with one of the Titanic’s valiant stokers, who said that they had been told to ‘fire her up as hard as we possibly could. From the time we left Queenstown until the moment of the shock we never ceased to make from seventy-four to seventy-seven revolutions. It never went below seventy-four and during that whole Sunday we had been keeping up to seventy-seven.’ In that case, Senator Smith understood, the ship had exceeded the seventy-five revolutions maintained by Ismay.
Later that night, Ismay asked permission to return home the following morning on the Lapland. Smith refused, placing him and some thirty-five members of the crew under surveillance and serving them with subpoenas to appear before the committee the following week. When the Lapland then sailed carrying five members of the Titanic’s crew, including the steersman Robert Hichens, Smith had the US Navy informed, the ship stopped and the witnesses were returned to shore by pilot boat. Why, Smith wondered, was the White Star Line so determined to get its men out of the country?
On the morning of Saturday 20 April, the inquiry reconvened in the hotel’s ballroom, described as the Waldorf-Astoria’s ‘outstanding feature’ and ‘the most sumptuous apartment of its sort in New York, if not in America’. Usually reserved for banquets, concerts and parties, the ballroom could also be, as a contemporary writer put it, ‘transformed almost instantly from a huge palace-de-danse into a most comfortable and practicable theatre, with more than 1,100 little gilt chairs, in addition to the permanent double tier of boxes around three sides of the room’.7 The focus of the press that morning was the arrival of the glamorous suffragette Inez Milholland. A New York celebrity, she was accompanying her former fiance Guglielmo Marconi, who was due to give evidence about the use of wireless on the Titanic and the Carpathia.
While the behaviour of the men on the Titanic represented to the popular imagination the ‘natural’ order confirmed by the sea, Inez Milholland was a symbol of the increasingly unnatural order of things on land. Aged eighteen, she had made four militant suffrage speeches on a soap box in Hyde Park and paraded the streets of London with a banner emblazoned with ‘Votes for Women’. In 1911, Milholland appeared in barely disguised form as the passionate heroine of Isaac Stevenson’s novel, An American Suffragette. Her presence at the inquiry today was a reminder of the ‘Votes or Boats’ debate which had been ignited by the Titanic disaster: women in the lifeboats had refused to return to rescue the men whose gallantry they had been only too pleased to accept on the sinking ship. ‘What do women want?’, the newspapers asked. It seemed that chivalry at sea was considered chauvinism on land. ‘I suggest, henceforth,’ said a man from St Louis, ‘when a woman talks women’s rights, she be answered with the word Titanic, nothing more — just Titanic? ‘The heroism of the men on the Titanic,’ wrote the Baltimore Sun, shows ‘that women can appeal to a higher law than that of the ballot for justice, consideration and protection.’ A writer calling himself ‘Mere Man’ asked if ‘the suffragette would have stood on that deck for woman’s rights or for woman’s privileges?’8 Miss Milholland had come as the friend of Marconi, but she also wanted to hear for herself what an anti-suffrage journal was triumphantly calling ‘the story that came up from the sea’.
First to the stand was the Carpathia’s wireless officer Harold Cottam, who was questioned about the origins of the Marconigrams, one of which had been received by Congressman Hughes, stating that the Titanic was being towed to Halifax with all her passengers safe on board. If these messages were not sent by Ismay in order to give the White Star Line time to reinsure the ship then who, the inquiry wondered amongst themselves, was responsible for them, and what purpose did they serve? Cottam claimed ignorance, after which the spectators cleared the way for twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s wireless operator, who had already sold his story to the New York Times for a considerable sum. Bride entered in a wheelchair where he sat slumped, his crushed and frostbitten foot in plaster and his pale face leaning against a pillow. Ismay, seated between Franklin and Lightoller, listened to the testimony of one of the men whose survival he had not bothered to inquire about. He heard how Bride and his fellow Marconi operator, Jack Phillips, had ‘joked’ as they sent out CQD signals saying they were sinking by the head. ‘The humour of the situation appealed to me, and I cut in with a little remark that made us all laugh, including the Captain. “Send SOS,” I said, “it’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.” We said lots of funny things to each other in the next ten minutes.’
