Letter clears 'blackguard of the Titanic'
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:17am BST 02/05/2007
He was one of the great blackguards of pre-First World War British society: Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, the man who not only was said to have bought his way off the sinking Titanic, but then stopped his half-empty lifeboat from returning to pick up drowning passengers.
However, the history books might have to be rewritten. A letter discovered in a London attic appears to exonerate the Old Etonian baronet and fencing champion of either cowardice or callousness.
Travelling with Sir Cosmo and his wife, Lucy was Mabel Francatelli, Lady Duff Gordon's secretary. In a long letter written by Miss Francatelli from New York a few days after the sinking, she gives a vivid account of their escape and rescue. She also says that Sir Cosmo behaved with complete generosity and integrity.
Sir Cosmo, his wife and the secretary abandoned the Titanic with two other American passengers and seven stokers in an emergency lifeboat designed for 40 people.
In the weeks after the sinking, in April 1912 it emerged that Sir Cosmo had paid each of the stokers £5. According to stories in the British press it was a reward for letting his small party on to their boat and not turning back to pluck survivors from the Atlantic for fear they would become overloaded and sink.
As the "unsinkable" White Star liner sank, Lady Duff Gordon, a fashionable London dress designer, is supposed to have said to Mis Francatelli: "There is your beautiful nightdress gone."
It was a hidesously insensitive remark that was to haunt the Duff Gordons in books and accounts of the Titanic for the rest of their days.
The Board of Trade inquiry into the loss of the Titanic cleared Sir Cosmo of wrongdoing and particularly of ignoring the maritime law of "women and children first". But the dirt stuck, the name of Duff Gordon was blackened in smart societyand the Scottish landowner lived like a recluce until his death in 1931.
The Duff Gordons even appeared in Titanic, the 1997 James Cameron film, played by Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres.
In Miss Francatelli's letter, the secretary, a Londoner, gives a detailed account of the hours spent in the lifeboat but makes no mention of her employer's "nightdress" remark. She gives an innocent explanation for how Sir Cosmo got his place on the lifeboat - namely, that there was nobody else at hand, no women and no children, as it was lowered by the crew.
She writes: "We walked to the end of the boat and they were letting down the last lifeboat on our side and calling for anymore (sic) women, and pulled at us, but we clung on to Sir Cosmo and said we would not go without him, so they lowered the boat. Presently there was a little boat at the end, what they called the emergency boat, the officers standing there told some stokers to man the boat and no other women were there, so Sir Cosmo asked if we [the two women] could get in, and we said we would if he could come. The dear officers let us, and we dropped into this boat, then they let it down to the water."
Later she writes: "We went down into the blackness of the water... There wasn't a light or a lamp in the boat. There were 12 of us, we and 2 Americans and seven stokers. We rowed away from the ship, which was sinking fast, so to get away from swell or sucksion (sic). Then all the rest is too terrible for me to write. The screams of the hundreds of dear women, children and the bravest of men fighting in the icy cold waves, I still hear.
"We prayed all night, and at daybreak we saw a boat in sight, about 5 miles away. They rowed like mad, and we [were] picked up at 6 o clock in the morning. Our little cockle shell boat coming up to the darling Carpathia (the liner, four miles off the Titanic) the water was rushing and we had to sit on a rope swing and they hauled me up... I just closed my eyes and clung tight.
"I watched the whole of it from our little boat and saw all the lights go out, and the very last of her, then the terrible explosion of rumbling, followed by the cries and screams of the hundreds in the water..."
Miss Francatelli's letter has come to light after her nephew took it to Christie's along with his aunt's life jacket. The jacket, signed by most of those in the lifeboat, is to be sold by the auction house on May 16 with an estimate of £50,000 to £80,000. The nephew has decided to keep his aunt's letter but a facsimile will be sold with the jacket.
