How to Survive the Titanic

distress’ at the time and finding his company boring, she had barely listened. Her statement was less a memory than ‘the record of an impression left on my mind’, but Ismay’s manner was ‘that of one in authority and the owner of the ship and that what he said was law. If this can be of service to anyone I do not wish to be silent or seem to be protecting him.’⁴ Soon after Mrs Ryerson made this statement, Marian Thayer stopped replying to Ismay’s letters.

On 24 March 1914, before the King’s Bench Division of His Majesty’s High Court of Justice, Ismay once again told his story, this time to George Betts, the New York attorney for the American claimants. As Ismay would not return to America, Betts had come to him. He was questioned about his position as a ‘conspicuous passenger’, about his understanding of the Marconigram from the Baltic, his discussion with Joseph Bell at Queenstown concerning the ship’s speed trials, and his communication with Captain Smith following the collision. Ismay’s rhetorical device was now vagueness, his manner that of someone grown tired of the facts. He casually contradicted himself, and to ensure that what he said today bore some relation to what he had said at the inquiries two years before, he requested reminders of his previous replies to the same questions.

When asked with whom he dined on the night of the accident, he said ‘Dr O’Loughlin, I think it was.’ Of the time at which the two men ate, he replied ‘somewhere about half past 7… I think it was’. The captain was dining ‘with some ladies, I think Mrs Widener’; as to the presence at the Wideners’ dinner party of Mrs Thayer, ‘I do not know whether she was there or not’. Asked to confirm whether the day on which he was handed the Marconigram from the Baltic was Sunday 14 April, Ismay said that it was a Sunday but that he ‘did not know the date’; asked whether he had shown the Marconigram to anybody else on the ship, he said that he ‘did not remember’. About whether he remembered ‘speaking on the afternoon of Sunday on deck to Mrs Ryerson and showing her the message’, he remembered speaking only ‘to Mrs Thayer’. The Marconigram, Ismay said, did not make ‘very much impression on me with regard to the ice’, and as for the question of speed, he had ‘never really considered the matter’. He described going onto the bridge in his pyjamas and talking to the Captain, and said that it was a ‘long time’ after this that he realised the ship would sink. Questioned as to whether he was familiar with the practice of putting ice warnings on the board of the chart room, Ismay said that ‘it would be a natural thing to do’. He swore that he had never dined at the Captain’s table — this had been the privilege of the Thayer family — but on one occasion, he now ‘believed’, the Captain may have dined with him. He had ‘never’, Ismay said, sat ‘in the ship’s lounge discussing the passage with Captain Smith’, and he had ‘never’ told the Captain that ‘we will beat the Olympic and get into New York on Tuesday’.

The claimants’ case against the White Star Line finally commenced in the United States Court in New York on 22 June 1915. Claims ranged from $50, by Eugene Daly, for a set of bagpipes, to $177,352.75 by Mrs Cardeza — the richest passenger on the ship — for the loss of fourteen trunks, three crates, a jewel box and four suitcases. Among the other items passengers claimed for were a signed photograph of Garibaldi, an Arab costume, a marmalade machine and I0lb of tea. With the help of a host of new witnesses, including Karl Behr and Jack Thayer, George Betts from the law firm of Hunt, Hill and Betts argued that Ismay had behaved on board as though he were a super captain, while the defence contended that he was travelling as an ordinary passenger. On 28 July 1916, the judge signed the decree ending all Titanic suits and White Star settled out of court, paying out $664,000 in compensation for loss of life and luggage, the price of a life being $30,000. It was a tacit admission of guilt.

In 1925, the IMM, which had never been profitable, got rid of its foreign flag holdings; passenger airlines crossing the Atlantic would soon be making steamships a thing of the past. Two years later White Star was bought by Lord Kylsant, chairman of the expanding Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. It was Kylsant, known as Lord of the Seven Seas, who finally sank the White Star Line; in 1931 he was found guilty of filing fraudulent financial reports, stripped of his title and sentenced to twelve months in Wormwood Scrubs. The government stepped in to save the company, forcing them into a merger with their great rival, Cunard. In 1933, Thomas Ismay’s life’s work became known as Cunard White Star Limited, and the Liverpool and London offices closed down.

