How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  At 8 a.m., before being sedated by the Carpathia’s doctor, Ismay had scribbled a Marconigram to Philip Franklin, American vice-president of the International Mercantile Marine, the parent company of the White Star Line:

  Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision with an iceberg, resulting in serious loss of life. Further particulars later.

  The message was written on the advice of Rostron, who described Ismay as ‘mentally very ill at the time’. So unable was Ismay to function, Rostron said, that ‘our purser asked him to add the last three words’. But Ismay did not send further particulars later, and nor was the Marconigram sent that day. Instead, it got buried under the mountain of messages from Titanic passengers which the exhausted operator, Harold Cottam, was trying to work his way through.

  Philip Franklin, who claimed to know as little as everyone else about the fate of the Titanic and her passengers, did not receive Ismay’s official notice of the wreck until Wednesday morning, by which point it had been overtaken by a deluge of other messages. During the previous two days, the White Star Line and the press offices were receiving and repeating what the British Chronicle described as ‘an orgy of falsehood’ which began with a Marconigram from an unidentifiable source which Franklin and others received on Monday, informing him that everything was fine:

  All Titanic passengers safe. The Virginian towing the liner into Halifax.

  Delighted, Franklin arranged for a ship to meet the Titanic as she came into port, and a train to take her passengers on to New York. Two hours later he received another message from another unidentifiable source, this time saying that it was ‘reported’ from the Carpathia that:

  All passengers of liner Titanic safely transferred to this ship and the SS Parisian. Sea Calm. Titanic being towed by Allan Liner Virginian to port.31

  Confused, Franklin ordered the train making its way to Halifax to turn around and come back again. The Titanic passengers would now be met, he assumed, in New York. The New York Sun felt able to run the headline ‘ALL SAVED FROM THE TITANIC’. It was only when David Sarnoff, a twenty-one-year-old Marconi operator, picked up a message from the Olympic that the truth was known:

  Carpathia reached Titanic position at daybreak. Found boats and wreckage only. Titanic had foundered about 2.20 a.m. in 41.16 north, 50.14 west. All her boats accounted for. About 675 souls saved, crew and passengers included.

  Sarnoff passed the information on to the Press Association, after which, in his own words, ‘Bedlam was let loose’. A second Marconigram from Captain Haddock of the Olympic read:

  Yamsi was Ismay’s codename. Until that moment, Franklin said, ‘we considered the ship unsinkable, and it never entered our minds that there had been anything like a serious loss of life’. The New York Times then ran the headline: ‘MANAGER OF THE LINE INSISTED SHE WAS UNSINKABLE EVEN AFTER SHE HAD GONE DOWN’.

  By Tuesday the names of survivors had begun to slowly trickle into the news offices, sent via the Olympic because the Carpathia had only a short-range wireless. Anguished crowds waited for news outside the White Star Offices in New York, Liverpool, Southampton and London, two wives of the crew dying from the shock and suspense. Word spread that Ismay was alive while other prominent men were not and that the Titanic had received, and ignored, several ice warnings. It was believed that the source of the reassuring Marconigrams received by Franklin, and also by Congressman J. A. Hughes — whose newly married daughter, Mrs Lucian P. Smith, had accused Ismay of demanding a private cabin on the Carpathia — was Ismay himself.

  The papers on the morning of Tuesday 16 April offered opinions on the wreck by experienced seamen. Admiral Dewey was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that any passenger who crossed the North Atlantic in a transatlantic vessel ‘takes his life in his hands… the greed for money-making is so great that it is with the sincerest regret that I observe that human lives are never taken into consideration’. Admiral F. E. Chadwick wrote in the New York Evening Post that the ‘ Titanic was lost by unwise navigation, by running at full speed’. The New York Times revealed what everyone in the shipping world already knew: the Titanic had been allowed, by the British Board of Trade, to go to sea with insufficient lifeboats. ‘If the Titanic had been under United States Government supervisions,’ a naval contractor wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, ‘its owners would have been compelled to equip it with forty-two lifeboats at least… The trouble with the English regulations is that they are behind the times.’ The ‘old fogeyism’ of the British had cost American lives, and ‘we Americans’, as Admiral Dewey put it, ‘surely have some rights in this matter’. The US naval historian, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, a relation of Marian Thayer’s dead husband, wrote in the Evening Post: ‘I hold that under the conditions, so long as there was a soul that could be saved, the obligation lay upon Mr Ismay that that one person and not he should have been on the boat.’ An editorial in New York’s Truth commented with irony: ‘I cannot help regarding it as “providential” that the chairman of the company happened to be standing where he was at the moment when the last boat — or was it the last but one? — left the ship, and there were no women or children at hand to claim the place into which he was thus enabled to jump.’

