How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  That Ismay failed to distinguish himself academically at Harrow was inconsequential. He was sent there to become a gentleman and not a scholar, and in order to be a gentleman he needed to mix with the sons of other gentlemen. As Squire Brown in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) puts it, on sending his own son to Rugby: ‘I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma… If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ Dr Thomas Arnold, Rugby’s famous headmaster, claimed that what his school looked for in a boy was, ‘first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; third, intellectual ability’, and the same was true for Harrow. Any learning that took place beyond an introduction to the ethics of leadership, fair play and self-control was incidental.

  The public schools were in the business of developing ‘character’ rather than intellect, and character meant conformity, selflessness, and patriotism.13 In his novel The Harrovians (1913), Arnold Lunn — a sportsman and adventurer whose father founded the Lunn Poly travel agency — praised the public schools for aiming ‘at something higher than culture. They build up character and turn out manly, clean-living men that are the rock of empire. They teach boys something which is more important than the classics. They teach them to play the game. It does not matter what a man knows. It’s precisely what he is that signifies.’ There was no better way for a boy to learn how ‘to play the game’ than through sport. Sport formed ‘character’ and Ismay was at Harrow during the years that games, particularly football and cricket, became a cult. ‘A truly chivalrous football player’, the Marlburian declared in 1876, ‘was never yet guilty of lying, or deceit, or meanness, whether of word or action.’ A school athlete was a hero, an honour to his house, a proven leader and a moral beacon. With his strapping build and impressive height, Ismay excelled at all forms of sport, particularly tennis and shooting, and yet his school records show that he joined no school team. Nor was he elected a member of the Philathletic club, founded by the boys themselves in 1853 and composed chiefly, though not entirely, of prominent athletes. Members were elected, and the fact that a fellow was a ‘good sort’ weighed when voting.

  Being nouveau riche, Ismay could never be a ‘good sort’ any more than he could have ‘character’. Despite the growing respect shown by ‘old money’ towards trade, coupled with the appreciation that many public school boys would go into business themselves, it was understood that earning a place in the world of commerce was not the same thing as inheriting a place in society. The middle classes could be educated alongside the upper classes, could imbibe their values and even, given the right moral fibre, become gentlemen themselves; but the stigma of trade nonetheless remained. Behaviour was held to be an effect of breeding and every new boy at Harrow was welcomed with the same question: ‘Who’s your father?’ Those with ‘heroic’ fathers, brothers or uncles, men who had excelled in sports or died for their country, were accorded heroic status themselves, while those like Ismay, who came from nowhere, were treated as nobodies.

  Starting Harrow in the same term as Ismay was Alexander Arthur, whose father was also a Liverpool shipowner. Perhaps the two new boys were friends — doubtless their fathers were acquainted — but it seems more likely that they sniffed one another out immediately and kept a good distance. Ismay was in an impossible position: the father he feared and respected at home was the object of derision at school. Thomas Ismay was relatively uneducated and spoke with a Cumbrian accent; his particular genius was of no value outside the dockyards. While his parents boasted that Bruce was at a top public school, he was being taught to feel ashamed of his home and of the family business he was expected to inherit. His father, meanwhile, had ambivalent feelings about the expensive education he was providing for his son. He was not putting Bruce through Harrow in order for the boy to gain notions of superiority or have ideas of his own; he was being primed to fill his father’s shoes.

  Were it not for his background, Ismay would have blended in with the others; he could never be accused of being either a swot or a wimp. In his history of the family, The Ismay Line, Wilton Oldham suggests that Bruce’s unhappiness at school was due to his having inherited his mother’s ‘shy and sensitive’ nature. Bruce, Oldham writes, learned to put on a ‘facade of brusqueness to avoid appearing over-sensitive’ which ‘often caused people to dislike him, until they got to know him well’.14 But few people, and certainly no one at Harrow, got to know him well; what friendships Ismay formed came later in life. He would have been a target for bullies but it is more likely that, as with many unhappy and conflicted children, Ismay himself was the bully. He had learned from his father the art of intimidation, which he now used in order to build a wall around himself. He would not have been a glamorous bully like Flashman, who terrorised the Rugby of Tom Brown’s Schooldays; he is more likely to have been a silently threatening loner, someone who might slap a bed against the wall with a small boy tucked inside. Pupils kept away from Ismay, and mocked his lack of pedigree only when his back was turned.

