Description:
The photos in Violet Jessop's moving memoir reveal her to have been still lovelier than Titanic star Kate Winslet, but that only made her job harder as a stewardess aboard the ship. As reported by John Maxtone-Graham, Jessop's beauty no doubt increased her troubles with the "philandering captains and pursers, loquacious or insufferable fellow stewardesses, and an array of sometimes horrifying passengers." But Jessop had no problem dishing the dirt on all aboard, the liveliest being her fellow steward Tim Nolan. "He had the appearance of a venerable archdeacon, the contrariness of the Irish, the rosy face of a child, and the soul of a vagabond," she reports. "It would take a mathematician to keep count of the resolutions made and broken by Tim to refrain from 'a drop of cheer' during one Atlantic crossing." Nolan had to stash his drops of cheer in rich folks' cabins, once being forced to hide under an occupied bed all day in a scene worthy of the Marx brothers. "Sure, wasn't I afraid I was going to sneeze every time I took a breath? It's me that'll be sober from now on," vowed Nolan. Nolan's encounter with a stuffed mermaid and a flesh-and-blood circus freak named the Bear Woman really freaked him out. "It took several people to convince Tim he was not still 'under the influence' and 'seeing things,'" Jessop writes. "The combination of the mermaid (he could not forget her placid expression and dainty arms) and the Bear Woman did a lot towards keeping Tim on the water wagon." Jessop's account of her last conversation with another colleague, Stan, who saved her life by ordering her to hustle up to the lifeboat that his sex disqualified him from boarding, is touching. They argued about her clothes. "I said as he brought forth my new spring outfit, all trimmings and things," writes Jessop, "'That's no rig for a shipwreck, all fussed up and gay.' Suddenly, I was trying to be jocular, afraid I might cry ... 'So long, Stan. Come up yourself soon, won't you?' He was standing with his arm clasped behind him in the corner ... He suddenly looked very tired. Good old, ugly-faced, big-hearted Stanley!" Good old, pretty-faced, big-hearted Violet. It's a good thing you wrote it all down. --Tim Appelo
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