![]() Marjorie Newell sat up in bed, wondering what had happened. The grinding, tearing sound that had awakened Marjorie Newell and her sister was made by an iceberg shearing a 300-foot gash in the Titanic‘s bow, helped along by the ship’s rapid 22.5-knot speed and the fact that a half-dozen warnings about drifting ice had been more or less ignored. “I don’t honestly remember how long we’d been down in our rooms, but we suddenly felt and heard a great vibration its size was just staggering.” “Well, as the evening wore on, my sister and I decided to retire, so we went to our rooms. While we sat there in the foyer, I distinctly remember that John Jacob Astor and his wife walked by, looking very affable and distinguished. My father smiled and said, ‘Do you think you can last till morning?’ You see, we had rather large appetites, and he was kidding us about whether we’d need more food. ![]() We just sat there for a while, feeling very refreshed and invigorated after this lovely trip. We had finished a lavish dinner in the corner of the magnificent dining room and had gone up to one of the foyers. “We were, I think, five days out of Cherbourg I do know that it was Sunday night. Everything on the ship was of the finest quality. “The Titanic was a massive affair in every way: four enormous smokestacks, carpets that you could sink in up to your knees, fine furniture that you could barely move, and very fine paneling and carving. Even now, almost 70 years later, a feeling of intense melancholy comes over the former Marjorie Newell as she recalls the last days in the short life of the ship they called unsinkable. She is 92 years old now only slightly hampered by her years, endlessly gallant and feisty about life and frankly hesitant to recall the events that irrevocably altered that life. It was a most beautiful ship,” says Marjorie Newell Robb today in her low-ceilinged 200-year-old house, originally built for a minister, in Westport Point, Massachusetts. In short, Marjorie and Madeline Newell would have had the inestimable pleasure of having sailed on the White Star Line’s crowning achievement, one of the jewels of the post-Edwardian age, the R.M.S. The Newell girls would certainly have something to tell their grandchildren: what it was like to sail on the world’s greatest ship, to travel in the company of some of the world’s richest men, like John Jacob Astor, or Isidor Straus of Macy’s Department Store, or Benjamin Guggenheim. Their trip home would encompass another week or so of sumptuous luxury and a triumphant arrival in New York harbor before the glorious vacation would be over. She was 11 stories high, a sixth of a mile long, weighed over 46 tons, and had a top speed of 24 to 25 knots. Newell had booked first-class passage for himself and his daughters on the maiden voyage of the world’s largest ship. There the daughters found one more surprise awaiting them, for A. After taking a ship to Marseilles and traveling thence up to Paris, the Newells arrived in Cherbourg, where they were to start the long voyage home. They traveled to the Pyramids (Marjorie Newell celebrated her 23rd birthday in Cairo), and made exhaustive investigations of the Holy Land: Port Said, Jaffa, Bethlehem, Jericho. ![]() So it was that in February of 1912, Arthur Newell and daughters Madeline and Marjorie set sail for Europe. Late in 1911 he decided to repeat the adventure, but his wife, who had a delicate disposition, and a daughter, who shared her mother’s temperament, begged off, having found the arduous embarkings and disembarkings infinitely wearing. In 1909, Newell had taken his family on a European trip, one of those leisurely three-month junkets that people had time and money for in those days. When that happened, his wife and three daughters would form a quartet and play some classical music to relax him and bring him out of his shell. A somewhat distant, austere man with a Van Dyke beard, a student of the Bible, a mediocre-to-poor keyboard player, he had a tendency to bring the office home with him. Born in Chelsea to poor parents, he had risen by dint of his unquestioned integrity and single-minded attention to detail to be Chairman of the Board of the Fourth National Bank of Lexington. Newell of Lexington, Massachusetts, had finally attained that station of life to which he had long aspired. ![]()
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