How to Survive the Titanic Read online

  By Tuesday 16 April, the whole world knew who J. Bruce Ismay was. The New York Times ran the headline: ‘Probably 1250 perish; Ismay safe’; the Denver Post was amongst dozens of papers to ask: ‘Who would not rather die a hero than live a coward?’ and the New York American summed up the case: ‘Mr Ismay cares for nobody but himself. He cares only for his own body, for his own stomach, for his own pride and profit. He passes through the most stupendous tragedy untouched and unmoved. He leaves his ship to sink with its powerless cargo of lives and does not care to lift his eyes. He crawls through unspeakable disgrace to his own safety.’ In England, Horatio Bottomley, spokesman for the working man and owner of the weekly, John Bull, addressed Ismay directly: ‘You were the one person on board who, as chairman of the White Star Line, had a large pecuniary interest in the voyage, and your place was at the Captain’s side till every man, woman and child was safely off the ship. The humblest emigrant in steerage had more moral right to a seat in the lifeboat than you.’ John Bull ran a three-month campaign against him, consisting of telegrams, articles, cartoons, letters and doggerel verses. ‘Someone’, wrote Bottomley, ‘ought to hang over this business. Sixteen hundred men and women have been murdered on high seas.’ In the Daily Mail, H. G. Wells, the literary giant of the age, was struck by the role played by chance in Ismay’s escape. ‘By the supreme artistry of Chance… it fell to the lot of that tragic and unhappy gentleman… to be aboard and to be caught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment.’ Let ‘no untried man’, Wells continued, ‘say he would have behaved better in his place. But for capitalism and for our existing social system [Ismay’s] escape — with five and fifty third-class children waiting below to drown — was the abandonment of every noble pretension. It is not the man I would criticise, but the manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of his position as would have sustained him in that crisis. He was a rich man and a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man.’

  The most serious accusation against Ismay was that he put profit before lives, dictating the ship’s speed to the Captain in order to get to New York in record time. ‘The Titanic disaster is a capitalist disaster,’ a radical Kansas paper declared, and ‘Ismay, worth one hundred million dollars and drawing a salary from the White Star Line of one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars’ is ‘the epitome of capitalism’. But the most common accusation was that Ismay had not behaved as a gentleman. ‘Gentlemen’, wrote Filson Young, ‘simply stood about the decks, smoking cigarettes, talking to one another, and waiting for the hour to strike. There is nothing so entirely dignified, as to be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror.’ Ismay’s actions were compared to those of other millionaires, men like Benjamin Guggenheim who had put on his dinner jacket and reputedly told his steward: ‘We’re dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen. I am willing to remain and play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the women and children.’ The night the Titanic went down, ‘all the great virtues of the soul were displayed’, wrote Philip Gibbs in a forty-page account, ‘The Deathless Story of the Titanic ‘, published two weeks after the wreck in a special edition of the mass circulation British paper, Lloyd’s Weekly News: ‘courage, self-forgetfulness, self-sacrifice, love, devotion to the highest ideals’. Logan Marshall, whose book, Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters also appeared in 1912, suggested that the term ‘chivalry’ was ‘a mild appellation’ for the ‘conduct of the gentlemen’ on board. ‘Some of the vaunted knights of old were desperate cowards by comparison. A fight in the open field, or jousting in the tournament, did not call out manhood in a man as did the waiting till the great ship took the final plunge.’ In the Daily News, George Bernard Shaw railed against the romantic language of heroism, the ‘ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggartly lying’ in which the catastrophe was couched. There was, for Shaw, ‘no heroism in being drowned when you cannot help it’.

  Social, rather than evolutionary, order must be maintained in a shipwreck: the fittest are obliged to ensure the survival of the weakest. Two days after the Titanic went down, the St Louis Post-Dispatch put the dilemma for male passengers in the form of an illustration entitled ‘The Last Seat — Should He Take It?’ A handsome young bridegroom is poised on a ladder between a sinking ship and a departing lifeboat, his lovely wife stands in the lifeboat with her arms open wide; behind him on the ladder is an unknown damsel in distress. There is only one seat in the boat: should the bridegroom preserve the family and join his wife, or be chivalric and make his wife a widow? Ismay, who had no relatives on board the ship to whom he could display his courage, showed neither the manners of a gentleman nor the mettle of a man; like Lady Macbeth, he was unsexed by his crime.

