How to Survive the Titanic

member of the peerage: he would effectively have remained a commoner. Thomas had previously put a good deal of effort into reviving the Ismay coat of arms, bestowed on the family in the reign of Edward I, and in 1891 Burke’s Peerage informed him that the Ismay arms would be included in their next edition, along with the family motto: Be Mindful.⁶ His family and friends urged him to swallow his pride, arguing that the acceptance of this honour ‘would be no bar to further promotion (and that other shipowners were receiving recognition of their work etc.)’,⁷ but he was steadfast in his refusal. His son, James, suggested that he might have been too hasty: ‘if the government had seen fit to offer you a suitable recognition of your great work, I should have been sorry if you had declined; for the bestowal of the honour I expected would have been thoroughly appreciated by the entire shipping community, and I am certain that everyone will feel that this can only be the first step towards the fitting elevation. Thinking over the other comparative cases, there does not seem to me any instance where a commoner, unless for special political reasons, has been given the higher rank without the intermediate step.’ Bruce was more cagey on the matter: ‘As you say,’ he wrote to his father, ‘whichever road one travels, one probably thinks it would have been better to have gone the other.’

His marriage was another of Thomas Ismay’s success stories. Loyal, devoted, and equipped with a good business mind, Margaret Bruce made the perfect wife and their union offered her the chance to involve herself in his professional world. She kept a diary for fifty years and her daily entries, which document the progress of her husband’s empire, reveal her worship of Thomas. Ismay Junior was raised in his father’s light: he was the son of Midas.

Joseph Bruce Ismay was born on 12 December 1862. He had a sister, Mary, two years older, who died of scarlet fever aged eleven during a visit to her maternal grandfather. His younger brother, Henry, died aged two in 1866, when Bruce was four. Next in line was James, born when Bruce was five, followed by Ethel, who was three years younger than James. Margaret then gave birth in quick succession to two sets of twins: Ada and Dora in 1872, Bower and Charlotte in 1874. Thomas greeted his heirs in pairs, but apart from his second son, James, he did not much like his children and particularly disliked his eldest surviving child, who he saw as a mother’s boy. Orphaned by his father’s coldness and the mutual devotion of his parents, Bruce found himself sandwiched between two dead and much mourned siblings and succeeded by six others who fell into natural partnerships. He was the odd one out in a family of doubles.

Ismay’s birthplace was Europe’s western gateway to the New World. ‘Busy, noisy, smoky, money-getting Liverpool,’ as James Currie called it in 1804. ‘This large, irregular, busy, opulent, corrupted town,’ another visitor wrote ten years earlier. Known as the Marseilles of England, the great port was dominated by the traffic of people and goods: in 1840 it had sixteen docks; by 1900 there were forty. The city, whose skyline was a web of funnels and masts, was shaped by migration: some 9 million emigrants sailed from her harbours in the nineteenth century to start new lives in the United States, Canada and Australia, while immigrants from Ireland, Russia, Poland and Northern Europe poured into the city from the ships and trains. Liverpool’s inhabitants knew the names of all the shipping lines and all the vessels; schoolboys could identify each company by its colours, they knew the tonnage, the length, the displacement figures of every new ship. Thousands of sailors and stevedores filled the quays, overhauling the running gear, unloading the cargo, painting the boats. Talk in the Ismay household was dominated by steam and sail, speed and shipping routes, graving yards and gantries; Thomas Ismay’s work seeped into every crevice of family life. Land, for young Ismay, was simply a place where ships came to fold their great white wings. The bay windows of the Ismays’ three-storey house, Beech Lawn in the suburb of Waterloo, looked across Crosby beach onto the grime of the Mersey where the White Star ships would blow their sirens in tribute to their owner as they passed his residence. Ismay loved the mournful beauty of ships and his future, he knew, lay in crossing over to the other side. He grew up tethered to New York.

The first of his family to receive the education of a gentleman, aged eleven Ismay left his local school in New Brighton and went south to a fashionable preparatory school in Elstree, a pretty village on the outskirts of London. His years there, from 1874 to 1876, coincided with the brilliant headmastership of the lean, handsome Reverend Lancelot Sanderson, known to his pupils as ‘the Guv’. Both the Reverend and his Irish wife, Katherine, were devoted to the welfare of their boys, each of whom was given a goodnight kiss by the ebullient ‘Mrs Kitty’, as Katherine Sanderson was affectionately called.

