The rest of the story may belong to the corpus of Titanic myth, but it’s reasonable to believe some of the details of Ben’s last moments. However, as neither Giglio nor the chauffeur, René Pernot, survived either, it is impossible to verify them. The first-class cabin steward, Etches, was ordered to take an oar in a lifeboat, and did survive. He subsequently made his way to the St Regis Hotel in New York, where several members of the Guggenheim family had apartments, and asked to see Ben’s wife, as he had been entrusted with a message from her husband. Florette, who already knew that Ben was missing, was too grief-stricken to see him; he was received by Daniel Guggenheim. The encounter was widely reported, but the fullest account of Etches’ story appeared in the New York Times on 20 April:
… I could see what they [Ben and Giglio] were doing. They were going from one lifeboat to another, helping the women and children. Mr Guggenheim would shout out, ‘Women first’, and he was of great assistance to the officers.
Things weren’t so bad at first, but when I saw Mr Guggenheim and his secretary three-quarters of an hour after the crash there was great excitement. What surprised me was that both Mr Guggenheim and his secretary were dressed in their evening clothes. They had deliberately taken off their sweaters, and as nearly as I can tell there were no lifebelts at all.
It is possible that Etches concocted a tale of heroism with an eye to a reward of some kind from the wealthy family; but in view of the fact that Ben and his valet were not the only men who went down with the ship rather than take what could have been seen as the cowardly expedient of getting into lifeboats, it seems unlikely. Other newspapers reported that among the prominent people on board, John Jacob Astor IV, of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, President Taft’s military aide, Major Archibald Butt, and Isidore Straus of Macy’s department store also helped others into the boats and thus sacrificed their own lives. Etches added that Ben had told him, ‘If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty,’ and that ‘No woman shall go to the bottom because I was a coward.’ Significantly, Bruce Ismay, who did save himself, was profoundly affected from the moment he was taken aboard the rescue ship, Carpathia. As the chronicler of the disaster, Walter Lord, records in his book A Night to Remember: ‘During the rest of the trip Ismay never left [his] room; he never ate anything solid; he never received a visitor … he was kept to the end under the influence of opiates. It was the start of a self-imposed exile from active life. Within a year he retired from the White Star Line, purchased a large estate on the west coast of Ireland, and remained a virtual recluse until he died in 1937.’
Ben’s family was devastated by his loss. Strangely, eight hours before the Titanic struck the iceberg, Florette and her three daughters were returning home from the eighty-ninth birthday party given for Florette’s father, James Seligman, when Benita’s attention was drawn to a newsvendor shouting, ‘Extra! Extra!’ By some clairvoyance, she urged her mother to buy a paper, insisting that ‘something terrible must have happened to Poppa’s boat’, as Hazel later recounted to a Guggenheim family chronicler, John H. Davis.
Though there is no reason to disbelieve Etches’ account, many apocryphal stories did grow up around the disaster. The newspapers had a field day, and this was not surprising. In the days before film, pop and sports celebrities figured largely in the public consciousness, it was the rich, the great and the good who filled these roles, and the Titanic had taken a fine crop of them to the bottom with her. There was another element too, which only became apparent months and even years later. The sinking of the unsinkable was a defeat of Humankind by Nature. Total and assured belief in technology foundered. The same year, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party died on their return journey from the South Pole: their bodies were discovered in November, another blow to the world’s confidence in itself. The First World War would soon decisively break down the old order.
In the rush to report the news of the sinking, various journalistic errors occurred. On 20 April the Daily Graphic brought out a commemorative edition focusing on the disaster, in which a photograph of Ben’s younger brother Simon appeared over the caption, ‘Benjamin Guggenheim’ – a further source of distress to the family. Etches is referred to as ‘James Johnson’ – another steward – in several accounts, and, most wildly of all, it was claimed that Ben had left a fortune of $92 million, ‘mostly to his family’. As his family had no idea of how much he was actually worth, this news aroused mixed feelings; but any optimistic reaction must have been tempered by the fact that Ben had only carried a life insurance policy of $23,000. Not a bad sum in itself – as a comparative guide, the prominent British journalist and sex-reformer William T. Stead, who also drowned in the disaster, was insured for $10,000; but the highest level of insurance of those on board was $50,000.
There were other myths. Throughout her life Hazel, who lost her father a few days short of her ninth birthday, was profoundly affected by the experience. At her own funeral in 1995, she had arranged for ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ to be played – but despite popular belief, the hymn was never played as the great ship died. The ship’s band bravely played on until the end – and not a single musician survived – but what they played was ragtime. Another myth which affected the Guggenheims was the story of a ‘Mrs Guggenheim’ being on board with her ‘husband’, a story which quickly inflated to produce a ‘blond singer’, a mistress of Ben’s whom he’d brought aboard at Cherbourg. No such person appears on the Titanic’s passenger list, and it is highly unlikely that even the womanising Ben would return home for his youngest daughter’s birthday, expecting to be met at the New York quayside by his family, with a woman in tow. (It is possible, though unlikely, that he picked someone up on board.)
For a time, Florette continued to cling to the hope that her husband was not dead, but simply missing – the first survivor lists issued were confusing, and the Carpathia aroused press anger by refusing to wire ahead a definitive schedule of whom she had picked up. This was not mischievous or malicious: Captain Rostron was giving wireless priority to ship’s business and survivors’ messages to their families. However, the Carpathia was a slow ship, and she didn’t reach New York until the Thursday following the Sunday night which had seen the Titanic sink.
There is no record of Benita’s reaction to the loss of her father, but Hazel and Peggy left behind their own testimonies. Hazel, who became a painter, was almost always concerned with ships and water in her pictures, and as late as 1969, on the anniversary of the sinking, she produced a five-stanza poem, ‘Titanic Lifeboat Blues’. A year later she had it set to music and recorded it, singing the words herself. The first stanza will suffice to give an impression. Despite its shortcomings, there’s no doubting its sincerity:
Half four score and seventeen years agoMy father stood on deck, declined towards safety to row.Gave his place in lifeboat to the weaker sex.That ship that sank midst wreck of trunk and bunk,Titanic was her name; Titanic was her shame!All this to win Atlantic speeding fame,That ocean sport; near coast of HalifaxHad nearby ship been lax?Who knows, not even writer Walter Lord.Perhaps He knows – Almighty God our LordCan tell what caused death’s knell.
Peggy, approaching fourteen at the time of her father’s death, is more succinct in her autobiography, written in the mid-1940s: ‘My father’s death affected me greatly. It took me months to get over the terrible nightmare of the Titanic, and years to get over the loss of my father. In a sense