by Brad Matsen
Correct, Mr. Pirrie, Morgan said. And I hope you and Mr. Ismay will consider serving on the board.
I would be delighted, and I will propose the seat to Mr. Ismay, Pirrie said. I must tell you that Ismay thinks the whole thing is a swindle and a humbug, he added, dropping his voice and leaning ever so slightly toward Morgan. But I’ll take your offer to him if you include this in the terms of the combine.
Pirrie played his real cards now. The White Star deal, as good as it was, meant nothing to him compared to saving his shipyard. As Morgan brightened visibly, Pirrie pushed across the table a piece of cockle-finish onionskin on which, in the elegant hand of a Victorian bookkeeper, was a single paragraph.
Builder’s Agreement
All orders for new vessels and for heavy repairs, requiring to be done at a shipyard of the United Kingdom, are to be given to Harland & Wolff, but nothing herein contained shall prevent the purchasers from placing orders for new steamers and repairs at shipyards in the United States. In return Harland & Wolff agree not to build ships for any persons not in the combination, except the Hamburg-American company, so long as orders from the combination keep the builders’ works busy. Harland & Wolff are to be paid the cost of the work plus 5 percent on new ships, 10 percent on new machinery in old vessels, and 15 percent on repairs. This agreement runs for ten years and is terminable thereafter only on five years’ notice from either side.
Morgan read it in a minute. Done, he said.
Pirrie said, I’ll take care of Ismay.
Six
ISMAY
Pirrie delivered Morgan’s offer to Bruce Ismay on a frosty January morning when the ancient Liverpool docks seemed to begrudge the prospect of yet another windy, freezing day. The cobbles and timbers were slippery with the night’s coating of rime, and the bad footing slowed the men as they picked their way among the sheds, chandleries, and tally shacks on the wharves. The first hour of a cold day working outside was brutal, but the effort of stowing cargo, coaling, watering, mucking out ballast, and manhandling mooring hawsers banished the chill by the time dawn marked the peaks of the buildings on the fringe of the waterfront. The new White Star office on the corner of James Street and the riverfront Strand where Bruce Ismay waited for Pirrie was among the first to catch the rays of the sun winking over the upper Mersey to the southeast. It was an eight-story ocher-and-white layer cake of brick and limestone set on a hulking granite base, ornamented with turrets and wrought-iron balconies, and topped with three oversized chimneys already flinging their dark smudges of coal smoke into the brightening sky.
James Street, as the White Star headquarters was known in the company, was a radical departure from the stately Victorian pile of the nearby Royal Liver Assurance headquarters, the blocky Cunard building, and the surrounding warehouses. Some called it “a slice of New Scotland Yard” because its architect, Richard Shaw, had also designed the famous police headquarters in London and seemed to be merely repeating himself in Liverpool. Scotland Yard was originally going to be an opera house, but its owners ran out of money; Shaw inherited the two floors of granite already in place and a smaller budget to complete the building for the Metropolitan Police. He finished it with six stories of alternating brick and limestone, transforming a stalled project into a curious masterpiece. Twelve years before getting the White Star job, Shaw had also designed Thomas Ismay’s mansion, Dawpool, a drafty monstrosity with primitive plumbing that was impossible to heat because the place filled with smoke from the chimneys no matter which way the wind blew. Some people wondered why Ismay stuck with the architect for James Street. Others, who knew him better, understood that the last thing Ismay would do would be to admit to failure as a judge of character.
The public office on the ground floor of James Street was as austere as a mausoleum, furnished in stark oak, its high walls sparsely decorated with two paintings of Teutonic, the first White Star liner with twin engines and no sails, a portrait of Thomas Ismay, and, in a glass case in the central aisle, the builder’s model of Afric, a 12,000-ton colonial service ship delivered in 1899 to carry livestock, frozen meat, and passengers on the Australian routes. The marble porter’s lodge opened into a cavernous ticketing room in which clerks managed sales, bills of lading, and customs declarations. Every sound—a stamp snapping against its pad, a cash drawer clicking shut, the ratchet of a Comptometer—ricocheted off the granite walls, giving the hall the efficient but chilly feel of a railway station.