  In the Senate, William Alden Smith of Michigan called for a formal inquiry to be conducted with immediate effect. His resolution was given unanimous support; he was to authorise a panel composed of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats ‘to investigate the causes leading to the wreck of the White Star liner Titanic, with its attendant loss of life so shocking to the outside world’. Senator Smith was empowered to ‘summon witnesses, send for persons and papers, to administer oaths, and to take such testimony as may be necessary to determine the responsibility therefore’. The sinking of the Titanic, said Senator Rayner of Maryland, was a crime and should be investigated in the same way as any other crime. Had the Titanic been an American ship and ‘subject to our own criminal procedure’, Ismay would be convicted of ‘manslaughter if not murder’. ‘Here you have the spectacle of the head of a line failing to see that his ship is properly equipped with life-saving apparatus, heedless of the warnings that he was sailing in dangerous seas, forsaking his vessel, and permitting 1,500 of her passengers and crew to be swallowed by the sea. Mr Ismay,’ Rayner suggested to the Senate, ‘the officer primarily responsible for the whole disaster’ has

  reached his destination in safety and unharmed. Mr Ismay should be brought here and be made to explain these things. He should not be requested to come. It is not a question of his good will… and he should be asked particularly to explain how he, the directing manager of the company, the superior of the Captain, and not under the Captain’s orders, directed the northern route which ended so fatally and then left hundreds of passengers to die while he took not the last boat, but the very first boat that left the sinking ship… All civilised nations will applaud the criminal prosecution of the management of this line. If they can be made to suffer, no sympathy will go out for them.

  Ismay, meanwhile, was planning his return voyage. He could not face New York: the onslaught of information, the questions, the crowds, the grief, his wife’s American family, the White Star Line executives, the insurers, the press, the publicity, the sharpening sense of the horror of it all. He would have to endure, he assumed, a rough few days — possibly even weeks — of media coverage before interest in the Titanic would fade away and he could get his life back.

  Escape came in the form of another White Star liner, the Cedric, currently docked in New York and ready to sail. On disembarking from the Carpathia, Ismay and the 200 surviving Titanic crew members could immediately board the Cedric and be home within the week. As fog was delaying the Carpathia, the need to postpone the Cedrics imminent departure quickly became a fixation for Ismay. It would not be absconding to return to England straight away, he reasoned; it was simply business as usual: he was, quite rightly, picking up the rhythm of his life again and the crew would need to get t
hemselves positions on new ships. So on Wednesday morning at 9 o’clock Ismay sent a Marconigram to Franklin reading:

  Very important you should hold Cedric daylight Friday for Titanic crew. Answer, Yamsi.

  Messages addressed to ‘Yamsi’ would be delivered personally to Ismay, and messages signed ‘Yamsi’ indicated that they were sent personally by Ismay himself. The name was not, Franklin later explained, ‘used by us very much over here’ — he had never himself used the name before — while it was ‘used entirely on the other side’.32 But when Ismay called himself Yamsi on the Carpathia, where he was on neither one side nor the other, it took on a different significance. Ismay backwards, Yamsi was an inversion of the man Ismay used to be. He had stepped into a looking-glass world where, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice explains when she ‘softly jumps’ from the fireplace into the drawing room on the other side of the mirror, everything is the same ‘only the things go the other way’.