As well as a school of boys to look after, the Sandersons had thirteen robust children of their own, of whom most were wayward and intelligent girls. The Sanderson tribe ran wild down the school corridors in their homespun clothes, ragging and teasing one other and anyone else they came across; they played hockey in the school dining room with canes and a tennis ball, they staged elaborate theatricals in the school hall, they pushed one another into the swimming pool in the summer months and belted each other with knotted towels. Monica, the eldest daughter, was remembered many years after her death as having been a girl who ‘sang in her cold bath’.⁸ The Reverend, whose health was frail, kept as far away from his unruly spawn as he reasonably could, but the invigorating, unpretentious atmosphere of his family suffused the school. In an age of decorum, the intellectual and physical energy of the Sanderson way of life — as well as the beauty of the daughters — made them hugely attractive and Mrs Kitty’s already vast dinner table groaned beneath the weight of a constant trail of enthusiastic house guests who would prolong meal times with philosophical and religious debate.

Visitors to Elstree tended to be men, like John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, who had been picked up by one or other of the children on their various travels. Galsworthy and Conrad were initially friends with Ted, the eldest of the Sanderson offspring, before being embraced by the family as a whole. The unusual freedom of life at Elstree was made apparent to Agnes, one of Ted’s sisters, when she visited the Galsworthy family home with its ‘acres of red pile carpet’ and ‘thousand gold chair legs’. The ‘atmosphere of Victorian propriety’, Agnes remembered, ‘the dumb immaculate servants, the low flanneletty Galsworthian voices, killed all life in us’.⁹ But the Galsworthy home was Bohemian in comparison with the Ismay household.

Elstree was a family school in every sense. Ted Sanderson would succeed his father as headmaster in 1910, and he in turn would be succeeded by his own son. For Ted, ‘there was no other school in the land to compare with Elstree. Where else was there such a fine view, such a beautiful chapel, such a Classical tradition, such good manners, such a manly, Christian tone?’¹⁰ Most people agreed. In 1887, it was voted by the Pall Mall Gazette the country’s best prep school for boys. In Sporting Pie, a memoir of his schooldays, F. B. Wilson writes that ‘in the year of 1890 there can have been no private school in the world that was quite on a par with Elstree, if only by reason of the wonderful selection of masters whom the Rev Lancelot Sanderson had got together’.

It was a school in which a homesick boy might be happy, but Ismay was miserable at Elstree. His reserved nature made him particularly unsuited to the community spirit of boarding and to the continual joshing and mocking and testing of a boy’s limits which went on from dawn to dusk. Even as a child, Ismay did not like the company of children; he was unpopular and lonely and separated from his adored mother, who had just given birth to her second set of twins. Raised in an authoritarian household, Ismay was uncomfortable around the domestic unruliness of the Sandersons. He liked his world ordered and controlled; as an adult, his visitors learned to arrive ten minutes earlier than their agreed time and wait until the clock struck the appointed hour before knocking on the door.

Ismay was a northerner in the south of England, a sea-gazer in a landlocked village. The only time he could return to the world of ships was in his school books, where he read about the HMS Birkenhead, the most famous shipwreck of the day, which had sunk off the Cape when his father was a teenager, carrying only enough lifeboats for the women and children. It was on board the Birkenhead that the ‘age-old’ law of women and children, known as the ‘Birkenhead drill’, was first used. Ismay learned how the band was reported to have played as the ship went down, how ‘the roll of the drum called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck’, how ‘they stood, as if on parade, no man showing restlessness or fear, though the ship was every moment going down, down’.¹¹ He and schoolboys all over the country would recite Kipling’s lines, ‘stand and be still to the Birken’ead drill’.

Thomas Ismay sent Bruce to Elstree not because he valued its atmosphere of freedom, which he doubtless considered southern and soft, but because the school prepared its pupils for Harrow. Ismay, whose clear thinking was often remarked upon, passed the entrance exams in the autumn of 1876 and became a Harrovian in January 1877 when he had just turned fifteen. The rigour of life at Harrow might have suited a boy of Ismay’s temperament more than had the jumble of Elstree, but Ismay’s misery seems to have increased. Again, he was under the