How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Dawpool’s interior was equally sobering. The dining room, says Saint, was ‘reminiscent of those pictures by Orchardson in which the grandee and his bored wife dine in desperate solitude’. Shaw had ‘over-relied’ throughout on set-piece effects such as his trademark part-Tudor and part-Classic inglenooks.21 An enormous, palm-filled and panelled picture room, whose domed, glazed ceiling (‘an eyesore’, according to Margaret Ismay) appeared to be supported by a colossal chimneypiece constructed from two enormous church organs, served as a gallery for Thomas Ismay’s art collection, which included Rossetti’s The LovingCup. Keen to compete with collectors of contemporary art, Ismay Senior also had his portrait painted by John Everett Millais.

  Costing £50,000 (£3.5 million in today’s money), the house took four years to build and was completed in 1886. It was not meant to be a working building in the heart of a great estate, but nor was it meant to be a family home. Dawpool was a show house, a stage set. The family, when they moved in with a newly acquired retinue of twenty-two indoor and ten outdoor servants, loathed it. Because there was no central heating and Thomas didn’t allow fires in the bedrooms until teatime, the house remained freezing for most of the year. When they were at last lit, the fires smoked so badly that, regardless of the weather, the windows had to be opened in order to release the fug. In these chilly rooms the unmarried Ismay daughters, forbidden by their father either to speak at table or to read the newspapers, sat sewing with their mother.

  So pleased was he with Dawpool that in 1897 Thomas Ismay asked Shaw to design the interior of the White Star’s new flagship, named Oceanic after their first liner. This second Oceanic was to be the largest and most luxurious ship in the world and the first to exceed the tonnage of Brunel’s Great Eastern of 1860. Money was no object, and so Shaw duly equipped her with gold-plated light fittings, marble lavatories, Queen Anne mirrors, Adam fireplaces, Ionic pillars, a domed ceiling decorated with allegorical figures representing Great Britain, the United States, Liverpool and New York, an oak-panelled dining room awash with gold, further panels carved with fruit and flowers in the style of Grinling Gibbons and a bacchanalian procession. There was a magnificent ‘Turkey red’ central staircase, and a smoking room lined in highly embossed leather gilt, with a carved mahogany frieze depicting sea nymphs. The sea nymph theme continued in stained-glass sliding shutters, while the ceiling formed a double dome decorated with scenes from the life of Columbus, and marble Italian figures posed in the corner niches. The Oceanics passengers, one commentator said, might be in Haddon Hall, the famous Elizabethan manor in Derbyshire; this was the grand country-house style which would increasingly characterise the interiors of all the White Star liners. Only in third-class, with its narrow bunks and undisguised pipes and girders, did the ship still resemble a ship.

  The problem for Thomas Ismay was that while he did not want to share his son’s company, he did want him involved in the family firm. To achieve both ends, the year after moving to Dawpool he sent Bruce, now aged twenty-one, to New Zealand aboard the newest White Star liner, the Doric. This was a luxury cruise rather than an adventure of the sort Thomas had enjoyed on the Charles Jackson. There were to be no drenchings or drinking songs, there was no joshing with the crew; the point of the journey was not to test Ismay’s mettle as a seaman but for him to see how the new service was working, and he was treated throughout with the wariness and respect due to the son of the owner. On his return to England nine months later, the position of manager of the White Star Line agency in New York became vacant and to keep him further out of his way, Thomas arranged that Bruce be given the job.

