subsidy of ?2 million to build the Lusitania and the Mauretania, both of which were to be used as naval ships should the circumstances arise. The terms of the subsidy were that ‘under no circumstances shall the management of the company be in the hands of, or the shares of the company held by, other than British subjects’. The Lusitania and Mauretania were a huge success; at 31,000 tons and equipped with the innovative Parson’s steam turbine, they were not only the largest but also the fastest ships afloat — the Mauretania would hold the Blue Riband for over a decade; the experience of travelling in her was, for Henry James, as if ‘carried in a gigantic grandmother’s bosom and the gentle giantess had made but one mighty stride of it from land to land’.
The IMM, which was increasingly accompanied by the term ‘ill-fated’, would prove Morgan’s only disaster. He controlled 136 ships and 45 routes between Europe and North America, but was operating at a loss. Cunard’s independence had effectively handicapped the combine, which was forced to spend its profits on the construction of competing ships. ‘The ocean’, concluded the Wall Street Journal, ‘was too big for the old man.’ ‘What threatens to swamp us,’ wrote Clinton Dawkins, one of Morgan’s British partners, to Charles Steele, one of his American partners, ‘is this monstrous indebtedness for shipbuilding, and I don’t feel satisfied that we are not putting more big ships into the Atlantic than it can bear.’38 When share prices plummeted in 1904, Morgan decided to replace the ailing Clement A. Griscom as the trust’s president. His first choice had been the brilliant Albert Ballin, head of the Hamburg-America Line, but Ballin turned it down and Morgan turned to Ismay as second best. He ‘did not mind losing money’, he explained to the White Star chairman, ‘but he did object to doing so owing to poor organisation’. Morgan’s hope was that the image of a young English captain of industry at the helm would push up the value of the company at the same time as quelling any alarm felt by the British at the ‘Morganisation’ of their favourite shipping line. Character, Morgan believed, comes ‘before anything else. Money cannot buy it,’39 and Ismay, he explained to his partners, not only possessed character but was ‘the only man who could straighten matters out’.40 Seven months earlier, Morgan had thought otherwise, arguing that an English president of the IMM would be an impossible drawback. In an interview with the New York Mail on 28 January 1904, Clement Griscom expressed his complete faith in Ismay as his replacement. ‘He has been trained in a splendid school — a school where one-man management has been taught and practiced… Mr Ismay would not accept the presidency unless he be given the one-man power which has made the White Star Line so successful.’ Ismay would of course, the American papers agreed, be making his home in New York. It would be impossible — as well as insulting — to run a vast American company from ‘the other side’.
As always when making a decision, rather than turn to his wife for advice Ismay approached his mother and Sanderson. ‘The idea of spending so much of my time in America is not congenial to me,’ he wrote to Sanderson from New York. ‘But if I could arrange to limit it to say, three months, it would not be so bad… I think you know that if I had considered my own inclination and feelings absolutely I should, in all probability, have resigned ere this, but I am trying to look at the matter from a general point of view.’ ‘I think your inclination is to accept,’ Margaret Ismay told her son, ‘and I do not wonder at it. For it is well known what exceptional power you have… You have a great deal of your life before you, and I hope you may be spared to bring the great concern with which you are so interested to a successful issue.’41
Ismay’s inclination, however, was not to accept: ‘If I only considered myself, I would decline the responsibility.’42 He knew the position was humiliating, added to which he had grown to dislike New York, no doubt due in part to animosities from his wife’s family. The presidency would also require a good deal of entertaining and public posturing, neither of which activities he enjoyed, but there was one further factor in Ismay’s reluctance to take up Morgan’s offer. His selling of the White Star Line was the start of the process by which he hoped to divest himself of responsibility in the shipping world and prepare for what he called, in a letter to the Head of the British Committee of the IMM, ‘a life of ease and enjoyment’.43 Ismay was forty-two and had, as his mother said, a great deal of his life before him, but he was uncertain that he wanted to spend it fulfilling his father’s ambitions. He had other interests; he liked hunting and fishing and had hoped to be selected as a Unionist Member of Parliament for the constituency of Ludlow in Shropshire, but failed to get the support of a ‘certain section of the Conservative party’.44 J. P. Morgan, now seventy-five, was also feeling his age and wanted to spend more time with his paintings. Morgan was handing the baton over to his son; Ismay had brought to an end his own father’s dream of a dynasty. Nonetheless, ‘it is a difficult proposition’, he wrote to Sanderson, ‘and I intend going slow, and giving the matter the most earnest and careful consideration. It is easy to jump in, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to climb out.’45
A cartoon in the New York Globe pictured John Bull, his head emerging from the Atlantic, devouring the IMM in the form of a ship. ‘He’s swallowed it!’ says America, but the truth is that when Ismay jumped, it was J. Pierpont Morgan who swallowed him whole.
