No. So this was the first message he had handed to you on this voyage? Yes. And when he handed this message to you, when the Captain of the ship came to you, the managing director, and put into your hands the Marconigram, it was for you to read? Yes, and I read it. Because it was likely to be of some importance, was it not? I have crossed with Captain Smith before and he has handed me messages which have been of no importance at all, countered Ismay. Were there other passengers present? There were. Did you read the message to them? I did not. Did you say anything to the passengers about it? I spoke to two passengers in the afternoon. At that time I did not speak to anybody.
Lord Mersey and Sir Rufus Isaacs then tried to ascertain at what time Ismay had been given the message. He now said it was before lunch, but at the US inquiry, they recalled, Ismay had told Senator Smith that he did not know if it was before or after lunch. ‘I suggest to you that what you said in America was accurate, that you were not certain whether it was in the afternoon or immediately before lunch?’ I am practically certain it was before lunch, Ismay recalled. The fact that he was heading off to lunch would explain why he had put the message in his pocket and then forgotten about it; the reason had been that he was otherwise occupied rather than that he did not want the ship to reduce speed. He had lunched alone, and later that afternoon he encountered Mrs Thayer and Mrs Ryerson on the deck. I cannot recollect what I said, he told the inquiry of the last time he had properly seen Marian Thayer, I think I read part of the message to them about the ice and the derelict — not the derelict, but that steamer that was broken down; short of coal she was. He was speaking rapidly.
Did you understand from that telegram that the ice which was reported was in your track? I did not. Did you attribute any importance at all to the ice report? I did not. No special importance at all. Then why, asked Isaacs, do you think the Captain handed you the message? As a matter of information, I take it, Ismay said, as though information was generally understood to be a thing of no importance. Information, countered Isaacs, of what? About, replied Ismay, the contents of the message. Isaacs was exasperated. When it came to Marconigrams, Ismay was Yamsi again, back through the looking-glass. The Marconigram, he suggested, referred to nothing but itself; the message contained information about the contents of the message.
The question of the Marconigram was returned to during the afternoon by other interrogators. Did you before that particular Sunday, asked Thomas Scanlan, who was determined to catch Ismay in his own trap, know what was the practice with regard to Marconigrams received by the officers on the ship relating to the navigation of the ship? I believe, replied Ismay, the practice was to put them up in the chart room for the officers. Was not the Marconigram from the Baltic essentially a message affecting navigation? Yes. Then will you say why, under those circumstances, with that knowledge, you put that Marconigram into your pocket? Because, Ismay responded patiently, it was given to me, as I believe now, just before lunchtime, and I went down and had it in my pocket. According to Ismay, the reason he had put the Marconigram in his pocket was because he had it in my pocket. And you suggest that you put it in your pocket simply in a fit of absent-mindedness? Yes, entirely. And you still retained it in your pocket until it was asked for by Captain Smith late in the evening? Ten minutes past seven, I think it was, he asked me for it. That is to say, it had been in your possession for something like five hours? Yes, I should think so. (Ismay will have dressed for dinner, in which case he would have removed the message from the jacket he was wearing during the day in order to put it into the pocket of his black evening jacket.) Did you not ask the Captain, wondered Scanlan, when you returned the message whether the ship would come within the latitude and longitude indicated? I did not, said Ismay. And the Captain said nothing to you about it? He did not. As far as Ismay was concerned, the Captain had handed him the message for no reason, and it said nothing.
On a voyage, wrote Filson Young in Titanic, two lives are lived side by side, ‘the life of the passengers and the life of the ship’. Ismay insisted that he lived the life of the passenger, but he also secretly lived the life of the ship. The question of his status on the Titanic, of whether or not he was an ordinary passenger, rested on the message from the Baltic. Why had Captain Smith given him the Marconigram if not to raise with him the issue of speed? Why had Ismay then treated it as a private letter rather than a public document? Why did he keep it back from the officers’ chart room but reveal its contents to two female passengers, as though the life of the ship had been any concern of theirs? Ismay claimed later that day, as he had claimed during the US inquiry, that he did not understand latitude and longitude and therefore had no idea what the message signified. Then the Marconigram, Isaacs put it to him, was unintelligible to you, was it not? It was unintelligible to me, Ismay conceded, as far as latitude and longitude were concerned. Ismay had read the message, he said, but not its meaning; he did not speak the language of ships and the sea: the Marconi message did not convey any meaning to me as to the exact position of ice. When he looked at the ocean, Ismay saw nothing but a waste of water while the Captain and officers saw the ship’s position on the globe as clearly as if it had been a star in the galaxy. But you understood, Isaacs pressed, that you would be in the ice region reported during the night? Yes, I understood that we would get up to the ice that night. So how, Isaacs wondered, did Ismay know that they were approaching a region of ice if not from the Marconigram? Because, Ismay quietly explained, Dr O’Loughlin had told him so over dinner. This is what the two men had been discussing during that last supper in the dining room. But Ismay also told the inquiry that he knew we were approaching the region of ice because of this Marconi message. So was it not, Lord Mersey then asked Ismay to confirm, because of the Marconigram that you expected to come into the region of ice that night? Oh yes, replied Ismay, it was because of the Marconigram. But, reasoned Mersey, if latitude and longitude are the things which tell you where the ice is and you do not understand latitude and longitude, I am quite at a loss to understand why it is you say you came to the conclusion that you would be in the ice region because of the Marconigram?
Ismay’s story came down, as ever, to a problem of meaning or even to the meaning of meaning. ‘He might have meant something else,’ explained Sir Rufus Isaacs to the baffled Lord Mersey, ‘but he does mean on account of the Marconigram.’ What he meant, Ismay explained, was that he knew they were reaching the ice region on account of the Marconigram and the doctor’s comment: it was the combination, he said, of the two together. ‘Then what you mean is this, concluded Isaacs, that you presumed the Baltic had sent you a message, without knowing whether it was right or wrong, apprising you of ice in your track? That is what you mean to say? Yes. That is what Ismay meant to say.
To the British inquiry, the meaning of the Marconigram lay not simply in its contents but in its being passed from Captain Smith to Ismay. Its meaning lay in its being inside Ismay’s pocket rather than on the board of the officers’ chart room. But the meaning of the Marconigram could also be found in the peculiar status of the message itself. The Titanic was not a lonely boat upon a lonely ocean; the sea was an invisible network of countless tracks and crossroads, and so too was the air above her masts. The transatlantic cable, laid along the ocean floor by Brunel’s Great Eastern, had allowed telegraph messages to be sent across the Empire, but Guglielmo Marconi’s recent invention of wireless messaging allowed ships for the first time to communicate with one another without using flags and flames. It was this, above all else, that interested Filson Young in the story of the Titanic; Young, who would later be influential in the development of BBC radio broadcasts, was quick to see the potential of new media technologies. Marconi had called into being a previously unknown universe of waves and currents; he turned a great silence into a thousand twangling instruments which carried, as Young put it, ‘whispers, questions, summonses, narratives’. The dots and dashes of Morse code dancing with the speed of light along threads of aerial wire allowed every ship within a thousand miles to spend their days in idle gossip. Through the headphones of Marconi’s operators, steamers swapped their stories, describing where they were, the weather around them, and the strange sights they had seen.
The scientific community had remained sceptical about the claims Marconi initially made for his invention — Thomas Edison believed that Marconi’s ambition to send wireless over water using electromagnetic charge was
