How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  The Oceanic, with berths for 2,000 people, carried only sixty-four passengers on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York in March 1871, but it was widely agreed that she was the finest vessel on the Atlantic route. Sleek and elegant, she looked more like a yacht than a steamer. The Oceanic was the first modern ocean liner: Thomas Ismay had set a new standard in shipbuilding which every steamship company then followed. It took seven days for her to reach New York, but speed was less important to Ismay Senior than splendour and comfort; his achievement was to build steady ships and thus bring to an end the misery of sea travel. Not only did White Star passengers have no reason to dread their crossing; their journey was now so restful that they were in no hurry to arrive. The designers at Harland & Wolff devised a plan not previously tried before: they placed the first-class staterooms amidships where there was least motion, rather than near the stern where the ship’s heaving and vibration were at their greatest. This way they prevented the condition described by Dickens of ‘not ill, but going to be’, and the compound of strange smells from the galley of which Dickens also complained could additionally be avoided. Staterooms were now double the size and with larger portholes; before fitting the ship out, William Pirrie, a young draftsman of genius employed at the shipyard, was sent on a tour of English and Continental hotels in order to observe their finest features. Where Samuel Cunard was dour and efficient, Thomas Ismay was decadent and efficient; and when the Baltic created a new speed record and the White Star won a rival contract to transport the mails to America, the Cunard Company was its only competitor.

  Brunel’s Great Eastern might be a city, but White Star liners were utopias. In Travelling Palaces, published in 1913 — seventy years after Dickens travelled on the Britannia and one year after the Titanic went down — J. A. Fletcher described the new luxury liners as idealised communities whose citizens shared a common goal. While the average home was still without adequate lighting or convenient sanitation, luxury liners provided both in excess. Policemen and courts of law were unnecessary to this new society because ‘the state, as epitomised by the liner, takes charge of the passenger’.4

  Under Thomas Ismay’s government, those in first-class would want for nothing, every need was anticipated, every desire satisfied. There were no crowds, no queues. The romance of the sea associated with sails and wooden hulls might be a thing of the past, but Ismay Senior replaced it with a fantasy of a different sort: the sea became an occasion for a party; his voyages provided passengers with unlimited pleasure, abundance and excess. Life on board was a series of concerts, dinners, dances and fancy-dress balls. The dining room now stretched from one side of the ship to the other, allowing passengers enough space to select their own company; they ate not on rows of bolted-down benches but at separate tables provided with a la carte menus and elegant, free-standing chairs. Couples could, for the first time in transatlantic history, dine a deux in a room divided by partitions which removed them from the site of the central table where the Captain entertained his guests and surveyed his clientele. They might then walk under the shelter of a promenade deck rather than be buffeted about by wind and spray. Love could blossom, business associations form. Oil lamps soon replaced gas and electric bells were installed in every room so that the steward, instead of being shouted for, could be signalled at the press of a button; rows of imitation windows provided the illusion of natural light.

  Most importantly, the vastness of the White Star liners made it possible to feel alone and passengers were able to enjoy the contemplation which comes from travel. With coal fires in the grates and curtains on the glass windows, the self-contained staterooms allowed families to imagine they were in their own apartments. Should they prefer not to join in the entertainments, they could cross the Atlantic in complete isolation.

  Disaster struck in 1873, when the White Star steamship Atlantic ran out of coal on her way to New York and, changing course to refuel in Halifax, hit a rock. Most of the lifeboats were swept away and 250 lives — a third of the passengers — were lost. It was the worst peacetime shipwreck to be recorded at sea, and the press had a field day when the subsequent inquiry found the White Star Line negligent. It was a trauma from which Thomas Ismay would never fully recover and were it not for his determination to forge ahead — he always maintained that the ship’s coal supply had been sufficient — the company might have been destroyed by the verdict.

