How to Survive the Titanic

Frances Wilson HOW TO SURVIVE THE TITANIC or THE SINKING OF J. BRUCE ISMAY

For Pauline

J. Bruce Ismay was managing director and chairman of the White Star Line, the company that built the Titanic. When the ship struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage, Ismay, who was on board, jumped into one of the last lifeboats to leave. He subsequently became, according to a headline, ‘The Most Talked of Man in All the World’. These are some of the things that were said about him:

‘Mr Ismay’s place as a man and as the responsible director of the White Star Line was on the planks of the imperilled ship. He esteemed his life higher than honour and duty, and as long as this life, which he was so anxious to save, lasts he will bear on his forehead the mark of Cain, the mark of the contempt of all men of honour’

– Frankfurter Zeitung

‘Mr Ismay cares for nobody but himself. He cares only for his own body, for his own stomach, for his own pride and profit’

– New York American

‘The humblest emigrant in steerage had more moral right to a seat in the lifeboat than you’

– John Bull

‘By the supreme artistry of Chance… it fell to the lot of that tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to be caught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment’

– H. G. Wells, Daily Mail

‘You will hunt poor Ismay from court to court, as if he were the only man that was saved’

– G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News

‘I have always felt that he was the most misunderstood and misjudged character of the early part of the century’

– Wilton Oldham, The Ismay Line

‘The parallel with the tale of Conrad’s Lord Jim will occur to most of us’

– New York Tribune

Map

^{The cover of a 1906 White Star Line passenger list.}

PART I At Sea

There was a Ship, quoth he

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Chapter 1 CHANCE

I took the chance when it came to me. I did not seek it.

J. Bruce Ismay, New York World

Ah! What a chance missed! My God! What a chance missed!

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

On the night his ship struck the iceberg, J. Bruce Ismay dined in her first-class restaurant with Dr William O’Loughlin, surgeon of the White Star Line for the previous forty years. The two men had shared similar meals on similar crossings, Ismay in his dinner jacket, O’Loughlin in his crisp white uniform. In another part of the dining room a dinner party was taking place in honour of the Captain, E. J. Smith. It was Sunday, 14 April 1912, and the Titanic, four days into her maiden voyage, was heading towards New York where she was due to arrive early on Wednesday morning.

After coffee and cigarettes, Ismay retired to his stateroom and was asleep by 11 p.m. He was aware that they were heading into an ice region because at lunchtime that day Captain Smith had handed him a Marconigram from another White Star liner, the Baltic, warning of ‘icebergs and large quantity of field ice’ about 250 miles ahead on the Titanic’s course. Ismay had casually slipped the message into his pocket, taking it out later that afternoon to show two passengers, Mrs Marian Thayer and Mrs Emily Ryerson, and handing it back to Captain Smith shortly before supper so that the warning could be displayed in the officers’ chart room. Ismay was not concerned about ice when he turned out his light; it must have been the calmest night ever known on the North Atlantic. The sky was a vault of stars, the sea a sheet of still black, the Titanic — the largest moving object on earth — was 46,000 tons of steel and the height of an eleven-storey building. To stand on the deck that night, a passenger later said, ‘gave one a sense of wonderful security’.