When Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney left Halifax on August 27, 1912, the Titanic disaster was only four months old. Just a few miles outside the city, Wilby noted that somewhere nearby lay “many of the unidentified victims of the ‘Titanic’ disaster.”
It is only a passing sentence in A Motor Tour Through Canada, but it provides an extraordinary historical backdrop to the journey.
Source: The Montreal Star, 1912, April 15.
Halifax had become closely connected with the disaster because cable ships were dispatched from the city to recover the dead from the North Atlantic.
"With coffins, one hundred tons of ice, an undertaker, and a chaplain, Mackay-Bennett left on April 17, arriving on-site three days later. The crew found 306 bodies. Embalming fluid quickly ran out, so 116 were buried at sea." Source: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.
The recovery operation also revealed something uncomfortable about the society of 1912: even after death, class distinctions mattered.
The Titanic had been built around an elaborate social hierarchy. First-, second- and third-class passengers slept in different accommodations, ate in different dining rooms and occupied different parts of the ship. When the vessel sank, those distinctions did not immediately disappear.
Social Status and the Recovery of Bodies
The recovery ship Mackay-Bennett eventually ran short of embalming supplies and coffins. Decisions then had to be made about which bodies could be preserved and returned to shore. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic notes that the class attitudes of the period influenced those decisions and that third-class passengers and crew members were disproportionately among those buried at sea.
Source: Star Phoenix, May 1, 1912.
Research by sociologist Jess Bier has examined the same disturbing question in greater detail. Her work suggests that economic and social status became intertwined with decisions concerning identification, preservation, and burial. Most of those committed to the sea were crew members or immigrant passengers traveling in third class.
Accounts of the recovery operation describe first-class victims being embalmed and placed in coffins, while some other victims were wrapped in canvas or cloth. When preservation became impossible, many crew members and third-class passengers were buried at sea.
The RMS Titanic steamship was a microcosm of social circulation in the early 20th-century Atlantic, and life on board was systematically stratified according to economic class. During the recovery following the sinking, 114 bodies, or one-third of the total recovered, were buried at sea, most of them crewmembers or immigrant passengers who had held third-class tickets.
More than 1,500 people perished in the disaster, and well over 1,000 of them were never found, many likely trapped in the ship as it went down.
Decisions about which bodies to bury at sea were made largely according to the perceived economic class of the recovered victims, and those with third-class tickets were far more likely to be returned to the water.
Jess Bier // Erasmus University Rotterdam
The distinction was not absolute. Third-class passengers and crew members were also among those whose bodies were brought to Halifax and buried there. It would therefore be incorrect to suggest that every first-class passenger received a coffin while every poorer passenger was buried at sea. But the evidence nevertheless demonstrates that class influenced how the dead were handled.
A Class-Conscious World
That makes Wilby’s reference to the Titanic more than a historical footnote. It offers a window into the class-conscious world from which he came—and into the relationship developing inside his own automobile.
Wilby was a 45-year-old English journalist. Fonce Val “Jack” Haney was the 23-year-old American mechanic supplied by the REO Motor Car Company to drive and maintain the automobile.
In Wilby’s published account, Haney is usually reduced to “the chauffeur.” Wilby described American chauffeurs as “sturdy, independent, self-contained fellows,” but complained that their understanding of social relationships had been “hopelessly confused by their own free interpretation of democracy and equality.”
A few days later in Truro, Wilby praised an English hotel worker for his “deferential English manner” and his willingness to say “sir.” The contrast is revealing: Wilby clearly valued deference, while Haney was anything but deferential.
Haney’s diary shows why their relationship became difficult. While Wilby observed Canada and gathered material for his book, Haney was responsible for keeping the REO moving through mud and on broken roads, despite mechanical failures. He repaired the fuel system, transmission, and clutch, improvised solutions on the road, and even recorded the rebuilding of a collapsed bridge.
The tension eventually erupted in Winnipeg. On September 21, Haney wrote:
“Had big fight with Wilby. He was going to leave at 1:30 today. I said NO, owing to condition of car and roads.”
Wilby described similar resistance as “covert mutiny.”
The difference says a great deal. To Wilby, resistance from a chauffeur could appear to be insubordination. To Haney, it was the practical judgment of the mechanic responsible for the automobile. That is where the connection with the Titanic becomes especially interesting.
A Broken Transmission Does Not Respond to Social Status.
The Titanic represented an older social order in which class determined where people slept, ate, and traveled—and, under the extraordinary circumstances following the disaster, could even influence how their bodies were treated after death. Wilby carried some of those same assumptions into Canada. But the REO was a very different social environment.
There was no first-class deck and no steerage. There was one automobile, thousands of miles of uncertain roads, and two men who had to reach the Pacific together. Socially, Wilby apparently considered himself above Haney. Practically, he depended upon him.
Mud did not care who the gentleman was. A broken transmission did not respond to social status. A collapsed bridge could not be repaired with a notebook. On the primitive roads of Canada, the man with the wrench could become considerably more important than the gentleman sitting behind him.
There is another layer of irony. Wilby ultimately controlled the published history because he wrote the book. Haney became “the chauffeur,” largely anonymous to generations of readers.
Haney’s Diary
But Haney kept a diary. More than a century later, that diary allows us to place the two voices beside one another: Wilby gives us the view from the rear seat; Haney gives us the road, the repairs and the frustrations from behind the steering wheel.
The Titanic therefore provides a powerful opening metaphor for this larger story. Wilby left Halifax from a world still deeply organized by class and deference. Then he crossed a vast country with a young American mechanic whose independence challenged those assumptions.
Sources
- Thomas W. Wilby, A Motor Tour Through Canada (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company; Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914), especially the Halifax and Truro passages and the Winnipeg section.
- F. V. “Jack” Haney, Diary of the First Trans-Canada Auto Trip (1912), including the September 21 Winnipeg entry and mechanical notes from the expedition.
- Mark Richardson, The Drive Across Canada, Prologue, for the later historical account of Wilby, Haney and the REO expedition.
- Nova Scotia Archives, RMS Titanic Resource Guide, for the recovery and burial figures connected with Halifax.
- Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Titanic – Halifax Connection, for the Halifax recovery operation and the role of contemporary class attitudes in burial-at-sea decisions.
- Jess Bier, “Bodily Circulation and the Measure of a Life: Forensic Identification and Valuation after the Titanic Disaster,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 5 (2018): 635–662.