  The force of Ismay Senior’s personality eclipsed that of his partner, William Imrie, a quiet, modest and cultured man known as ‘the prince of shipowners’. Thomas Ismay became famous in the shipping industry for having never offended a rival, for creating thousands of jobs in Belfast, for offering the use of his entire fleet to Queen Victoria for service during the Boer War, for founding a training ship, the Indefatigable, which began the shipping careers of over 2,000 boys from poor homes, and for starting a pension fund for Liverpool sailors. He was chairman of the Board of Trade Life-Saving Appliances Committee, Justice of the Peace for Lancashire and Cheshire, a member of Lord Hartington’s Commission on the organisation of the Army and Navy and of the Royal Commission on Labour, and he was Deputy Lord Lieutenant and High Sheriff of Cheshire. He turned down as many positions and titles as he accumulated, whether the chairmanship of the London and North-Western Railway Company, the suggestion that he stand for Parliament (he was a Liberal Unionist) or, in 1897, the offer of a baronetcy. In a letter to Bruce, Thomas compared himself to a ‘Mr Whiby in the House who declined all honours, preferring to remain Mr Whiby which he said was good eno’ for him’. A good name, he suggested, was a man’s best title. The popular press, which championed Thomas Ismay, celebrated his decision with the following ditty:

  He would not be a baronet,

  Not so his wishes ran,

  His mind on other things was set,

  He chose to be a man.5

  The reason Thomas Ismay turned down the baronetcy was not, however, because he chose to be a man but because he hoped to be a lord. He felt insulted by the offer. A baronet was only a ‘Sir’ and did not count as a member of the peerage: he would effectively have remained a commoner. Thomas had previously put a good deal of effort into reviving the Ismay coat of arms, bestowed on the family in the reign of Edward I, and in 1891 Burke’s Peerage informed him that the Ismay arms would be included in their next edition, along with the family motto: Be Mindful.6 His family and friends urged him to swallow his pride, arguing that the acceptance of this honour ‘would be no bar to further promotion (and that other shipowners were receiving recognition of their work etc.)’,7 but he was steadfast in his refusal. His son, James, suggested that he might have been too hasty: ‘if the government had seen fit to offer you a suitable recognition of your great work, I should have been sorry if you had declined; for the bestowal of the honour I expected would have been thoroughly appreciated by the entire shipping community, and I am certain that everyone will feel that this can only be the first step towards the fitting elevation. Thinking over the other comparative cases, there does not seem to me any instance where a commoner, unless for special political reasons, has been given the higher rank without the intermediate step.’ Bruce was more cagey on the matter: ‘As you say,’ he wrote to his father, ‘whichever road one travels, one probably thinks it would have been better to have gone the other.’

  His marriage was another of Thomas Ismay’s success stories. Loyal, devoted, and equipped with a good business mind, Margaret Bruce made the perfect wife and their union offered her the chance to involve herself in his professional world. She kept a diary for fifty years and her daily entries, which document the progress of her husband’s empire, reveal her worship of Thomas. Ismay Junior was raised in his father’s light: he was the son of Midas.

  Joseph Bruce Ismay was born on 12 December 1862. He had a sister, Mary, two years older, who died of scarlet fever aged eleven during a visit to her maternal grandfather. His younger brother, Henry, died aged two in 1866, when Bruce was four. Next in line was James, b
orn when Bruce was five, followed by Ethel, who was three years younger than James. Margaret then gave birth in quick succession to two sets of twins: Ada and Dora in 1872, Bower and Charlotte in 1874. Thomas greeted his heirs in pairs, but apart from his second son, James, he did not much like his children and particularly disliked his eldest surviving child, who he saw as a mother’s boy. Orphaned by his father’s coldness and the mutual devotion of his parents, Bruce found himself sandwiched between two dead and much mourned siblings and succeeded by six others who fell into natural partnerships. He was the odd one out in a family of doubles.

