that the story first began to shape itself: the passenger list provided the most popular reading on board, after which the list of survivors became the most widely read document in the world. Columns analysing the percentages of deaths in first-, second- and third-class have been pored over for a century, and we continue to be staggered by the quantities of employees and objects on board the ship. The story of the Titanic could be written as an inventory. The kitchen and dining-room staff alone included butchers, bakers, night bakers, Vienna bakers, the passenger cook, grill cook, fish cook, sauce cook, soup cooks, the larder cook, the roast cook, Hebrew cook, pastry cook, vegetable cook, the cook and stewards’ messmen, the coffee men, the assistant confectioner, chefs, the entree cook, the iceman, the scullions, the plate-warmers, kitchen porters, carvers, scullery men, the kitchen clerk, wine butler, dining saloon steward, pantry stewards, plate steward, reception room steward, lounge attendant, smoke room steward, verandah cafe steward, a la carte restaurant manager, maitre d’, assistant waiters, and the ship’s bugler who summoned the passengers to table. The ship’s pantry carried 500 breakfast cups, 3,000 teacups, 1,500 coffee cups, 3,000 beef tea cups, 1,000 cream jugs, 2,500 breakfast plates, 2,500 dessert plates, 12,000 dinner plates, 4,500 soup plates, 1,200 coffee pots, 1,200 teapots, 4,500 breakfast saucers, 3,000 tea saucers and 1,500 coffee saucers.
But there is also a sense in which the facts and figures tell us nothing at all, and Beesley duly arranges his version of the loss of the Titanic into nine rich and layered narrative chapters and a hundred tightly written pages. Despite his desire to tell a story, Beesley’s account pivots and stalls around a handful of words whose floating meanings he cannot pin down. The word ‘beauty’ particularly bothers him, because beauty has now aligned itself to death. He repeats the word again and again, as though trying to fix it into place: ‘the beauty of the night, the beauty of the ship’s lines, and the beauty of the lights, all these things in themselves were intensely beautiful’.12 He also returns to ‘motion’ and ‘motionless’, which terms seem to have lost their moorings. ‘The Titanic lay peacefully on the surface of the sea — motionless, quiet, not even rocking to the roll of the sea… the sea was as calm as an inland lake save for the gentle swell which could impart no motion to a ship the size of the Titanic? In Beesley’s hands ‘motionless’ also describes movement. The sea is at the same time swelling and motionless; the ship is motionless when she is both steaming ahead and sinking — ‘and there she remained — motionless!’ The sky, the floating bodies, the air, the stars, the lifeboats are all motionless — ‘the oarsmen lay on their oars, and all in the lifeboat were motionless’ — as is the cold, ‘if one can imagine “cold” being motionless and still’.13
At his desk in the Boston club, Beesley — who has previously written only letters, university essays and school reports — cannot stop writing. He is pouring out page after page of rapt prose: ‘The complete absence of haze’, he says of the night,
produced a phenomenon I had never seen before: where the sky met the sea the line was as clear and definite as the edge of a knife, so that the water and the air never merged gradually into each other and blended to a softened rounded horizon, but each element was so exclusively separate that where a star came low down in the sky near the clear-cut edge of the waterline, it still lost none of its brilliance. As the earth revolved and the water edge came up and covered partially the star, as it were, it simply cut the star in two, the upper half continuing to sparkle as long as it was not entirely hidden, and throwing a long beam of light along the sea to us.14
Beesley’s rhetoric recalls that of the master-mariner Joseph Conrad, and these pages in particular are reminiscent of the first part of Lord Jim, in which Jim’s pilgrim ship, the Patna, moves ‘so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns’.15 At times Beesley’s descriptions mirror those of Conrad with such uncanniness as to suggest he was using Lord Jim as his model. Beesley writes of being aboard the Titanic: ‘To stand on the deck many feet above the water lapping idly against her sides, and looking much further off than it really was because of the darkness, gave one a sense of wonderful security.’16 Conrad writes of Jim on the Patna: A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed on earth the assurance of everlasting security.’17
Lawrence Beesley, who based his experience of the Titanic on adventure stories (and became father-in-law to the novelist Dodie Smith, who wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians) was later turned into a literary figure himself. Julian Barnes describes in A History of the World in ioV2 Chapters how, when Pinewood Studios filmed A Night to Remember on a pond in Elstree Studios, Beesley asked to be an extra in the scene where the ship goes down. Not having the necessary actor’s union card, permission was denied. But so determined was he to repeat the pivotal experience of his lifetime that, dressed as an Edwardian, he slipped unnoticed onto the set. ‘Right at the last minute,’ writes Barnes, ‘as the cameras were due to roll, the director spotted that Beesley had managed to insinuate himself to the ship’s rail; picking up his megaphone, he instructed the amateur imposter kindly to disembark. And so, for the second time in his life, Lawrence Beesley found himself leaving the Titanic just before it went down.’
Contemplation and reflection played no part in Ismay’s daily routine. Described by a friend as ‘austere, uncompromising and intolerant to the weaknesses of human nature’, Ismay resisted the effects of even minor daily disorder and shielded himself from what events he could not control. The loss he now suffered was beyond anything that could be measured. Incapable of articulating, or even comprehending, his response to the wreck, he said nothing on board the Carpathia. He detached himself from the experience of Sunday night, he froze himself into the present tense. The disaster, Ismay decided, had nothing to do with him; it happened around him, not to him and certainly not because of him. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he was asked at the British inquiry, ‘that, except perhaps apart from the Captain, you, as the responsible managing director, deciding the number of boats, owed your life to every other person on that ship?’
‘It has not,’ Ismay replied, in all honesty. And yet the same friend who had described Ismay’s intolerance of human weakness also noted that ‘no one could be kinder or more sympathetic or enter more fully into the troubles of others… Had I to sum up his character in one word — it would be that of Integrity.’18
The only crew member from the Titanic to see Ismay on the Carpathia was Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the most senior of the four surviving officers. Lightoller, another Christian Scientist, described in an article for the Christian Science Journal the following October how ‘all fear left me and I… realised the truth of being’.
Swept off the ship, Lightoller spent the night, along with twenty-eight other frozen men, straddling a capsized lifeboat. Aged thirty-eight in 1912, he had been at sea since he was thirteen and experienced two shipwrecks before he was twenty-one. An employee of the White Star Line for fourteen years, before joining the crew of the Titanic he had been an officer on the Oceanic. In a longer account of the disaster, written twenty-three years later, Lightoller describes how, as the ship was sinking, he was standing ‘partly’ in a lifeboat helping to load the women and children when Captain Smith suggested that, as there were no other seamen available to man the boat, Lightoller should ‘go with her’. ‘Praises be’, Lightoller remembers in horror, ‘I had just sufficient sense to say “Not damn likely” and jump back on board.’ Ismay’s opposite, Lightoller is distinguished for having jumped off a lifeboat and onto a sinking ship. He acted, he said, on ‘pure impulse… an impulse for which I was to thank my lucky stars a thousand times over in the days to come’.19
Lightoller later explained to those who were bewildered by Ismay’s behaviour on the Carpathia, that the chairman of the White Star Line was ‘obsessed’ by guilt; as he lay on his bed, a wretched figure, he ‘kept repeating that he ought to have gone down with the ship, because he found that women had gone down’.20 But according to Ismay’s account, he did not know that women had gone down on the Titanic. Asked at the US inquiry what proportion of women and children were saved, he replied, I have no idea, I have not asked.
On the Thursday, 18 April, Dr McGhee suggested that Jack Thayer visit Ismay before the Carpathia docked in New York, to ‘help relieve the terribly nervous condition he was in’.
