How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  But that is not the story of the second half of Ismay’s life. The reality was harder than the public imagined it to be: Ismay simply carried on living, keeping out of the way and out of his own way. He did not retire to Costelloe Lodge and hide behind the sea; he visited Ireland for long summer breaks because the Cashla had the best trout- and salmon-fishing in all of Ireland. It was rumoured that every fish he caught on his hook reminded him of the drowned from the Titanic, but the truth is that Ismay found in fishing some of the forgetfulness he sought. The angler, says Isaac Walton, is ‘free from the unsupportable burthen of an accusing, tormenting Conscience: a misery that no-one can bear…’ Ismay was respected by the locals, to whom he gave employment and by whom he was called ‘Your Honour’, and his children, grandchildren and close friends would join him in Costelloe for memorable holidays. After her husband’s death, Florence continued to come here with the family. ‘For the first time,’ wrote Ismay’s granddaughter, Pauline Matarasso of her childhood visits to Connemara, ‘in this place of wilderness and wet I found a reality that was better than books. House and garden, large but not grand, stood close by an inlet where the peat boats came from the Aran Isles with their red-brown sails tied up to unload the turf that was the islanders’ only income.’ Ismay, who had always been private, now became more private; as Pauline Matarasso puts it, he reverted to type. ‘When he laid aside his public persona in 1913 he stood stripped to basics — a man so emotionally inhibited and so narrow in his interests as to be inapt for normal family and social life. Reclusion is the choice of those for whom the chronic pain of isolation seems preferable to the agony of rebuff. In this sense, he had long been a recluse.’2 The catastrophe had confirmed for him that the true danger was neither icebergs nor instincts; it was other people.

  As arranged, on 30 June 1913, Ismay handed over the presidency of the IMM and the chairmanship of the White Star Line to Harold Sanderson. When the Great War began, the White Star liners were turned into armed cruisers and the Ismay family left Sandheys in Liverpool to live in the London house at Hill Street. White Star had a good war: the Olympic — ‘Old Reliable’ as she became known — survived after ramming and sinking a submarine, and when America joined the Allies, the Baltic was proud to bring over the first US troops. After the Titanic, Ismay had set up a pension fund for maritime widows to which he donated £10,000. In 1919, he put forward a further £25,000 to begin a National Mercantile Marine Fund in appreciation of the ‘splendid and gallant’ bravery of the men in the British Mercantile Marine, with preference for grants and pensions to be given to those who had served on Liverpool-built ships. Ismay gave generously to charities for the rest of his life.

  Meanwhile, compensation claims were being presented. In October 1913, when an Irish farmer sued for the loss of his son he was represented by Ismay’s adversary, Thomas Scanlan, who interrogated Lightoller for a second time, on this occasion before a jury. The White Star Line was now found guilty of negligence, the jury concluding that the danger to the ship was foreseen and the speed reckless. White Star appealed but the verdict was upheld; the conclusions drawn by the British Board of Trade inquiry had been made to look ridiculous. In America, at the instigation of the Titanic Survivors’ Committee, suit was commenced against White Star on behalf of the steerage passengers. Those survivors who had not been called as witnesses at the Senate inquiry now provided depositions to show that Ismay had been running the ship. Elizabeth Lines, a first-class passenger returning from Paris for her son’s graduation ceremony, testified that after lunch on the day before the collision she had overheard a two-hour conversation between Ismay and Captain Smith. The two men were taking coffee in the lounge, a few tables away from her own, and Mrs Lines had her back to where they were sitting. ‘At first I did not pay any attention to what they were saying, they were simply talking and I was occupied, and then my attention was arrested by hearing the day’s run discussed, which I already knew had been a very good one in the preceding twenty-four hours, and I heard Mr Ismay — it was Mr Ismay who did all the talking — I heard him give the length of the run and I heard him say “Well, we did better today than we did yesterday, we made a better run today than we did yesterday, we will make a better run tomorrow. Things are working smoothly, the machinery is bearing the test, the boilers are working well.” They went on discussing it, and then I heard him make the statement, “We will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday.”’ Those exact words, Mrs Lines said, ‘fixed themselves’ on her mind. Captain Smith had said nothing throughout and Ismay’s tone had been ‘dictatorial’. The owner ‘asked no questions, he made assertions, he made statements. I did not hear him defer to Captain Smith at all.’ Elizabeth Lines admitted that she had only seen Ismay once in her life, twenty years before when he lived in New York, but insisted that she knew ‘for certain’ the voice belonged to him. He was the same man who ate his meals ‘at the Captain’s table on the Captain’s right’.3

