How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  The crew listen to Karain’s tale in silence and try to console him: ‘Every one of us, you’ll admit, has been haunted by some woman,’ they say. To protect the chief from the whispering shade of his murdered friend, they give him a talisman in the form of a coin depicting the head of Queen Victoria. It is unclear whether they are helping him to face or to shirk his crime, but Karain, the narrator concludes, ‘had known remorse and power, and no man can demand more from life’.

  Marian Thayer, the woman who constantly occupied Ismay’s thoughts and to whom he had talked ‘all the time’ in the year following the wreck, died on 14 April 1944. It was exactly thirty-two years to the day after the death of her husband on the Titanic. The curious timing of Mrs Thayer’s death recalls the lines by Louis MacNeice on the death of his grandmother. As a boy in Belfast, MacNeice had ‘one shining glimpse of a boat so big it was named Titanic’:

  As now for this old tired lady who sails

  Toward her own iceberg calm and slow;

  We hardly hear the screws, we hardly

  Can think her back her four score years.

  …the day went down

  To the sea in a ship, it was grey April,

  The daffodils in her garden waited

  To make her a wreath, the iceberg waited;

  At eight in the evening the ship went down.

  Marian Thayer never remarried and nor did she remove from her dressing table the framed verses Ismay had sent her in 1913. Jack Thayer waited until 1940 to add his own version of events to the sea of survivors’ stories. ‘No two happenings in the stream of space time are identical,’ The Sinking of the SS Titanic begins, and ‘no two individuals no matter how close they may be together on shipboard have the same description of experience to relate’. For Thayer as for Ismay, Lightoller and many others, the Titanic was a tale of sleeping and waking, but with the hindsight of twenty-eight years and two world wars, his perspective had changed. It was not only himself who woke to the sound of a nail scraping along the side of the ship. ‘To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.’12

  The world went back to sleep again as far as the Titanic was concerned, but interest was reawakened in 1955 by Walter Lord’s non-fiction novel, A Night to Remember, which two years later was filmed at the Pinewood Studios in Elstree, one mile from the school where Ismay had been so unhappy and Conrad, as a guest of the riotous Sanderson family, had been so happy. Kenneth More played a splendidly game Lightoller, the hero of the drama, and Ismay was portrayed by Frank Lawton as a fool in a pair of striped pyjamas. Lightoller would never see himself immortalised; he died of heart failure in 1952, without getting his own command in the White Star Line or ever receiving from the company ‘a word of thanks’ for taking on the role of ‘whipping boy’ at the inquiries. ‘It must’, he concluded, ‘have been a very curious psychology that governed the managers of that magnificent line.’13 The very brave can be very dangerous and, according to Walter Lord, Lightoller was ‘too much the romantic individualist, too likely to say what he thought… It was fatal for a White Star Line officer to have been associated with the Titanic.’14

  In 1935, Lightoller had written his memoirs, Titanic and Other Ships, which he dedicated to Sylvia, ‘My persistent wife, who made me do it’. Here he proves himself a man of many-sided courage, an adventurer addicted to the unpredictability of sea life, to the ‘feel of something living under my feet’. It is a tale of cyclones, shipwrecks and desert islands, of albatross bones, giant sea bats, and sailing ships with ‘towering tiers of bellying canvas’. It is not until chapter thirty that Lightoller arrives at the maiden voyage of the Titanic, but he does not repeat here his claim that following the collision Ismay had ordered the Captain to go ‘Slow Ahead’ or that Robert Hichens had turned the wheel the wrong way. A storyteller with several versions of the night, each one tailored to a specific audience, the story told by Lightoller to his adoring wife must be regarded in the same light as the many other accounts by survivors of their experience. It is a version of events, to be placed on top of other versions much as the Victorian geneticist, Francis Galton, overlapped photographs of faces so that the individual features vanished and the common characteristics were accentuated. Lightoller’s role as Ismay’s secret sharer was saved for Sylvia’s ears alone, and after her husband’s death she carried the story around like a loaded gun. In a letter to Walter Lord sent from America in 1956, Sylvia Lightoller revealed that she was hoping to ‘get a call from the CBS for their “I’ve Got a Secret” TV programme as I have rather a good one about the Titanic, so if by chance I am chosen to go to New York I should so much like to meet you and have a chat’. Neither CBS nor Walter Lord took up her offer.15

