How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  ‘Then you did know on the Sunday morning,’ Isaacs continued, ‘that in the ordinary course of things between then and the Monday evening you might be increasing your speed to full speed?’ I knew, Ismay said, if the weather was suitable either on the Monday or the Tuesday the vessel would go at full speed for a few hours. In order for the ship to reach her maximum level of revolutions, further boilers would have to be lit, which implied that the Titanic had been gathering speed on the Sunday in preparation for her trials on Monday. When Ismay was asked whether the Captain was aware that the ship was to increase her speed, he answered, simply, No.

  ‘Now, Mr Ismay,’ said the Irish Thomas Scanlan, who had taken over the questioning. ‘I want to ask you this question: What right had you, as an ordinary passenger, to decide the speed the ship was to go at, without consultation with the Captain?’ Ismay did not have time to answer, because Lord Mersey intervened.

  ‘Well, I can answer that — none; you are asking him something which is quite obvious; he has no right to dictate what the speed is to be.’

  ‘But he may,’ said Scanlan, ‘as a super captain.’

  Ismay apparently suppressed a smile of embarrassment as nervous laughter ran through the hall.

  ‘What sort of person’, inquired Mersey, ‘is a “super captain”?’

  ‘I will tell you as I conceive it, My Lord,’ said Scanlan. ‘It is a man like Mr Ismay who can say to the Chief Engineer of a ship what speed the ship is to be run at.’

  A ‘super captain’, like Nietzsche’s ‘superman’, is beyond accountability.

  Was Ismay a super captain, a double captain, or a double agent, living both the life of the ship and the life of the passenger? In America, he had spoken of our intention to run the ship at full speed on the Monday or Tuesday but Senator Smith had not asked to whom the ‘our’ referred. Ismay, it was now pointed out, repeatedly used the word ‘our’ in relation to the Titanic, and it was drawn to his attention that during the US inquiry he had said that we were working her up to full speed. ‘You see, you use the personal pronoun, “we”.’ I could not, Ismay drily replied, have said I was gradually working her up. But, it was suggested, Ismay could have said ‘the Captain’ rather than ‘we’, if it was indeed the Captain whom Ismay was talking about.

  On 18 April, a statement had appeared in the Daily Mail by Alexander Carlisle, the brother-in-law of Lord Pirrie and former general manager of Harland & Wolff. In the original plans for the Titanic, Carlisle revealed, provision had been made for having four lifeboats per davit. Questioned today about Carlisle’s claims, Ismay denied having ever seen any such design. Nor did he know that anybody connected with the White Star Line saw such a design. Moments later he conceded that, I saw the design I have no doubt; I saw the design with the rest of the ship, after which he once again insisted that I tell you I have never seen any such design. Have you ever heard of it before? asked Lord Mersey. No, I have not, Ismay confirmed.

  ‘I take it,’ said Scanlan, ‘that this is what you say, that you have no recollection of seeing the design at all.’ Ismay replied that this indeed was the case. ‘Or the fitting up of the boats at all?’ Oh, yes, he said that he had seen the design for the fitting up of the boats. ‘You did see it?’ asked Scanlan. Oh, yes, repeated Ismay.

  Lord Mersey tried to clarify things. ‘Have you ever until today heard that there was a design for the Titanic by which she was to be provided with forty lifeboats?’ No, My Lord, Ismay said.

  Ismay’s meanings were slipping in and out of focus, and Scanlan moved the questions on.

  Thomas Scanlan’s interrogation had cornered Ismay, but it was the Welsh MP, Clement Edwards, who had him pinned wriggling to the wall. Edwards focused on Ismay’s ‘moral duty’ on board the ship and his right to survive the Titanic at all. ‘You’, he asked, ‘were one of those responsible for determining the number of lifeboats?’ Ismay agreed. ‘Did you know that there were some hundreds of people on that ship who must go down with her?’ Ismay said that he had known this. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ asked Edwards, ‘that, apart from the Captain, you, as the responsible managing director, deciding the number of boats, owed your life to every other person on that ship?’ No, said Ismay firmly, it has not. If, Edwards reasoned, Ismay had been helping to load the women and children into the lifeboats, then why had he not searched for further women and children on other decks before jumping into Collapsible C himself? A man in his position should surely show himself prepared to take some level of personal risk. Ismay’s not having moved from the starboard side looked suspiciously as if he was ensuring his own survival rather than taking responsibility for the ship’s community of ‘other’ passengers.