  The official Marconigram that Ismay had been persuaded to send Franklin on Monday morning was eventually received at 9 o’clock on Wednesday morning. No sooner had Franklin absorbed its contents than ‘Yamsi’s’ message arrived. So rather than being furnished with the ‘further particulars’ promised in the first message, Franklin was instead being told to delay the Cedric. He replied:

  Accept my deepest sympathy horrible catastrophe. Will meet you aboard Carpathia after docking. Is Widener aboard?

  George Widener, who had not survived, was the son of a director of the International Mercantile Marine. Franklin also forwarded a message from Ismay’s wife, Florence:

  So thankful you are saved, but grieving with you over the terrible calamity. Shall sail Saturday to return with you.

  Ignoring both messages, Ismay repeated to Franklin:

  Most desirable Titanic crew aboard Carpathia should be sent home earliest moment possible. Suggest you hold Cedric, sailing her daylight Friday unless you see any reason contrary. Propose returning in her myself. Please send outfit of clothes, including shoes, for me to Cedric. Have nothing of my own. Please reply, Yamsi.

  Franklin replied that ‘we all consider it most unwise to delay Cedric considering all circumstances’, adding that he had arranged for the crew to return home on Saturday on the Lapland. He later explained that ‘we determined it would be a very unfortunate thing to attempt to hold the Cedric and hurry the crew on board or agree to Mr. Ismay’s sailing under the present circumstances, with which Mr Ismay, as we knew, was not in any way familiar. We were here, and we were hearing the criticism. We knew what was being said, but Mr Ismay had no knowledge or information regarding that. We realised the necessity of getting the crew off, which was just what we wanted done in every other case of the kind and what every shipowner would do.’33

  Ismay then sent two further Marconigrams which Franklin received one after another between 8.00 and 8.44 a.m. on Thursday 18 April:

  Think most unwise keep Titanic crew until Saturday. Strongly urge detain Cedric sailing her midnight, if desirable. Yamsi

  Unless you have a good and sufficient reason for not holding Cedric, please arrange to do so. Most undesirable have crew New York so long. Yamsi.

  Only in his next message, also sent that day, did Ismay mention his wife and answer the question Franklin had asked several Marconigrams earlier:

  Widener not aboard. Hope to see you quarantine. Please cable wife am returning Cedric. Yamsi.

  Franklin’s frantic response, despatched at 4.45 that afternoon, read:

  Concise Marconigram of actual accident greatly needed for enlightenment public and ourselves. This most important. Franklin.

  Neither he nor the public would be enlightened until the Carpathia reached New York at 9 o’clock that night. It was Captain Rostron’s decision to ensure that messages to and from the families of Titanic survivors were given priority, to allow no account of the disaster to be transmitted by Marconigram and to ignore requests from the press for further details. It was assumed on shore that the embargo on information had been enforced by Ismay.

  The US Navy, picking up ‘Yamsi’s’ messages to Franklin, forwarded them to Senator William Alden Smith in Washington. Glancing over their contents, the Senator made an appointment to see President Taft to arrange that Ismay and other key witnesses be prevented from absconding, and Taft ordered that a Treasury Revenue cutter intercept the Carpathia before she docked. It seemed wisest, Senator Smith argued, to begin the inquiry into the wreck of the Titanic in New York where the witnesses could all for the moment be found, and then remove it to the capital where the witnesses could be under the jurisdiction of the Senate. In reply to the question of whether he was going to arrest J. Bruce Ismay, the Senator told journalists that ‘We not going into this matter with a club. We will proceed cautiously and conservatively.’34 On Thursday evening, William Alden Smith and his colleague, Senator Newlands, waited at the Cunard Pier for the Carpathia to arrive.

  The days spent on the Carpathia were suspended in a time of their own. In a private account of the wreck written for his scrapbook, the tennis champion Karl Behr, who had lost none of his party, wrote that ‘although the sinking of the Titanic was dreadful, to my mind the four days among the sufferers on the Carpathia was much worse and more difficult to try and forget’.35 While babies howled for their absent mothers, mothers wept for their dead children and wives grieved for their husbands, Marian Thayer was reunited with her son, Jack, whom she had imagined drowned, and the two socialites, Edith Russell and Lady Duff Gordon, who had lost nothing other than several trunks of couture, joked that ‘pannier skirts and Robespierre collars were at a discount in mid-ocean’. Friendships formed, perspectives on the fatal night’s events were pulled together, and rumours commenced. The main topic of conversation between the women in first-class was the survival of Bruce Ismay, currently being cared for by the doctor in his private cabin.

