How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  In a remark which was then hard for him to live down, Smith suggested to Lightoller that some of the passengers might, as a ‘last resort’, have tried to keep dry in the Titanic’s watertight compartments. ‘Is that at all likely?’ Smith asked.

  ‘No sir,’ said Lightoller. ‘Very unlikely.’

  William Alden, who had by no means finished with Lightoller, was afterwards known by the British press as Watertight Smith.

  After Lightoller’s testimony, Ismay left the room and paced the corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria smoking cigarettes. He was joined by journalists who badgered him as to whether he had left a ship filled with women and children. The inquiry, Ismay responded in a rage of indignation, was ‘horribly, horribly unfair. I cannot understand it.’ He spoke to the press — whom he knew to be conducting a trial of their own — as he had been unable to speak to Smith. Ismay, who had never before made a speech, was now fighting for his life:

  What sort of man do you think I am? Do you believe I’m the sort who would have left the ship as long as there were any women and children aboard her? I think it was the last boat that was lowered I went into. I did then what any other passenger would do. And tell me how I was different from any other passengers? I was not running the ship. If they say I was the president of the company that owns the ship then I want to know where you will draw the line. As I lay in my stateroom on board the Carpathia I went over every detail of the affair. I have searched my mind with deepest care. I have thought over each single incident that I could recall of the wreck. I am sure that nothing wrong was done — that I did nothing I should not have done. My conscience is clear, and I have not been a lenient judge of my own acts. I took the chance when it came to me… Why, I cannot even protect myself by having my counsel ask questions. Don’t misunderstand me by thinking I mean questions calculated to twist the witnesses up. On the contrary, I mean questions intended to simplify involved meanings. A glaring example of this happened this morning when I was asked about rowing the boat and I said I had been at one of the oars, but had not seen the ship go down. At once I was asked how I could have failed to see her since, if rowing, I must have been facing her. It would have been easy for my counsel to show that I was pushing at an oar which was being handled by two or three of us. There was no room to sit down in the proper oarsman’s position.6

  Various versions of these words appeared in newspapers around the world, and Ismay would never again speak to a journalist in so unguarded a fashion. It was unlike him to be this voluble; he had acted out of character. He had wanted, as he put it, to ‘simplify’ his own ‘involved meanings’. He needed to talk, to unravel the knots which were tying inside him; he needed to be understood.

  The press were relying on the fact that those survivors who were not called as witnesses, or those who had been called and consequently felt misrepresented by Senator Smith, were keen to tell their story; the construction of a stable narrative was a way of dealing with the chaos of the experience. So while the inquiry was making criminals of some survivors, the press were turning others into heroes. That evening’s papers carried an interview with one of the Titanic’s valiant stokers, who said that they had been told to ‘fire her up as hard as we possibly could. From the time we left Queenstown until the moment of the shock we never ceased to make from seventy-four to seventy-seven revolutions. It never went below seventy-four and during that whole Sunday we had been keeping up to seventy-seven.’ In that case, Senator Smith understood, the ship had exceeded the seventy-five revolutions maintained by Ismay.

  Later that night, Ismay asked permission to return home the following morning on the Lapland. Smith refused, placing him and some thirty-five members of the crew under surveillance and serving them with subpoenas to appear before the committee the following week. When the Lapland then sailed carrying five members of the Titanic’s crew, including the steersman Robert Hichens, Smith had the US Navy informed, the ship stopped and the witnesses were returned to shore by pilot boat. Why, Smith wondered, was the White Star Line so determined to get its men out of the country?

  On the morning of Saturday 20 April, the inquiry reconvened in the hotel’s ballroom, described as the Waldorf-Astoria’s ‘outstanding feature’ and ‘the most sumptuous apartment of its sort in New York, if not in America’. Usually reserved for banquets, concerts and parties, the ballroom could also be, as a contemporary writer put it, ‘transformed almost instantly from a huge palace-de-danse into a most comfortable and practicable theatre, with more than 1,100 little gilt chairs, in addition to the permanent double tier of boxes around three sides of the room’.7 The focus of the press that morning was the arrival of the glamorous suffragette Inez Milholland. A New York celebrity, she was accompanying her former fiance Guglielmo Marconi, who was due to give evidence about the use of wireless on the Titanic and the Carpathia.

