Captain of the Carpathia by Eric L. Clements

Author:Eric L. Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

CHAPTER 15

THE VERY BEST TYPE OF SAILOR MAN

The year 1926 was the last that Rostron commanded Mauretania, the last that the Rostrons lived in Liverpool and the year that he received the greatest honour of his life. That January, Sir Thomas Royden hand-delivered a letter to 10 Downing Street urging Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to nominate Rostron for a knighthood in the King’s Birthday Honours list that July. Royden wrote that ‘Captain Rostron occupies a position that is almost unique among the Captains of the Mercantile Marine,’ and followed that observation with a recitation of the highlights of Rostron’s career. These included the Titanic rescue in Carpathia ‘after a hazardous journey at [the] highest speed the ship could attain and through ice flows,’ as well as his distinguished war service and his appointment as aide de camp to the King in 1924.

Royden made another argument for knighting Rostron independent of his individual exploits: the ‘recognition of the importance to the nation of its Mercantile Marine’. Royden believed that ‘an occasional honour conferred by His Majesty the King on the men who have risen to the top of their profession emphasises in a very suitable way the high and responsible position that men like Captain Rostron occupy in our national life’. Royden thought that the morale of the merchant service had been ‘greatly enhanced’ by the knighthoods conferred upon Sir James Charles of Cunard and Sir Bertram Hayes of the White Star Line and concluded: ‘I feel very strongly that it is in the national interest that the men of the Mercantile Marine should be proud of their profession and that, as a consequence, our ships should be manned by the right class of sailor man.’1

Prime Minister Baldwin concurred in Royden’s assessment, as did King George V, and so the announcement appeared in The London Gazette:

Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood. St James’s Palace, S.W.1, 3rd July, 1926. The KING has been graciously pleased on the occasion of His Majesty’s Birthday, to give orders for the following promotions in and appointments to, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire… To be [Knight Commander] of the Civil Division of the said Most Excellent Order:… Captain Arthur Henry Rostron, C.B.E., R.N.R., Captain of the ‘Mauretania’.2

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire has two divisions, Civil and Military, and five ranks: Knight Grand Cross, Knight Commander, Commander, Officer and Member. Rostron had been appointed a Commander of the Military Division at the close of the First World War, but Sir Arthur, as he was known henceforth, was appointed Knight Commander of the Civil Division in the same list as a permanent under-secretary for mines and a principal assistant secretary to the Board of Trade. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times found the 1926 Birthday Honours, which included forty-eight knighthoods, ‘rather an uninteresting list’, for whatever that was worth, but held Rostron’s appointment to be ‘one honor which will meet with the approval of the general public’.3

Fittingly, Rostron learned of his knighthood while at sea.

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