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Philip Spiess
THE UNSINKABLE EDITH ROSENBAUM:
or, The Cincinnati Gal Who Didn’t Go Down with the Titanic
The boat deck of the R.M.S. Titanic was icy cold that April morning in 1912, and the sky was blue-black, as it was just after midnight in the north Atlantic. Edith Louise Rosenbaum [later Russell], of Cincinnati, directed her cabin steward, Robert Wareham, to fetch her musical pig from her First Class cabin. Then, with the others, she waited in trepidation to board Lifeboat No. 11.
In that year of 1912 Miss Edith Rosenbaum was based in Paris, working as a buyer for several New York-based clothing stores. She was also the correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, then just two years old. She reported regularly for the magazine on the seasonal collections of the leading couture salons of Paris: Paquin, Poiret, Doucet, Lucile, and Cheruit. She also wrote a front-page column, giving her analysis of current fashion trends, sharing information on new fabrics and styles, and occasionally giving profiles of the leading personalities of the French fashion world.
How did a thirty-two-year-old single young woman from Cincinnati rise to such a role in the heady female fashion world of pre-World War I Europe? It was family background: Miss Rosenbaum was the daughter of Harry Rosenbaum, a wealthy merchant in the dry goods field in Cincinnati. He was a director of Louis Stix & Co.; later he was an influential cloak and suit manufacturer, trading as H. Rosenbaum & Sons on the southwest corner of Fourth and Race Streets. The company advertised its “mighty avalanche of bargains” in cloaks, capes, suits, and furs, selling the most popular fashions of the day, including the “cheviot suit,” made from the wool of Scotland’s cheviot sheep. It also sold imitation Alaska seal capes made with China and English seal, “so perfect an imitation that you can hardly distinguish them from a real Alaska seal. There’ll be a big rush!”
Harry Rosenbaum explained his business philosophy this way: “Competition is the life of trade; it causes rivalry and rivalry sets men thinking, and thinking sets men working, and working produces art. Eight hundred of our men and women tailors have been working night and day and have done wonders. There are no middle men’s profits here.” In the women’s department, Rosenbaum said of the ladies’ corsets he sold, “No problem finding the right fit. Our corsetieres [!] will gladly assist you.” (No doubt the corsets would do in a pinch.) Later on, Rosenbaum became an investor in garment industry real estate in New York City, moving his family there in 1902.
But before she was moved there, Rosenbaum’s daughter Edith was educated in the Cincinnati public schools, then “finished” in a series of young ladies’ finishing schools, notably the Mount Auburn Young Ladies Institute (later known as the H. Thane Miller School) in Cincinnati and Miss Annabel’s in Philadelphia. By age 16 she was attending Misses Shipley’s at Bryn Mawr, and she was later enrolled in Bryn Mawr College. Moving to Paris in 1908 to become a saleswoman for the couture house of Cheruit, she shortly joined the Paris office of the in-house fashion journal of Wanamaker’s, the prominent Philadelphia department store. While there, she provided fashion sketches for the Butterick Pattern Service.
Edith Rosenbaum, fresh from reporting the latest fashions from the Easter Sunday races in Paris, had paid 27 pounds, 14 shillings, and 5 pence for her ticket on the Titanic; she boarded the ship at Cherbourg. Just a few months earlier, in August, 1911, Edith had narrowly escaped death in an automobile accident near Rouen, France, when one of her traveling companions, Ludwig Towe, an aristocrat from Berlin (of the family known for inventing the Mauser bullet), had taken his new car out for a spin. Later on, Edith was philosophical about such mishaps: “I’m accident prone. I’ve been in shipwrecks, car crashes, fires, floods, and tornadoes. I’ve had every disaster but bubonic plague and a husband.”
Edith was in the library on E Deck until ten minutes before the Titanic struck the iceberg. The steward called out, “11:30 – lights out.” She went to her stateroom, A11, handing the steward some letters and picking up a book on the way. “There was something about the Titanic, it was so very formal; it was so very stiff,” she said. “The atmosphere was stiff. The coziness – well, you know, that kind of ‘get-together feeling,’ it didn’t exist,” she later said.
In her stateroom, having turned on the electric light, Edith noticed three sudden shocks, one after another, the third strong enough to make her grab a bedpost. Then the boat came to a halt. Looking out the window, she saw a grayish-white mass floating by. She put on her fur coat and went outside to find out what was going on. Told that the mass was an iceberg, “There’s one-eighth above the water and seven-eighths below,” Edith went up on the boat deck: she’d never seen an iceberg before, she told the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1957. “We picked up the bits of ice and most of us played snowballs.” (By the way, she also was emphatic that the ship’s orchestra did not play “Nearer My God, to Thee,” nor did it continue playing as the ship sank. “When people say music played as the ship went down, that is a ghastly, horrible lie,” she told the BBC.)
Told to start planning to abandon ship, Edith locked up everything in her three staterooms, taking the nineteen keys to her nineteen trunks with her. She had on evening slippers with diamond buckles, a wool cap, two fox furs, and a paper-thin broadtail coat, no underwear and no stockings. Asking a cabin steward if he thought there was any danger, she said, “If there is, you better go back and get my mascot.” Her mascot was her musical pig; the steward went back and got it. But then Edith and others with her hesitated to board the lifeboats. “I looked at that lifeboat, swinging on the davits, an awful long way, and down below was the sea, fourteen floors below.”
As she stood frozen, a sailor came along and, grabbing her mascot pig, threw it into the lifeboat. “When they threw that pig,” she said, “I knew it was my mother calling me.” But she wasn’t quick enough getting into the lifeboat: “Bruce Ismay [head of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic] saw me and picked me up like a puppy and threw me down the steps.” Once in the lifeboat, those in it all quickly paddled away from the Titanic, so as not to be sucked under when the monster ship finally submerged.
Aboard the lifeboat, Edith Rosenbaum famously comforted the children in Lifeboat 11 with her mascot, her lucky pig music box, which her mother had given her. A wind-up tail on the pig made the music box play the “Maxixe,” a Brazilian dance tune. Edith wound and rewound the pig’s tail all night long until the survivors in the lifeboat were picked up in the early hours of April 15, 1912, by the ocean liner Carpathia (which saved many of the Titanic’s survivors). Edith Rosenbaum Russell still had her musical pig with her when she died in London in 1975.
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