How to Survive the Titanic

suffering might have been avoided’.

Florence collected antique furniture and nurtured her brood, especially Tom who, after contracting polio as a baby, had become ‘the butt of his father’s sarcasm’.²⁷ In 1905 she purchased her first motor car, and owing to Ismay’s dislike of driving, she began to enjoy motoring holidays alone. To provide some companionship for his daughter, George Schieffelin had sent over her rebellious, voluble, horse-loving sister, Constance. ‘Con’ was liked by everyone but her charms were particularly admired by Ismay’s youngest brother, Bower, the only male twin of the two sets in the Ismay family. Before either had time to discover they had nothing in common beyond being related already, Bower and Constance were married. It was 1900 and a family of doubles had doubled itself even further.

Following a series of heart attacks, Thomas Ismay had died aged sixty-two in November 1899, one year before the reign of Queen Victoria came to its end. He lived just long enough to see, in January, the launch of the Oceanic, whose magnificent interior had been designed by Shaw. The ‘crack’ liner that was to be a monument to himself and his firm became instead his memorial. Visitors from Britain, Germany and America came to watch the Oceanic launched, and a special train brought sightseers from all over Ireland to attend the occasion at Harland & Wolff. When she then steamed up the Mersey, Ismay Senior, now seriously ill, went out in the tender to meet her; she was the finest vessel he had ever seen. The Oceanic was also admired by the Americans, especially the Wall Street monarch, J. Pierpont Morgan.

Thomas Ismay had created one of the world’s most profitable shipping lines; his fortune was equivalent to $40 million and his weight in the shipping world was such that his inconsolable widow received a message of condolence from the Kaiser. ‘There is terrible, terrible blank in the house,’ Margaret wrote in her diary following her husband’s death. ‘Shall we ever be able to live without him. All my life was centred in him, and as the time goes on it can only get worse for me.’²⁸ On the day of Thomas Ismay’s funeral, the city of Liverpool went into mourning with flags flying at half-mast. His career was compared by one journalist to a ‘staircase ascending upward, straight, regular, well ordered, firm in its setting, perfect in its surroundings’,²⁹ and his gravestone in the churchyard at Thurstaston village was inscribed with the legend: ‘Great thoughts, great feelings came to him like instincts unawares.’ It is a curiously pertinent inscription, for the son as much as for the father.

The first decision that Bruce Ismay made as the new head of the White Star Line was to sell it. In 1901 he was approached by J. Pierpont Morgan who, having arranged the mergers that formed General Electric, Northern Securities and the Steel Corporation, was now looking to monopolise the North Atlantic trade by bringing the various American and European steamships under the ownership of one monster trust. The British shipping industry, which had thrived during the Boer War, was currently crippled by competition; should Morgan control the shipping lines, he could fix the fares at a handsome profit. He therefore offered the White Star shareholders ten times the value of the line’s earnings for 1900, a particularly lucrative year. Ismay insisted on a further $7 million in cash and Morgan eventually bought White Star for $35 million. The ships would continue to sail under a British flag and to employ a British crew, but they would be owned by Americans. William Imrie, James Ismay and a third partner, W. S. Graves, would retire and Ismay continue as managing director and chairman of the company, with Harold Sanderson at his side.

In December 1902, White Star joined the American Line (formally the British Inman Line), the Red Star Line, the Dominion, the Atlantic Transport and the Leyland Line in the International Mercantile Marine, known as the IMM, and Ismay, Imrie & Co. became, as Bruce Ismay put it, ‘a dead letter’.³⁰ James Ismay, whose wife, Lady Margaret Seymour, had recently died in childbirth, was only too pleased to throw in the towel and he moved his young family down to Dorset where he became a successful and much-loved country squire. He replaced his tenants’ run-down cottages with large black and white timbered houses in the style of Norman Shaw, and farmed pigs, whose lard and bacon were supplied to the White Star liners. Bower was interested only in horses and so long as his hobby was funded, he did not much care who owned the White Star Line. The female members of the Ismay family were less happy about the turn in events. ‘This ends the White Star Line,’ Margaret wrote in her diary, ‘in which so much interest, thought, and care was bestowed and which was my dearest one’s life’s work.’ Because a clause in Thomas Ismay’s will instructed that none of his daughters should invest in any other shipping company, the sale of the White Star Line meant that Ethel, Ada, Dora and Charlotte were each forced to relinquish their inheritance.