  Ismay replied in what had by now become his mantra: I was standing by the boat, I helped everybody into the boat that was there, as the boat was being lowered away, I got in.

  That does not answer the question, said Edwards. You had been taking a responsible part, according to the evidence and according to your own admission, in directing the filling of the boats? Ismay disagreed; he had not been taking a ‘responsible part’, he had simply been helping to put the women and children into the boats as they came forward. Edwards sighed. I am afraid, he said, we are a little at cross-purposes. Is it not the fact that you were calling out ‘Women and children first’, and helping them in? Yes, Ismay conceded, itis. Then, reasoned Edwards, is it not the fact that you were giving directions as to women and children getting in? I was, Ismay said, helping the women and children in. Please, demanded Edwards, answer my question. Is it not the fact that you were giving directions in helping them? I was calling, Ismay explained, for the women and children to come in. Calling for the women and children and then helping them in was not the same thing, Ismay suggested, as giving directions. What I am putting to you, said Edwards, is this: that if you could take an active part at that stage, why did you not continue the active part and give instruction, or go yourself to other decks, or round the other side of that deck, to see if there were other people who might find a place in your boat? I presumed, said Ismay, that there were people down below who were sending the people up. But, Edwards drove in his rapier, you knew there were hundreds who had not come up… That is your answer, that you presumed that there were people down below sending them up? Yes. And does it follow from that that you presumed that everybody was coming up who wanted to come up? I knew, Ismay finally admitted, that everybody could not be up. There was a silence. Then, Edwards continued slowly, I do not quite see the point of the answer? Everybody, Ismay snapped, that was on the deck got into that boat.

  Lord Mersey then intervened.

  ‘Your point, Mr Edwards, as I understand is this: that, having regard to his position, it was his duty to remain upon that ship until she went to the bottom. That is your point?’

  ‘Frankly,’ said Edwards, ‘that is so; I do not flinch from it a little bit.’ There were no more passengers to get into that boat, Ismay then repeated for the umpteenth time; the boat was actually being lowered away.

  The next day, in anticipation of Ismay’s reappearance at the stand, the Drill Hall was filled to its capacity. ‘Fashionably dressed dames’, the Daily Sketch reported, ‘levelled lorgnettes and opera glasses,’ through which they saw ‘a quietly dressed and rather youthful man of unassuming mien step up to take the oath’. But anyone looking for a thrill was too late: they had missed the main event and the concluding session of Ismay’s part in the inquiry, which was dominated by the safe questioning of White Star’s own lawyer, Sir Robert Finlay, stayed firmly on technical lines. Only once did Ismay’s ‘quiet, stolid’ voice, the Telegraph reported, verge on the ‘dramatic’, and this was when he was again asked about the circumstances under which he left the Titanic. Where were the other passengers? I can only assume, he said, that the passengers had gone to the after part of the ship. He was no longer leaving behind him an empty ship; Ismay’s story was filling up.

  At the back of the hall, amongst the myriad faces gazing at
the witness stand, was a most discreet and understanding man. In his dramatic illustration of Ismay’s interrogation, ‘J. Bruce Ismay Before the British Titanic Inquiry’, which took up a double-page spread of the popular illustrated news journal, The Sphere, Fortunino Matania sees him as no one has seen him before. Ismay is an outcast marooned on an island, cut off from the rest of mankind by a sea of facts. He is a figure whose very simplicity complicates matters. The Drill Hall is a forest of shining pates, white collars and frock coats — all seen from the back — conferring, scribbling, and straining to hear. This is Conrad’s British Board of Trade, taking ‘its dear old bald head’ out for a moment from under its wing. The room is stuffed with words, talk crossing over more talk like radio waves, and the balconies overflow with feathered hats and craning necks. On ground level, in the centre of the first bench, Sir Rufus Isaacs fires his questions at the diminutive figure who is positioned far away on the stand with his back to the model of his now dead ship, one hand in his pocket, the fingers of his other hand touching the table. The only person to be represented in full length, Ismay advances straight at you, his feet treading lightly on the ground. Two weeks ago, he was indistinguishable from these featureless men; he belonged to the same realm of boardrooms and rapidly ascending power. Now he has the look of a man who has been to the edge of the world and back. To Matania, Ismay is an enigma, locked so tightly within that he seems like a missing person. He has massive presence and no presence at all, he is both the smallest and the largest man in the room, and we see him as clearly or as unclearly as we see ourselves. ‘At sea, you know,’ Marlow explains in Chance in words which could have been written to accompany Matania’s image, ‘there is no gallery. You hear no tormenting echoes of your own littleness there.’