  On the morning of Wednesday 17 April, while Ismay was writing his Yamsi telegrams, a first-class passenger, Emily Ryerson, let it be known to her friends that at 5 o’clock on Sunday afternoon she had been persuaded by Marian Thayer to take some air. Mrs Thayer had been returning, with her husband and her eldest son, from Berlin where they had been staying as guests of the American Consul General. Mrs Ryerson, who had been on a shopping trip in Paris, was returning for the funeral of her eldest son, a student at Yale who had been killed the previous week in a motoring accident. She had spent the last four days on the Titanic in her stateroom. After walking for an hour on the covered deck, Mrs Thayer and Mrs Ryerson stopped in the companionway to watch the sun go down while their husbands took a stroll. The evening was clear, windless and deadly cold; the sky was ‘quite pink’. The intimacy between the two women was interrupted by the arrival of an impeccably dressed Ismay, who asked if their staterooms were comfortable. Ismay, with whom Emily Ryerson had only the slightest acquaintance — ‘he was a friend of a number of friends of mine’ — then ‘thrust a Marconigram at me saying we were in among the icebergs. Something was said about speed and he said that the ship had not been going fast but that they were to start up extra boilers that afternoon or evening.’ Mrs Ryerson saw that the message also mentioned a distressed liner, the Deutschland, which had run out of coal and needed towing. Ismay, Mrs Ryerson said, scoffed at the suggestion that the Titanic might come to the rescue, declaring that ‘they had no time for such matters as our ship wanted to do the best and something was said about getting in on Tuesday night’ (the Marconigram had not in fact been a request for help; its purpose was only to inform the Titanic of the Deutschlands position). Mrs Ryerson carried on the conversation ‘to keep the ball going’. She was bored by Ismay’s company and only half-listening to what was being said, later recalling the ‘impression’ rather than the ‘exact words’. Ismay, she thought, had been speaking ‘partly’ to Mrs Thayer but ‘mostly’ to her. When asked about the incident, Ismay — who was possessed, several of his employees noted, of a remarkable memory — remembered only the presence of Mrs
Thayer.

  When Mr Ryerson and Mr Thayer reappeared, Ismay departed. His manner throughout, Emily Ryerson concluded, ‘was that of one of authority and the owner of the ship and what he said was law’.36 But it seems more likely that this was an example of Ismay, in his awkward way, being light-hearted. Never good at small talk, or talk of any kind, he was drawn to the openness of certain American women, and everyone was drawn to the sympathetic Marian Thayer. The Marconigram he showed them was the one from the Baltic which he had been carrying in his pocket since lunchtime, when the Captain had passed it to him. The message, which would become the focus of the British inquiry, read:

  Have moderate variable winds and clear fine weather since leaving. Greek steamer Athenai reports passing icebergs and large quantity of field ice today in latitude 41.51 north, longitude 49.52 west. Last night we spoke German oil tank Deutschland, Stettin to Philadelphia not under control short of coal latitude 40.42 north, longitude 55.11, wishes to be reported to New York and other steamers. Wish you and Titanic all success.

  The suggestion that Captain Smith and Ismay had known about the ship’s proximity to ice was shocking. ‘I remember with deep feeling,’ wrote Lawrence Beesley,

  the effect this information had on us when it first become generally known on the Carpathia. Rumours of it went round on the Wednesday morning, grew to definite statements in the afternoon, and were confirmed when one of the Titanic officers admitted the truth of it in reply to a direct question… It was not then the unavoidable accident we had hitherto supposed: the sudden plunging into a region crowded with icebergs which no seaman, however skilled a navigator he might be, could have avoided… It is no exaggeration to say that men who went through all the experiences of the collision and the rescue and the subsequent scenes on the quay at New York with hardly a tremor, were quite overcome by this knowledge and turned away, unable to speak.37