Pirrie was fairly certain he would be able to talk Bruce Ismay into selling to Morgan, but he knew from experience that convincing his younger partner of anything was much easier if he treated him with the respect of an equal. Bruce’s father, Thomas Henry Ismay, or T.H., as he was known, had been dead for two years, after a cascade of heart attacks. Pirrie sensed that Bruce was not entirely unhappy about his father’s departure. T.H. had subscribed to the philosophy that boys will not become men unless they are browbeaten, criticized, and subjugated; the elder of his two sons had caught the worst of it.
Bruce Ismay still cringed every time he thought of the day he went to work as an apprentice in the early autumn of 1880. The old White Star offices on Water Street were ripe with memories from visits arranged by his mother to remind him and his younger brother, James, that as surely as beavers built a dam, they were destined to run a shipping company. The bite of stale tobacco, the thuds, clatters, and shouting on the wharves, and the mystical presence of the great ships outside were as familiar to him as his childhood nursery. Wearing a black vested suit, he had followed a pace behind his identically dressed father through the freight bins on the ground floor, up two flights of stairs, and into a room full of men at high-legged ledger tables, each of whom muttered, Morning, Mr. Ismay, Master Ismay, without looking up from their books.
Thomas Ismay’s office overlooked the Mersey River, fully a mile across at that point in its journey from the middle of England to the Irish Sea, alive with ships, lighters, ferryboats, and smacks attending one another and the docks on the Liverpool side. T.H. walked to a leaded bay window and lit a cigarette. He stood with his back to his waiting son, scanning the waterfront below where one of his ships, Britannic, lay at anchor in the stream, waiting for a high enough tide to moor at its pier. Another, the smaller Adriatic, was fast to the quay while stevedores topped up the freshwater tanks and slung cargo into its forward hold. Ismay lifted a gold pocket watch from his vest and checked the time. Adriatic sailed at noon that day and, from the looks of things, on schedule. Adriatic and the slightly newer Britannic were the most up-to-date combinations of sails and steam engines that had reduced the crossing time between Liverpool and New York to a mere eight days, give or take a few hours.
Bruce lingered quietly by the door for five minutes, then finally hung his coat in its customary place on a bentwood rack he had used as a child and left his father standing at the window. As Bruce approached the office manager’s desk to get his assignment for the day, a bell on the wall rang once—a shrill, high note—and one of the men working there jumped up to answer the boss’s summons.
Please inform the new office boy, Thomas Ismay said in a stage voice loud enough to carry into the next room, that he is not to leave his overcoat lying about in my office.
Joseph Bruce Ismay, who thought of himself as Bruce even though everyone in his family called him Joseph, coped stoically with his father; the teachers at Elstree School and Harrow; his tutor for a year in France; and all the other men who thought it their duty to stun him into excellence with mean-spirited criticism. Defying them would have been unthinkable, so Bruce retreated into silent fantasies of solo adventures in foreign ports where he knew no one and no one knew him. He armored himself with a practiced reticence that most people interpreted as arrogance. He learned to shut the door on their world and endure the fact that he was the not-quite-capable elder son of one of the world’s celebrated shipping geniuses.
T. H. Ismay was a shrewd, self-made merchant prince whose road to riches was a matter
of Liverpool legend. In 1868, a fleet known as the White Star clippers was doing a brisk business on the sea-lanes to the Australian goldfields when the bonanza down under went bust, taking the company and its bankers with it into bankruptcy. T.H., the son of a boatbuilder, had been scratching out a living with a pair of square riggers. He took the biggest risk of his life when he borrowed £1,000 to buy the White Star name, its flag, and whatever goodwill was left in the wake of the once dependable company. The bankruptcy court put the wooden clipper ships up for auction, but with a flash of insight, Ismay ignored them. Grown knees, forks, timbers, and planks for building ships were already scarce in Europe, and their cost soared when they had to be imported from Canada. The future, T.H. felt certain, was in iron. He refitted his own ships for longer voyages, took over the White Star routes, and carried cargo and passengers attracted by free land and opportunity in Australia and New Zealand. His backhauls still included gold, wool, jugged mutton, and the few passengers who’d gone broke or crazy on the raw frontier and decided to come home to Europe. A year later, Ismay was showing enough profit to be able to peddle four hundred £1,000 shares in his company, keeping fifty shares for himself. When, a little over a decade after buying the White Star name, T.H. put his oldest son to work on Water Street, he owned ten sailing steamers and had four more on order at Harland and Wolff. Not one of his ships carried a mortgage.
