How to Survive the Titanic

hopes she might pay him a visit if she is in Europe, as ‘I would dearly love to have a good talk with you.’ He has not been doing much; one of his nieces is getting married. ‘I have to go but there is nothing I dislike more than a wedding.’ He is looking ahead to life in Galway and wondering how to ‘occupy my time when I go out of business’. It still ‘makes me very unhappy to think that I am severing my connections with a concern made by my father the most successful in the world, one of which I was so proud. I loved the ships.’ He fears he is ‘boring’ her and says she is ‘always in my thoughts’.

She replies almost instantly with words of wisdom and sympathy, and he reads her letter many times: ‘it has helped me so much’. His own reply is filled with self-recrimination: how do his friends put up with him? He is so anti-social, he doesn’t like people or crowds. He has been ‘shooting’ and ‘praying’, she is ‘much in my mind’, she knows his faults better than anyone else, only she understands that he is someone who ‘feels very deeply and [is] extremely sensitive and undemonstrative. I cannot show myself as I really am and always put my worst side forward. I don’t know why I unburden myself to you in this manner.’ Mrs Thayer waits for a month before replying with a cable, asking him to remind her of the names of the three books she had sent him, which she is evidently now recommending to someone else. ‘Please do not think a cable message is satisfying,’ Ismay responds, ‘you owe me at least two letters and they can’t be cables.’ He is going to Ireland this week and ‘looking forward to getting away and living in the country. I’m sorry to say I never liked people and am now worse than ever in this respect.’ He hopes that Florence will not be ‘bored to death’, otherwise he will have to sell the house. He has been fishing in Dorset, playing a good deal of golf (‘I know of no game that takes one so out of oneself’) and in August will go shooting in Scotland. His philandering brother, Bower, won the Derby, to then have the prize ‘taken from him owing to the wrong riding of the jockey. Everybody feels he has been most unfairly treated.’ Will Mrs Thayer ever be ‘coming to this side?’

Here the correspondence, as it exists, comes to an end. Perhaps they continued to write and the letters are lost, but it seems unlikely. They had nothing further to say to one another and Ismay, who told his story to Mrs Thayer as best he could, gave up the hope that he would one day be able to talk to her in person. Instead, he may have had an affair with another Titanic survivor, the fashion journalist Edith Russell, whose life he had saved by insisting that she get into a lifeboat when she was standing on the deck. Miss Russell, who became famous for leaving the ship with her ‘lucky pig’, later confided to William Macquitty, who produced the film of A Night to Remember, that she and Ismay were to become ‘more than just friends’. There is no further evidence of their relationship, but it is easy to believe. Ismay needed a secret sharer and Edith Russell was one of the few survivors who saw him as a hero. What remains of their correspondence, however, shows that he had no particular feelings for Miss Russell in the years immediately after the Titanic.

Mrs Thayer came to England on several occasions but never saw Ismay again. She spent the rest of her life on the ‘other side’, making contact with her lost husband through her new discovery of mirror-writing.

Chapter 7 THE SUPER CAPTAIN

The isle is full of noises

The Tempest, III, ii

On 2 May 1912, as the Adriatic steamed out of New York carrying Ismay in one of its cabins, the British Board of Trade inquiry into the wreck of the Titanic began in London. The Scottish Drill Hall at Buckingham Gate, armoury of the Scottish Rifles, had been chosen as a venue because it could hold several hundred spectators, most of whom would be, it was anticipated, ladies with time on their hands. Described by the Daily Mirror as resembling ‘a gigantic swimming pool’, the grim building proved too capacious by far; an audience of less than one hundred, including only ten women — of whom one was Virginia Woolf — settled into the galleries for the opening proceedings. Two hundred further seats were taken on the floor by presiding lawyers and pressmen.

