How to Survive the Titanic

tutelage of a legendary headmaster who served for other boys as an inspiration. Dr Montagu Butler raised his pupils in the Arthurian tradition of gallantry, honour and courtliness. Harrovians were marinated in the language of chivalry; this was a time in which the Victorian public schools promoted ‘the knightly life once more’, as J. H. Skrine, Warden of Glenalmond College, scathingly put it, with the attendant ‘narrowness… pride of caste… soldier scorn of books and industry which is not of the open air, as war, the chase, the game’. English public schools were breeding a species of male so pointlessly romantic and impossibly arcane that they seemed, in the words of Second World War poet Keith Douglas, to be ‘unicorns, almost’.

Ismay was in Bushell’s House (as was Ted Sanderson, who went up to Harrow four years later) along with forty other boarders. He shared a room consisting of a table, two chairs, a washstand and two beds which folded into the wall during the day; he was expected to provide his own rugs, cups and cushions, either bringing them from home or buying them from other boys, and he soon learned that displaying pictures of your family was considered in bad taste. John Galsworthy, five years younger than Ismay, recalled his own time at Harrow — which had been a great success — as dominated by ‘all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast till you reached a certain form.’ You must ‘not be enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme matter as a drive over the pavilion at cricket, or run the whole length of the ground at football. You must not talk about yourself or your home people; and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.’¹²

In his first term Ismay fagged for an older boy, which involved filling his bath, lighting his fires, running his messages, carrying his footballs, bringing him gravy cutlets and jugged hare from the village, and rushing to his side whenever he heard the call ‘boy-oy-oy’. Other Harrow traditions included the folding of a bed to the wall with a boy still tucked up inside it and the ‘House chor’, at which the fezzes’, or the football eleven, sat in state at a table with two candlesticks, a toasting fork and a racquet. Standing on the table, a candlestick in each hand, every boy in the house would take turns to sing, any sign of hesitation eliciting a prod from the toasting fork and a slap from the racquet.

That Ismay failed to distinguish himself academically at Harrow was inconsequential. He was sent there to become a gentleman and not a scholar, and in order to be a gentleman he needed to mix with the sons of other gentlemen. As Squire Brown in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) puts it, on sending his own son to Rugby: ‘I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma… If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ Dr Thomas Arnold, Rugby’s famous headmaster, claimed that what his school looked for in a boy was, ‘first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; third, intellectual ability’, and the same was true for Harrow. Any learning that took place beyond an introduction to the ethics of leadership, fair play and self-control was incidental.

The public schools were in the business of developing ‘character’ rather than intellect, and character meant conformity, selflessness, and patriotism.¹³ In his novel The Harrovians (1913), Arnold Lunn — a sportsman and adventurer whose father founded the Lunn Poly travel agency — praised the public schools for aiming ‘at something higher than culture. They build up character and turn out manly, clean- living men that are the rock of empire. They teach boys something which is more important than the classics. They teach them to play the game. It does not matter what a man knows. It’s precisely what he is that signifies.’ There was no better way for a boy to learn how ‘to play the game’ than through sport. Sport formed ‘character’ and Ismay was at Harrow during the years that games, particularly football and cricket, became a cult. ‘A truly chivalrous football player’, the Marlburian declared in 1876, ‘was never yet guilty of lying, or deceit, or meanness, whether of word or action.’ A school athlete was a hero, an honour to his house, a proven leader and a moral beacon. With his strapping build and impressive height, Ismay excelled at all forms of sport, particularly tennis and shooting, and yet his school records show that he joined no school team. Nor was he elected a member of the Philathletic club, founded by the boys themselves in 1853 and composed chiefly, though not entirely, of prominent athletes. Members were elected, and the fact that a fellow was a ‘good sort’ weighed when voting.