  It is easy to become what Second Officer Lightoller called an ‘armchair judge’, and forget that the Titanic passengers were responding to the crisis moment by moment. People behaved instinctively, but instincts need to be trained. Any number of brave and extraordinary acts took place as fear set in, couples separated and people prepared to die, but Ismay was seen to perform none of them. He had one view only: to carry on living. His instinct to survive became a force which overwhelmed and obliterated a lifetime of training. Of the few passengers who publicly praised his behaviour, three were women. The first was a stewardess who said that Ismay had saved her life by insisting that, being a ‘woman’ as well as a stewardess, she climb into a lifeboat; the second was Edith Russell, the fashion reporter who had likened the ship going down to a skyscraper. Miss Russell told the New York Times that as one of the last boats was being lowered, Ismay seized her arm and said: ‘Woman, what are you doing here? All women should be off the boat.’ Having been told by an officer that there was ‘no immediate danger’ and that the Titanic’s sister, the Olympic, was on her way to pick up the remaining passengers, Edith Russell had been drifting calmly between the lounge and the boat deck cradling her ‘lucky pig’. Had Ismay not thrown her down the steps to A Deck, where she was shoved headfirst, in her hobble skirt and diamond-buckled slippers, through a porthole and into a lifeboat, she would doubtless have stayed on board. ‘There has been much criticism of Mr Ismay,’ said Miss Russell, who claimed that they had subsequently become lovers, ‘but he certainly saved my life.’ The third woman to defend Ismay was Mrs Marian Thayer, who let the press know that any unfair statements about him which had appeared in the papers under her name had not been authorised: ‘Mr Ismay had done everything a man could do to help passengers on the Titanic! And Mrs Thayer did everything she could to defend Mr Ismay, who had — although she did not yet know it — fallen in love with her during the voyage.

  J. Bruce Ismay died on the night of 14–15 April 1912, and died again in his bedroom twenty-five years later. He was mired in the moment of his jump; his life was defined by a decision he made in an instant. Other survivors of the Titanic were able, in varying degrees, to pick themselves up and move on, but Ismay was not. His was now a posthumous existence.

  It is typical that in his most significant gesture Ismay is poised iconically between a sinking ship and a collapsible boat. The threshold was his natural home. He lived his life between the Old World and the New; when he was in New York, he referred to England as ‘the other side’. He crossed the North Atlantic more than eighty times: he held the record number of crossings between England and America, spending the equivalent of two and a half years floating between ports. Whether dining with the doctor on board as though he were an honorary member of the crew, or sitting stiffly amongst the Lebanese women and children in the lifeboat as though he were a passenger, Ismay is always awkwardly positioned, in neither one place nor another. He is never at the centre of his own story. We watch him skulk around the margins of films like A Night to Remember and James Cameron’s Titanic, the image of wealth, weakness and self-interest, an almost sickly figure separated from the healthy fellowship of potential heroes, an idler amongst workers who gets in everyone’s way when he is
only trying to help. In contrast with the image of the stalwart crew, the back-slapping young men and the blue-blooded passengers, Ismay is portrayed as introverted, impotent, nouveau riche. He is the man who doesn’t understand the jokes and can’t keep up with the conversation; in Cameron’s Titanic, where he is played by Jonathan Hyde, Ismay is asked whether it was he who thought of the ship’s name.

  ‘Yes, actually,’ Ismay replies. ‘I want to convey sheer size; and size means stability, luxury and, above all, strength.’

  ‘Do you know of Dr Freud, Mr Ismay?’ says Rose De Witt Bukater. ‘His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you.’

  ‘Freud?’ says Ismay. ‘Who is he? A passenger?’

