Scandalously, though, that first lifeboat, which was built to hold 40 people, left with only twelve on board˳ Most were crew˳ According to unverified press reports, when the ship went down, Lucile turned to Franks and said, “There goes your lovely nightgown˳” The story goes that the angry crewmen protested that they had lost their livelihoods, upon which Duff Gordon handed each of them £5˳ Later, however, his action came under suspicion, construed as bribing the crew not to turn around and save more people˳
This poignant footnote to the Titanic disaster has been uncovered by Joanna Hashagen, a curator at the Bowes Museum in County Durham in the north of England, through the story of a bride, Linda Beatrice Morritt, a glamorously adventurous girl who had ordered an exquisite silk and lace wedding dress from Lucile in London, just before the couturier took the fated transatlantic voyage˳
In an evocative exhibition, “Lucile-Fashion Designer, Titanic Survivor,” the Lucile dress—the height of fashion, with its narrow, cascading, diaphanous flounces of shimmering satin and pearls—is displayed in almost perfect condition, in its original box, just as it was delivered to the bride for her marriage to a dashing aristocratic aviator, William Rhodes-Moorhouse˳ Even more rivetingly, Linda’s photographs of her wedding are also on show, accompanied by a remarkable record of her notes and souvenirs, including a marked-up program noting her favorite dresses from the Lucile fashion show she’d attended in London in March, just a month before the couturier’s departure on the doomed ship˳ The bride pasted in a newspaper cutting about the disaster, showing a photograph of the Titanic above portraits of some of the survivors, Lucile included˳
Despite the scandal which erupted in the press in both America and Britain around the behavior of the Duff Gordons, Linda Morritt insisted on wearing her Lucile dress down the aisle in a Knightsbridge church only two months after the disaster˳ Her reaction went hand in hand with the support from loyal customers shown to Lady Duff Gordon when she appeared, wearing a black veiled hat and purple-lined coat at the disaster inquiry on May 17: The hearing was packed with society ladies, dressed to the hilt in Lucile˳
The Duff Gordons were exonerated˳ Though Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon never lived it down, his wife’s business continued to flourish˳ After setting up more outposts in Chicago and Paris, she went on to design costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies˳ And Linda Morritt’s story has a happy ending, too: Having stayed at the Savoy Hotel on her wedding night, she and her new husband thought they should do something special for their honeymoon, so on August 4, 1912, they made the first three-person flight across the English Channel in a bi-plane˳ (The third person was a journalist˳) Their plane crashed on landing, but no one was hurt˳
Miniseries researchers, are you out there, somewhere?
“Lucile-Fashion Designer, Titanic Survivor” is on view at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, England through April 14 through January 6, 2013; bowesmuseum˳org˳uk
Click here to read “Period Pieces: 100 Years of Titanic Costumes˳”
Click here to find out about **Julian Fellowes’**s Titanic miniseries˳
