How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  A committee of twenty-five surviving passengers prepared a statement to be issued to the press once they reached New York. ‘In addition to the insufficiency of lifeboats, rafts &c, there was a lack of trained seamen to hand the same — stokers, stewards &c are not efficient boat handlers. There were not enough officers to carry out the emergency orders on the bridge and to superintend the launching and control of the lifeboats, and there was an absence of searchlights… We suggest that an international conference should be called [and] we urge the United States Government to take the initiative as soon as possible.’38

  The Carpathia, wrote Lawrence Beesley, ‘returned to New York in almost every kind of climatic condition: icebergs, ice fields and bitter cold to commence with; brilliant warm sun, thunder and lightning in the middle of one night (and so closely did the peal follow the flash that women in the saloon leaped up in alarm saying rockets were being sent up again); cold winds most of the time; fogs every morning and during a good part of one day, with the foghorn blowing constantly; rain, choppy sea with the spray blowing overboard and coming in through the saloon windows’.39 It was in drizzle that she steamed past the Statue of Liberty on the evening of Thursday 18 April. The newspaper boats clustered around the ship, shouting up questions through their megaphones. Through his own loudspeaker, Rostron announced that anyone trying to come on board would be ‘shot down’. At New York harbour’s Pier 54, a silent crowd of 30,000 waited as the ship crept up the river. The only lights visible were the Carpathia’s portholes and the bursts coming from photographer’s lamps. The business of docking, always slow, seemed interminable as the tugs worked away to get the ship warped in. At 9.30 p.m., the Titanic’s survivors, seventy of whom were widows, began to descend and the crowd divided into two long, cordoned-off lines through which they could pass. ‘Every figure, every face seemed remarkable,’ a journalist wrote. Senator Smith described the appearance of ‘the almost lifeless survivors in their garments of woe — joy and sorrow so intermingled that it was difficult to discern light from shadow’.40 First to appear on the gangway were the richest passengers; last off were those in steerage including the Lebanese immigrants who had shared Ismay’s boat. Finally, six orphaned babies were carried out in the arms of the Carpathia crew. The Titanic survivors, many of whom were finding speech difficult, were not expecting such a reception. It was the tolling of bells and the booming of cannon which brought home that they ‘had passed through a history-making disaster’.41 Ambulances were waiting for the injured, and the Women’s Relief Committee were ready to distribute clothes and shoes among the steerage passengers. Boarding houses were thrown open for those hundreds who had nowhere to stay, while the White Star Line had arranged for passengers who were now destitute to reach their final destination.

  When everyone else had left the ship, Philip Franklin, Senator Smith and Senator Newlands showed their passes and slipped quietly on board. The two senators waited impatiently outside Dr McGhee’s cabin while Franklin went in to see Ismay with a new suit of clothes, the pair of shoes he had asked for and a fashionable scotch cap. Ismay dressed himself while Franklin explained that he would not be returning home on the Cedric and took him through the draft of an official statement he had prepared for Ismay to give to the press. After some minutes, Senators Smith and Newlands demanded to see Ismay, and Franklin replied that he was too ill to be interviewed. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Senator Smith, ‘but I will have to see that for myself’, and pushing open the door with his umbrella, informed Ismay that he would be appearing the next morning at the US Senate official investigation into the wreck of the Titanic. William Alden Smith had secured his star witness.

  Flanked by detectives, Ismay left the Carpathia at 11.15 p.m. and went to the rear of the dock to the Cunard offices where an assortment of selected pressmen waited to finally get their story. Franklin’s statement was read out by one of the White Star Line officers:

  In the presence and under the shadow of a catastrophe so overwhelming, my feelings are too deep for expression in words. I have only to say that the White Star Line, its officers, and employees, will do everything possible to alleviate the suffering and sorrows of the survivors and the relatives and friends of those who have perished. The Titanic was the last word in shipbuilding. Every regulation prescribed by the British Board of Trade had been complied with. The master, officers, and crew were the most experienced and skilled in the British service. I am informed that a committee of the United States Senate has been appointed to investigate the circumstances of the accident. I heartily welcome the most complete and exhaustive inquiry, and any aid that I or my associates or our builders or navigators can render is at the service of the public and the governments of both the United States and Great Britain. Under these circumstances, I must respectfully defer making a further statement at this time.

