put up a front to prove that they were never going to be kicked around again.
Playing poker with a high spirit was a masculine rite of passage in first-class Atlantic crossings. The staking of large sums was a display of status: wherever rich men gathered, there were poorer men, too, adepts at sleight of hand, subterfuge, and connivance. Notices on the Titanic warned that the first-class saloons of liners were infested by cardsharps, and unavailingly sought to discourage gambling. Harry (“Kid”) Homer, a professional gambler, originally from Indianapolis, was a first-class passenger on the Titanic, and a gaunt, hard-faced rogue he looks in his photograph, with all the facial charm of a prison guard. A former Los Angeles car salesman turned professional gambler named George Brereton was also known as “Boy” Bradley and traveled under the alias of George Brayton. Charles Romaine, originally from Georgetown, Kentucky, but now of Anderson, Indiana, was another gambler traveling under a disguised surname.
The first-class lounges were action zones for confidence tricksters, too, with their squalid dedication and vindictive traps. Alfred Nourney, calling himself Baron von Drachstedt, ostensibly a salesman of fast cars, upgraded from second class to first class, where he moved with the care of a spy who had infiltrated a hostile camp. He was a slippery youth who took his cues quickly and was ready for any chances offered. It is suggestive of Nourney’s targets that he insinuated his way into a card game with Greenfield the furrier and Henry Blank, of Glenridge, New Jersey, who had been visiting Swiss watchmakers and dealers in precious stones in Amsterdam.
“It is a stratified society,” Steiner continued, “and the lines are dollar-marked.” Stewards assessed the size of men’s bank accounts by the contents of their wardrobes and placed passengers accordingly. “Around the captain’s table are gathered the stars in the financial firmament; those whom nobody knows, who travel without retinue, are at the remote edges of the dining room, far away from the limelight.” This was different from the equality of steerage, where “everybody ‘gets his grub’ in the same way, in the same tin cans, ‘first come, first served’; and all of us are kicked in the same unceremonious way by the crew.” 13 It was not as if the table manners were reliably superior in first class. Steiner saw plutocrats eating blueberry pie off their knives and frowning in confusion at the little bowls of rose water set before them. Some American success stories not only lacked table manners but did not know how to dress. “The new rich used to come secretly to me to be coached, not only in the art of dressing, but in the art of wearing beautiful clothes,” Lady Duff Gordon confided. Englishwomen paid as much as twenty guineas for a consultation, and in New York she received five times that sum from wives of “self-made men” who felt incapable of appearing in society until they had been drilled. 14
In the childish belief, held by many rich people, that they could dupe their staff, newly embarked first-class passengers used to tell their stewards, “I am a friend of the President of this line.” Violet Jessop, who was seldom outsmarted by those she served, used to reflect what a lucky man Bruce Ismay was to have so many thousands of friends. 15 On the Titanic, first-class accommodation was filled to 46 percent of capacity: a sure indication that there was overcapacity in the Atlantic steamship business. The liner’s 337 first-class passengers were estimated to be worth $500 million.
Richest of all was John Jacob Astor. A photograph survives of him entraining at Waterloo Station for Southampton: a man of forty-seven, looking straight at the camera, his bearing stiffened by high confidence in himself and his purposes, Astor resembles a conventional ruling-class Englishman, with his trim moustache, erect bearing, bowler hat, rolled
Playing poker with a high spirit was a masculine rite of passage in first-class Atlantic crossings. The staking of large sums was a display of status: wherever rich men gathered, there were poorer men, too, adepts at sleight of hand, subterfuge, and connivance. Notices on the Titanic warned that the first-class saloons of liners were infested by cardsharps, and unavailingly sought to discourage gambling. Harry (“Kid”) Homer, a professional gambler, originally from Indianapolis, was a first-class passenger on the Titanic, and a gaunt, hard-faced rogue he looks in his photograph, with all the facial charm of a prison guard. A former Los Angeles car salesman turned professional gambler named George Brereton was also known as “Boy” Bradley and traveled under the alias of George Brayton. Charles Romaine, originally from Georgetown, Kentucky, but now of Anderson, Indiana, was another gambler traveling under a disguised surname.
The first-class lounges were action zones for confidence tricksters, too, with their squalid dedication and vindictive traps. Alfred Nourney, calling himself Baron von Drachstedt, ostensibly a salesman of fast cars, upgraded from second class to first class, where he moved with the care of a spy who had infiltrated a hostile camp. He was a slippery youth who took his cues quickly and was ready for any chances offered. It is suggestive of Nourney’s targets that he insinuated his way into a card game with Greenfield the furrier and Henry Blank, of Glenridge, New Jersey, who had been visiting Swiss watchmakers and dealers in precious stones in Amsterdam.
“It is a stratified society,” Steiner continued, “and the lines are dollar-marked.” Stewards assessed the size of men’s bank accounts by the contents of their wardrobes and placed passengers accordingly. “Around the captain’s table are gathered the stars in the financial firmament; those whom nobody knows, who travel without retinue, are at the remote edges of the dining room, far away from the limelight.” This was different from the equality of steerage, where “everybody ‘gets his grub’ in the same way, in the same tin cans, ‘first come, first served’; and all of us are kicked in the same unceremonious way by the crew.” 13 It was not as if the table manners were reliably superior in first class. Steiner saw plutocrats eating blueberry pie off their knives and frowning in confusion at the little bowls of rose water set before them. Some American success stories not only lacked table manners but did not know how to dress. “The new rich used to come secretly to me to be coached, not only in the art of dressing, but in the art of wearing beautiful clothes,” Lady Duff Gordon confided. Englishwomen paid as much as twenty guineas for a consultation, and in New York she received five times that sum from wives of “self-made men” who felt incapable of appearing in society until they had been drilled. 14
In the childish belief, held by many rich people, that they could dupe their staff, newly embarked first-class passengers used to tell their stewards, “I am a friend of the President of this line.” Violet Jessop, who was seldom outsmarted by those she served, used to reflect what a lucky man Bruce Ismay was to have so many thousands of friends. 15 On the Titanic, first-class accommodation was filled to 46 percent of capacity: a sure indication that there was overcapacity in the Atlantic steamship business. The liner’s 337 first-class passengers were estimated to be worth $500 million.
Richest of all was John Jacob Astor. A photograph survives of him entraining at Waterloo Station for Southampton: a man of forty-seven, looking straight at the camera, his bearing stiffened by high confidence in himself and his purposes, Astor resembles a conventional ruling-class Englishman, with his trim moustache, erect bearing, bowler hat, rolled
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