“You can kiss your trunks goodbye”

Introduction by Randy Bryan Bigham

“You can kiss your trunks goodbye.” Those words, spoken by a Titanic victim, First Class Steward Robert Wareham, 37, were often repeated by survivor and fashion journalist Edith Rosenbaum (later Russell) in articles she wrote or interviews she authorized. Her exchange with the cabin attendant occurred sometime shortly after 1: 00 a.m. on April 15th. Edith was 32 at the time. She remembered Wareham in nearly every account she gave thereafter, even until the last years of her life.

But in none of the stories she agreed to later in life, a time when the memories she related in press interviews were fading, was she more consistently lucid than in the taped 1966 interview she granted to a neighbor, Mary Stephens. It took place at London’s Embassy House Hotel where Edith lived in her final days.

Although Mary, then 19, made three tapes of Edith telling her story of the Titanic sinking, she transcribed only one before realizing the others had become irreparably damaged.

“Miss Russell was quite a character,” Mary Stephens, now 75, recalled. 

She was nearly 90 and very frail but was still extremely opinionated. Edith rubbed some people the wrong way, but I felt it was because she had had to fight for herself in the business world and it made her kind of hard. Not a lot of women were in business then and I was fascinated by her. I was also American-born like she was, so I sympathized with her a little, you might say. Edith hated the attention of reporters because they always asked the same thing, she told me. And none cared about her fashion career or any of that.

It was in response to Edith’s complaining about what a worry talking to reporters had become that Mary offered to audio record an interview with her. Mary could then submit it to a member of the press of Edith’s choosing. According to plans, Mary would ask questions of which Edith approved and she’d afterwards “just let Miss Russell talk all she wanted,” as Mary put it.

The interview took place late in May 1966 in Mary’s apartment while Edith held the toy pig with which she famously abandoned Titanic 54 years earlier. 

“I think Edith felt more at ease with a friend and that’s why she remembered things so brightly,” Mary said.

There were no stresses, no nosy questions. My cat was snuggling with her and the pig on a sofa in my living room. Edith had some tea and biscuits as she talked into the recorder which was on a side table. I remember she looked pretty in a blue dress and she had on a string of pearls. But true to form, Edith wasn’t satisfied and wanted to add to the recording before I released it to a news agency. Edith never got back to me, though, and I forgot all about it until a few years ago.

The following transcript, lightly edited for grammar, is the result of that day’s interview. Information about Mary’s family and other personal comments unrelated to Titanic were eliminated at the request of Mary Stephens:

*     *     *

Well, Mr. Daniels (sic) said goodbye to me in the lounge, left and went on deck. I waited a little while, and then a steward or somebody came along and said that women and children were to go out onto A Deck. So I tottered off. There was a crowd when I got there, but they were all lining up to go back up an iron staircase to the Boat Deck. There had been an order to send up the women. I got in line and suddenly we were stopped and told to turn around, go back down and to wait for orders. This was absurd to me as obviously the crew didn’t know what was going on any more than I did.¹

I was so exasperated I went back inside to the lounge. I sat down in a big easy chair. It was comparatively warm in the lounge and there were others waiting there, entirely unconcerned, so I felt safe for the moment. Along came my room steward in a few minutes, Wareham, in an overcoat. He said to me, “Miss, I’m glad you are up and have on your lifebelt.”²

I said to him, “I think it’s ridiculous.” And I gave him my trunk keys and asked him to see that my bags were transferred ashore when we got to Halifax. There was talk we were to be towed to Halifax. He looked at me sort of funny, and said, “You can kiss your trunks goodbye.”

I was shocked and asked him if we were in any real danger. He said he hoped not but was worried because he had a wife and children back home. I then became a little more concerned. I wasn’t frightened. I cannot believe it now, but I wasn’t nervous yet. Even so, I was sufficiently worried to ask Wareham to go back to my cabin and get my pig – you know, it’s a music box.

Wareham went and got it, bringing it to me wrapped in a blanket.  I thanked him and he went off down the corridor. As I held the pig, I suddenly became conscious of people looking my way. They probably thought I was silly to be carrying a money bank. I am sure they thought that’s what it was.

I sat there for a while longer and slowly the room emptied. There was almost no one else there but me. And I don’t recall seeing any other women about. I must have stayed there nearly half an hour after I’d come back in from the outer deck; I don’t remember the exact time but it had been just around 1 o’ clock when I’d returned to the lounge from the promenade. I made a decision to stay only another half hour and then I would go out on deck again and have a look around.

But I ended up sitting there for only about five more minutes. I am glad I didn’t stay longer, or I might not be here today. As I looked around that lovely room, I began noticing it seemed to be on a slant. The deck was lopsided, you know, sort of leaning toward the bow. This alarmed me and I got up.³

No one was in the hallway or on the stairs as I mounted them to the Boat Deck. They say the band was playing around there somewhere, but I saw no band when I went up. I came out on the starboard side this time and immediately I saw that the lifeboats had gone.⁴

I went aft along the deck. It was dark but up ahead there was a crowd of people that I could see, just standing around, in the distance.⁵ I passed a deck house and was just rounding a corner when I spied a man standing in a doorway leading to some steps. He said, “You there, what are you still doing on this ship? All women, I thought, were off in the boats. Come here.”⁶

It was Mr. Bruce Ismay. He was hatless in a long coat and his pajamas showed beneath his trouser legs. He looked very much unnerved and almost shoved me into the stairwell when I walked over to him.

