How to Survive the Titanic

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^{J. Bruce Ismay was the odd one out in a family of doubles. Sandwiched between two dead siblings, he was succeeded by two sets of twins.}

^{The first of his family to receive the education of a gentleman, in 1874 Ismay went aged eleven to Elstree in Middlesex, to prepare him for Harrow. A sea-gazing northerner in the south of England, he was miserable at school.}

^{In 1882, J. Bruce’s father Thomas Ismay commissioned Richard Norman Shaw to design him a palace on 390 dank acres overlooking the River Dee. Florid at sea, Ismay senior was austere on land, the absence of trees and flowers emphasising the severity of the family home.}

^{The Ismay family, including spouses and twins. Seated centre, then clockwise: Margaret Ismay, Charlotte, Bower, Ethel, James, Lady Margaret Seymour (James’s wife), Bruce, Thomas Ismay, Florence, (unidentified gentleman), Dora and Ada.}

^{The picture room at Dawpool, whose domed ceiling was described by Ismay’s mother, Margaret, as ‘an eyesore’, served as a gallery for Thomas Ismay’s art collection, which included Rossetti’s The Loving Cup (on the easel to the left).}

^{In New York, where he worked as an agent for the White Star Line, Ismay behaved much as any rich, handsome, unattached 22-year-old male would in a city four thousand miles away from his oppressive father.}

^{Following their wedding on New York’s Fifth Avenue, Ismay and his new wife Florence sailed to Liverpool on the Oceanic to meet his family.}

^{Margaret, the Ismays’ eldest daughter, was born in 1889. Following the death of their second child and the cooling of their marriage, Margaret became Ismay’s favourite.}

^{Sandheys, outside Liverpool: the Ismays’ family home. Ismay, who liked order and quiet, had a separate wing built in which to house the children.}

^{Ismay’s second son, Tom, born in 1894, was rejected by his father after polio left him disabled.}

^{Workers leaving Harland and Wolff in Belfast, 1911. The shipyard covered 80 acres, employed 16,000 local men and distributed ?28,000 in weekly wages. The Titanic can just be seen under construction in the gantry behind.}

^{Draftsmen designing the White Star Liners in the drawing room at Harland and Wolff, 1908.}

^{The designer’s internal drawings for the Titanic’s first-class staircase.}

^{Plans for the construction of the Titanic. At 882 feet 9 inches in length, 92 feet 6 inches in width, 175 feet high and weighing in at 46,328 tons, the Titanic was the largest ship ever built, and at her launch, the largest moving object on Earth.}

^{The Titanic carried four funnels — although the fourth was a dummy, thought by the designers to make the ship look more powerful. Each was the height of a two-storey house and wide enough for two locomotives to pass through simultaneously.}

^{The Titanic and Olympic in the gantries. ‘For months and months,’ wrote Filson Young, ‘in that monstrous iron enclosure there was nothing that had the faintest likeness to a ship; only something that might have been the iron scaff olding for the naves of half-a-dozen cathedrals laid end to end.’}

^{Prior to her launch, Lord Pirrie and Ismay (right) inspect the completed Titanic at Harland and Wolff.}

^{‘The trouble with the beds,’ Ismay noted in his inspection of the Olympic, ‘is entirely due to their being too comfortable.’ With coal in the grates and curtains on the windows, those in first class were able to feel that they were in their own private apartment.}

^{The two first-class entrance staircases on the Titanic were the ship’s most luxurious fittings. Built in the English style of William and Mary, the iron banister grillwork was inspired by the French court of Louis XIV. Clad in oak panelling with bronze cherubs supporting the ornamental lamps, a large glass dome allowed in natural light.}

^{‘The reading and writing room is of 1770, but in pure white, with an immense bow window’, as one journalist described it.}

^{Loading the mailbags prior to departure from Queenstown (Cork), Ireland. Among the 200,000 letters and packages carried by the Titanic was the manuscript of Joseph Conrad’s story, ‘Karain’.}

^{The Titanic leaving Queenstown on 11 April 1912, her last port of call before crossing the Atlantic.}

^{The Titanic’s boat deck. It was Ismay’s decision to restrict the number of lifeboats on the davits so that the deck was not cluttered.}

^{Marconi room on the Olympic, as the Titanic’s would have looked. Guglielmo Marconi’s recent invention of wireless messaging allowed ships for the first time to communicate with one another without using flags and flames. Marconigrams, it was believed, made the sea as safe as a suburban street.}

^{The Titanic’s captain and officers. Captain Smith is seated, second from right.}