  Three weeks after Ismay took up his new post he was confronted by his first maritime disaster. Two White Star ships, the Celtic and the Britannic, one on her way to Liverpool and the other on her way back, collided in poor weather and were badly damaged. The passengers panicked and the Captain was forced to use his gun to maintain order. The wounded liners limped back to New York in tandem, flashing lights and firing guns at one-minute intervals. An inquiry was held and the Captains of both ships were severely reprimanded for travelling at excessive speeds. Ismay, the representative of the company, was expected to issue the US press with information. It was a job to which he was ill-suited: Ismay loathed publicity and had never mastered the art of public speaking or self-presentation. He had a brusque, abrupt and imperious manner, and journalists — to whom he was always rude — saw him as arrogant, charmless and disdainful. But most striking was his inability to give a straight reply to a plain question. Ismay became famous amongst reporters on both sides of the pond for what the Financier called his ‘enigmatic’ non-answers. In its ‘Shipping Notes’, the paper described Ismay’s responses in an interview as ‘the luminous fog’ which ‘issued from his mouth’. But no one disliked Bruce Ismay as much as the press baron and man of the people, William Randolph Hearst (portrayed as Citizen Kane in the film by Orson Welles). The combination of Hearst’s hatred and Ismay’s luminous fog would result in his undoing.

  Aside from unpopularity with the press, all we know of Ismay’s activities during his two years in New York is that they caused his parents concern. In Wilton Oldham’s words, he ‘painted the town very red indeed’, which probably means that he behaved much as any rich, handsome, unattached twenty-two-year-old male would do in a city 4,000 miles away from his oppressive father. The evidence suggests that Ismay was happy; he socialised, he made friends; he was away from English snobbery in a city where every man was a potential tycoon. He went to dances and concerts, and he indulged his love of expensive shoes and suits — Ismay, whose ‘clothes’, in the words of an employee, ‘were always perfect and his shoes a dream’, was described by the Boston Globe as ‘somewhat fond of club life and one of the best-dressed men in England’.22 When Thomas offered him a partnership in Ismay, Imrie and Co., the acceptance of which would require him to return to Liverpool, Bruce — to his father’s fury — turned it down.

  It was in New York that Ismay met Harold Sanderson. No relation of the Sandersons of Elstree, Harold, who was born in 1859, came from old Yorkshire stock and was the eldest son of Richard Sanderson, who ran a shipping agency in Birkenhead for the Wilson Line of Hull. In the early 1880s, Richard Sanderson had left England to represent the Wilson Line in New York. Here, with Harold and his younger brothers, he founded his own shipping firm of Sanderson and Sons. Six foot two and as lean as a greyhound, Harold Sanderson was ‘courteous and considerate to a degree hardly attainable by others’, with a reputation for honesty in business.23 United by their youth, nationality, professions and physiques, Sanderson and Ismay became friends.

  Harold Sanderson had married his wife, Maud Blood, in New York in 1885 and it was his example that Ismay was following when he gave up his life of pleasure in 1887 and proposed to Florence Schieffelin, ‘a charming girl with real brown hair, beautiful eyes and a singularly winsome manner’.24 Maud Blood, to whom Sanderson was devoted, was from a cultured and well-travelled family and had been educated in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Florence Schieffelin, the eighteen-year-old daughter of one of New York’s oldest families, came from similar stock. The Schieffelins originated from Nordlington, near Nuremberg; a forebear had been a distinguished artist and pupil of Albrecht Dürer. Florence’s father, George, was a graduate of Columbia and a prominent New York attorney; her mother, Margaret, was the granddaughter of John Ferris Delaplaine, a wealthy New York shipping merchant. Within weeks of setting eyes on her, during a Thanksgiving Day party at the Tuxedo Club in New Jersey, Ismay asked Florence to marry him. Neither father approved of the match and George Schieffelin, who doted on his daughter, suggested that the couple wait a year. When he finally gave his consent, it was on the grounds that Ismay promised always to keep Florence in America. The arrangement suited Ismay perfectly. They were married in December 1888 in the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue, before what the New York Times called ‘a fashionable assemblage’. The bride, celebrated as the ‘belle of the city’, wo
re lace and diamonds and carried a bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley. The papers described Ismay as ‘a fine specimen of young manhood, being about twenty-six years of age, tall and graceful. He has, at this early age, achieved what might be deemed an enviable position in the marine world where he is widely known, popular and a great favourite, as he is also in the social world of New York.’ The wedding breakfast was held at the Schieffelin family home on East Forty-Ninth Street, after which the Ismays moved into a house at 444 Madison Avenue.

