How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Following a series of heart attacks, Thomas Ismay had died aged sixty-two in November 1899, one year before the reign of Queen Victoria came to its end. He lived just long enough to see, in January, the launch of the Oceanic, whose magnificent interior had been designed by Shaw. The ‘crack’ liner that was to be a monument to himself and his firm became instead his memorial. Visitors from Britain, Germany and America came to watch the Oceanic launched, and a special train brought sightseers from all over Ireland to attend the occasion at Harland & Wolff. When she then steamed up the Mersey, Ismay Senior, now seriously ill, went out in the tender to meet her; she was the finest vessel he had ever seen. The Oceanic was also admired by the Americans, especially the Wall Street monarch, J. Pierpont Morgan.

  Thomas Ismay had created one of the world’s most profitable shipping lines; his fortune was equivalent to $40 million and his weight in the shipping world was such that his inconsolable widow received a message of condolence from the Kaiser. ‘There is terrible, terrible blank in the house,’ Margaret wrote in her diary following her husband’s death. ‘Shall we ever be able to live without him. All my life was centred in him, and as the time goes on it can only get worse for me.’28 On the day of Thomas Ismay’s funeral, the city of Liverpool went into mourning with flags flying at half-mast. His career was compared by one journalist to a ‘staircase ascending upward, straight, regular, well ordered, firm in its setting, perfect in its surroundings’,29 and his gravestone in the churchyard at Thurstaston village was inscribed with the legend: ‘Great thoughts, great feelings came to him like instincts unawares.’ It is a curiously pertinent inscription, for the son as much as for the father.

  The first decision that Bruce Ismay made as the new head of the White Star Line was to sell it. In 1901 he was approached by J. Pierpont Morgan who, having arranged the mergers that formed General Electric, Northern Securities and the Steel Corporation, was now looking to monopolise the North Atlantic trade by bringing the various American and European steamships under the ownership of one monster trust. The British shipping industry, which had thrived during the Boer War, was currently crippled by competition; should Morgan control the shipping lines, he could fix the fares at a handsome profit. He therefore offered the White Star shareholders ten times the value of the line’s earnings for 1900, a particularly lucrative year. Ismay insisted on a further $7 million in cash and Morgan eventually bought White Star for $35 million. The ships would continue to sail under a British flag and to employ a British crew, but they would be owned by Americans. William Imrie, James Ismay and a third partner, W. S. Graves, would retire and Ismay continue as managing director and chairman of the company, with Harold Sanderson at his side.

  In December 1902, White Star joined the American Line (formally the British Inman Line), the Red Star Line, the Dominion, the Atlantic Transport and the Leyland Line in the International Mercantile Marine, known as the IMM, and Ismay, Imrie & Co. became, as Bruce Ismay put it, ‘a dead letter’.30 James Ismay, whose wife, Lady Margaret Seymour, had recently died in childbirth, was only too pleased to throw in the towel and he moved his young family down to Dorset where he became a successful and much-loved country squire. He replaced his tenants’ run-down cottages with large black and white timbered houses in the style of Norman Shaw, and farmed pigs, whose lard and bacon were supplied to the White Star liners. Bower was interested only in horses and so long as his hobby was funded, he did not much care who owned the White Star Line. The female members of the Ismay family were less happy about the turn in events. ‘This ends the White Star Line,’ Margaret wrote in her diary, ‘in which so much interest, thought, and care was bestowed and which was my dearest one’s life’s work.’ Because a clause in Thomas Ismay’s will instructed that none of his daughters should invest in any other shipping company, the sale of the White Star Line meant that Ethel, Ada, Dora and Charlotte were each forced to relinquish their inheritance.