  Emily Ryerson now provided the testimony she had withheld from Senator Smith during the US inquiry. She had been walking on the deck with Marian Thayer when Ismay appeared and ‘produced from his pocket a telegram’. ‘We are in amongst the icebergs,’ he said, and will ‘start some extra boilers tonight’. Being in a state of ‘mental distress’ at the time and finding his company boring, she had barely listened. Her statement was less a memory than ‘the record of an impression left on my mind’, but Ismay’s manner was ‘that of one in authority and the owner of the ship and that what he said was law. If this can be of service to anyone I do not wish to be silent or seem to be protecting him.’4 Soon after Mrs Ryerson made this statement, Marian Thayer stopped replying to Ismay’s letters.

  On 24 March 1914, before the King’s Bench Division of His Majesty’s High Court of Justice, Ismay once again told his story, this time to George Betts, the New York attorney for the American claimants. As Ismay would not return to America, Betts had come to him. He was questioned about his position as a ‘conspicuous passenger’, about his understanding of the Marconigram from the Baltic, his discussion with Joseph Bell at Queenstown concerning the ship’s speed trials, and his communication with Captain Smith following the collision. Ismay’s rhetorical device was now vagueness, his manner that of someone grown tired of the facts. He casually contradicted himself, and to ensure that what he said today bore some relation to what he had said at the inquiries two years before, he requested reminders of his previous replies to the same questions.

  When asked with whom he dined on the night of the accident, he said ‘Dr O’Loughlin, I think it was.’ Of the time at which the two men ate, he replied ‘somewhere about half past 7… I think it was’. The captain was dining ‘with some ladies, I think Mrs Widener’; as to the presence at the Wideners’ dinner party of Mrs Thayer, ‘I do not know whether she was there or not’. Asked to confirm whether the day on which he was handed the Marconigram from the Baltic was Sunday 14 April, Ismay said that it was a Sunday but that he ‘did not know the date’; asked whether he had shown the Marconigram to anybody else on the ship, he said that he ‘did not remember’. About whether he remembered ‘speaking on the afternoon of Sunday on deck to Mrs Ryerson and showing her the message’, he remembered speaking only ‘to Mrs Thayer’. The Marconigram, Ismay said, did not make ‘very much impression on me with regard to the ice’, and as for the question of speed, he had ‘never really considered the matter’. He described going onto the bridge in his pyjamas and talking to the Captain, and said that it was a ‘long time’ after this that he realised the ship would sink. Questioned as to whether he was familiar with the practice of putting ice warnings on the board of the chart room, Ismay said that ‘it would be a natural thing to do’. He swore that he had never dined at the Captain’s table — this had been the privilege of the Thayer family — but on one occasion, he now ‘believed’, the Captain may have dined with him. He had ‘never’, Ismay said, sat ‘in the ship’s lounge discussing the passage with Captain Smith’, and he had
‘never’ told the Captain that ‘we will beat the Olympic and get into New York on Tuesday’.

  The claimants’ case against the White Star Line finally commenced in the United States Court in New York on 22 June 1915. Claims ranged from $50, by Eugene Daly, for a set of bagpipes, to $177,352.75 by Mrs Cardeza — the richest passenger on the ship — for the loss of fourteen trunks, three crates, a jewel box and four suitcases. Among the other items passengers claimed for were a signed photograph of Garibaldi, an Arab costume, a marmalade machine and I0lb of tea. With the help of a host of new witnesses, including Karl Behr and Jack Thayer, George Betts from the law firm of Hunt, Hill and Betts argued that Ismay had behaved on board as though he were a super captain, while the defence contended that he was travelling as an ordinary passenger. On 28 July 1916, the judge signed the decree ending all Titanic suits and White Star settled out of court, paying out $664,000 in compensation for loss of life and luggage, the price of a life being $30,000. It was a tacit admission of guilt.