  The groom’s family did not attend the ceremony; Thomas Ismay was too busy with Lord Hartington’s Commission on the administration of the Army and Navy. A proud man, Ismay Senior nurtured doubts about the clan Bruce was marrying into: the Schieffelins were not only foreigners but also upper class, with all the attendant notions of superiority. He was equally uncomfortable when, in 1892, James married Lady Margaret Seymour, the eldest daughter of the Marquis of Hertford. He did not want it thought that he tried to advance his family by engineering ‘good’ marriages; the sons of Thomas Ismay did not need to marry well in order to prove themselves gentlemen. He and Margaret did not meet Florence until after the wedding, when Bruce brought his bride to England. Their arrival at Dawpool was then celebrated as befits the son of the lord of the manor, with the ringing of bells, fireworks and a dinner for one thousand of the residents of Thurstaston.

  A daughter, Margaret, was born to the newlyweds in late 1889 after which, in September 1890, Thomas, who wanted to retire from the company but remain involved as its chairman, again suggested that Bruce become a partner, along with James who was just down from Oxford. The offer was once more contingent on Ismay’s return to England. Should he turn it down, the position would go to James. Ismay, who resented the idea of being overtaken by a preferred brother with no interest in ships and none of his own experience — Bruce had now worked for the White Star Line for ten years — had little choice. He was caught between the demands of his father and the promise he had made to his father-in-law to keep Florence in America, and Thomas doubtless enjoyed playing the trump card in the power struggle between the two patriarchs. George Schieffelin reluctantly released his son-in-law from his bond, and in January 1891 he saw his daughter, his granddaughter, and his six-month-old grandson, Henry, off to Liverpool on board the White Star liner, the Teutonic.

  The crossing was a disaster. Florence was seasick, baby Henry became ill; Florence wanted to nurse him but Ismay insisted on using an inexperienced maid. The baby’s illness worsened, and soon after they landed, Henry died at Dawpool. The event brought to an end what marital happiness the Ismays had briefly known. Bruce, who would never recover from his young son’s death, now fixed his affections on his daughter. Florence had sacrificed her child and her country to start a new life in a drab Liverpool suburb with a man she no longer recognised.

  Margaret Ismay suggested that the young family stay at Dawpool until they found a suitable home of their own, but it was an idea Thomas could not countenance. His life was ordered with military precision; if he saw a fallen leaf on the drive when he left for work in the morning he would put a stone on it; should it still be there when he returned in the evening he demanded of the gardeners what they had been doing all day. The thought of having at the heart of his empire a taciturn son, a tearful American and an unpredictable two-year-old granddaughter was intolerable, so he rented for them what Florence called a ‘horrid house’ several miles away, and threw in the use of a servant to help with the cooking.

  Bruce immersed himself in work, determined that his father would have no grounds for criticising him. There were no more weekend jaunts for the couple, no more dances. Pleasures that he and Florence had once enjoyed together, such as the theatre, he now preferred to do alone, slipping out to a matinee during a quiet afternoon. Unlike his father, who had shared all his business concerns with his wife, Ismay shared nothing with Florence. He would think his problems through in solitude during long walks, or on the top deck of the trams in which he would travel around and around the city. He stuck to a clockwork routine, leaving the house at the same time every morning and returning at the same time every night, bringing with him what Florence referred to as his ‘dreaded dispatch box’. The only outings with his wife were now dinners at Dawpool, which Florence also thought horrid. Her presence there, however, added a lightness of touch and Ismay’s four sisters adored her. Regardless of Thomas’s expectation that women remain mute at the table and disengage themselves from the wider world, Florence, swallowing her homesickness and dressed in the latest fashions, chattered away in her American accent about her family and New York. Ismay, meanwhile, turned inwards. He grew to hate noise and particularly parties, but there was nothing he now disliked so much as a wedding.