  Both taciturn sons of rich fathers, J. Bruce Ismay and J. Pierpont Morgan were cut from the same cloth. ‘Money Talks but Morgan doesn’t’, wrote the Tribune after a dinner held in Morgan’s honour; his study contained a plaque which read Tense moult, Parlepeu, Ecritrien (Think a lot, Say little, Write nothing). Bruce Ismay, wrote a reporter in the Northern Whig in February 1904, ‘is one of the silent ones of the earth. Whether he be a genius or not, one may be sure that garrulity will never be his undoing.’ The millionaires presented themselves as two halves in a marriage of equals, and while Ismay insisted that the name of the IMM be absent from bills of lading of the White Star Line and that the White Star offices occupy an independent building of their own, it was clear that Thomas Ismay’s company had become one of Morgan’s costly possessions, to be counted along with his fabulous yacht, the Corsair, his famous library, and his vast collection of art and gems.31 Morgan, according to his British partner, Clinton Dawkins, was a ‘physical and intellectual giant’, a man with ‘something Titanic about him’.32 Compared by a Yale professor to Alexander the Great, and described by B. C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, as ‘the financial Moses of the New World’, Morgan was an imperious, intolerant, irascible robber baron, the ‘boss croupier’ of Wall Street who subjected the country’s entire economy to the ‘psychopathology of his will’. He now controlled not only the American railroads, but also his own fleet of luxury liners to ferry him across the Atlantic. It was Morgan rather than Ismay who was henceforth treated on board White Star ships as the owner; before the Titanic was even built, Morgan selected from the plans which suite of rooms would be his.

  Morgan’s new combine initially received a positive reception in the States. The inflation of the US merchant marine would give the country ‘a position of pre-eminence such as it has not enjoyed since the decadence of shipbuilding’ after the civil war.33 Morgan believed he was also doing the British ‘a good turn’ and expected to be greeted ‘with open arms’ when he visited London later that year; instead he found himself ‘everywhere cold-shouldered, having been suspected of filching our mercantile ships’.34 The British, who had been sanguine about Morgan putting their other shipping lines into his trouser pocket, were distressed by the loss of White Star. What, the public asked, would happen in the event of war if the nation’s finest ships were no longer owned by the nation? Ismay’s actions had ‘virtually cede[d] to the United States the control of the North Atlantic shipping business’.35 An article in the shipping journal, Fairplay, expressed the general concern:

  What many people do feel is the keenest regret that such a magnificent line as the White Star, not to mention the other great lines associated with it, aggregating nearly one million tons of our best shipping, should have passed from British to American ownership, and from British to American control. The Combine fleets are American to the backbone; Americans found the capital, and it is Americans who appoint and pay the managers to this side. It is nothing but mere pretence to say that through the technical wording of the Company’s Act they are in any sense British, through this technicality they are allowed to fly the British flag, a fact most people regard as a public scandal.36

  Berlin’s National Zeitung smugly reported that ‘the blow to England is all the greater since the German companies have been able to keep out of the trust and maintain their independence’.37 Ismay’s understanding was that a partnership with the House of Morgan had been unavoidable. Had Morgan not bought up the British shipping companies, the Americans, as the British Ambassador in Washington put it, would have formed an ‘avowedly hostile combine to run our ships off the Atlantic and squeeze them… out of US ports’. Before long, the Americans began to regard the IMM as a British firm, a giant White Star Line, while the British believed that the White Star Line had secretly become American.

  To prevent Cunard from joining the International Mercantile Marine, the British government granted them a subsidy of £2 million to build the Lusitania and the Mauretania, both of which were to be used as naval ships should the circumstances arise. The terms of the
subsidy were that ‘under no circumstances shall the management of the company be in the hands of, or the shares of the company held by, other than British subjects’. The Lusitania and Mauretania were a huge success; at 31,000 tons and equipped with the innovative Parson’s steam turbine, they were not only the largest but also the fastest ships afloat — the Mauretania would hold the Blue Riband for over a decade; the experience of travelling in her was, for Henry James, as if ‘carried in a gigantic grandmother’s bosom and the gentle giantess had made but one mighty stride of it from land to land’.