  For Galsworthy, the public school creed was as follows: ‘I believe in my father, and his father, and his father’s father, the makers and keepers of my estate, and I believe in myself and my son and my son’s son. And I believe that we have made the country and shall keep the country what it is. And I believe in the Public Schools, especially the Public School I was at.’15 What is striking about Ismay is that he believed neither in his father, nor in his son (who would go to Eton), nor in the public school he was at. Ismay never identified himself as a Harrovian, never nurtured a nostalgia for his alma mater’s rituals, private language or house songs; never saw himself as belonging to a exclusive club of fellows who had more in common with one another than they had with the rest of society. He felt no connection to the school whatsoever.

  In Ismay’s same year and house was Horace Vachell, who later wrote a novel about Harrow called The Hill: A Romance of Friendship. Published in 1905 but set in the 1890s, The Hill gives us a good idea of what Harrow was like for someone like Ismay, and it is possible that Vachell’s main character, a bully called Scaife who is the unpopular son of a Liverpool shipping magnate, was a portrait of Ismay himself. Vachell chose as his novel’s epigraph ‘Fellowship is heaven and the lack of it is hell’. The lines, by the pre-Raphelite William Morris, which continue ‘fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them’, capture the Edwardian cult of belonging, and the fourteen-year-old Scaife, who does not belong to the heaven of fellowship, is appropriately known as ‘the Demon’. Scaife’s father, in the manner of Tom Brown’s father and of Ismay’s father too, tells him that ‘I’m sending you to Harrow to study, not books nor games, but boys, who will be men when you are a man. And above all, study their weaknesses. Look for the flaws. Teach yourself to recognise at a glance the liar, the humbug, the fool, the egoist, and the mule. Make friends with as many as are likely to help you in after life, and don’t forget that one enemy may inflict a greater injury than twenty friends can repair. Spend money freely; dress well, swim with the tide, not against it.’

  Making friends, however, presented difficulties for Scaife because his father pronounced ‘inestimable’ ‘inesteemable’ and ‘connoisseur’ ‘connysure’. Ah, the Scaifes!’ the father of one boy says; A man I know dined with them last week. He reported everything overdone, except the food.’ Socially suspect, Scaife is morally queasy: a boy from his background might have all the credentials for popularity, but he can never be one of us. Scaife was ‘keen at games, popular in his house, clever at work — clever, indeed! Inasmuch as he never achieved more or less than was necessary — generous with his money, handsome and well-mannered, blessed, in fine, with so many gifts of the Gods, yet [he] lacked a soul.’

  ‘One is reminded sometimes,’ says the languid son of an old family, ‘that the poor Demon is the son of a Liverpool merchant, bred i
n or about the Docks… One knows that family is not everything, but, other things being equal, it means refinement. The first of the Howards was a swineherd, I dare say, but generations of education, of association with the best, have turned them from swineherds into gentlemen, and it takes generations to do it.’16

  On board the Titanic was another Harrovian, Tyrell William Cavendish, who was in the same year as Ismay’s youngest brother, Bower. Tyrell Cavendish, who went down with the ship, was described in a letter to the Uttoxeter Advertiser, his local paper, as ‘one of the heroes’ who ‘died as an English noble gentleman, unselfish and heroic to the last’. The paper did not report Ismay’s survival, which was nothing if not a proclamation of selfhood as something distinct from fellowship.

  Ismay left Harrow after eighteen months. It is unlikely that Thomas pandered to his son’s unhappiness by removing him from the school; Bruce probably left because Harrow’s work was complete. He could now enter the world a Harrovian and that is what counted. He was sent to complete his education in a tutoring establishment in Dinard, a fashionable French resort frequented by wealthy English and American tourists. Here he learned to play excellent tennis and his tutor, an English clergyman called the Reverend Edwards, predicted that Bruce ‘will… be one of the leading men in the country; he has such a wonderful brain’. His abilities were best suited to the world of business, and when Ismay returned to England he went not to Oxford, as his brother James would do, but back to Liverpool where he started as an apprentice at Ismay, Imrie & Company.