  Boasts about the Titanic’s superiority as a ship were of no interest to the press, who had already decided that their story was to be a stirring narrative of chivalry and cowardice. ‘On what boat did you leave the Titanic? one journalist asked. ‘What do you mean?’ Ismay replied, unaware that this was an issue. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I left on a boat leaving from the centre.’ What was the number of the boat on which you left, in their order of departure? ‘I left from the starboard forward collapsible, the last boat to leave.’ Do you want to answer the charge that it is the custom, on the maiden voyage of a new liner, to make as fast a passage as possible in order to secure the good advertising which would follow? ‘That statement is absolutely false,’ Ismay replied ‘with more animation’, the New York Times reporter noted, ‘than he showed at any time during the interview’. ‘I can speak for the White Star Line that such a proceeding is not the case, and that the Titanic at no time during her voyage had been at full speed.’ He was asked how long it took the ship to sink (‘two hours and twenty-five minutes since the collision’), whether it was ‘true that she remained afloat long enough to save all had there been enough boats’ (‘I decline to answer’). He explained that he had been asleep at the time of the accident, that he had then come on deck, that he did all he could; he answered questions about the bulkheads and the length of time the lights remained on after the collision. When asked how he happened to be one of the ‘mostly women and children’ in the lifeboats, he spoke only of the magnificent behaviour of the crew. He said he did not see the ship go down, that he could offer no suggestions as to why the vital wireless message he sent to Franklin from the Carpathia had been delayed. When he was asked again how he came to be among the survivors, Franklin intervened to say that the question was unfair. The interview came to an end, and, flanked by bodyguards, Ismay was driven to the Ritz Carlton Hotel for the night.

  Amongst those in New York who had booked their passage to Southampton on the Titanic’s return journey was the English writer John Galsworthy, who had been rehearsing his new play, The Pigeon. Caught up in the moment, Galsworthy decided not to go home immediately, but to attend the Titanic inquiry instead.

  Chapter 3

  YOUTH

  This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak, the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.

  Joseph Conrad, Youth

  Ismay’s father, Thomas Henry, was born in 1837, the year Queen Victoria came to the throne and Bruce, like the future Edward VII, was as different from his mighty parent as it was possible to be. Thomas was a Victorian, Bruce an Edwardian; the father stood for entrepreneurial strength and imperial greatness, the son for decline.

  The Ismays were of Cumbrian stock and Thomas began his life in the small town of Maryport at the mouth of the River Ellen, in one of a row of tiny cottages called Whillan’s Yard. His own father, Joseph, was a shipbuilder and after the birth of three further children — Charlotte and Mary, who were twins, and Sarah — the family moved to a larger house in the shipy
ard where Thomas’s grandfather, Henry Ismay, who had once been a sea captain, now worked as a timber merchant. In their new home, called The Ropery because the ropes for the ships lay all around, a final child, John Sealby, was born. Thomas spent his childhood at the harbour, chatting to the sailors and carving model ships from driftwood. Because he was bright and promising, he was sent to a good school in Carlisle where he excelled at sport, especially cricket, and took special studies in navigation. He also improved in writing: a letter from his father, dated 1849, congratulates Thomas on his most recent correspondence which had been ‘very well Wrote and spelled’.

  Known as ‘Baccy’ for the tobacco he chewed all day in imitation of the sailors at the harbour, Thomas was short, confident, convivial and popular. He was, a contemporary remembered, ‘a dark complexioned lad with dark piercing eyes, whose hobby was the sea, whose ambition was a sea-faring life, and who never seemed so happy as when engaged in fashioning a miniature sailing vessel with a pocket knife out of a block of wood, rigging it with masts and sails… and then sailing [it] on the pond at Irthington’. When he was thirteen his father died and Thomas became head of the family. He stayed on at school until he was fifteen and at sixteen began an apprenticeship in the Liverpool shipping firm of Imrie, Tomlinson, where he befriended William Imrie, a fellow apprentice and the son of the joint owner.