I went down the stairs alone – Mr. Ismay did not follow me - and came out on the deck below where stewards or sailors, I don’t know who they were, stood around directing people to the side of the ship, to the open-air windows. I saw women in front of me being helped over the rail and suddenly I realized I was expected to follow them into a lifeboat that was hanging alongside.⁷

This astonished me, as I knew I wasn’t dressed to be out in the cold in a boat. I was wearing a thin silk dress with absolutely no underwear. And my broadtail coat was just one of my spring furs; my heaviest fur I had left behind, thinking I would not be out of bed very long. 

I tried to tell the men I was not prepared to go but they picked me up and sat me on the edge of the rail. I was frantic and struggled to get free. As I wriggled loose, my shoes fell off – they were bedroom slippers that I’d put on with no stockings.

When the men stopped pulling at me, I collected my slippers. Another man came up to me then and said he would help me make the jump over into the lifeboat which was swaying and tilted to one side. I recognized him. It was Mr. Mock whom I had met on the tender at Cherbourg.⁸

He said for me to step on his knee and he clasped his hands together like a sort of cradle to boost me up. I did so and he lifted me to the rail again. There I stood to leap through the air to a man who was waiting in the boat to catch me. The gap between the ship and the lifeboat was not great but, in a long, tight skirt, it seemed so.

Suddenly from somewhere a member of the crew, a steward, I suppose, reached for me and grabbed hold of my pig which I had under one arm; I must have been hesitating too much for his liking. I was told later by another steward that the man thought the pig I carried was a baby. 

As it went sailing through the air, the pig fell out of its blanket and into the bottom of the boat.

I was getting ready to jump, but seeing my pig thrown in ahead of me determined me to leap at once. The man in the lifeboat who was waiting for me lost his balance when I went, and we both fell into the boat. I felt myself go forward, head foremost, but when I landed I caught myself with my left arm.

I crawled around to find my little pig mascot. I saw it had a chipped leg. I then looked to see that the lifeboat was crowded with women and children — many children, it seemed to me, some of them crying. The boat started to lower away and Mr. Mock sat on the rail and jumped at the last minute. As far as I could see, a mother and her child, Mr. Mock and I were the last to get into the boat which lowered quickly in a series of jerks to the sea.⁹

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mary Stephens for trusting me with her memories of Edith, to Celeste Laframboise for pointing out the exact location on Titanic’s deck plans of Edith’s fateful encounter with Ismay, and to Gregg Jasper for his editing suggestions and advice.

Notes

1. Marian Thayer (1872-1944) was similarly exasperated. According to Martha Stephenson (1860-1934), Mrs. Thayer snapped at a steward, “Tell us where to go and we will follow. You ordered us up here and now you are taking us back.” (Titanic: Death of a Dream by Michael Davie, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1986, p. 61; On Board RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage by George M. Behe, Lulu.com, 2011, p.405)
2. The body of Robert Arthur Wareham (1874-1912) was recovered by Mackay-Bennett and was buried at Fairview Lawn Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
3. Based on generally accepted times of events as well as Edith’s own memories, it would appear she waited in the lounge until about 1:20 a.m. This tallies with one of her earliest interviews in which she said she was in the lounge for approximately half an hour before she left for the Boat Deck. (New York Times, April 23, 1912)
4. Edith was noticing that starboard Boats 1, 3, 5 and 7 had been lowered.
5. Edith was remembering the throng of people around Boat 9 which was likely in the process of lowering from the Boat Deck or had already reached the water. Boats 11, 13 and 15 had by this time been lowered to the level of A Deck. Edith would have reached the aft Boat Deck at around 1:25-1:30 a.m.
6. This lucky encounter occurred at the entrance to the aft Boat Deck’s starboard First Class stairwell that led to A Deck. These stairs were in the deck house at the base of the third funnel.
7. She was being led to Lifeboat 11 which would lower away at approximately 1:35 a.m. (Halpern, Samuel, ed. et al, Report into the Loss of the SS Titanic, Gloucestershire (UK): The History Press, 2011, p. 140. Halpern has since theorized that Boat 11 may have departed slightly earlier than the traditionally accepted time. In her earliest full-length account of the sinking, Edith claimed her bracelet watch read 1:45 a.m. as Boat 11 began rowing away from the side of the ship. (Rosenbaum, Edith L., “The Wreck of the Titanic,” Cassell’s, June 1913, pp. 33-46)
8. Philipp Mock (1881-1951), a miniature painter, had previously escorted his sister, Emma Schabert (1876-1961), to Boat 11. The lifeboat being suspended from davits on the Boat Deck above, gravity dictated that it was hanging level; it was the ship that was actually tilting. The list was to port by 1:30 a.m., a starboard list having disappeared about half an hour earlier. Edith mentioned the listing in several subsequent accounts — in the Irish Independent (April 18, 1956), Moustique (October 19, 1958), Woman’s Own (April 14, 1962) and Ladies’ Home Companion (May 1964).
9. The woman with child may have been Second Class passenger Nellie Becker (1876-1961) with one of her two small children, Richard (1910-1975) and Marion (1907-1944). Her third child, Ruth (1899-1990), escaped in Boat 13. Mrs. Becker recalled reaching Boat 11 just as it was lowering. (Becker, Mrs. Allen O., “Experiences of the Titanic Disaster,” Lutheran Woman’s Work, July 1912, pp. 169-171). Second Class Steward Jacob Gibbons similarly recalled assisting two children in Boat 11 at the last minute. Gibbons may have been the steward who helped Edith jump into the boat after her toy pig which he also remembered (Western Gazette, May 3, 1912).