  Even before the Titanic, Ismay was despised in America for inheriting rather than earning his position in the White Star Line. To a country of self-made men, he was a spoilt product of the class system. He was despised in Britain, on the other hand, for his lack of pedigree, for assuming the privileges of an aristocrat while working in trade for a living. For a country whose hierarchy is based on birth, Ismay was no more than a Liverpudlian businessman. Seamen thought him a shore-dweller; to his family, who feared him, he was king of an ocean world. Ismay’s problem, as the British inquiry concluded, was that he belonged in a category of his own. He fitted in nowhere, least of all on board the Titanic where, when the crisis came, he slipped through the all-important classifications. Alone of those on board, his journey did not have a destination. Other passengers were going somewhere, most of them on a one-way ticket: emigrating, joining their families, getting married, returning home. But Ismay was drifting across the Atlantic simply to drift back again when the Titanic turned around.

  When it came to saving his own life, he later told journalists: ‘I took my chance to escape — yes. It came to me though, I did not seek it… And why shouldn’t I take my turn? There are only two classes on a ship — crew and passengers. I was a passenger. It is true I am president of the company, but where do you draw the line?’16 Because he was a ‘passenger’ and not a member of the crew, Ismay said that he had ‘nothing to do with’ ordering the loading of the boats. But in a private account of his own experience, Karl H. Behr, a twenty-six-year-old love-sick tennis player who, having secretly pursued his sweetheart, Helen Newsome, across Europe where she was travelling with her parents, had planned an ‘accidental’ meeting with her on board the Titanic, described how Ismay commanded the lowering of the lifeboats as though he were the most authoritative person on the ship. Behr was standing with Miss Newsome and her mother and stepfather, Mr and Mrs Beckwith, next to a ‘comfortably filled’ lifeboat, when ‘Ismay came over to us and calmly told us we should get into a second boat which was being filled’. No one obeyed him as he walked off, because they did not believe that the boat was capable of sinking. ‘In a few minutes Ismay noticed us still standing together; he again walked over and with considerably more emphasis told us to get into the lifeboat — we were the last passengers on the deck. I told Mrs Beckwith I thought we should do what he said, and she finally led the way to the boat. Stepping in front of Ismay, she asked if all her party could get into the same lifeboat and he replied, “Of course Madam, every one of you”.’17

  The first Titanic film, Saved from the Titanic, appeared after four weeks, in May 1912, with the twenty-two-year-old silent movie star, Dorothy Gibson, who had been on board, playing herself in the dress she had worn in her lifeboat. When, in 1954, Walter Lord was writing his classic account of the wreck, A Night to Remember, he received hundreds of letters in response to his request for memories. In 1958, when the book was being filmed, dozens more Titanic survivors offered the producer, William Macquitty, their help, all believing that they had the ‘correct’ version of events. Many said they had been among the last to leave the ship, and a few proudly claimed to have been the notorious male who had dressed in women’s clothing to ensure his escape. The need felt by the survivors to tell their tales was, from the start, overwhelming and the need of those who were not on board to read their accounts, to see the films, to repeat the experience and work it through, to raise the Titanic and watch her go down again and again is one of the shipwreck’s most peculiar effects. Colonel Archibald Gracie said, after he was rescued by the Carpathia, that the only purpose of the rest of his life was to write an account of surviving the Titanic; when he died eight months later he had completed his task.

  Sea stories are as fuelled by jumps as romances are by misunderstandings: whether it is jumping off or onto a ship, a jump contains a concentration of narrative intensity. In Ismay’s jump can be seen his whole life story, but after the inquiries, while passengers and journalists were putting together the most enduring sea story of the last hundred years, he never spoke of his beloved ship again, either in public or in private. And yet from the age of twenty until his death, he scoured the newspapers of the world, cutting out and keeping every article — and there are thousands — referring either to himself or to the White Star Line. Noting in his square, slow handwriting the source and date of each, he pasted them in chronological order into a dozen large, labelled leather-bound ledgers. In this sense, Ismay compiled an edited version of his rise and fall.