  Ismay’s birthplace was Europe’s western gateway to the New World. ‘Busy, noisy, smoky, money-getting Liverpool,’ as James Currie called it in 1804. ‘This large, irregular, busy, opulent, corrupted town,’ another visitor wrote ten years earlier. Known as the Marseilles of England, the great port was dominated by the traffic of people and goods: in 1840 it had sixteen docks; by 1900 there were forty. The city, whose skyline was a web of funnels and masts, was shaped by migration: some 9 million emigrants sailed from her harbours in the nineteenth century to start new lives in the United States, Canada and Australia, while immigrants from Ireland, Russia, Poland and Northern Europe poured into the city from the ships and trains. Liverpool’s inhabitants knew the names of all the shipping lines and all the vessels; schoolboys could identify each company by its colours, they knew the tonnage, the length, the displacement figures of every new ship. Thousands of sailors and stevedores filled the quays, overhauling the running gear, unloading the cargo, painting the boats. Talk in the Ismay household was dominated by steam and sail, speed and shipping routes, graving yards and gantries; Thomas Ismay’s work seeped into every crevice of family life. Land, for young Ismay, was simply a place where ships came to fold their great white wings. The bay windows of the Ismays’ three-storey house, Beech Lawn in the suburb of Waterloo, looked across Crosby beach onto the grime of the Mersey where the White Star ships would blow their sirens in tribute to their owner as they passed his residence. Ismay loved the mournful beauty of ships and his future, he knew, lay in crossing over to the other side. He grew up tethered to New York.

  The first of his family to receive the education of a gentleman, aged eleven Ismay left his local school in New Brighton and went south to a fashionable preparatory school in Elstree, a pretty village on the outskirts of London. His years there, from 1874 to 1876, coincided with the brilliant headmastership of the lean, handsome Reverend Lancelot Sanderson, known to his pupils as ‘the Guv’. Both the Reverend and his Irish wife, Katherine, were devoted to the welfare of their boys, each of whom was given a goodnight kiss by the ebullient ‘Mrs Kitty’, as Katherine Sanderson was affectionately called.

  As well as a school of boys to look after, the Sandersons had thirteen robust children of their own, of whom most were wayward and intelligent girls. The Sanderson tribe ran wild down the school corridors in their homespun clothes, ragging and teasing one other and anyone else they came across; they played hockey in the school dining room with canes and a tennis ball, they staged elaborate theatricals in the school hall, they pushed one another into the swimming pool in the summer months and belted each other with knotted towels. Monica, the eldest daughter, was remembered many years after her death as having been a girl who ‘sang in her cold bath’.8 The Reverend, whose health was frail, kept as far away from his unruly spawn as he reasonably could, but the invigorating, unpretentious atmosphere of his family suffused the school. In an age of decorum, the intellectual and physical energy of the Sanderson way of life — as well as the beauty of the daughters — made them hugely attractive and Mrs Kitty’s already vast dinner table groaned beneath the weight of a constant trail of enthusiastic house guests who would prolong meal times with philosophical and religious debate.

  Visitors to Elstree tended to be men, like John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, who had been picked up by one or other of the children on their various travels. Galsworthy and Conrad were initially friends with Ted, the eldest of the Sanderson offspring, before being embraced by the family as a whole. The unusual freedom of life at Elstree was made apparent to Agnes, one of Ted’s sisters, when she visited the Galsworthy family home with its ‘acres of red pile carpet’ and ‘thousand gold chair legs’. The ‘atmosphere of Victorian propriety’, Agnes remembered, ‘the dumb immaculate servants, the low flanneletty Galsworthian voices, killed all life in us’.9 But the Galsworthy home was Bohemian in comparison with the Ismay household.

  Elstree was a family school in every sense. Ted Sanderson would succeed his father as headmaster in 1910, and he in turn would be succeeded by his own son. For Ted, ‘there was no other school in the land to compare with Elstree. Where else was there such a fine view, such a beautiful chapel, such a Classical tradition, such good manners, such a manly, Christian tone?’10 Most people agreed. In 1887, it was voted by the Pall Mall Gazette the country’s best prep school for boys. In Sporting Pie, a memoir of his schooldays, F. B. Wilson writes that ‘in the year of 1890 there can have been no private school in the world that was quite on a par with Elstree, if only by reason of the wonderful selection of masters whom the Rev Lancelot Sanderson had got together’.