Soon after the Titanic made contact with the Carpathia, her wireless began to grow weaker so ‘I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it I don’t know. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night, and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about. I will never live to forget the work Phillips did for the last awful fifteen minutes. He clung on, sending and sending. He clung on for about fifteen minutes after the Captain released him. The water was then coming into our cabin.’ As the band started to play ‘Autumn’, Phillips ‘ran aft’ and as Harold Bride was helping a group of the crew to lower the final collapsible boat, a wave washed them all into the sea.
Bride’s testimony was interrupted at one point when the doors burst open and a woman ran crying into the ballroom. Was First Officer Murdoch alive or dead? Smith asked whether Lightoller ‘would be good enough to tell the lady whatever she wishes to know’. Lightoller, who had been the last person to see Murdoch alive took her aside and explained that ‘Mr Murdoch died like a man doing his duty’, after which she left quietly.
Bride continued. ‘The next I knew I was in the boat. But that wasn’t all; I was in the boat, and the boat was upside down, and I was under it. I just remember realising I was wet through, and that whatever happened I must breathe.’ He got out — ‘how, I don’t know’ — and started swimming from the ship. ‘She was a beautiful sight then. Smoke and sparks rushing from her funnels.’ The band was still playing as the ship ‘flowed’ down. ‘I felt after a little while like sinking. I was very cold. I saw a boat of some kind near me, and put all my strength into an effort to swim to it. It was hard work and I was all alone when a hand reached out… and pulled me aboard.’ The hand came from the upturned collapsible lifeboat which was being manned by Lightoller, and Bride was the last man ‘invited’ on board. Invited? Smith expressed surprise: ‘There were others struggling to get on?’
‘Yes,’ replied Bride who had not heard Lightoller’s testimony the day before, in which he said the opposite: ‘dozens… men were swimming and sinking everywhere’.
‘Dozens in the water?’ Smith repeated. Who were, Smith wondered, the men on the boat?
‘They were all part of the boat’s crew,’ said Bride. A horrified gasp went round the room as the reality of the scene became apparent.
Ismay, sitting at one end of the table, did what he would do throughout the hearings: on sheets of paper taken from the press table, he drew over and over again an image of the White Star flag.
There was no session that afternoon. Instead the committee and their subpoenaed witnesses prepared to leave for Washington, where the proceedings would continue on Monday morning in the less lush atmosphere of the new Senatorial buildings. That night Ismay again asked for, and was again refused, permission to return home, at which point he lodged a formal complaint with James Bryce, the British Ambassador. ‘I have the utmost respect for the Senate of the United States,’ Ismay said, ‘but the inquiry as it is proceeding now may wreak great injustice rather than clear up points in question.’
Senator Smith, Bryce explained to the British Foreign Office, was responding to the parallel inquiry into Ismay’s actions being conducted by the American press, particularly the sensationalist ‘Yellow Press’ dominated by William Randolph Hearst. One of the most powerful formers of opinion in America, Hearst had met Ismay when he was a White Star agent in New York. His immediate dislike of the aloof Englishman was intensified when Morgan made Ismay president of the IMM. A reformist who saw himself as a spokesman for the American people, Hearst owned papers in every region and in six major cities, all of which he treated as a daily letter to his 4 million readers. He called his work ‘government by newspaper’, and whatever causes he championed or campaigned against tended to win the day (the views expressed in Hearst’s New York Journal were credited with provoking the Spanish-American War). His style was defined by one of his editors as ‘Gee-Whizz Journalism’: Any issue the front page of which failed to elicit a “Gee Whizz!” from the readers was a failure, whereas the second page ought to bring forth a “Holy Moses!” and the third an astounding “God Almighty!”’9 Described by Theodore Roosevelt as an ‘unspeakable blackguard’ who combined ‘with exquisite nicety all the worst faults of the
