They said I got away in a boat And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you I sank as far that night as any Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water I turned to ice to hear my costly Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide In a lonely house behind the sea Where the tide leaves broken toys and hat-boxes Silently at my door. The showers of April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the Late light of June, when my gardener Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed On seaward mornings after nights of Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no-one. Then it is I drown again with all those dim Lost faces I never understood. My poor soul Screams out in the starlight, heart Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone. Include me in your lamentations. Derek Mahon, After the Titanic1 Cashla, meaning ‘twisting creek’ or inlet from the sea, is a Gaelic-speaking part of Connemara in County Galway. Ismay called the place by its anglicised name of Costelloe, and it was here that in 1913 he began what Walter Lord describes in A Night to Remember the life of ‘a virtual recluse’. Ismay’s fall, which was reported in newspapers across America, had become the stuff of legend. A feature in Oklahoma’s Times Democrat in 1914 described him as living ‘among the missing’ in the ‘bleakest’ place on earth. ‘Look where he hides in misery and shame. Day after day he must hear them, the shrieks of drowning men crying down the wind.’ In 1915, Utah’s Ogden Standard called Ismay ‘The World’s Exile’: ‘In one of the wildest spots on the west coast of Ireland where the silence is so heavy that one hardly dares to speak, lives in exile a man who until a few years ago had a high social standing in New York, had wealth and enjoyed all the pleasures and sports that his rank and financial standing afforded.’ Now, it was reported, local children chanted ‘coward coward coward’ when they passed his gate.
Costelloe Lodge, as Ismay’s house was called, lay in an oozing, seeping, percolating moonscape of bogs, loughs and boulders, gazed down upon by the pale blue form of the Twelve Pins Mountains. ‘It is awfully wild and away from everybody,’ he told Mrs Thayer after his first visit; ‘I will enjoy the place.’ The treeless limestone terrain, scooped out, scraped smooth, grooved and rent by ice-age glaciers, was inhabited by goats rather than people. The River Cashla, carving its course through the moor, cut through the ten acres of Ismay’s garden, enclosing the house on two sides. In nearby Clifden, the masts at the Marconi station picked up and passed on the stories that blew in from the sea. Like the house in Liverpool in which he had grown up, the windows of the Lodge looked out to the Atlantic.
To live in isolation is an appropriate penance for someone who has committed a breach of faith with the community of mankind. The symbolism of Ismay’s fate seems perfect: a seaman in exile from the sea, he hides on a primitive island which is also the womb of his ship, the flame of his honour keeping its vigil inside him like the last candle burning in a desecrated church. This is his Promethean punishment: Ismay the Titan bound forever to a rock, peregrines and ravens circling his head, the screams of the dead in his ears, frozen words hanging on the air, the empty sky and the empty ocean shimmering together as far as the vanishing horizon.
But that is not the story of the second half of Ismay’s life. The reality was harder than the public imagined it to be: Ismay simply carried on living, keeping out of the way and out of his own way. He did not retire to Costelloe Lodge and hide behind the sea; he visited Ireland for long summer breaks because the Cashla had the best trout- and salmon-fishing in all of Ireland. It was rumoured that every fish he caught on his hook reminded him of the drowned from the Titanic, but the truth is that Ismay found in fishing some of the forgetfulness he sought. The angler, says Isaac Walton, is ‘free from the unsupportable burthen of an accusing, tormenting Conscience: a misery that no-one can bear…’ Ismay was respected by the locals, to whom he gave employment and by whom he was called ‘Your Honour’, and his children, grandchildren and close friends would join him in Costelloe for memorable holidays. After her husband’s death, Florence continued to come here with the family. ‘For the first time,’ wrote Ismay’s granddaughter, Pauline Matarasso of her childhood visits to Connemara, ‘in this place of wilderness and wet I found a reality that was better than books. House and garden, large but not grand, stood close by an inlet where the peat boats came from the Aran Isles with their red-brown sails tied up to unload the turf that was the islanders’ only income.’ Ismay, who had always been private, now became more private; as Pauline Matarasso puts it, he reverted to type. ‘When he laid aside his public persona in 1913 he stood stripped to basics — a man so emotionally inhibited and so narrow in his interests as to be inapt for normal family and social life. Reclusion is the choice of those for whom the chronic pain of isolation seems preferable to the agony of rebuff. In this sense, he had long been a recluse.’2 The catastrophe had confirmed for him that the true danger was neither icebergs nor instincts; it was other people.
As arranged, on 30 June 1913, Ismay handed over the presidency of the IMM and the chairmanship of the White Star Line to Harold Sanderson. When the Great War began, the White Star liners were turned into armed cruisers and the Ismay family left Sandheys in Liverpool to live in the London house at Hill Street. White Star had a good war: the Olympic — ‘Old Reliable’ as she became known — survived after ramming and sinking a submarine, and when America joined the Allies, the Baltic was proud to bring over the first US troops. After the Titanic, Ismay had set up a pension fund for maritime widows to which he donated ?10,000. In 1919, he put forward a further ?25,000 to begin a National Mercantile Marine Fund in appreciation of the ‘splendid and gallant’ bravery of the men in the British Mercantile Marine, with preference for grants and pensions to be given to those who had served on Liverpool-built ships. Ismay gave generously to charities for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, compensation claims were being presented. In October 1913, when an Irish farmer sued for the loss of his son he was represented by Ismay’s adversary, Thomas Scanlan, who interrogated Lightoller for a second time, on this occasion before a jury. The White Star Line was now found guilty of negligence, the jury concluding that the danger to the ship was foreseen and the speed reckless. White Star appealed but the verdict was upheld; the conclusions drawn by the British Board of Trade inquiry had been made to look ridiculous. In America, at the instigation of the Titanic Survivors’ Committee, suit was commenced against White Star on behalf of the steerage passengers. Those survivors who had not been called as witnesses at the Senate inquiry now provided depositions to show that Ismay had been running the ship. Elizabeth Lines, a first-class passenger returning from Paris for her son’s graduation ceremony, testified that after lunch on the day before the collision she had overheard a two-hour conversation between Ismay and Captain Smith. The two men were taking coffee in the lounge, a few tables away from her own, and Mrs Lines had her back to where they were sitting. ‘At first I did not pay any attention to what they were saying, they were simply talking and I was occupied, and then my attention was arrested by hearing the day’s run discussed, which I already knew had been a very good one in the preceding twenty-four hours, and I heard Mr Ismay — it was Mr Ismay who did all the talking — I heard him give the length of the run and I heard him say “Well, we did better today than we did yesterday, we made a better run today than we did yesterday, we will make a better run tomorrow. Things are working smoothly, the machinery is bearing the test, the boilers are working well.” They went on discussing it, and then I heard him make the statement, “We will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday.”’ Those exact words, Mrs Lines said, ‘fixed themselves’ on her mind. Captain Smith had said nothing throughout and Ismay’s tone had been ‘dictatorial’. The owner ‘asked no questions, he made assertions, he made statements. I did not hear him defer to Captain Smith at all.’ Elizabeth Lines admitted that she had only seen Ismay once in her life, twenty years before when he lived in New York, but insisted that she knew ‘for certain’ the voice belonged to him. He was the same man who ate his meals ‘at the Captain’s table on the Captain’s right’.3
Emily Ryerson now provided the testimony she had withheld from Senator Smith during the US inquiry. She had been walking on the deck with Marian Thayer when Ismay appeared and ‘produced from his pocket a telegram’. ‘We are in amongst the icebergs,’ he said, and will ‘start some extra boilers tonight’. Being in a state of ‘mental