  In 1925, the IMM, which had never been profitable, got rid of its foreign flag holdings; passenger airlines crossing the Atlantic would soon be making steamships a thing of the past. Two years later White Star was bought by Lord Kylsant, chairman of the expanding Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. It was Kylsant, known as Lord of the Seven Seas, who finally sank the White Star Line; in 1931 he was found guilty of filing fraudulent financial reports, stripped of his title and sentenced to twelve months in Wormwood Scrubs. The government stepped in to save the company, forcing them into a merger with their great rival, Cunard. In 1933, Thomas Ismay’s life’s work became known as Cunard White Star Limited, and the Liverpool and London offices closed down.

  As someone who feared chaos, Ismay now arranged for himself a life of routine. Easter was spent golfing at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland and summers were spent in Ireland. For the rest of the year he would catch the train every Sunday afternoon from Euston to Liverpool Lime Street, draw the blinds of his private compartment and eat the cold supper he had brought with him. He would then stay three nights in the city’s North Western Railway Hotel and attend to his business meetings, returning to London on Wednesday evening. He was still director of the London and North-Western Railway (a forerunner of British Rail), of the London and Globe Insurance Company, the Sea Insurance Company and the Pacific Loan and Investment Company, and he was chairman of the Asiatic Steamship Company and the Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association, whose minutes show that the Titanic was mentioned on a weekly basis in relation to insurance claims. If Ismay went alone to a concert at St George’s Hall, as he preferred to do, he booked two seats and placed his hat and coat on the second one. Florence arranged her bridge parties for the half of the week that her husband was away, and when the couple hosted the occasional dinner — for never more than eight people — Bruce would always be given his own plate of cold turkey.

  In I922, Costelloe Lodge was destroyed in an arson attack by the IRA — these were the years of the War of Independence, when big houses were everywhere going up in flames — but Ismay, undeterred, had it rebuilt brick by brick, taking great interest in the project. The new lodge was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and the garden laid out by Gertrude Jekyll. In I927, Ismay’s second daughter, Evelyn, married Harold Sanderson’s son, Basil, uniting the two families in a way that would have pleased Thomas Ismay. Evelyn later completed the convergence of the twain by giving birth to Ismay-Sanderson twins.

  Evelyn’s daughter, Pauline Matarasso, remembers the ‘solemnity’ of her grandparents’ Hill Street home. ‘Anyone arriving at the house was met by a triumvirate: two footmen, one as dark as the other was fair, would be standing on the steps to either side of the door, flanking the heavier figure of the butler, poised to take the name of the visitor.’ She does not recall Ismay speaking, ‘though I suppose he must have given us some form of greeting.’5 Adding to the austerity of the atmosphere was the silence around the subject of the Titanic. To the horror of the dinner table, one child once asked his grandfather whether he had ever been in a shipwreck, while another, proud to be able to impart such adult information, told Ismay that he had read in the newspapers about a train crash in which 256 people had died. ‘How do you know 256 people died?’ Ismay retorted. ‘Were you there? Did you count them?’ It was not until Ismay’s grandchildren were older that they would hear the story of the Titanic and learn that it was never to be mentioned. ‘Truth’, as Pauline Matarasso puts it, ‘was of little interest to the grown-ups gathered round my childhood. They were in the possession of the facts, which cleared my grandfather of wrongdoing. This concentration on the facts was very calming. Without a moral dimension, without words like hubris, competition, guilt, greed, hedonism, the event was drained of emotion like a stuck pig of blood. It was their way of surviving; they could cope with a corpse. My grandfather Ismay was a corpse himself.’6