  Florence Ismay was not amongst those who wrote to Walter Lord with her account of what ‘really happened’. The Titanic had ruined the first part of her life and she was determined to enjoy the second, which began after Ismay died, at which point she surrendered her British citizenship and took an oath of repatriation with the United States. This old tired lady was ninety-six when her own ship went down on New Year’s Eve 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP

  ‘It is easy to jump in,’ J. Bruce Ismay had told Harold Sanderson in 1904, ‘but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to climb out.’ Ismay never climbed out from the hole into which he had fallen and nor did he achieve the catharsis that traditionally comes with tragedy, but when we see him through Conrad’s hooded eyes he has something of the tragic hero. His destiny lay submerged, riding in wait, ready to leap. He was an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances, who behaved in a way which only confirmed his ordinariness. Ismay is the figure we all fear we might be. He is one of us.

  Memorial stone in the garden of Costelloe Lodge

  Advertisement for Joseph Conrad’s first essay on the Titanic (Daily Sketch, 3 May 1912)

  Afterword

  What solitary icebergs we are…

  Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

  In August 1924, one year after returning from New York on board the Majestic — his single experience of travelling on a White Star liner — Conrad, the most remarkable of Ismay’s secret sharers, died of a heart attack. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’

  Conrad produced more words on the Titanic than any of his literary contemporaries. Even the press expressed surprise at the silence of the writing community in response to the greatest peacetime shipwreck in history. ‘Few of the magazines this month have anything to say regarding the terrible disaster in the North Atlantic which has shocked and saddened the whole world,’ noted the Daily Telegraph in the summer of 1912 in its round-up of journals such as Blackwood’s, Cornhill and Strand. It is only ‘Mr Joseph Conrad in the English Review’, who ‘makes some comments on the catastrophe’. W. B. Yeats, the national poet of the country in which the Titanic was built, said nothing in public about the event at all; Henry James, who had made the same crossing between England and his native New York on a dozen occasions, mentions the Titanic only once, in a condolence letter to friends of the American artist Francis Millet, who was travelling with White House aide Archie Butt. E. M. Forster, despite his sense in Howards End that ‘any fate was titanic’, remained silent, as did D. H. Lawrence. John Galsworthy attended the inquiry in Washington but apart from comments confided to his diary, he wrote nothing about the experience, not even reporting his impressions to Conrad.

  G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle produced newspaper copy when they were asked to do so, but there is no mention of the subject in their private correspondence, and nor did it bleed into their subsequent work. Virginia Woolf, who attended the British Board of Trade inquiry in London, said in a letter to her friend Katherine Cox that ‘what I s
hould really like to do now, but must refrain, is a full account of the wreck of the Titanic. Do you know it’s a fact that ships don’t sink at that depth, but remain poised half-way down, and become perfectly flat, so that Mrs Stead is now like a pancake, and her eyes like copper coins.’ This image is Woolf’s only observation on the wreck: instead of writing a full account of the Titanic she wrote The Voyage Out, about another journey from which there was no return.

  It was the general public who discovered a bottomless capacity for reading and writing about the Titanic. Those who had never before penned a line were inspired to produce poems by the yard, some of which were collected in special anthologies; newspapers were inexhaustible in their coverage of the story (the New York Times allotted seventy-five pages to the Titanic in the first week alone); survivors’ accounts were rushed out by the press, and popular journalists put together instant ‘biographies’ of the ship. The Titanic brought out the writer in everyone except those who wrote for a living, most of whom, like Ismay, were apparently struck dumb by the event. The novelists, poets and playwrights of the Edwardian age simply couldn’t find the words and what they did write served as a cover for talking about something else, like commerce, chance or class. ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg’, runs a spoof headline in The Onions book, Our Dumb Century (1999). Even Hardy’s memorial poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, written for the souvenir programme of the Covent Garden benefit matinee for the families of the dead on 4 May, can be read as a poem not about the Titanic but about his doomed marriage to Emma Gifford.1 ‘Trust a boat on the high seas,’ as Conrad puts it in Lord Jim, ‘to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.’ Conrad’s insight could serve as the epigraph for the story of J. Bruce Ismay.

