In Titanic, written in two weeks and published one month after the shipwreck, the popular journalist Filson Young gave his memorable description of her construction at Harland & Wolff.
For months and months in that monstrous iron enclosure there was nothing that had the faintest likeness to a ship; only something that might have been the iron scaffolding for the naves of half-a-dozen cathedrals laid end to end. Far away, furnaces were smelting thousands and thousands of tons of raw material that finally came to this place in the form of great girders and vast lumps of metal, huge framings, hundreds of miles of stays and rods and straps of steel, thousands of plates, not one of which twenty men could lift unaided; millions of rivets and bolts — all the heaviest and most sinkable things in the world. And still nothing in the shape of a ship that could float upon the sea… The scaffolding grew higher; and as it grew the iron branches multiplied and grew with it, higher and higher towards the sky, until it seemed as if man were rearing a temple which would express all he knew of grandeur and sublimity…50
Like other writers on the Titanic, Young describes the ship as sinister while the excesses of her twin — whose simultaneous construction he does not mention — tend to be depicted with the humour, respect and affection befitting an eccentric but dependable aunt.
On 31 May 1911, Morgan and Ismay were present at Harland & Wolff for the launch of the still unfurnished Titanic and the handing over of the now completed Olympic. On 14 June, the Olympic set off on her maiden voyage to New York with Ismay and Florence on board. While Florence enjoyed society, Ismay kept an eye on the professionalism of the crew and made a note of the areas in which the ship was deficient, details of which he sent in Marconigrams to the White Star office in Liverpool. Her accommodation extended over five decks; she had electric elevators, a barber’s shop and a dark room for photographers. She was thoroughly modern, but she was also, as a contemporary remarked, a time machine:
You enter the reception room which is Jacobean, the restaurant is in the Louis Seize period with beautiful tapestry on the walls, the lounge is Louis Quinze with details copied from Versailles. The reading and writing rooms are of 1770, but in pure white, with an immense bow window. The smoking room is Georgian of the earlier period… The various apartments are decorated in almost as many styles and combinations of styles as there are rooms to be adorned… You may sleep in a bed depicting one ruler’s fancy, breakfast under another dynasty altogether, lunch under a different flag and furniture scheme, play cards or smoke, or indulge in music under three other monarchs, have your afternoon cup of tea in a verandah which is essentially modern and cosmopolitan, and return to one of the historical periods experienced earlier in the day for your dinner… If a good democratic citizen of the US thinks he can enjoy his voyage better in an Empire suit of rooms — in a more comfortable bed than the emperor ever had — or a French republican likes a royal suit of one of the Louis monarchs; or an ardent German socialist suddenly evinces a desire to travel in luxury in an Imperial suit… whatever the taste, the steamship company will welcome and make them comfortable, as long as they pay the fare in advance.51
During his tours of the ship, Ismay noticed that the crew’s galley was without a potato peeler, that cigarette holders were needed in the lavatories, and that the reception room, as the most popular room in the ship, would benefit from a further fifty cane chairs and ten more tables. The mattresses on the beds were too ‘springy’ — ‘the trouble with the beds is entirely due to their being too comfortable’ — and as the companionway between the lounge and the smoking room on A Deck was not used, the space might be better converted into a few extra staterooms. A further suggestion of Ismay’s was to limit the service from the pantry to the saloon to one door on each side; closing off the other doors ‘will enable us to put two additional tables in the Saloon, giving an increased sitting capacity of eight people’. He recorded that the voyage out took ‘five days, 16 hours, 42 minutes, average speed 21.7… daily runs, 428 miles, 534, 525, 548’, and before returning to Southampton he arranged for the Olympic to be fully coaled in New York.52
He was clearly not a regular passenger. But nor did Ismay have the swagger and authority of a cigar-chewing shipowner. He spent his time on board the Olympic rearranging the deckchairs.