  While the behaviour of the men on the Titanic represented to the popular imagination the ‘natural’ order confirmed by the sea, Inez Milholland was a symbol of the increasingly unnatural order of things on land. Aged eighteen, she had made four militant suffrage speeches on a soap box in Hyde Park and paraded the streets of London with a banner emblazoned with ‘Votes for Women’. In 1911, Milholland appeared in barely disguised form as the passionate heroine of Isaac Stevenson’s novel, An American Suffragette. Her presence at the inquiry today was a reminder of the ‘Votes or Boats’ debate which had been ignited by the Titanic disaster: women in the lifeboats had refused to return to rescue the men whose gallantry they had been only too pleased to accept on the sinking ship. ‘What do women want?’, the newspapers asked. It seemed that chivalry at sea was considered chauvinism on land. ‘I suggest, henceforth,’ said a man from St Louis, ‘when a woman talks women’s rights, she be answered with the word Titanic, nothing more — just Titanic? ‘The heroism of the men on the Titanic,’ wrote the Baltimore Sun, shows ‘that women can appeal to a higher law than that of the ballot for justice, consideration and protection.’ A writer calling himself ‘Mere Man’ asked if ‘the suffragette would have stood on that deck for woman’s rights or for woman’s privileges?’8 Miss Milholland had come as the friend of Marconi, but she also wanted to hear for herself what an anti-suffrage journal was triumphantly calling ‘the story that came up from the sea’.

  First to the stand was the Carpathia’s wireless officer Harold Cottam, who was questioned about the origins of the Marconigrams, one of which had been received by Congressman Hughes, stating that the Titanic was being towed to Halifax with all her passengers safe on board. If these messages were not sent by Ismay in order to give the White Star Line time to reinsure the ship then who, the inquiry wondered amongst themselves, was responsible for them, and what purpose did they serve? Cottam claimed ignorance, after which the spectators cleared the way for twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s wireless operator, who had already sold his story to the New York Times for a considerable sum. Bride entered in a wheelchair where he sat slumped, his crushed and frostbitten foot in plaster and his pale face leaning against a pillow. Ismay, seated between Franklin and Lightoller, listened to the testimony of one of the men whose survival he had not bothered to inquire about. He heard how Bride and his fellow Marconi operator, Jack Phillips, had ‘joked’ as they sent out CQD signals saying they were sinking by the head. ‘The humour of the situation appealed to me, and I cut in with a little remark that made us all laugh, including the Captain. “Send SOS,” I said, “it’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.” We said lots of funny things to each other in the next ten minutes.’

  Soon after the Titanic made contact with the Carpathia, her wireless began to grow weaker so ‘I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it I don’t know. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night, and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging
about. I will never live to forget the work Phillips did for the last awful fifteen minutes. He clung on, sending and sending. He clung on for about fifteen minutes after the Captain released him. The water was then coming into our cabin.’ As the band started to play ‘Autumn’, Phillips ‘ran aft’ and as Harold Bride was helping a group of the crew to lower the final collapsible boat, a wave washed them all into the sea.

  Bride’s testimony was interrupted at one point when the doors burst open and a woman ran crying into the ballroom. Was First Officer Murdoch alive or dead? Smith asked whether Lightoller ‘would be good enough to tell the lady whatever she wishes to know’. Lightoller, who had been the last person to see Murdoch alive took her aside and explained that ‘Mr Murdoch died like a man doing his duty’, after which she left quietly.

  Bride continued. ‘The next I knew I was in the boat. But that wasn’t all; I was in the boat, and the boat was upside down, and I was under it. I just remember realising I was wet through, and that whatever happened I must breathe.’ He got out — ‘how, I don’t know’ — and started swimming from the ship. ‘She was a beautiful sight then. Smoke and sparks rushing from her funnels.’ The band was still playing as the ship ‘flowed’ down. ‘I felt after a little while like sinking. I was very cold. I saw a boat of some kind near me, and put all my strength into an effort to swim to it. It was hard work and I was all alone when a hand reached out… and pulled me aboard.’ The hand came from the upturned collapsible lifeboat which was being manned by Lightoller, and Bride was the last man ‘invited’ on board. Invited? Smith expressed surprise: ‘There were others struggling to get on?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Bride who had not heard Lightoller’s testimony the day before, in which he said the opposite: ‘dozens… men were swimming and sinking everywhere’.