  Notes

  Documents from the Ismay family archive at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich are identified by TRNISM, and those from the Lord MacQuitty Collection at the National Maritime Museum by LMQ. The sources for all the quotations from the US Senate and British Board of Trade inquiries into the wreck of the Titanic can be found online at www.titanicinquiry.org, and are referred to below as Inquiry Proceedings.

  PART I: AT SEA

  Chapter 1: Chance

  1 A full account of the various versions of the loading of Collapsible C, ‘Ismay’s Escape: Did he jump or was he pushed?’, can be found at: www.paullee.com/titanic/ismaysescape.html

  2 John B. Thayer, The Sinking of the SS Titanic, April 14–15, 1912 (Philadelphia, 1940), p. 20.

  3 LMQ/7/2/21.

  4 Quoted in Logan Marshall, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters (Charlford, 2008), p. 40.

  5 Thayer, pp. 18 and 20.

  6 Colonel Archibald Gracie, ‘The Truth About the Titanic, reprinted in The Story of the Titanic As Told by Its Survivors, Lawrence Beesley, Archibald Grade, Commander Lightoller, Harold Bride, edited by Jack Winocour (Dover, 1960), p. 259.

  7 Charlotte Collyer, The Semi-Monthly Magazine, 26 May 1912.

  8 Quoted in John Wilson Foster, ed., Titanic (Penguin, 1999), p. 83.

  9 Violet Jessop, Titanic Survivor (Sutton Books, 2007), pp. 152–3.

  10 Lawrence Beesley, ‘The Loss of the SS Titanic , in Winocour, ed., The Story of the Titanic As Told by Its Survivors, p. 41.

  11 Gracie, ‘The Truth About the Titanic , in ibid., p. 150.

  12 Commander Lightoller, ’Titanic, in ibid., p. 278.

  13 Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by M. A. Screech (Penguin, 2006), pp. 829–30.

  14 LMQ/7/2/19.

  15 LMQ/7/3/B.

  16 Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1912.

  17 LMQ/7/1/15.

  Chapter 2: Luckless Yamsi

  1 US Senate Inquiry Proceedings, testimony by Captain Rostron.

  2 Marconigram sent from the Olympic to the Carpathia.

  3 The Times, 20 April 1912.

  4 Atlantic City Daily Press, 5 May 1912.

  5 US Senate Inquiry proceedings.

  6 Daily Telegraph, 21 April 1912.

  7 TRNISM/3/1.

  8 John B. Thayer, Evening Bulletin, Thursday 14 April 1932.

  9 Lawrence Beesley, ‘The Loss of the SS Titanic, p. 19.

  10 Ibid., p. 30.

  11 Ibid., p. 9.

  12 Ibid., p. 44.

  13 Ibid., p. 43.

  14 Ibid., p. 42.

  15 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale, edited with an introduction by Alan H. Simmons, with Notes and Glossary by J. H. Stape (Penguin Classic, 2007), p. 19. All subsequent quotations from Lord Jim come from this edition.

  16 Beesley, ‘The Loss of the SS Titanic , p. 32.

  17 Lord Jim, p. 17.

  18 Lightoller, ‘Titanic’, p. 296.

  19 Unsigned manuscript dated August 1926. I am grateful to Angus Cheape for drawing my attention to this document.

  20 US Senate Inquiry Proceedings, testimony by Lightoller, 19 April 1912.

  21 Thayer, The Sinking of the SS Titanic, p. 30.

  22 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 279.

  23 British Inquiry Proceedings, testimony by Alexander Carlisle, Question 2i284.

  24 Washington Times, 17 April 1912.

  25 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 275.

  26 Washington Times, 17 April 1912.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Speech by Senator William Alden Smith, US Senate Inquiry Report, 28 May 1912.

