. There was also the issue of C-37’s size, which offered comfortable if standard first-class accommodation, different to the more splendid options profiled in the White Star Line’s advertising.[35] It has been suggested that Lady Rothes’ parents decided to treat their daughter and her companion to an upgrade; it has also been suggested that the room was unsuitable for the Countess. The two explanations are not wholly contradictory. The Purser’s Office was on the same deck and requests to be moved were not uncommon. An admiring captain with the Cunard Line thought that pursers and their staff on board the great liners ‘do most of the clerical work of this floating city; the purser’s office is a kind of “enquire within” bureau for passengers; it is a reception office; it is the place where complaints are ventilated, and where official oil is poured on the sometimes troubled waters that are bound to occur in a ship that carries, as she often does, thirty different nationalities – including people of widely different tastes, customs, temperaments and requirements’.[36] Upon hearing that the request for a new room concerned Lady Rothes, Purser McElroy seems to have moved with breakneck speed.
They were escorted past the staircase, the Purser’s Office and its Enquiry Desk, which functioned much like the reception of a modern hotel, and into long white-panelled corridors leading to stateroom C-77. It was a particularly convenient relocation for Cissy, since her employer’s new room was opposite the small but comfortable special dining room set aside for maids, valets and other servants travelling with their employers.[37] Lady Rothes was, by European standards, the highest-ranking person on the ship, a silken-voiced embodiment of the empire of manners which the British aristocracy still commanded. With her caste’s social influence still tangible, Noëlle was not an anachronism on the Titanic, but she was an anomaly in being the only member of the nobility on board.[38] An old world silently passed a new one as the Countess’s party walked among the self-made millionaires and plutocrats who occupied most of the other C-Deck staterooms.
The parlour in the Strauses’ suite was identical on the Titanic and the Olympic. The desk where Ida wrote her letter to Lilian Burbidge can be seen on the far left.
Sitting room of first-class parlour suite on the Olympic, by Robert John Welch (© National Museums NI)
Ten doors up from the Countess’s new stateroom, sixty-three-year-old Ida Straus, travelling with her husband Isidor, a former Democratic congressman for New York and co-owner of Macy’s department store, was thrilled with her quarters. The Strauses had taken a parlour suite, which gave them a bedroom, a drawing room, a bathroom and ample wardrobe space. The layout of their rooms, C-55 and C-57, was almost identical to the same suite on the Olympic, from which several photographs fortunately survive showing in detail the parlour and bedroom occupied by Ida Straus and her husband.[fn1][39] The drawing room was decorated in an Edwardian take on the Regency era, with three-armed candelabra mounted throughout on the room’s mahogany walls, flecked with interweaving gold leaf. A tapestry of a pastoral scene, vaguely in the style of Fragonard, was displayed between two curtain-draped portholes and above the fireplace with its electric heater. On a table in the centre of the room, a large bouquet of flowers had been waiting for Ida when she arrived, a gift from Lilian Burbidge, wife of Richard Burbidge, Managing Director of Harrods. The two couples had spent some time together during the Strauses’ recent stay in London, during which the Burbidges had taken them to theatre and supper, favours which Ida planned to repay when the British couple visited New York the following summer.
The Atlantic Ocean had framed Ida and Isidor Straus’s life together. Both were first-generation Americans, emigrating to the United States as children – in Isidor’s case from the kingdom of Bavaria and in Ida’s from the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, two decades before both territories were incorporated with varying degrees of unwillingness into a unified Imperial Germany. Transatlantic travel then had been fraught with possible dangers and certain discomfort, but it had already begun its meteoric sequences of improvement when the couple first met in New York in the 1860s, at a time when their families were on opposite sides of the American Civil War and Isidor, who had then lived in Georgia, was preparing to sail back to Europe to work as a blockade runner for the Confederacy. He had called on old friends of his family in New York, including the young Ida Blun’s parents, before booking passage to England, while maintaining the pretence of being a Northerner under which he had arrived. By the time they met again and fell in love, the Confederacy