  The IMM, which was increasingly accompanied by the term ‘ill-fated’, would prove Morgan’s only disaster. He controlled 136 ships and 45 routes between Europe and North America, but was operating at a loss. Cunard’s independence had effectively handicapped the combine, which was forced to spend its profits on the construction of competing ships. ‘The ocean’, concluded the Wall Street Journal, ‘was too big for the old man.’ ‘What threatens to swamp us,’ wrote Clinton Dawkins, one of Morgan’s British partners, to Charles Steele, one of his American partners, ‘is this monstrous indebtedness for shipbuilding, and I don’t feel satisfied that we are not putting more big ships into the Atlantic than it can bear.’38 When share prices plummeted in 1904, Morgan decided to replace the ailing Clement A. Griscom as the trust’s president. His first choice had been the brilliant Albert Ballin, head of the Hamburg-America Line, but Ballin turned it down and Morgan turned to Ismay as second best. He ‘did not mind losing money’, he explained to the White Star chairman, ‘but he did object to doing so owing to poor organisation’. Morgan’s hope was that the image of a young English captain of industry at the helm would push up the value of the company at the same time as quelling any alarm felt by the British at the ‘Morganisation’ of their favourite shipping line. Character, Morgan believed, comes ‘before anything else. Money cannot buy it,’39 and Ismay, he explained to his partners, not only possessed character but was ‘the only man who could straighten matters out’.40 Seven months earlier, Morgan had thought otherwise, arguing that an English president of the IMM would be an impossible drawback. In an interview with the New York Mail on 28 January 1904, Clement Griscom expressed his complete faith in Ismay as his replacement. ‘He has been trained in a splendid school — a school where one-man management has been taught and practiced… Mr Ismay would not accept the presidency unless he be given the one-man power which has made the White Star Line so successful.’ Ismay would of course, the American papers agreed, be making his home in New York. It would be impossible — as well as insulting — to run a vast American company from ‘the other side’.

  As always when making a decision, rather than turn to his wife for advice Ismay approached his mother and Sanderson. ‘The idea of spending so much of my time in America is not congenial to me,’ he wrote to Sanderson from New York. ‘But if I could arrange to limit it to say, three months, it would not be so bad… I think you know that if I had considered my own inclination and feelings absolutely I should, in all probability, have resigned ere this, but I am trying to look at the matter from a general point of view.’ ‘I think your inclination is to accept,’ Margaret Ismay told her son, ‘and I do not wonder at it. For it is well known what exceptional power you have… You have a great deal of your life before you, and I hope you may be spared to bring the great concern with which you are so interested to a successful issue.’41

  Ismay’s inclination, however, was not to accept: ‘If I only considered myself, I would decline the responsibility.’42 He knew the position was humiliating, added to which he had grown to dislike New York, no doubt due in part to animosities from his wife’s family. The presidency would also require a good deal of entertaining and public posturing, neither of which activities he enjoyed, but there was one further factor in Ismay’s reluctance to take up Morgan’s offer. His selling of the White Star Line was the start of the process by which he hoped to divest himself of responsibility in the shipping world and prepare for what he called, in a letter to the Head of the British Committee of the IMM, ‘a life of ease and enjoyment’.43 Ismay was forty-two and had, as his mother said, a great deal of his life before him, but he was uncertain that he wanted to spend it fulfilling his father’s ambitions. He had other interests; he liked hunting and fishing and had hoped to be selected as a Unionist Member of Parliament for the constituency of Ludlow in Shropshire, but failed to get the support of a ‘certain section of the Conservative party’.44 J. P. Morgan, now seventy-five, was also feeling his age and wanted to spend more time with his paintings. Morgan was handing the baton over to his son; Ismay had brought to an end his own father’s dream of a dynasty. Nonetheless, ‘it is a difficult proposition’, he wrote to Sanderson, ‘and I intend going slow, and giving the matter the most earnest and careful consideration. It is easy to jump in, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to climb out.’45

  A cartoon in the New York Globe pictured John Bull, his head emerging from the Atlantic, devouring the IMM in the form of a ship. ‘He’s swallowed it!’ says America, but the truth is that when Ismay jumped, it was J. Pierpont Morgan who swallowed him whole.

  ‘He’s Swallowed It Be Gosh!’

  His appointment, noted the Glasgow Evening Times, ‘was consonant with the whole of the Ismay family history. An Ismay never goes back.’ And Ismay did not return to live in New York, a slight that the city would find hard to forgive. Instead, as he patiently explained to journalists wondering where he would now be residing, the headquarters of the IMM would be sometimes in America, sometimes in England, sometimes on the high seas and sometimes on a golf course in Scotland. They would be, Ismay famously said, ‘wherever I am’.