Now that the mariners were dry and the narrative was no longer unravelling in real time, interest in the Titanic was beginning to wane. The public had feasted on the tragedy for long enough; the weather was getting warmer and the forthcoming summer promised a brilliant social season. Londoners were looking for distractions, and J. M. Barrie’s gift of a statue of Peter Pan to Kensington Gardens received more press attention than the inquiry’s opening session. The essentials of the wreck were now widely known and the dramatis personae — Ismay, Lightoller, Rostron and Captain Smith — were familiar figures in every household. The US inquiry had been reported in full by the British press; Ismay’s statement of self-defence had been read over breakfast by the whole country and his second examination by Senator Smith had been transcribed in the pages of The Times only the day before. The British inquiry, it was assumed, would be no more than an echo. The assessors would take the script produced by William Alden Smith and dignify it a little, introducing a new interpretation here, a different character-reading there. As it was, the British inquiry added to the mystery of Ismay’s actions one vital scene which had been overlooked by Senator Smith, while they moved another from the margins of the drama to the centre.

Despite the arrival of the assessors in mourning, the inquiry began on a note of triumph rather than tragedy. Sir Robert Finlay, representing the White Star Line, announced in his opening statement that ‘this disaster has given an opportunity for a display of discipline and of heroism which is worthy of all the best traditions of the marine of this country’. The following day, lookout Archie Jewell and Able Seaman Joseph Scarrott gave the first witness accounts on home ground of the wreck of the Titanic to a gallery now containing only one woman and a policeman. Reports of the crew’s statements, described by The Times as ‘thrilling narratives of the last scenes on the doomed ship’, could be found nestling in the heart of the Daily Mirror while the paper’s headlines announced ‘Britain’s First Aeroplane Warship To Take Part in Next Week’s Naval Inspection By the King’.

What had drawn the crowds to the US Senate inquiry was the promise of language unrehearsed and under pressure, of voices betraying their speakers. The US inquiry had proved a conundrum; as the events of the night of 14 April unravelled, the truth became more and more elusive. Nothing made any sense: while everyone told the same story (‘I went to bed, I heard a scraping sound, I went on deck, I got in a lifeboat, I was cold’), no two accounts appeared to agree. Speech became fraught with danger as witnesses tried to steer their answers around the traps placed in their way by William Alden Smith. Sentences subsided, imploded, broke down into babble. Those who had attended the British inquiry in the hope of hearing language at breaking point found that the acoustics of the Scottish Drill Hall were such that they could hear nothing at all. The proceedings, so far from the galleries that they had to be watched through binoculars, were closer to a silent newsreel or a series of lantern slides than a live event. Even the assessors cupped their hands to their ears in order to catch what was said.

The hall, which had been turned into a makeshift court with a great swath of velvet curtain covering up the brickwork, was focused around a witness stand, a twenty-foot model of the Titanic carrying sixteen miniature lifeboats, and a large chart of the North Atlantic. To the right of the witness stand was a dais on which was seated the Wreck Commissioner, Lord Mersey and, at a lower level, his five assessors. Facing Lord Mersey were the other members of the Board of Inquiry, who together made up the sharpest legal minds in the country: the Solicitor-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs QC; Sir Robert Finlay, Liberal Unionist MP for St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities, representing the White Star Line; Thomas Scanlan, MP for Sligo, representing the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union; and Clement Edwards, MP for the Welsh mining seat of East Glamorganshire, and representing the Dockers’ Union. A sounding board, resembling an enormous box lying on its side with the lid open, was installed on the dais, but the contraption made little difference. ‘Lord Mersey’s questions to counsel and witnesses’, reported the Daily Mirror, still ‘sounded like whispers.’ The hushed proceedings seemed symbolic of the fact, now increasingly apparent, that the witnesses had very little to reveal about what had happened to the Titanic. As the Mirror put it, ‘in the midst of expectancy, as terrible almost as the silence of that frosty sparkling night on which more than fifteen hundred people went slowly into the depths, there is absolutely no answer to give! There is no answer.