  ‘Dozens in the water?’ Smith repeated. Who were, Smith wondered, the men on the boat?

  ‘They were all part of the boat’s crew,’ said Bride. A horrified gasp went round the room as the reality of the scene became apparent.

  Ismay, sitting at one end of the table, did what he would do throughout the hearings: on sheets of paper taken from the press table, he drew over and over again an image of the White Star flag.

  There was no session that afternoon. Instead the committee and their subpoenaed witnesses prepared to leave for Washington, where the proceedings would continue on Monday morning in the less lush atmosphere of the new Senatorial buildings. That night Ismay again asked for, and was again refused, permission to return home, at which point he lodged a formal complaint with James Bryce, the British Ambassador. ‘I have the utmost respect for the Senate of the United States,’ Ismay said, ‘but the inquiry as it is proceeding now may wreak great injustice rather than clear up points in question.’

  Senator Smith, Bryce explained to the British Foreign Office, was responding to the parallel inquiry into Ismay’s actions being conducted by the American press, particularly the sensationalist ‘Yellow Press’ dominated by William Randolph Hearst. One of the most powerful formers of opinion in America, Hearst had met Ismay when he was a White Star agent in New York. His immediate dislike of the aloof Englishman was intensified when Morgan made Ismay president of the IMM. A reformist who saw himself as a spokesman for the American people, Hearst owned papers in every region and in six major cities, all of which he treated as a daily letter to his 4 million readers. He called his work ‘government by newspaper’, and whatever causes he championed or campaigned against tended to win the day (the views expressed in Hearst’s New York Journal were credited with provoking the Spanish-American War). His style was defined by one of his editors as ‘Gee-Whizz Journalism’: Any issue the front page of which failed to elicit a “Gee Whizz!” from the readers was a failure, whereas the second page ought to bring forth a “Holy Moses!” and the third an astounding “God Almighty!”’9 Described by Theodore Roosevelt as an ‘unspeakable blackguard’ who combined ‘with exquisite nicety all the worst faults of the conscienceless, corrupt, and monied man’, Hearst ran a campaign against Ismay which presented him in these same terms. One of Hearst’s publications, the New York American, carried a front-page cartoon of the White Star chairman sitting in a lifeboat watching a sinking ship, accompanied by the words: ‘THIS IS J. BRUTE ISMAY: A picture that will live in the public memory for ever. J. Bruce Ismay safe in a lifeboat while 1,500 people drown. We respectfully suggest that the emblem of the White Star be changed to that of a “Yellow liver”.’ ‘He must be glad he is an Englishman,’ another of his papers said. ‘He is no gladder than we are.’

  ‘However much may have been written about this school of journalism,’ Bryce explained to the British government, ‘it is difficult for any person not residing in this country to realise to what extent their influence over the less well-educated classes is pernicious in its heartless exploitation of every calamity that has ever saddened, and of every scandal that has ever attracted attention in, this country.’10 Both William Randolph Hearst and William Alden Smith would stop at nothing, Bryce believed, in their exploitation of the grief and rage of the American people so long as it served their own ends, and for each man the story of Ismay’s survival was bigger than the story of the Titanic itself. Added to which, Senator Smith felt no need to inform Bryce of his actions or intentions. ‘It might have been more courteous,’ the British Ambassador felt, ‘if some communication had been addressed to this embassy, though from persons so ignorant of the usages of international relations as most members of the Senate are no such action need have been expected.’ And as to his qualifications for chairing the committee, it ‘was generally admitted that Senator Smith is one of the most unsuitable persons who could have been charged with an investigation of this nature’. Smith was the type of man who was ‘always anxious to put himself forward where any passing notoriety can be achieved’. The US Secretary of State agreed; the inquiry was ‘mere self-advertisement’. Nor did Taft dispute this assessment of Senator Smith’s character. The President of the United States, according to Bryce, was ‘of the opinion that as long as the chairman of the committee thought it would keep him in the headlines the inquiry would go on’.11

  As William Alden Smith left the last session of the New York hearings on the afternoon of Saturday 20 April, he told journalists on the steps of the Waldorf-Astoria that ‘the surface has barely been scratched. The real investigation is yet to come.’