  At eighteen, he left England to test the fibre of his stuff aboard the Charles Jackson, a small sailing ship of 352 tons destined for Chile. This was Thomas Ismay’s first sea voyage and, always a keen travel diarist, his record of the journey proves him a solid, humorous and uncomplicated team player.

  January 7, Monday. This is the 19th anniversary of my birthday, and a beautiful day it is, being almost calm, remained on deck nearly all day shooting gulls. The crew in the forecastle had a bottle of brandy given them to drink, and if I judge from the songs I heard them singing, they enjoyed the contents. During the evening Rapp, the Captain and myself were amusing ourselves with singing, Home Sweet Home, etc. Of course, the performance would not have elicited great applause from an audience endowed with taste. I do hope I may enjoy every anniversary as well.

  He relieved the Captain’s toothache (‘I induced him to get a little salt heated, and put into a flannel stocking and tied round the jaw’), guffawed when he got a wetting (‘everyone generally enjoys a laugh when another gets wet, and it is best for the sufferer to laugh too’) and made the most of the worst conditions (‘You have to hold on to your plate to keep it near you, to hold onto your glass of water to avoid the unnecessary luxury of a shower bath’). Once the Charles Jackson arrived in Chile, Thomas visited the theatre, enjoyed the food and drink, rode out in the mornings and danced by night with the local girls, who may have ‘spat’ and ‘smoked’ but ‘between the ankles and the chin’, he thought, were ‘the best formed race of women in the world’.1

  When he returned to Liverpool in 1858, Thomas was unstoppable. Aged twenty-two, he set up a ship-broking business, became director of his own line of steamships carrying cargo and passengers to South America and married Margaret Bruce, daughter of local shipowner Luke Bruce. Aged thirty, he bought for £1,000 the goodwill and house flag of the then bankrupt White Star Line of Australian clippers, founded twenty years before by the Liverpool businessmen Henry Threlfell Wilson and John Pilkington, then cashing in on the gold rush. Australian gold was small fry: Thomas Ismay’s aim was to cash in on the floods of immigrants making their way to the United States.

  Work was his passion and his calling. Ismay Senior wanted to make money but also to make his mark, to bestow pride on his nation and to sire a dynasty who would carry his torch. In 1868 he attended a dinner party at Broughton Hall, the Liverpool home of a Hamburg Jew called Gustavus C. Schwabe. The guests included Thomas’s former fellow apprentice, William Imrie. Over a game of billiards, so the story goes, it was agreed that Ismay and Imrie would together form a new company, Ismay, Imrie & Co., which would run steam-powered ships across the North Atlantic and that Harland & Wolff, co-owned by Schwabe’s nephew in Belfast, would be the exclusive builders of these vessels. Harland & Wolff would use only the best materials available, and payment would be an unusual arrangement based on cost plus agreed profit margin. Schwabe, who had already invested in another Liverpool shipping company, the Bibby Line, three of whose ships had been built by Harland & Wolff, would support this new venture and ensure further backing from other Liverpool businessmen.

  Thus the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, better known as the White Star Line, was formed, with Ismay, Imrie & Co. as the parent company. Ismay would look after the steam vessels and Imrie the sailing ships, both of which would be built by Harland & Wolff. ‘The story of the association between the Belfast builders and the White Star Line,’ read an article in the journal Engineering in 1912, ‘practically involves the story of the development of the Atlantic liner.’ It was to be ‘a wonderful story’, reflected the London Opinion in 1904, ‘of tonnage, horse-power and names ending in -ic’.

  Edward Harland had come to Belfast from Yorkshire in 1854 to take charge of a shipyard on Queen’s Island. In 1858 he bought the yard and in 1861 he and Gustav Wolff formed Harland & Wolff. Twenty years later what had begun as a tiny works on a few acres, with one berth and forty-eight employees, contained six slips and a thousand workers including interior designers, artists, tapestry makers and upholsterers. Eventually Harland & Wolff would cover 80 acres, employ 16,000 local men and distribute £28,000 in weekly wages.