‘He’s Swallowed It Be Gosh!’ His appointment, noted the Glasgow Evening Times, ‘was consonant with the whole of the Ismay family history. An Ismay never goes back.’ And Ismay did not return to live in New York, a slight that the city would find hard to forgive. Instead, as he patiently explained to journalists wondering where he would now be residing, the headquarters of the IMM would be sometimes in America, sometimes in England, sometimes on the high seas and sometimes on a golf course in Scotland. They would be, Ismay famously said, ‘wherever I am’.
In an attempt to envisage the new president’s working life, the satirical journal The Syren ran, in October 1905, an imaginary interview with J. Bruce Ismay. He is pictured in a ‘simple apartment, about 150ft in length and 80ft in breadth, fitted and furnished plainly, indeed austerely’. The walls are panelled in the ‘rarest mahogany, inlaid with mother of pearl’, the light fittings are ‘solid silver’, and ‘the furniture is priceless. Over one of the massive mantelpieces hangs a large oil painting by a well-known Scotch academician, entitled “Bruce Vanquishing his Enemies”.’ Behind what looks like a ‘large pianola’, but turns out to be ‘a wonderful entanglement of telephone and telegraph wires, speaking tubes, etc.’, Ismay can be found keeping ‘in constant and close touch with each sub-section of each section of each division of each department of each branch of each Line of each Trust of the great TRUST itself’.
The story goes that one summer evening later in the year, Bruce and Florence Ismay went to dinner at Downshire House in Berkeley Square, the home of William, now Lord, Pirrie who had been managing director of Harland & Wolff since the death of Sir Edward Harland in 1894. An Irishman determined to make his mark on London society, Pirrie was a famously lavish host. During the evening, the shipowner and the shipbuilder agreed, over coffee and cigars, to build the twins Olympic and Titanic, each 15,000 tons bigger than the Lusitania and the Mauretania.
It’s an evocative image: an opulent candlelit dinner enjoyed by two successful businessmen and their glittering wives in the Mayfair of the gilded age. Ismay and Florence are chauffeured down to Berkeley Square from their own magnificent house in Chesham Street, Belgravia; after dessert the women drift off to gossip and play cards in the fern-filled drawing room while the men, slightly drunk, decide to build the most enormous and fabulously equipped ships the world has ever known. The evening at Downshire House is the perfect accompaniment to the evening at Gustavus Schwabe’s mansion forty years earlier.
Many evenings were shared between the Pirries and the Ismays when they were all in London, but it is unlikely that the idea for the Titanic was born during a neighbourly supper. Nor is it necessary to bathe the birth of the ship in such a sepia glow; there was nothing particularly inspired or outlandish in the idea of building a bigger ship than the one before. Technology was moving at such a rate that every ship the White Star Line commissioned from Harland & Wolff was bigger than the last; it went without saying that their next group of ships would need to be considerably larger and more dramatic if they were to grab the headlines from the two Cunarders. Nor is it likely that the idea for the Titanic was conceived so late in the day. The Lusitania and the Mauretania were to be launched in late 1907: why would the power-hungry J. P. Morgan, whose ambition was to eliminate competition on the North Atlantic, wait until a few months before the launch of the already famous Cunarders before reacting to their challenge?