  30 LMQ/7/2/37.

  31 The bogus messages may have been the result of an eavesdropping amateur wireless operator picking up Marconigrams on two different subjects and combining them. ‘Is the Titanic safe?’ and ’Asian 300 miles west of Titanic and towing oil tanker to Halifax’ became ‘All Titanic passengers safe — towing to Halifax’.

  32 US Senate Inquiry Proceedings.

  33 I bid.

  34 Wyn Craig Wade, The Titanic: End of a Dream (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980), p. 97.

  35 LMQ/7/i/i5.

  36 LMQ/7/2/22.

  37 Beesley, ‘The Loss of the SS Titanic, p. 58.

  38 Ibid., pp. 8i–2.

  39 Ibid., p. 82.

  40 US Senate Inquiry Report, 28 May 1912.

  41 Account by Edith Russell, LMQ/7/2/i9.

  Chapter 3: Youth

  1 TRNISM/7/4.

  2 Bram Stoker, ‘The World’s Greatest Shipbuilding Yard’, The World’s Work, Vol IX, March 1907, p. 360.

  3 Jules Verne, A Floating City (Routledge, 1876), p. 12.

  4 R. A. Fletcher, Travelling Palaces: Luxury in Passenger Steamships (Pitman and Sons, 1913), p. 30.

  5 Letter from James Ismay to his father, TRNISM/10/1.

  6 TRNISM/4/1.

  7 TRNISM/10/1.

  8 Dudley Parker, The Man of Principle: A View of John Galsworthy (Heinemann, 1963), p. 36.

  9 Catherine Dupre, John Galsworthy: A Biography (Collins, 1976), p. 43.

  10 John Eddison, A History of Elstree School (1979), p. 49.

  11 Quoted in Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (Yale University Press, 1981), p. 13.

  12 John Galsworthy, Another Sheaf (New York, 1919), p. 92.

  13 See Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos (Constable, 1987).

  14 Wilton Joseph Oldham, The Ismay Line: The White Star Line and the Ismay Family Story (Journal of Commerce, 1961), p. 42.

  15 John Galsworthy, The Country House (Heinemann, 1907), p. 58.

  16 Horace Annesley Vachell, The Hill: A Romance of Friendship (John Murray, 1905), pp. 24–89.

  17 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. xxvii.

  18 Thomas Ismay can be compared to the media tycoon, Robert Maxwell, another self-made man who was by turns charming and monstrous. Maxwell ran his home, Headington Hill House, as though he were the ruler of a small province, controlling the decisions and behaviour of his nine children and receiving unconditional devotion from the wife he would ridicule in public. In 1968, he gave an interview in The
Times where he explained that he did not have good working relations with men because ‘they tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality.’ What Maxwell was looking for, he said, was not a man with a mind of his own but ‘an extension of the boss’.

  19 Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw (New Haven, 1976), p. 261.

  20 Ibid.

  21 I bid.

  22 Lt Colonel Frank Bustard, Titanic Commutator, June 1974.

  23 Basil Sanderson, Ships and Sealing Wax: The Memoirs of Basil, Lord Sanderson of Ayot (Heinemann, 1967), p. 2.

  24 Truth, 12 April 1888.

  25 Sanderson, Ships and Sealing Wax, p. ii.

  26 Pauline Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done (Michael Russell, 2005), p. 17.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Twenty-seven of Margaret Ismay’s pocket diaries are kept in the Ismay archive at the National Maritime Museum.

  29 Quoted in Paul Louden-Brown, The White Star Line: An Illustrated History 1870–1934 (Ship Pictorial, 1991), p. v.

  30 US Senate Inquiry Proceedings, ‘There is nobody left in the firm except myself. It is practically a dead letter now to all intents and purposes.’

  31 Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (Random House, 1999), p. x.

  32 Ibid., p. 394.

  33 Ibid., p. 474.

  34 Ibid., p. 467.

  35 Albert Ballin to the German Embassy in London, quoted in Strouse, p. 463.

  36 LMQ/3/6.

  37 Strouse, Morgan: American Financier, p. 463.

  38 Ibid., p. 477.

  39 Alan Frederick Lewis, The Great Pierpont Morgan (Gollancz, 1949), p. 282.