Bruce Ismay’s apprenticeship in Liverpool ended, mercifully, in 1886. Either because Thomas Ismay figured out that his son despised him or because he despised his son, he assigned him to the White Star office in New York. More than 70 percent of inbound and 60 percent of outbound freight and passengers passed through New York’s harbor. The number of emigrants from the Old World to the New approached a million a year, every one of whom arrived by ship. To commemorate that flood of humanity and the optimism it kindled in the underclasses of Europe, France gave the United States a 151-foot-tall statue of the personification of Liberty. Liberty arrived, coincidentally, as Bruce Ismay and his valet moved into a town house on the West Side of lower Manhattan, near the White Star docks.
Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age, and Ismay and his pal Harold Sanderson, who worked for his own family’s shipping company, took their places among the tight society of young, rich bons vivants. Ismay was not a smooth player among the polished New Yorkers, and many people who encountered the aloof heir to the White Star fortune were left feeling offended by his standoffishness. Sometimes, Ismay’s social awkwardness even forced confrontations. On one particular evening, a mutual friend introduced him to the twenty-four-year-old son of a mining tycoon who had just inherited a San Francisco newspaper and was in New York to buy another one. William Randolph Hearst squared his shoulders, lifted his chin, and stuck out his hand to shake. Ismay, startled by the American lack of reserve he had never quite gotten used to, hesitated a moment too long. Hearst turned on his heel and walked away without a word. Who was that again? Ismay asked Sanderson.
Ismay stumbled from stag line to stag line until October 1887, when he abruptly abandoned bachelorhood at a watering hole called the Tuxedo Club by asking Julia Florence Schieffelin to marry him. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a member of the Knickerbocracy, the four hundred men who supposedly ruled New York City, and a celebrated beauty who had not been at all impressed when she’d met Bruce Ismay on the circuit a month earlier. After their first encounter, the odd Englishman kept turning up unexpectedly as she stepped from a carriage or a doorway. He would mumble an awkward greeting, tip his black bowler, and go on his way. She was curious about the apparently shy or absurdly arrogant man, but had dreams of her own of far-off lands.
For Ismay, it had been love at first sight. At the Tuxedo Club, his awkward persistence paid off when Julia agreed to brave the elements and walk with him around the grounds of the coastal estate. Half in jest, he made his proposal and was stunned when she accepted. Their engagement ignited a storm of opposition from her father, who buttonholed Ismay and declared that there was no way he was going to let his daughter marry a man who was going to take her away from Manhattan.
Fine, Ismay told George Schieffelin. I promise you that I will live here for the rest of my life. Ismay could think of nothing more wonderful than living in New York and being spared the pains of being a single man in high society.
T. H. Ismay had other plans. A year and a half after the wedding, the young Ismays went to Dawpool for a midsummer visit to show off their new daughter and enjoy the best month of the year in the lush green uplands over the Mersey. The visit went according to form, with picnics, forest walks, trap shooting for the men, and teas for the women. At dinner one night, T.H. stunned his family when he stood up, cleared his throat, and told them he was retiring from day-to-day management of his company but would stay on as chairman. Then, in no uncertain terms, he said that either Bruce would return home to take his place as president or the job would go to James.