  In The Ismay Line, Wilton Oldham recounts how on Bruce’s first day at work he left his hat and coat on his father’s stand, as he had done throughout his childhood. ‘Please inform the new office boy’, Ismay Senior asked one of his clerks, ‘that he is not to leave his hat and coat lying about in my office.’ By means such as this, Oldham suggests, Thomas ‘implanted’ in Bruce ‘the sense of inferiority’ he then carried all his life. But what is striking about the tale — apart from the fact that Ismay Junior could not distinguish between the etiquette of work and that of home — is that he was so wounded by his father’s insistence that he use the same cloakroom as his new colleagues that, in the words of Oldham, ‘he rarely wore a coat again’.

  At around the same time, he returned home from work early one evening and, without asking permission, took his father’s favourite horse for a gallop along Crosby Sands. When the animal broke his leg and had to be shot, Thomas’s rage was such that Bruce ‘never rode again’. This pattern was to be repeated throughout his life: when his own eldest son died as a baby, Ismay found contact with his next three children difficult; when his second son, Tom, caught polio, he further distanced himself — ‘Bruce possessed that curious trait which some people have,’ wrote Oldham, ‘in that he shrank from anyone who was not physically perfect and after this his attitude to Tom was tinged with this involuntary repugnance.’ When the Titanic was sinking, Ismay could not watch, and he then never went to New York again.

  Oldham, who is an apologist for Bruce Ismay — ‘I have always felt that he was the most misunderstood and misjudged character of the early part of the century’ — edges around the tricky relationship between father and son.17 Bruce, he writes, ‘was devoted to both his parents and his mother loved him too; but his father found him difficult’. If Bruce was ‘brusque and arrogant’, filled with ‘destructive criticism’ and a ‘biting sarcasm’, it was because he had been broken by his father’s ‘constant humiliations’. There was, Oldham says, ‘a feeling of constraint between them owing to Thomas Ismay’s unconscious jealousy of [Bruce]’. The ‘friction’ between them was such that they could not occupy the same house or be in the office at the same time as one another. Oldham’s comments are the result of conversations with Ismay’s widow, Florence, then in her nineties; the specific reasons why Thomas might have found Bruce difficult are not discussed, and nor does Oldham offer reasons for the mutual ‘friction’ or the ‘unconscious jealousy’. What is clear is that Thomas Ismay, who generally found people easy to deal with because they did what he told them to do, was irritated by Bruce, who did not. Yet Bruce was the only one of the three sons, including Thomas Ismay’s favourite, James, to share his father’s love of ships and shipping, and the only one prepared to devote himself to the White Star Line. Ismay Senior was a tycoon who dreamed of heading a dynasty, and Bruce was the means by which he could achieve his ambition. James, who had no interest in ships, proved himself an excellent landlord and farmer, while Bower — Ismay’s favourite brother — grew into an Edwardian dandy who squandered his father’s money on racehorses. The only explanation Oldham gives of the loathing between Thomas and Bruce is that Bruce ‘was quick to learn and when asked his opinion would state it clearly and forthrightly; Thomas Ismay liked to consider a problem from all angles before reaching a decision, and so resented his quick-thinking son’. Bruce was, according to those who worked for him, dogmatic and dictatorial; he would brook no argument and his insistence on punctuality verged on the fanatical. The problem for Thomas was that Bruce was the same as him and different, and he feared both aspects of his character. He wanted his eldest son to be his mirror image but not to occupy the same space. Thomas provided him with palatial homes, fleets of servants and an upper-class education, but then resented him for having it easy. Bruce grew up knowing that he was not himself but a failed version of someone else; he was never to forget that he was an inferior model, an imperfect copy.18

  In 1877, when Bruce was away at school, Thomas Ismay bought a house surrounded by 390 acres of melancholy, dank land in Thurstaston on the western Wirral, overlooking the sandbanks of the River Dee and twelve miles by ferry from Liverpool. The Ismays’ former home of Beech Lawn was in a suburb inhabited by sea captains and ship’s officers. Captain E. J. Smith had at one time lived around the corner and Joseph Bell, the Titanic’s Chief Engineer, lived down the road, as would, at various points, Captain Rostron of the Carpathia and Second Officer Charles Lightoller. Now that Thomas Ismay had become rich, he needed to set himself apart from his employees. He needed his own Xanadu.

  Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the Liverpool suburbs were filling up with merchant palaces. ‘Crowds of comfortable and luxurious villas’, wrote a journalist in 1873, ‘besprinkle the country for miles round Liverpool, inhabited by shipowners, ship-insurers, corn merchants, cotton brokers, emigrant agents, &tc, &tc, men with “one foot on sea, and one on shore”’. One such villa was Broughton Hall, the home of Gustavus Schwabe. A Gothic Revival mansion (today a convent), Broughton was built for Schwabe in 1859 and it was here in 1869 that the agreement had been made between Thomas Ismay and William Imrie to resurrect the White Star Line. Thomas Ismay’s purchase of the land at Thurstaston was a demonstration of how successful the previous seven years had been. Imrie, meanwhile, had moved into a grand pile called Holmstead on the North Mossley Hill Road. A patron of the arts, Imrie filled his house (now also a convent) with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including his collection of works by Evelyn De Morgan. Holmstead was the epitome of modernity and discernment: Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream could be found above the fire in the library next to a stained-glass window by Morris and Co., and Edward Burne-Jones’s The Tree of Forgiveness was displayed upon William Morris wallpaper in the music room where Imrie and his wife would host singing evenings. Frederick Leyland, another self-made Liverpool shipowner who patronised contemporary artists, entertained Whistler in his own new manor house, Speke Hall, eight miles out of Liverpool. Thomas Ismay’s house would prove him likewise to be a man of taste: his home would be the perfect marriage of money and art. He would appear to all the world the image of fulfilment.

  Ismay Senior liked making things — in the garden of Beech Lawn he had built a grotto consisting of large rocks faced with mirrors which surrounded a sunken well and iron spiral staircase — and he now decided to demolish the existing house in Thurstaston, built only twelve years earlier, and start again. He would ask the most fashionable
architect of the day to design him a mansion that would overshadow all other mansions. Not one nail would go into its construction: Thomas wanted the building held together by brass screws alone. No reason is recorded for this particular eccentricity but it is possibly because the house would then resemble a ship, where steel plates are bolted together by rivets. To gather ideas for his new project, he and Margaret began a tour of English manors and in January 1882 they visited Adcote in Shrewsbury, designed by Richard Norman Shaw for the Darby family, the industrialists who built Ironbridge. Shaw’s style was a combination of ‘merrie Englande’ and Gothic Revival; an admirer of Pugin, Shaw designed vernacular buildings typified by severe outlooks and soaring, twisted chimneys; other signature touches were half-timbered bay windows, inglenooks, stained glass and high ceilings. Thomas Ismay liked his style and asked Shaw to give him something akin to Adcote, only bigger and better. He wanted a modern house which impersonated an ancient house, something which, as Charles Ryder would describe Brideshead, looked as though it had grown silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation.

  Shaw, who had a reputation for building stately homes for businessmen (his customers would include a number of shipowners), also had shipping connections: his brother was a partner in Shaw Savill, a company specialising in runs to New Zealand, and during the construction of the Ismay house, White Star made a deal to provide the ships and crew for Shaw Savill’s New Zealand trade if they came up with the passengers.

  Shaw’s legacy can be seen in London’s New Scotland Yard, the striped White Star offices in Liverpool, and the Tudorbethan houses of the stockbrocker belt. He built sturdy mansions for sturdy men and Dawpool, the mansion he built for Thomas Ismay, was, in the words of Shaw’s biographer Andrew Saint, ‘a monster perched on the headland’.19 Again and again, Dawpool, whose front alone measured 250 feet, is described in terms of monstrosity. It was built to be magnificent but, unlike the White Star liners, Dawpool’s treatment of its guests was indiscriminate. No one was comfortable; Dawpool was an exercise in strength and severity rather than in home-making. Florid at sea, Ismay Senior was austere on land. Dawpool’s immense mass, Saint writes, ‘palliated only by dark ivy patches clasping at the ruddy sandstone walling, started out from the barren heath, amidst outcrop, gravel, furze, heather and bracken’. The mood was ‘alternately fearsome and ghostly, lowering in shadow and rainfall, bleaching balefully in sunlight, in accord with the rich but chilly red of the Wirral sandstone from which it was fashioned’.20 Thomas had no interest in cultivating land, and the consequent lack of trees, gardens (he disliked flowers) and parkland increased the general aspect of brutalism.