That same year, Country Life ran an illustrated feature on Dawpool which described the pile as ‘a fine and acknowledged masterpiece, familiar and honoured wherever English architecture is held in esteem’. The pictures, however, seemed to be of an empty house. Instead of photographing the rooms in which the family lived, the magazine gave its readers a look at one of the vast chimneypieces and a glimpse up a panelled staircase. The author of the accompanying article suggested that the lack of any signs of life allowed ‘the architectural qualities of the building to stand out in strong relief unconfused by the competing charms of the beautiful furniture and pictures’, but there was no disguising the fact that Dawpool was uninhabited. Following Margaret Ismay’s death in 1907, the house had become a shell. It ‘had more than answered its purpose’, Margaret Ismay told Shaw; ‘for it had interested and amused Mr Ismay every day of his life for fifteen years’. One after another their sons refused to live there. The house, which Shaw thought might be converted into a sanatorium or a smallpox hospital, lay empty until it was sold in 1927. Then the new owner had it demolished which, due to its tremendous sturdiness, took great quantities of dynamite. Dawpool was inhabited for only thirteen of its forty years, a lifespan slightly longer than that of the ships it resembled. Nothing in the Ismays’ Brobdingnagian world lasted for long.
The maiden voyage of the Titanic was to have been 20 March, but because of a recent accident involving the Olympic the date was put forward to 10 April, which had originally been scheduled as the date of her second voyage. On 20 September 1911, as she was beginning her fifth Atlantic crossing under the command of Captain Smith, the Olympic had collided with the HMS Hawke, less than half her size. A large triangular hole, eight feet by fifteen feet, was punctured in Olympic’s side.
The hole in the side of the Olympic
Her watertight doors were ordered closed, and while two compartments were flooded the others remained dry and she stayed afloat. The passengers, who had been at lunch when their cabins were destroyed, were now offloaded and their passage cancelled. The Olympic was towed to Southampton where it took ten days to patch up her hull. She was then taken back to Harland & Wolff for the repairs proper to begin; because her propeller shaft, bent in the collision, needed replacing it was thought best to use the one due to be fitted to the Titanic. The collision cost White Star Line £130,000 in repairs and £154,000 in lost revenue when the next three voyages had to be cancelled. The Olympic’s crew, who were without work for a month, were given no compensation for loss of income. The subsequent inquiry concluded that Captain Smith was guilty of recklessness. The Captain was shaken — this was his first serious accident in thirty years’ service — but the Olympic stayed afloat. These new White Star liners, Smith now believed, were indestructible.
On 21 March, Ismay’s eldest daughter, Margaret, married Captain Ronald Cheape in what the papers called the ‘first society wedding of the year’. It cannot have been an easy time for Ismay who, like many unhappily married men, focused his love on his favourite daughter rather than his wife. Like Ismay, Ronald Cheape was tall and handsome with a love of guns and discipline; he was also a Scot and the newlyweds were due to move to Mull after a period in India. The marriage ceremony took place at St George’s, Hanover Square, and the reception was held at the Ismays’ new London home at 15 Hill Street, Mayfair. Margaret, who was initially to have joined her father on the Titanic, was on her continental honeymoon when the Ismay family drove down to the Southampton docks in their Daimler Landaulette on 9 April.[1] The depleted clan stayed the night in the South Western Hotel, and, after waving Bruce off, Florence and the children went on a motoring trip to Wales. Lord Pirrie could not join Ismay on the Titanic because he was reco
vering from an operation for an enlarged prostate gland; James Ismay, too, was ill (with pneumonia), and J. P. Morgan was forced to cancel at the last minute due, he said, to the pressure of work.53 It seems that Ismay, who now took over Morgan’s stateroom, was also looking for a get-out clause: two weeks before the departure date he wrote to Philip Franklin, vice-president of the IMM, suggesting that he call off his voyage, ‘in view of the threatened investigation of the Shipping Companies’. Franklin replied: ‘Confident no reason to alter your plans.’54 As she left her berth in Southampton harbour, the suction from the Titanic snapped the mooring lines of the neighbouring ship, the New York. Action from Captain Smith, the pilot and a tug managed to prevent the inevitable collision.