After Bruce caught his breath, he told his father he had promised George Schieffelin that he wouldn’t take his daughter and grandchildren to live in England. What he didn’t say was that he would rather die than work for his brother. There had never been any question that James was the family favorite; for reasons that were never clear to Bruce, his brother delighted his father rather than irritating him. He also didn’t mention the fact that running the business with his father looking over his shoulder might simply be more than he could stand. With the decision still up in the air, Bruce and Florence sailed back to New York on the magnificent new Majestic, sister to Teutonic and, at 10,000 tons, the world’s largest steamship. It also held the current record for the Atlantic crossing: five days, eighteen hours, and eight minutes.
Schieffelin was nothing if not a smart businessman. When Bruce told him about T.H.’s ultimatum, he realized that a son-in-law at the helm of one of the world’s most profitable shipping empires was better than a son-in-law working as a minion in the White Star agency in New York. He released Bruce from his promise, and the Ismays sailed for Liverpool two months later.
For the next six years, Bruce Ismay rode the tram to James Street every day. He carried his lunch in a satchel, fished, played lawn tennis and bridge on weekends, and kept the White Star Line ships running on time. His father blew into his life from time to time like a squall off the Irish Sea, but Bruce survived by laying down his own set of rules for the office, his colleagues, and his ships by which he could clearly measure performance and defend himself against criticism. The stories that circulated in the company, particularly among the officers on White Star liners, were anything but complimentary about the tightly wound, mustachioed martinet in the president’s chair. According to one of them, Ismay reprimanded the master of Teutonic for sailing from Liverpool with some of the windows of his wheelhouse up and some of them down. According to another, memorialized in a letter from a White Star captain, William Marshall, to his wife, “the Big White Chief” spent most of his time during a voyage to New York inspecting details in the galley, staterooms, parlors, and engine room. Thankfully, Marshall also told her, Ismay had enough sense to stay out of the way when it came to the navigation and the actual running of the ship.
In Bruce Ismay’s office, with the door closed, Pirrie sat in an armchair near the open hearth and talked his partner through Morgan’s proposition. It’s a two-edged sword, he said. The shareholders of White Star and Harland and Wolff will reap an enormous windfall in cash, but we will also own shares in the combine and eventually have to pay for Morgan’s mistake of overpaying us when we have to return dividends on those shares and any other money we borrow to stay in business. On the other hand, if we do not surrender White Star, Morgan will not stop in his attempts to take over our British, German, Belgian, and Dutch competitors. As a part of his combine we will have a chance. As its enemy, both White Star and Harland and Wolff are doomed.
Thomas Ismay would never have let Pirrie steer so momentous a decision about his precious company, but his son had mov
ed into a comfortable orbit around the shipbuilder. Ismay trusted Pirrie completely and was relieved to be doing business with an older man who did not make him feel like an incompetent fool. Ismay was very good at keeping his ships running on time with the windows in the proper position, and he was quite happy to leave the strategizing to Pirrie. On February 4, 1902, the White Star Line ceased to exist as an independent company and became the keystone of Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, known to all simply as IMM.
Pirrie’s strategy for saving Harland and Wolff had worked perfectly. The guarantee of all of the combine’s construction and repair business in Europe had cost him absolutely nothing. The windfall from his White Star shares would cushion him during the next economic collapse—whenever it came—and allow him to expand his shipyard to build more and bigger ships. Pirrie’s prediction about the dismal consequences of Morgan’s paying too much for Ismay’s company, however, began to come true a year later. White Star staggered under the shared burden of the nearly bankrupt combine and Morgan’s inability to corner the market because he failed to gain control of enough other big lines to put together a monopoly. The shipping industry went into an almost fatal price war. In 1903, you could buy a ticket across the Atlantic for £2. Only a boom in travelers saved White Star and IMM. Between 1898 and 1907, fueled by American immigration, the number of passengers increased steadily from 600,000 to 2,400,000 a year. In 1904, with the combine in the depths of its struggle to survive, Pirrie engineered a change of leadership at IMM. He convinced Morgan and the combine boards in America and England to replace its president, Clement Griscom, with the man he had slowly, quietly moved into the embrace of his vision: Bruce Ismay.