Being nouveau riche, Ismay could never be a ‘good sort’ any more than he could have ‘character’. Despite the growing respect shown by ‘old money’ towards trade, coupled with the appreciation that many public school boys would go into business themselves, it was understood that earning a place in the world of commerce was not the same thing as inheriting a place in society. The middle classes could be educated alongside the upper classes, could imbibe their values and even, given the right moral fibre, become gentlemen themselves; but the stigma of trade nonetheless remained. Behaviour was held to be an effect of breeding and every new boy at Harrow was welcomed with the same question: ‘Who’s your father?’ Those with ‘heroic’ fathers, brothers or uncles, men who had excelled in sports or died for their country, were accorded heroic status themselves, while those like Ismay, who came from nowhere, were treated as nobodies.

Starting Harrow in the same term as Ismay was Alexander Arthur, whose father was also a Liverpool shipowner. Perhaps the two new boys were friends — doubtless their fathers were acquainted — but it seems more likely that they sniffed one another out immediately and kept a good distance. Ismay was in an impossible position: the father he feared and respected at home was the object of derision at school. Thomas Ismay was relatively uneducated and spoke with a Cumbrian accent; his particular genius was of no value outside the dockyards. While his parents boasted that Bruce was at a top public school, he was being taught to feel ashamed of his home and of the family business he was expected to inherit. His father, meanwhile, had ambivalent feelings about the expensive education he was providing for his son. He was not putting Bruce through Harrow in order for the boy to gain notions of superiority or have ideas of his own; he was being primed to fill his father’s shoes.

Were it not for his background, Ismay would have blended in with the others; he could never be accused of being either a swot or a wimp. In his history of the family, The Ismay Line, Wilton Oldham suggests that Bruce’s unhappiness at school was due to his having inherited his mother’s ‘shy and sensitive’ nature. Bruce, Oldham writes, learned to put on a ‘facade of brusqueness to avoid appearing over-sensitive’ which ‘often caused people to dislike him, until they got to know him well’.¹⁴ But few people, and certainly no one at Harrow, got to know him well; what friendships Ismay formed came later in life. He would have been a target for bullies but it is more likely that, as with many unhappy and conflicted children, Ismay himself was the bully. He had learned from his father the art of intimidation, which he now used in order to build a wall around himself. He would not have been a glamorous bully like Flashman, who terrorised the Rugby of Tom Brown’s Schooldays; he is more likely to have been a silently threatening loner, someone who might slap a bed against the wall with a small boy tucked inside. Pupils kept away from Ismay, and mocked his lack of pedigree only when his back was turned.

For Galsworthy, the public school creed was as follows: ‘I believe in my father, and his father, and his father’s father, the makers and keepers of my estate, and I believe in myself and my son and my son’s son. And I believe that we have made the country and shall keep the country what it is. And I believe in the Public Schools, especially the Public School I was at.’¹⁵ What is striking about Ismay is that he believed neither in his father, nor in his son (who would go to Eton), nor in the public school he was at. Ismay never identified himself as a Harrovian, never nurtured a nostalgia for his alma mater’s rituals, private language or house songs; never saw himself as belonging to a exclusive club of fellows who had more in common with one another than they had with the rest of society. He felt no connection to the school whatsoever.

In Ismay’s same year and house was Horace Vachell, who later wrote a novel about Harrow called The Hill: A Romance of Friendship. Published in 1905 but set in the 1890s, The Hill gives us a good idea of what Harrow was like for someone like Ismay, and it is possible that Vachell’s main character, a bully called Scaife who is the unpopular son of a Liverpool shipping magnate, was a portrait of Ismay himself. Vachell chose as his novel’s epigraph ‘Fellowship is heaven and the lack of it is hell’. The lines, by the pre-Raphelite William Morris, which continue ‘fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them’, capture the Edwardian cult of belonging, and the fourteen-year-old Scaife, who does not belong to the heaven of fellowship, is appropriately known as ‘the Demon’. Scaife’s father, in the manner of Tom Brown’s father and of Ismay’s father too, tells him that ‘I’m sending you to Harrow to study, not books nor games, but boys, who will be men when you are a man. And above all, study their weaknesses. Look for the flaws. Teach yourself to recognise at a glance the liar, the humbug, the fool, the egoist, and the mule. Make friends with as many as are likely to help you in after life, and don’t forget that one enemy may inflict a greater injury than twenty friends can repair. Spend money freely; dress