This was to have been Ismay’s final voyage in a professional capacity; seeing no future in the IMM he planned to announce his retirement on 31 December 1912. In the autumn of 1911, he offered to hand Harold Sanderson the chairmanship of the White Star Line and presidency of Morgan’s combine. ‘I will not attempt to disguise the fact that having been identified with the White Star Line so long and so intimately, the prospect of terminating the connection causes me real distress,’ Ismay wrote, ‘and I dislike to think of it; but, on the other hand the strain of the Liverpool work is, I know, beginning to tell on me… I hope that, upon reflection, you will not harbour the thought that I am deserting the ship prematurely.’55 Sanderson, believing that his own career had reached a plateau, was grateful to take Ismay’s place, after which Ismay changed his mind about the date of his retirement. It would now not be until 30 June 1913 because, he explained to Sanderson, ‘I can only look upon my prospective severance from the business with which I have been connected all my career with very mixed and doubtful feelings, and, perhaps selfishly, I am anxious to make it as easy as possible… I feel that making such an entire change in my mode of life as that contemplated would come less hardly if made in the summer than in the winter, as in the former case, I should have good weather, long days, and my shooting to look forward to, which would give me occupation for some months and this would enable me to better prepare for the time when I should have little or nothing with which to fill up my time.’ But, Ismay conceded, ‘the 30th June, 1913 is a “FAR CRY” and much may happen between now and then’.56 His retirement was to be kept a secret from the IMM.
He was forty-nine and lost in the middle of his life; these are the years in which Dante describes falling ‘into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me’. When Ismay boarded the Titanic, he had betrayed his father’s dream, he had discussed his resignation with Sanderson, and he had given away in marriage the only one of his children to whom he felt close. His own marriage was troubled and he had set in motion a future in which he had ‘little or nothing’ to look forward to but a prolonged emptiness. It is easy to show courage if you are part of a group or representing something in which you believe, but Ismay was alone on board and representing nothing, no one. He had no family to wave off in a lifeboat, no son present to whom he could set a fine example of manliness. He was neither passenger nor owner.
When he jumped from the Titanic, Ismay had no status at all.
Chapter 4
THESE BUMBLE-LIKE PROCEEDINGS
Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Enter MARINERS wet
The Tempest, I, i
The Waldorf-Astoria had originally been two hotels. The thirteen-storey Waldorf was built in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor, to irritate his aunt who lived next door. When she duly moved uptown, his cousin, John Jacob Astor — described as the world’s greatest monument to unearned income — added four storeys to her house and turned it into the Astoria. In 1897, the twin buildings conjoined and, connected by an interior street known as Peacock Alley, became the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world. ‘The last word in grandeur’, the Waldorf-Astoria — which occupied the space of an entire city block and would later be demolished to make way for the Empire State Building — did not look like a hotel. It was described in a novel written in 1905 called The Real New York, as resembling ‘nothing so much as a huge iceberg of gingerbread — what Lewis Carroll would have called a “gingerberg”’.1 The interior was a stage set and professional guides were employed to give tours of the Marie-Antoinette drawing room, which mirrored the original in Versailles, the Astor Room, which reproduced the dining room of the family home before it became a hotel, the replica Louis XV gallery and the duplication of the Soubise ballroom in Paris. ‘There were more wonders,’ reported the Sun after the hotel’s official opening, ‘than could be seen in a single evening — magnificent tapestries, paintings, frescoings, wood carvings, marble and onyx mosaics, quaint and rich pieces of furniture, rare and costly tablewear… Louis XIV could not have got the like of the first suite of apartments set apart for the most distinguished guests of the hotel. There is a canopied bed upon a dais, such as a king’s bed should be… There are baths, elevators, electric lights.’ And to enter it all, you go through revolving front doors which are like ‘screw propellers’.
