A few others canceled for reasons of illness and altered plans, or because they had resolved, warning aside, that sailing on a British ship in wartime wasn’t prudent. The famed Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry planned initially to travel with producer Frohman on the Lusitania, but well before the warning appeared she canceled her booking and switched to an American ship, the New York. She encouraged Rita Jolivet to do likewise, but Jolivet kept her original booking. One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes. Second class was so full that a number of passengers learned to their delight that they had been given first-class rooms.
For those passengers who did feel unsettled by the German warning, Cunard offered comforting words. Wrote passenger Ambrose B. Cross, “From the very first the ship’s people asseverated that we ran no danger, that we should run right away from any submarine, or ram her, and so on, so that the idea came to be regarded as a mild joke for lunch and dinner tables.”
Moreover, a conviction existed among passengers that upon entering the waters off Britain’s west coast, the so-called Western Approaches, the ship would be met by the Royal Navy and escorted to Liverpool. Cunard encouraged this belief, and may have believed it as well, on the basis of the Royal Navy’s past efforts to direct and escort the company’s ships. Long before the sailing, Oscar Grab, twenty-eight, a newly married clothing importer from New York, made an appointment to talk with a Cunard representative about submarines and the overall safety of transatlantic crossings. Grab’s wife of thirty-nine days had begged him to take an American ship. Grab and the Cunard official had a long talk, during which Grab was told that steps would be taken to protect the ship during the crossing. He felt reassured enough to buy a first-class ticket, although he waited to do so until the day before departure.
Any passenger who read that morning’s edition of the New York Times would have found explicit reassurance. In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone “there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.”
The Times reporter said, “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?”
“Yes,” Sumner replied; “as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.”
Passenger Ogden Hammond, a real-estate developer and a member of the State Assembly of New Jersey, asked a Cunard official if it was safe to cross on the ship and got the reply, “Perfectly safe; safer than the trolley cars in New York City”—a possibly ill-advised answer, given the high frequency of fatal trolley accidents in the city.
Aboard the Lusitania, there was a good deal of gallows humor, but it was spoken from a position of comfort and confidence. “Of course we heard rumors in New York that they were going to torpedo us, but we didn’t believe it for one moment,” said May Walker, one of the ship’s stewardesses. “We just laughed it off, and said they would never get us, we were too quick, too speedy. It was just the same kind of trip as it was any other trip.”
One of her tasks was to help manage passengers’ children. “There was all sorts of deck games. Quoits. And they had fancy dress parades for them,” Walker said. Children whose birthdays happened to fall during a voyage were given a party—“a little private party,” Walker said—and a birthday cake, with their names on it. “They had the time of their lives, and the run of the ship.”
On this voyage, she would have her hands full. Many British families were now returning home to do their part in supporting the nation in time of war, and the ship’s size and speed provided a degree of reassurance. The passenger manifest listed ninety-five children and thirty-nine infants.
Whole families came aboard. Cunard set aside a group of first-class staterooms for Paul Crompton of Philadelphia and his wife and their six children—one “infant” included—and their nanny, twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy Allen. (Cunard tickets did not identify babies by name, possibly out of quiet resentment that they traveled free.) Crompton was a cousin of Cunard’s chairman, Alfred Allen Booth, whose Booth Group owned the steamship line. Crompton headed the group’s leather-goods subsidiary. Cunard’s New York manager, Sumner, greeted the family just before boarding and “looked personally after their comfort for the voyage.” On the opposite side of the ship, one deck down, the Pearl family of New York took three first-class staterooms, E-51, E-59, and E-67. Frederic Pearl was headed to London for a posting at the American Embassy, and brought his wife and four children: a five-year-old son, two daughters under the age of three, and one infant. The Pearls brought along two nannies. The children, including the baby, stayed with their nannies in E-59 and E-67; the parents lounged in comparative bliss by themselves in E-51. Mrs. Pearl was pregnant.