  In 1836, a scientific writer called Dionysius Lardner gave a lecture on steam navigation in which he suggested that ‘establishing a steam intercourse with the United States’ was as likely as ‘making a voyage from New York or Liverpool to the moon’. That same year, Isambard Kingdom Brunel formed the Great Western Steamship Company in order to build a line of steamships to travel between Bristol and New York. Two years later the Sirius, owned by the St George Steam Packet Company, was the first ship to cross the Atlantic by steam power alone. Taking eighteen days, she beat Brunel’s Great Western by twenty-four hours. When the fuel on the Sirius ran out, the crew burned the furniture; the science fiction writer, Jules Verne, was inspired to use the scene in Around the World in Eighty Days.

  Then in 1840 a Canadian named Samuel Cunard beat both the Great Western Steamship Company and the St George Steam Packet Company in winning a British government contract to run the first regular mail and passenger transatlantic steamship service. Cunard’s fleet of four sister steamers could offer what no other shipping line was able to do: a swift and punctual schedule of departure. This was a hugely attractive feature for passengers used to waiting at the port until the ship was filled and the winds were fair, before embarking on a passage of indeterminate length. Under sail it took around forty days to reach America; Cunard could reduce this to a fortnight.

  The Britannia, the first Cunarder to be launched, was celebrated as the last word in shipbuilding and in 1842 Charles Dickens and his wife booked their passage to Boston on board the new liner. The ‘stateroom’, Dickens recorded, was not at all the ‘room of state’ pictured in the brochure, with its almost ‘interminable perspective’. It was instead ‘an utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box’ into and out of which he and his wife had to twine themselves ‘like serpents’. Their luggage could no more be ‘got in at the door… than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot’. The sumptuous bed they had seen in the illustration in the booking office was a ‘very thin mattress’ spread over ‘a most inaccessible shelf’ like a ‘surgical plaster’. Reading in bed was not possible — at least, Dickens found, it was not possible to tell what it was you were reading — and nor was it possible to get away from the ‘extraordinary compound of strange smells’ which accompanied sea life.

  Steam, it was believed, would never successfully replace sail. Sail might be slow but it was at least a proven means of transport; by contrast the behaviour of these new-fangled steam wa
gons was terrifyingly unpredictable and uncertain. Should they break down in mid-ocean, where were the engineers to do the repairs? The fact that the first steamships still carried sails suggested to passengers that the shipbuilders themselves lacked trust in these vessels. Harland & Wolff were to change all this: their reputation for efficiency and expertise meant that the shift from sail to steam, from wood to iron, and eventually from iron to steel, was made possible. ‘All through this great shipyard,’ wrote Bram Stoker in an article on Harland & Wolff, ‘the biggest and finest and best established in the world, there is omnipresent evidence of genius and forethought; of experience and skill; of organisation complete and triumphant.’ The ‘perfection of the business organisation’ was made apparent to Stoker when he watched the workers clock off at 5.30 on a Friday afternoon and queue to collect their wages. All 16,000 men were paid ‘within ten minutes’.2

  The first liner built for the White Star Line by Harland & Wolff was the Oceanic, followed, in under two and a half years, by the Atlantic, Baltic, Republic, Adriatic, Celtic, Gallic and Belgic. When the Oceanic was launched, in 1870, she made news by being the first ship to exceed in length Brunel’s Great Eastern, which had laid the transatlantic cable and which, at 673 feet, was then the biggest moving object in the world. In A Floating City, a novel published in 1867, Jules Verne described crossing the Atlantic on the Great Eastern. His narrator is less interested in seeing America than in seeing the ship itself which, he says, was ‘something more than a ship, it was… a section detached from English soil which, having crossed the sea, united itself to the American continent’. The Great Eastern, wrote Verne, was a ‘microcosm’ carrying ‘a little world along with it’, containing ‘all the instincts, follies, and passions of the human race’.3