Both taciturn sons of rich fathers, J. Bruce Ismay and J. Pierpont Morgan were cut from the same cloth. ‘Money Talks but Morgan doesn’t’, wrote the Tribune after a dinner held in Morgan’s honour; his study contained a plaque which read Tense moult, Parlepeu, Ecritrien (Think a lot, Say little, Write nothing). Bruce Ismay, wrote a reporter in the Northern Whig in February 1904, ‘is one of the silent ones of the earth. Whether he be a genius or not, one may be sure that garrulity will never be his undoing.’ The millionaires presented themselves as two halves in a marriage of equals, and while Ismay insisted that the name of the IMM be absent from bills of lading of the White Star Line and that the White Star offices occupy an independent building of their own, it was clear that Thomas Ismay’s company had become one of Morgan’s costly possessions, to be counted along with his fabulous yacht, the Corsair, his famous library, and his vast collection of art and gems.³¹ Morgan, according to his British partner, Clinton Dawkins, was a ‘physical and intellectual giant’, a man with ‘something Titanic about him’.³² Compared by a Yale professor to Alexander the Great, and described by B. C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, as ‘the financial Moses of the New World’, Morgan was an imperious, intolerant, irascible robber baron, the ‘boss croupier’ of Wall Street who subjected the country’s entire economy to the ‘psychopathology of his will’. He now controlled not only the American railroads, but also his own fleet of luxury liners to ferry him across the Atlantic. It was Morgan rather than Ismay who was henceforth treated on board White Star ships as the owner; before the Titanic was even built, Morgan selected from the plans which suite of rooms would be his.

Morgan’s new combine initially received a positive reception in the States. The inflation of the US merchant marine would give the country ‘a position of pre-eminence such as it has not enjoyed since the decadence of shipbuilding’ after the civil war.³³ Morgan believed he was also doing the British ‘a good turn’ and expected to be greeted ‘with open arms’ when he visited London later that year; instead he found himself ‘everywhere cold-shouldered, having been suspected of filching our mercantile ships’.³⁴ The British, who had been sanguine about Morgan putting their other shipping lines into his trouser pocket, were distressed by the loss of White Star. What, the public asked, would happen in the event of war if the nation’s finest ships were no longer owned by the nation? Ismay’s actions had ‘virtually cede[d] to the United States the control of the North Atlantic shipping business’.³⁵ An article in the shipping journal, Fairplay, expressed the general concern:

What many people do feel is the keenest regret that such a magnificent line as the White Star, not to mention the other great lines associated with it, aggregating nearly one million tons of our best shipping, should have passed from British to American ownership, and from British to American control. The Combine fleets are American to the backbone; Americans found the capital, and it is Americans who appoint and pay the managers to this side. It is nothing but mere pretence to say that through the technical wording of the Company’s Act they are in any sense British, through this technicality they are allowed to fly the British flag, a fact most people regard as a public scandal.³⁶

Berlin’s National Zeitung smugly reported that ‘the blow to England is all the greater since the German companies have been able to keep out of the trust and maintain their independence’.³⁷ Ismay’s understanding was that a partnership with the House of Morgan had been unavoidable. Had Morgan not bought up the British shipping companies, the Americans, as the British Ambassador in Washington put it, would have formed an ‘avowedly hostile combine to run our ships off the Atlantic and squeeze them… out of US ports’. Before long, the Americans began to regard the IMM as a British firm, a giant White Star Line, while the British believed that the White Star Line had secretly become American.

To prevent Cunard from joining the International Mercantile Marine, the British government granted them a