  In an attempt to envisage the new president’s working life, the satirical journal The Syren ran, in October 1905, an imaginary interview with J. Bruce Ismay. He is pictured in a ‘simple apartment, about 150ft in length and 80ft in breadth, fitted and furnished plainly, indeed austerely’. The walls are panelled in the ‘rarest mahogany, inlaid with mother of pearl’, the light fittings are ‘solid silver’, and ‘the furniture is priceless. Over one of the massive mantelpieces hangs a large oil painting by a well-known Scotch academician, entitled “Bruce Vanquishing his Enemies”.’ Behind what looks like a ‘large pianola’, but turns out to be ‘a wonderful entanglement of telephone and telegraph wires, speaking tubes, etc.’, Ismay can be found keeping ‘in constant and close touch with each sub-section of each section of each division of each department of each branch of each Line of each Trust of the great TRUST itself’.

  The story goes that one summer evening later in the year, Bruce and Florence Ismay went to dinner at Downshire House in Berkeley Square, the home of William, now Lord, Pirrie who had been managing director of Harland & Wolff since the death of Sir Edward Harland in 1894. An Irishman determined to make his mark on London society, Pirrie was a famously lavish host. During the evening, the shipowner and the shipbuilder agreed, over coffee and cigars, to build the twins Olympic and Titanic, each 15,000 tons bigger than the Lusitania and the Mauretania.

  It’s an evocative image: an opulent candlelit dinner enjoyed by two successful businessmen and their glittering wives in the Mayfair of the gilded age. Ismay and Florence are chauffeured down to Berkeley Square from their own magnificent house in Chesham Street, Belgravia; after dessert the women drift off to gossip and play cards in the fern-filled drawing room while the men, slightly drunk, decide to build the most enormous and fabulously equipped ships the world has ever known. The evening at Downshire House is the perfect accompaniment to the evening at Gustavus Schwabe’s mansion forty years earlier.

  Many evenings were shared between the Pirries and the Ismays when they were all in London, but it is unlikely that the idea for the Titanic was born during a neighbourly supper. Nor is it necessary to bathe the birth of the ship in such a sepia glow; there was nothing particularly inspired or outlandish in the idea of building a bigger ship than the one before. Technology was moving at s
uch a rate that every ship the White Star Line commissioned from Harland & Wolff was bigger than the last; it went without saying that their next group of ships would need to be considerably larger and more dramatic if they were to grab the headlines from the two Cunarders. Nor is it likely that the idea for the Titanic was conceived so late in the day. The Lusitania and the Mauretania were to be launched in late 1907: why would the power-hungry J. P. Morgan, whose ambition was to eliminate competition on the North Atlantic, wait until a few months before the launch of the already famous Cunarders before reacting to their challenge?

  The part played by William Pirrie in the story of the Titanic is, like the similarly named William Imrie, that of the forgotten partner. Except that Pirrie was more than a partner; he was the world’s leading shipbuilder and regarded Harland & Wolff as his ‘personal fiefdom’.46 It was Pirrie who was behind the deal with J. P. Morgan, Pirrie who persuaded Ismay to join the conglomerate, Pirrie who pushed for Ismay as the president of the IMM, Pirrie who probably dreamed up the Titanic. The appearance on the scene of J. P. Morgan made Pirrie nervous about his own future: under Bruce Ismay’s leadership the White Star Line could go under and Harland & Wolff would then lose their best customer. But should White Star join up with Morgan, a good deal more work might come Pirrie’s way: Harland & Wolff might build ships for the entire conglomerate. So rather than standing against the threat of a syndication, after secret discussions with Morgan Pirrie decided to promote the IMM as ‘something magnificent and ingenious’ and he pressurised Ismay, who had initially called the whole thing ‘a swindle and a humbug’, into following suit.47 The White Star Line would sooner contemplate establishing a line to the moon, Ismay had originally told reporters, than be bought by J. P. Morgan. He now quickly changed his tune. Under the terms of the arrangement between White Star and the IMM, ‘all orders for new vessels and for heavy repairs, requiring to be done at a shipyard of the United Kingdom, were to be given to Harland & Wolff’.48 ‘I do not mind confessing,’ Pirrie wrote to Ismay when he at last accepted the IMM presidency, ‘that it was with something very like a sigh of relief that I heard that all had been satisfactorily settled,’49 and the IMM was generally known as ‘the Pirrie Relief-Bill’.