  It was Ismay’s suggestion that Harold Sanderson leave Sanderson and Sons in the hands of his younger brothers and take on the job of general manager of the White Star Line in Liverpool. With Sanderson on board, Ismay would have a colleague to whom he could relate while Florence would have, in Maud, a compatriot as a neighbour. The job would be a step up the ladder for Sanderson, and Thomas Ismay, impressed that his son was making sensible decisions, agreed to take him on, making Harold Sanderson the White Star Line’s first major outside appointment. So in 1894 the Sanderson family, along with their six-foot-tall black nanny, arrived in Liverpool and moved into a sandstone house called Holmfield, which was next door to Sandheys, the late Georgian house in which the Ismays now lived in the suburb of Mossley Hill. Holmfield was soon filled with Maud’s childhood friends from the continent, and the Sanderson children grew up in a ‘babel of languages’.25 To escape from his own silent household, Ismay took Sanderson for epic cycling trips, the two men sometimes covering up to seventy-five miles a day.

  The culmination of Florence Ismay’s unhappiness came in the summer of 1900 when, heavily pregnant, she went into labour with her fifth child (she and Bruce now had Margaret, Thomas and Evelyn) during a stay with the recently widowed Margaret at Dawpool. Not wanting the bother of a birth in her house, Margaret sent Florence back to Sandheys in a horse and carriage. During the journey back, a baby girl was stillborn and Florence never forgave her mother-in-law; nor did she forgive Bruce for allowing such a thing to happen.

  Florence’s wretchedness is vividly described by her granddaughter, Pauline Matarasso, in a memoir of her childhood, A Voyage Closed and Done:

  The Mossley Hill years were not happy ones for my grandmother: conventional, unimaginative but fun-loving, she was made wretched by what passed for intimacy with her husband and by the tedium of provincial life… Florence retained a lasting nostalgia for her childhood home, which translated itself into a refusal to eat anything she hadn’t eaten in her father’s house: fifty years later this still ruled out a number of staples, notably sausages. Brought up to compliance and respectful of all conventions, she released the bully in her husband who took pleasure in snubbing her at dinner parties, leaving her floundering and the guests embarrassed.26

  The bullied son had become the bullying husband and father, and Florence ‘slowly created a life for herself in the large spaces which her husband left her’. Ismay gave her an allowance with which she ran the home and garden and looked after the needs of the children and servants without having to bother him. She arranged the household, Florence later told Wilton Oldham, ‘to revolve around Bruce; everything was done for his comfort and convenience, his tastes and preferences were studied meticulously and put before all others’. Because Ismay liked cold turkey, cold turkey was served every night; because Ismay did not like the noise of children, except for that of Margaret, they were housed in a specially built wing, separated from their parents by two green baize doors. In an unsigned document written in 1936, a family friend made an attempt to describe and explain Ismay. ‘Treated with undue severity in his youth, he makes no allowance for its follies and ignorances. Nor has he learned that repression is not the way to encourage development in the young.’ His ‘otherwise fine charac
ter is spoiled by bursts of irritability and unreasonableness’ which he directs against ‘those of whom he is fondest’. Had Ismay’s behaviour, the writer concludes, ‘been commented on by the sweetest and best of women in their early married life, a good deal of suffering might have been avoided’.

  Florence collected antique furniture and nurtured her brood, especially Tom who, after contracting polio as a baby, had become ‘the butt of his father’s sarcasm’.27 In 1905 she purchased her first motor car, and owing to Ismay’s dislike of driving, she began to enjoy motoring holidays alone. To provide some companionship for his daughter, George Schieffelin had sent over her rebellious, voluble, horse-loving sister, Constance. ‘Con’ was liked by everyone but her charms were particularly admired by Ismay’s youngest brother, Bower, the only male twin of the two sets in the Ismay family. Before either had time to discover they had nothing in common beyond being related already, Bower and Constance were married. It was 1900 and a family of doubles had doubled itself even further.