Baltimore native Lucy Polk Carter survived Titanic sinking — but not marriage

Lucy Polk Carter, the Baltimore-born beauty who was acclaimed for her “hourglass figure and Gibson Girl hair” by society editors, entered into a Titanic lifeboat and into history as a participant in one of history’s most horrific maritime disasters.

As word ricocheted throughout the world that the RMS Titanic, bound for New York on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic during the night of April 14, 1912, the event had an aura of unbelievability about it.

All the more so because of the ship’s design, Titanic was deemed “unsinkable” which publicists quickly seized.

In the April 15 editions of The Evening Sun, Baltimoreans were comforted by a story and headline that read: ALL TITANIC PASSENGERS ARE SAFE; TRANSFERRED IN LIFEBOATS AT SEA.

But joy quickly turned to sorrow when dark headlines on April 16 in a Sun extra proclaimed the awful extent of the tragedy.

GIANT TITANIC GOES DOWN; 1,500 PERISH; 675 SAVED, Carpathia en route for New York With The Rescued, Who Are Mostly Women And Children. GREATEST OF SEA DISASTERS. Huge Ship Struck Iceberg At 10;25 Sunday Night. She Sank At 2:20 O’clock Monday Morning, Long Before The Vessels Hurrying To Her Rescue Reached The Spot.

“Mrs William E. Carter, the only person on board from Baltimore, is believed to have been saved,” reported The Sun.

Reporters raced to Carter’s girlhood home at St. Paul and 29th streets, where they asked her father, William Stewart Polk, a Baltimore insurance executive with John S. Selby & Co., if he had received news from White Star Line, owners of the ill-fated vessel, as to the fate of his daughter.

With perfect Edwardian insouciance and class consciousness reflective of the age, Polk sniffed the air and told Sun reporters, “It is usual in such cases that the first-class passengers are given the preference. If the dispatches are true that women and children were taken off first, then Mrs. Carter must be among that number.”

A woman of impeccable beauty and stylishness, Carter possessed a social pedigree that linked her with President James Polk and the noted Peale family painters of Baltimore.

Society editors for years had gushed that Carter was a “great belle and noted beauty” and a prominent figure of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Newport society.

Her international social constellation both here and abroad included Astors, Vanderbilts, Biddles, Goelets, Wideners and English royalty, the bon-ton and the absolute creme de la creme of late Victorian and Edwardian society.

Her 1896 marriage to William Ernest Carter, scion of an old Philadelphia industrial family, at the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, was described in The Sun as being “one of the social events of the season.”

The popular couple settled into domestic life at “Gwedna,” their estate Bryn Mawr, on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and summered in Newport.

Carter, whose major avocation in life, was playing polo for the Bryn Mawr Benedicts, in 1911 boarded the RMS Lusitania with his wife and their two children, William Thornton Carter II and Lucile Polk Carter, accompanied by his wife’s maid, Augusta Serreplaa, manservant Alexander Cairns, and chauffeur, Augustus Aldworth, a terrier and a spaniel.

Rumours had quietly begun circulating that the marriage was in trouble and this lengthy trip abroad was an attempt to rescue it.

In March of 1912, Carter had purchased passage aboard the RMS Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship, and at the last minute changed to the Titanic that was making its maiden voyage to New York.

They held first-class passage — tickets number 113760 — to spacious accommodations in B-96 and B-98, which the press billed as the “Millionaire’s Special.”

Aldworth, the chauffeur, was traveling second-class.

Resting deep in Titanic’s hold was a Renault motor car that Carter had purchased while abroad.

After the Titanic collided with the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., Carter returned to his family’s staterooms, and urged his wife to get their two children up, dressed and into their life jackets and go on deck.

She never saw him again.

“One after the other they dropped rapidly into the sea: No. 6 at 12:55, No. 3 at 1 a.m., No 8 at 1:10. Watching them go, first-class passenger William Carter advised Henry Widener to try for a boat,” wrote Baltimore-born author Walter Lord in his 1956 book, “A Night to Remember.”

“Wiedener shook his head. ‘I think I’ll stick to the big ship, Billy, and take a chance.'” He later perished in the sinking.

One of Carter’s shipmates in Collapsible C was J. Bruce Ismay, chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, whose conduct that night became highly controversial.

He was driven from the company and died in exile in 1937.

Ismay became such a social pariah in the post-Titanic days, that his wife never allowed the word Titanic to be spoken around him, and when he attended the theater purchased seats on either side of him.

When traveling by train, he followed the same pattern.

Mrs. Carter entered Boat 4 with her two children, and after landing in New York, told a reporter, “I kissed my husband goodbye and as he stood on deck I went down the side in a lifeboat. There were no seamen there. It was life or death. I took an oar and started to row.”

It was the beginning of many variances of her story.

She rowed through the night wearing on her blouse a diamond horseshoe stickpin, while the rest of jewels went to the bottom of the Atlantic more than two miles deep.

Arriving at 8 a.m. alongside the Carpathia, Mrs. Carter looked up and saw her husband  leaning over the rail who said: “I’ve had a jolly good breakfast. I didn’t think you’d make it.”

Less than a week after the disaster, The Sun was reporting that Carter became “incensed at an imputation of cowardice and resented it with his fist,” to a reporter who had inquired about his conduct that night.

It was no surprise that he became a defender of charges of cowardice that arose against Ismaay.

Carter explained that he had entered the lifeboat to assist with the wowing.

“A shadow of doubt hovers over this version, since the British Inquiry established that Collapsible C left the Titanic some 15 minutes before Mrs. Carter and the children in Boat 4,” wrote Lord. 

A “growing coolness,” reported The Sun, grew between the couple as there were reports of mental and physical cruelty including when Carter horsewhipped his wife when she protested his behavior.

“That he frequently boxed her ears without provocation. That he was nearly always drunk,” reported The Sun. “That on one occasion in England, he stayed in bed for two months , drinking whiskey, until he was in a maudlin condition.”

He called her “vile names,” was a serial womanizer, when not drunk and would vanish for long periods of time.

The fact that the Titanic disaster played a major role in the termination of their marriage is indisputable.

Mrs. Carter sued for a divorce which was granted June 15, 1914 on the grounds of “Cruel and barbarous treatment.”

In August of 1914, Mrs. Carter married George Clymer Brooke  Jr., a Philadelphian, who was heir to the E & G. Brooke Iron Co. that had been founded by his family in 1788.

The couple lived at their estate “Almondbury,” their estate near Villanova, Pa.

In 1916, the couple gave birth to Elizabeth Muhlenberg “Betty” Brooke Blake, who died in 2016.

The former Mrs. Carter was 59 when she died of a heart attack at “Almondbury” in 1936.

She is buried at St. Michaels Cemetery in Birdsboro, Pa., where she rests with her second husband, who joined her in 1953.

Carter died in 1940 and was buried at West Laurel Cemetery in Bala Cynwad, Pa.

The character of Lucy Polk Carter is partially referenced in the 1997 James Cameron epic and sweeping film, “Titanic,” which won 11 Academy Awards.

Kate Winslet, in the Carter role, plays Rose, a wealthy young woman who’s engaged to Cal Hockley, an abusive and jealous society swell, who is portrayed by Willam Zane Jr.

Lecturing in Baltimore in 1957 after the publication of “A Night to Remember,” Lord told The Sun, “There is no telling how a man will act, because under stress we’re all equal. It was always that way, at Pearl Harbor, the Johnstown Flood and when the Titanic sank. I don’t know what it is that makes human beings behave so differently, but it fills me with awe.”