  Ismay and his bodyguards arrived in Washington on Sunday at 8 p.m., exactly one week after the Titanic hit the iceberg. Hundreds of people were gathered around the entrance to Willard’s Hotel in the hope of getting a look at the infamous coward, and so Ismay slipped in through the back door and was whisked up the stairs to the suite which had been reserved for his party. Lightoller was booked into the less grand Continental together with the Titanic’s frustrated crew, who, he said in his memoirs, ‘refused point blank to have anything more to do with either the inquiry or the people, whose only achievement was to make [them] look ridiculous’. With the help of Bryce and Franklin, Lightoller managed to ‘bring peace to the camp’, but he was annoyed at being quartered with his inferiors rather than with the White Star officials he was doing so much to protect, and insisted on being either moved to the Willard or provided with a separate floor and dining arrangements. The Continental’s staff muttered about how the rich and the poor on the Titanic were now bedding down side by side on the ocean floor.

  The papers that weekend had run Emily Ryerson’s sensational account of her encounter with Ismay when she had been walking with Mrs Thayer on the deck of the Titanic. ‘Sunday morning Mr Ismay showed to a woman passenger a wireless message with an ice warning. She asked if the Titanic would not go slower and Mr Ismay replied laughing, “No FASTER! We want to get by it”.’ Here was the evidence the inquiry needed to prove that Ismay was party to negligence; it also implied that he had lied when he told Senator Smith that he was not aware on that day of any proximity to ice. Mrs Ryerson agreed to swear to her story, and
that night Ismay issued a press release. Unlike the few words he gave to reporters when he left the Carpathia, it seems likely that Ismay himself drafted this next statement which appeared in The Times on 23 April, and that it is therefore his only published self-defence. It was ‘impossible’, Ismay said, ‘to answer every false statement, rumour or invention that has appeared in the newspapers… but I do not think that courtesy requires me to be silent in the face of the untrue statements’. He stressed his initial willingness to appear at the inquiry, ‘without subpoena’, and to answer every question put to him ‘to the best of my ability, with complete frankness and without reserve’. He described again, this time for the benefit of the British public, his actions on the Titanic, repeating that he had been ‘a passenger and [therefore] exercised no greater right or privileges than any other passenger. I was not consulted by the commander about the ship, her course, speed, navigation, or her conduct at sea.’ He stated that he had not, as claimed in the press, been at a dinner party with the Captain on Sunday night, and that it was ‘absolutely and unqualifiably false that I ever said that I wished that the Titanic should make a speed record or should increase her daily runs’. He confirmed that an ice warning from the Baltic had indeed been ‘handed to me by Captain Smith, without any remarks, as he was passing me on the afternoon of Sunday, April 14. I read the telegram casually and put it in my pocket,’ and insisted that he had said nothing to Mrs Ryerson about the ship being speeded up. Had the warning ‘aroused any apprehension in my mind — which it did not — I should not have ventured to make any suggestion to a commander of Captain Smith’s experience and responsibility, for the navigation of the ship rested solely with him’. Ismay described, yet again, how he had been asleep at the time of the collision, how he worked at loading the starboard boats, and how, as the forward collapsible lifeboat was being lowered, ‘Mr Carter, a passenger, and myself got in.’ He explained that the Yamsi messages sent from the Carpathia ‘have been completely misunderstood’ and that he could not be accused of trying to avoid the Senate Committee’s inquiry because he had ‘not the slightest idea that any inquiry was contemplated’. He concluded by saying that ‘it was the hope of my associates and myself that we had built a vessel which could not be destroyed by the perils of the sea or the dangers of navigation. The event has proved the futility of that hope.’