  The inquiry, Ismay told Mrs Thayer, had been ‘the most trying ordeal to go through. They had me on the stand for seven hours and I was not in a fit condition either mentally or physically to give evidence.’ His appearance was followed by that of his friend and business partner, Harold Sanderson, and later by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Arctic explorer. Asked about speed, Shackleton replied that the case of the Titanic opened up the ‘very wide question of relationship between owners and captains’. Captains, Shackleton believed, act ‘under the instructions of their owners… when the owner is on board, you go’.

  The proceedings dragged out until the end of the month, after which counsel considered their findings. During a speech which lasted three days — longer than any of Marlow’s monologues — Rufus Isaacs concluded that ‘We are left, I must say, in some difficulty in understanding what actually took place between Mr Ismay and Captain Smith.’ Despite the acumen and ferocity of his interrogation and the impact in the courtroom of Scanlan’s term ‘super captain’, Isaacs did not ‘think that there is any evidence that Mr Ismay interfered. The evidence that we have got all tends the other way.’ It was as though the Solicitor-General had heard nothing of the proceedings at all. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘as your lordship has pointed out, and it must be pretty obvious, the showing of the telegram to Mr Ismay was not such an act as would have been performed by the Captain to an ordinary passenger.’ Ismay was rather, as the Telegraph put it, a ‘super passenger’. Sir Robert Finlay then referred to a suggestion made during the proceedings that when Ismay read the Marconigram from the Baltic he ‘ought to have said to the Captain to “Go Slow”’. ‘Sometimes,’ Finlay sorrowfully concluded, ‘it seems Ismay was to blame for interfering and at others to blame for not interfering.’7

  The commission’s report was presented on 30 July. It was less florid than the narrative produced by Senator Smith, more British in its restraint. Their verdict was, Ismay told Mrs Thayer, along the lines he expected and no doubt others expected it too, but for many people Mersey’s concluding remarks would come as a surprise. The British inquiry into the wreck of the Titanic decided that no one was responsible for the death of 1,500 people. There was some tut-tutting about more lifeboats clearly being needed, which in future should be manned by seamen rather than passengers, but otherwise the wreck was the result of excessive speed and extraordinary climatic circumstances. Lightoller’s rhetoric had won the day. If Captain Smith had indeed — and it was, Lord Mersey insisted, ‘pure surmise’ — questioned Ismay on the issue of navigation, he was given a rap around the knuckles, for ‘no one can suppose for a moment that the Captain did not know quite well that the whole responsibility of the navigation of the ship was upon him and that he had no business to take orders from anybody else’. As for Ismay, it was agreed that his status on the ship was ‘in a category all its own’ but that his ‘very presence… had an effect on the navigation… even though he never said a single word’. Here the British inquiry endorsed, indeed took its script from, the US Senate inquiry. As for the question of whether Ismay had performed his ‘moral duty’ — if, as Mersey put it, the ‘discharge of the moral duty of Mr Ismay was relevant’ — he was cleared of blame. ‘Mr Ismay,’ said Lord Mersey, ‘after rendering assistance to many passengers, found “C” collapsible, the last boat on the starboard side, actually being lowered. No other people were there at the time. There was room for him and he jumped in. Had he not jumped in he would merely have added one more life, namely, his own, to the number of those lost.’

  Lord Mersey approached Ismay’s situation as though he had been making silent inquiries into his own case. Exonerating Ismay, he exonerated himself; ‘Nobody’, as Captain Marlow said, ‘is good enough.’