  It was a school in which a homesick boy might be happy, but Ismay was miserable at Elstree. His reserved nature made him particularly unsuited to the community spirit of boarding and to the continual joshing and mocking and testing of a boy’s limits which went on from dawn to dusk. Even as a child, Ismay did not like the company of children; he was unpopular and lonely and separated from his adored mother, who had just given birth to her second set of twins. Raised in an authoritarian household, Ismay was uncomfortable around the domestic unruliness of the Sandersons. He liked his world ordered and controlled; as an adult, his visitors learned to arrive ten minutes earlier than their agreed time and wait until the clock struck the appointed hour before knocking on the door.

  Ismay was a northerner in the south of England, a sea-gazer in a landlocked village. The only time he could return to the world of ships was in his school books, where he read about the HMS Birkenhead, the most famous shipwreck of the day, which had sunk off the Cape when his father was a teenager, carrying only enough lifeboats for the women and children. It was on board the Birkenhead that the ‘age-old’ law of women and children, known as the ‘Birkenhead drill’, was first used. Ismay learned how the band was reported to have played as the ship went down, how ‘the roll of the drum called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck’, how ‘they stood, as if on parade, no man showing restlessness or fear, though the ship was every moment going down, down’.11 He and schoolboys all over the country would recite Kipling’s lines, ‘stand and be still to the Birken’ead drill’.

  Thomas Ismay sent Bruce to Elstree not because he valued its atmosphere of freedom, which he doubtless considered southern and soft, but because the school prepared its pupils for Harrow. Ismay, whose clear thinking was often remarked upon, passed the entrance exams in the autumn of 1876 and became a Harrovian in January 1877 when he had just turned fifteen. The rigour of life at Harrow might have suited a boy of Ismay’s temperament more than had the jumble of Elstree, but Ismay’s misery seems to have increased. Again, he was under the tutelage of a legendary headmaster who served for other boys as an inspiration. Dr Montagu Butler raised his pupils in the Arthurian tradition of gallantry, honour and courtliness. Harrovians were marinated in the language of chivalry; this was a time in which the Victorian public schools promoted ‘the knightly life once more’, as J. H. Skrine, Warden of Glenalmond College, scathingly put it, with the attendant ‘narrowness… pride of caste… soldier scorn of books and industry which is not of the open air, as war, the chase, the game’. English public schools were breeding a species of male so pointlessly romantic and impossibly arcane that they seemed, in the words of Second World War poet Keith Douglas, to be ‘unicorns, almost’.

  Ismay was in Bushell’s House (as was Ted Sanderson, who went up to Harrow four
years later) along with forty other boarders. He shared a room consisting of a table, two chairs, a washstand and two beds which folded into the wall during the day; he was expected to provide his own rugs, cups and cushions, either bringing them from home or buying them from other boys, and he soon learned that displaying pictures of your family was considered in bad taste. John Galsworthy, five years younger than Ismay, recalled his own time at Harrow — which had been a great success — as dominated by ‘all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast till you reached a certain form.’ You must ‘not be enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme matter as a drive over the pavilion at cricket, or run the whole length of the ground at football. You must not talk about yourself or your home people; and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.’12

  In his first term Ismay fagged for an older boy, which involved filling his bath, lighting his fires, running his messages, carrying his footballs, bringing him gravy cutlets and jugged hare from the village, and rushing to his side whenever he heard the call ‘boy-oy-oy’. Other Harrow traditions included the folding of a bed to the wall with a boy still tucked up inside it and the ‘House chor’, at which the fezzes’, or the football eleven, sat in state at a table with two candlesticks, a toasting fork and a racquet. Standing on the table, a candlestick in each hand, every boy in the house would take turns to sing, any sign of hesitation eliciting a prod from the toasting fork and a slap from the racquet.