The purpose of the Waldorf-Astoria, as one wit put it, was to purvey ‘exclusiveness to the masses’. Only incidentally somewhere to stay the night, it was a restaurant before the days when eating in public was fashionable, it was ‘the club of all clubs’, the place to be seen. The hotel welcomed unescorted women, who promenaded in pairs down Peacock Alley, or came alone simply because they could. J. P. Morgan was a patron; here the Steel Corporation was born. The hotel contained 40 reception rooms, 1,000 bedrooms and 700 bathrooms; it was thought ‘big enough to hold the whole population’, but it could hold less than half the number who could be held by the Titanic, whose first-class survivors were housed in the Waldorf on the night the Carpathia landed. The doorman on duty recalled how ‘never before in all its history did the hotel witness such dramatic scenes as were enacted in the corridors and lobbies. So packed and jammed was the hotel that it was difficult to find room to move around.’2 John Jacob Astor, returning with his pregnant teenage bride from their European honeymoon, was now dead and his gingerberg would provide the opening scene for the Senate’s interrogation of the gilded age.
Advertisement for the Olympic and Titanic, 1911
When Ismay, flanked by bodyguards along with two of the IMM’s top attorneys and Philip Franklin, stepped through the Waldorf-Astoria’s revolving doors at 9.30 a.m. on Friday 19 April, John Jacob Astor’s final moments were already being imagined in papers across the country. In one version, he placed his wife in a lifeboat and then ‘with a military salute, turned back to take his place on the sinking Titanic. Another had him proclaim, after conferring with four other important men, Archie Butt, Benjamin Guggenheim, John Thayer and George Widener, ‘Not a man until every woman and child is safe in the boats.’ A steerage passenger described how he had been placed safely in a boat by someone he believed to have been Astor, and a song told how the millionaire parted from his wife with the words ‘Good-bye my darling, don’t you grieve for me/, I would give my life for the ladies to flee’. Most likely is the account given by Second Officer Lightoller of turning Astor away from the lifeboat when he asked whether he might join his wife, who was in a ‘delicate condition’. ‘Now,’ wrote the Denver Post, ‘when the name of Astor is mentioned, it will be the John Jacob who went down with the Titanic that will come first to mind; not the Astor who made the great fortune, not the Astor who added to its greatness, but John Jacob Astor, the hero.’ The heroic John Jacob Astor had replaced the decadent John Jacob Astor, the man who had divorced his first wife, whose second marriage six months before to a girl younger than his own son had been considered a scandal, and whose giant hotel, frequented by fops and feminists, was considered to be a site of sexual transgression and social disorder. The manly death of John Jacob Astor had reaffirmed conservative values.
The chandeliered East Room was cleare
d of its gilt and brocade furniture and a walnut conference table was placed in the centre. Ismay, in a new blue suit with a black scarf running through the high collar, was the first to push through the crowds outside and his party sat and waited. Soon after 10 a.m. the doors opened to allow in reporters and a great tide of spectators, most of them well-heeled women in plumed hats. The notorious figure they had all come to see was fiddling nervously with his moustache and shirt cuffs. One journalist described Ismay as looking ‘distinctly oriental’, another thought he looked suspiciously ‘German’, and a third said his appearance was that of a ‘cultivated Englishman’, which was not intended as a compliment. But the general impression Ismay gave to the crowd whose gaze had fixed itself upon him was of a man who, as a fourth reporter put it, lived ‘a life of ease rather than one of strength, as if he were accustomed to having his own way because it is given him rather than because he wins it’. Meanwhile in London, a crowd of 5,000 had formed around St Paul’s Cathedral where a memorial service for the victims of the wreck was taking place.
At 10.30 Senators Smith and Newlands arrived with their advisor, General Uhler of the Commerce Department’s steamboat inspection service. The room fell silent, and after Smith’s brief introduction to the proceedings, the cross-examination of Ismay began.
How to Survive the Titanic Page 12