  As he and Florence dined on the evening of 5 June, at 15 Hill Street, Ismay’s ordeal in the Drill Hall now over, a mile down the road in the Albert Hall a ‘One Hundred Years Ago’ ball was taking place. It was billed as the party of the season; the great dome was transformed into Brighton’s Royal Pavilion during the time of the Regent, and 4,000 people dressed in the fashions of 1812 came to celebrate Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. ‘The spirit of Beau Brummel was abroad,’ the papers reported, ‘and it was reflected in the magnificent costumes and dresses which were worn… the scene after midnight was brilliant in the extreme. It was easily the most fashionable and the most brilliant society function of the season. The floor was a fluttering, jingling, dazzling maelstrom.’ The ball was a nostalgic reminder of simpler, slower, happier days, but it also echoed the maelstrom of the last moments of the Titanic, where the combination of music, dressing gowns and dinner suits made the scene something like, as one passenger said, ‘a fancy dress ball in Dante’s Hell’. ‘Would life have been then more pleasant’, the Daily Mirror wondered the morning after the London party, ‘than it is today as we know it? Some enterprising spirit might next year organise a Futurist Ball which shall transport us to 2012… In 2012 we shall dread that war in the air is coming. If you are unhappy today, 1812 would have suited you no better, and no better than 2012 which, on notepaper, will look like a telephone number misplaced.’

  Chapter 8

  ISMAY’S UNREST

  They said I got away in a boat And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you

  I sank as far that night as any Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water

  I turned to ice to hear my costly Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of

  Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide

  In a lonely house behind the sea Where the tide leaves broken toys and hat-boxes

  Silently at my door. The showers of April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the

  Late light of June, when my gardener Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed

  On seaward mornings after nights of Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no-one. Then it is

  I drown again with all those dim Lost faces I never understood. My poor soul

  Screams out in the starlight, heart Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.

  Include me in your lamentations.

  Derek Mahon, After the Titanic1

  Cashla, meaning ‘twisting creek’ or inlet from the
sea, is a Gaelic-speaking part of Connemara in County Galway. Ismay called the place by its anglicised name of Costelloe, and it was here that in 1913 he began what Walter Lord describes in A Night to Remember the life of ‘a virtual recluse’. Ismay’s fall, which was reported in newspapers across America, had become the stuff of legend. A feature in Oklahoma’s Times Democrat in 1914 described him as living ‘among the missing’ in the ‘bleakest’ place on earth. ‘Look where he hides in misery and shame. Day after day he must hear them, the shrieks of drowning men crying down the wind.’ In 1915, Utah’s Ogden Standard called Ismay ‘The World’s Exile’: ‘In one of the wildest spots on the west coast of Ireland where the silence is so heavy that one hardly dares to speak, lives in exile a man who until a few years ago had a high social standing in New York, had wealth and enjoyed all the pleasures and sports that his rank and financial standing afforded.’ Now, it was reported, local children chanted ‘coward coward coward’ when they passed his gate.

  Costelloe Lodge, as Ismay’s house was called, lay in an oozing, seeping, percolating moonscape of bogs, loughs and boulders, gazed down upon by the pale blue form of the Twelve Pins Mountains. ‘It is awfully wild and away from everybody,’ he told Mrs Thayer after his first visit; ‘I will enjoy the place.’ The treeless limestone terrain, scooped out, scraped smooth, grooved and rent by ice-age glaciers, was inhabited by goats rather than people. The River Cashla, carving its course through the moor, cut through the ten acres of Ismay’s garden, enclosing the house on two sides. In nearby Clifden, the masts at the Marconi station picked up and passed on the stories that blew in from the sea. Like the house in Liverpool in which he had grown up, the windows of the Lodge looked out to the Atlantic.

  To live in isolation is an appropriate penance for someone who has committed a breach of faith with the community of mankind. The symbolism of Ismay’s fate seems perfect: a seaman in exile from the sea, he hides on a primitive island which is also the womb of his ship, the flame of his honour keeping its vigil inside him like the last candle burning in a desecrated church. This is his Promethean punishment: Ismay the Titan bound forever to a rock, peregrines and ravens circling his head, the screams of the dead in his ears, frozen words hanging on the air, the empty sky and the empty ocean shimmering together as far as the vanishing horizon.