  Despite his silence, he is someone we already know. Ismay has long inhabited the seabed of our psyches; he has been wandering through our literature for centuries in his various guises. He is Noah, building his ark into which everything comes in pairs; he is Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, whose obsession with the great white Leviathan dooms his crew; he is Ishmael — even the name is similar — who ‘alone survived’ when the Pequod went down. Ismay is the Ancient Mariner, cast out from the community of mankind; he is Dr Frankenstein, whose creation became a monster that pursued him across icy wastes; and he is Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, who also jumped from a sinking ship and was forced to live on without honour.

  Chapter 2

  LUCKLESS YAMSI

  There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

  Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

  The small boats drifted through the ice. Above them hung a sky of spectacular brilliance: what looked at first like the lights of ships turned out to be falling stars whose reflections shot across the water like cat’s eyes. With the morning sun icebergs the size of islands became glittering gems; some were shades of pink and blue, others were gleaming pyramids of beaten gold. Their ‘awful beauty’, wrote Lawrence Beesley, ‘could not be overlooked’. It was only now that those inside the boats were able to see one another’s faces. A spirited American first-class passenger, who became known as the ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown, described the morning of 15 April as the ‘most wonderful’ she had ever seen. ‘I have just returned from Egypt. I have been all over the world, but I have never seen anything like this. First the gray and then the flood of light. Then the sun came up in a ball of red fire. For the first time we saw where we were. Near us was open water, but on every side was ice. Ice ten feet high was everywhere, and to the right and left and back and front were icebergs. Some of them were mountain-high. This sea of ice was forty miles wide, they told me.’ Ismay did not remember the sunrise that day.

  When the distress call from the Titanic came in, Harold Cottam, the twenty-one-year-old wireless officer on the Cunard Line’s Carpathia, bound from New York to Gibraltar, was preparing for bed but happened to still have the telephone to his ear. Had the message arrived a few minutes later, the Marconi machine would have been turned off. Cottam informed the Captain, Arthur Rostron, who headed to the spot where the Titanic was reported wounded. Rostron had no idea how many passengers he was to pick up, how many other ships would be on the scene, or in what state he would find the great liner. As the Carpathia steamed ahead he prepared a list of orders for his crew:

  English doctor, with assistants, to remain in first-class dining room.

  Italian doctor, with assis
tants, to remain in second-class dining room.

  Hungarian doctor, with assistants, to remain in third-class dining room.

  Each doctor to have supplies of restoratives, stimulants, and everything to hand for immediate needs of probable wounded or sick.

  Purser, with assistant purser and chief-steward, to receive the passengers etc., at different gangways, controlling our own stewards in assisting Titanic passengers to the dining rooms, etc.; also to get Christian and surnames of all survivors as soon as possible to send by wireless.

  Inspector, steerage stewards, and Master at Arms to control our own steerage passengers and keep them out of the third-class dining hall, and also to keep them out of the way and off the deck to prevent confusion.

  Chief Steward: that all hands would be called and to have coffee, tea, soup, etc., in each saloon, blankets in saloons, at the gangways, and some for the boats.

  To see all rescued cared for and immediate wants attended to.

  My cabin and all officials’ cabins to be given up. Smoke rooms, library etc. dining rooms, would be utilised for Titanic’s passengers, and get all our own steerage passengers grouped together.1

  When the Carpathia arrived at 4.30 a.m. there was nothing to see but ‘boxes and coats and what looked like oil on the water’.2 The lifeboats, scattered across a five-mile radius, slowly gathered around the rescue ship and at six that morning Ismay was picked up. He said that he had been rowing continuously, but his emotional state when he left the Titanic suggests that he was incapable of doing anything physical, while his frozen condition when the Carpathia arrived implies that he had not moved a muscle for hours. In an interview with the Guernsey Press, a Titanic first-class stewardess called Annie Martin said that she recalled Ismay ‘sitting on his haunches on the stern of the boat that was cleared by the Carpathia just before ours. He sat there like a statue, blue with cold, and neither said a word nor looked at us. He was nearly dead when taken on board, for he was wearing only his nightclothes and an overcoat.’