  Ismay spent his last summer in Ireland in 1936, after which acute pains in his right leg led to an amputation below the knee, which took place in his bedroom in Hill Street. Now housebound in London and no longer able to enjoy his outdoor pursuits, he withdrew further into himself. On 27 May of the same year, Cunard White Star’s first ship, the Queen Mary, left Southampton on her maiden voyage — ‘Say,’ quipped an American passenger as she boarded the liner, ‘when does this place reach New York?’ — and on 20 September 1937 the Titanic’s twin, the Olympic, was taken to Inverkeithing in Scotland to be dismantled. Three weeks later, Ismay suffered a stroke which left him unable to speak or see. He died aged seventy-four on 17 October 1937, the year of George VI’s coronation. Following his funeral at St Paul’s in Knightsbridge, Ismay was cremated and his ashes placed in a shady plot at Putney Vale Cemetery in south London. The four sides of his tomb were engraved by Alfred Gerrard, Head of Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, with a handsome fleet of sailing ships. The stone contains lines from James 3:4:

  Behold also the ships which though they be so great and are driven of fierce winds yet are turned about with a very small helm whithersoever the governor listeth.

  In the garden of Costelloe Lodge, Florence had the following words carved into a stone:

  In memory of Bruce Ismay, who spent many happy hours here 1913–36. He loved all wild and solitary places, where we taste the pleasure of believing that what we see is boundless as we wish our souls to be.

  After the inquiry into the case of the Patna finds Jim guilty of ‘abandoning in the moment of danger the lives and property ‘confided to’ his ‘charge’, he is stripped of his seaman’s papers. He stays on in the eastern seaports, limping from job to job like a bird with a broken wing, hiding his identity, unable to endure reference to the scandal, and disappearing whenever it is mentioned. It is impossible, he realises, to lay the ghost of a fact; ‘there is always that bally thing at the back of my head.’ Jim wants a ‘clean slate’ and with Marlow’s help he makes ‘the second desperate leap of his life’, into Patusan, a remote island backwater in the South Seas consisting of bandits, maidens, and thirty miles of forest and surf. In the novel’s second half, Jim is treated as a leader and called by the natives ‘ Tuan or ‘Lord’ Jim. Just as he once gazed at the serenity of the world from the security of the Patna, he now looks ‘with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of the land’. Defending his village from attack by an English marauder, Jim dies like a medieval knight.

  ‘The division of the book into two parts’, Conrad admitted, was its ‘plague spot’.7 Readers and critics have agreed; Lord Jim is less a book divided into two than a self-divided book, a book which breaks in the middle and, like Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield, it has become a novel remembered for its first part alone. Conrad was successfully able to imagine Jim’s failure but he failed to imagine his success; when his account of Jim’s life in Patusan begins, Marlow relaxes his grip on the young man�
��s consciousness and the narrative loses its psychological tautness. Conrad would have been wiser to say goodbye to Jim as he embarked on his island life, as he said goodbye to Leggatt in ‘The Secret Sharer’ when he slipped off the ship to swim to Koh-ring, a ‘free man… striking out for his new destiny’. But he was too involved in Jim’s story, he needed too badly see Jim wrest control of his fate, and in order for Jim to win back his honour Conrad had to change the genre of his book. What Albert Guerard described as ‘perhaps the first major novel built on a true intuitive understanding of sympathetic identification as a psychic process’, now became a boy’s adventure story of the kind that Jim had always dreamt of inhabiting.

  Jim eventually dies for honour, but has he redeemed himself? Has he, in his island life, faced or shirked his crime? While Conrad made Jim’s ending too easy, Marlow is always drawn to the equivocal and it is the absence of clarity in the young man’s situation that interests him. Despite Marlow’s endless production of words, Jim becomes less and less clear as the tale progresses. It is only, Marlow realises, ‘when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun’. By the close of Lord Jim, the book’s subject is no longer the encounter between the self we believe ourselves to be and the self unknown, lying in wait like a snake beneath a stone. Marlow now wonders whether atonement is possible at all, whether a slate can ever be clean. ‘A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.’