As someone who feared chaos, Ismay now arranged for himself a life of routine. Easter was spent golfing at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland and summers were spent in Ireland. For the rest of the year he would catch the train every Sunday afternoon from Euston to Liverpool Lime Street, draw the blinds of his private compartment and eat the cold supper he had brought with him. He would then stay three nights in the city’s North Western Railway Hotel and attend to his business meetings, returning to London on Wednesday evening. He was still director of the London and North-Western Railway (a forerunner of British Rail), of the London and Globe Insurance Company, the Sea Insurance Company and the Pacific Loan and Investment Company, and he was chairman of the Asiatic Steamship Company and the Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association, whose minutes show that the Titanic was mentioned on a weekly basis in relation to insurance claims. If Ismay went alone to a concert at St George’s Hall, as he preferred to do, he booked two seats and placed his hat and coat on the second one. Florence arranged her bridge parties for the half of the week that her husband was away, and when the couple hosted the occasional dinner — for never more than eight people — Bruce would always be given his own plate of cold turkey.

In I922, Costelloe Lodge was destroyed in an arson attack by the IRA — these were the years of the War of Independence, when big houses were everywhere going up in flames — but Ismay, undeterred, had it rebuilt brick by brick, taking great interest in the project. The new lodge was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and the garden laid out by Gertrude Jekyll. In I927, Ismay’s second daughter, Evelyn, married Harold Sanderson’s son, Basil, uniting the two families in a way that would have pleased Thomas Ismay. Evelyn later completed the convergence of the twain by giving birth to Ismay-Sanderson twins.

Evelyn’s daughter, Pauline Matarasso, remembers the ‘solemnity’ of her grandparents’ Hill Street home. ‘Anyone arriving at the house was met by a triumvirate: two footmen, one as dark as the other was fair, would be standing on the steps to either side of the door, flanking the heavier figure of the butler, poised to take the name of the visitor.’ She does not recall Ismay speaking, ‘though I suppose he must have given us some form of greeting.’⁵ Adding to the austerity of the atmosphere was the silence around the subject of the Titanic. To the horror of the dinner table, one child once asked his grandfather whether he had ever been in a shipwreck, while another, proud to be able to impart such adult information, told Ismay that he had read in the newspapers about a train crash in which 256 people had died. ‘How do you know 256 people died?’ Ismay retorted. ‘Were you there? Did you count them?’ It was not until Ismay’s grandchildren were older that they would hear the story of the Titanic and learn that it was never to be mentioned. ‘Truth’, as Pauline Matarasso puts it, ‘was of little interest to the grown-ups gathered round my childhood. They were in the possession of the facts, which cleared my grandfather of wrongdoing. This concentration on the facts was very calming. Without a moral dimension, without words like hubris, competition, guilt, greed, hedonism, the event was drained of emotion like a stuck pig of blood. It was their way of surviving; they could cope with a corpse. My grandfather Ismay was a corpse himself.’⁶

Ismay spent his last summer in Ireland in 1936, after which acute pains in his right leg led to an amputation below the knee, which took place in his bedroom in Hill Street. Now housebound in London and no longer able to enjoy his outdoor pursuits, he withdrew further into himself. On 27 May of the same year, Cunard White Star’s first ship, the Queen Mary, left Southampton on her maiden voyage — ‘Say,’ quipped an American passenger as she boarded the liner, ‘when does this place reach New York?’ — and on 20 September 1937 the Titanic’s twin, the Olympic, was taken to Inverkeithing in Scotland to be dismantled. Three weeks later, Ismay suffered a stroke which left him unable to speak or see. He died aged seventy-four on 17 October 1937, the year of George VI’s coronation. Following his funeral at St Paul’s in Knightsbridge, Ismay was cremated and his ashes placed in a shady plot at Putney Vale Cemetery in south London. The four sides of his tomb were engraved by Alfred Gerrard, Head of Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, with a handsome fleet of sailing ships. The stone contains lines from James 3:4:

Behold also the ships which though they be so great and are driven of fierce winds yet are turned about with a very small helm whithersoever the governor listeth.

In the garden of Costelloe Lodge, Florence had the following words carved into a stone:

In memory of Bruce Ismay, who spent many happy hours here 1913–36. He loved all wild and solitary