How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Lightoller (who shares his own secrets with his wife, whom he met on board a White Star ship) is not Ismay’s only secret sharer. Wherever we find him, Ismay is one half of a whispering partnership. He whispers side by side with Harold Sanderson, his secret replacement at the IMM; he whispers over dinner with Lord Pirrie when they plan to upstage the Lusitania with the Titanic; he whispers with William E. Carter, who jumped into his lifeboat at the same time; with Captain Smith, who handed him the Marconigram from the Baltic; with J. P Morgan, whose involvement in the finances of the White Star Line would come as a shock to the British inquiry; and most importantly he whispers with Mrs Thayer. He is mired, Ismay reveals to her, in the moment of his jump; he is lost and can only find himself again in her. Ismay and Marian Thayer form, he feels, a part of one another. It seems that everyone, except Florence, is Ismay’s secret sharer.13

  To Ismay’s family it was Kipling and not Conrad who best described his internal struggle, and Bruce’s sister-in-law sent him a copy of Kipling’s ‘If’ because ‘it reminds me so of you’. First published two years earlier in the collection Rewards and Fairies, Kipling had written the verse in 1895 in celebration of Dr Leander Starr Jameson, a British colonial statesman who, with the secret support of the British government, had assembled a private army outside the Transvaal to overthrow Paul Kruger’s Boer government. The uprising, known as the Jameson Raid, was prevented by the Boer forces and Jameson was forced to surrender. His much-publicised trial took place in London where he was lionised by the press as ‘the hero of one of the most daring raids in all the annals of border warfare’. Jameson held his tongue throughout about the involvement of the government under whose auspices he was now being tried, and presented himself in court as ‘a quiet, modest gentleman, in faultless and fashionable dress, with civilian stamped upon him from head to foot’.

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too;

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

  If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same;

  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

  Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

  And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools—

  If you can do these things and more, Kipling concludes, ‘you’ll be a Man, my son’. To his family, Ismay was shouldering the blame with the stoicism of a soldier.

  Ismay’s next letter to Marian Thayer is written on the last day of the year. Their previous letters have crossed in the post; she has sent him Emerson’s essay on ‘Compensation’ and two books of prayer, Out from the Heart and I Thank Thee. They all, Ismay says, ‘contain so much that is true and helpful’. She has also written to Florence to ‘make inquiries’ about Ismay’s health following a story in the American press. The article was groundless — based, Ismay supposes, on rumours about his imminent retirement — but Mrs Thayer, who now realises that Ismay has misunderstood their relationship, is in rapid retreat. He must not be allowed to talk about his ‘attraction’ to her or ‘where our friendship would have taken us’ had the ship not hit the iceberg. As far as she is concerned, they are simply two unhappy survivors who have shared a ghastly experience. Florence is pleased to hear from Mrs Thayer and shows her husband the letter. It is unlikely that Ismay reciprocates the gesture.

  Christmas with the Ismays is particularly grim. He finds it ‘impossible to get through’ and imagines that Marian will be feeling the same. She was in his thoughts ‘constantly… I wonder if you felt it?’ He is filled with self-loathing, and now that Mrs Thayer has woven his wife into her world of connections he feels licensed to talk about the difficulties of his home life. Rather than creating a distance between herself and Ismay by writing to Florence, Mrs Thayer has inadvertently encouraged Ismay to clear his throat and move the conversation on. He has, he now reveals, ‘such a horrible, undemonstrative nature. I cannot show people how fond I am of them and not doing so hurts their feelings and they imagine I do not care for them. What can I do? Of course, one cannot hurt other people without hurting oneself.’ It is unlikely that the account of his failings he gives Marian Thayer has ever been expressed to Florence, that Ismay has ever told his wife how agonising he finds it to watch himself hurt others or that the silent person she is currently living with bears no relation to the person he feels himself to be. ‘Very often,’ he continues to Mrs Thayer, ‘a word would make things right, one’s horrid pride steps in and this causes unhappiness. I wonder if you know all I mean.’ Mrs Thayer, who seems never to have suffered from horrid pride, may not know all he means, as Ismay suddenly sees. ‘I can hear you saying what a horrible character and I agree. I absolutely hate myself at times. Tell me what I can do to cure myself.’ She has told him in an earlier letter not to ‘lock’ himself ‘up tight’. Ismay is amazed that Mrs Thayer can have picked up on this aspect of his character: ‘When did you notice that this was another of my failings? Do you know that I always put my worst side forward and very very few people ever get under the surface? I cannot help it, can you help me to change my horrid nature?’ He still has ‘awful fits of depression’ and wishes he ‘could make something of the life that remains’. Perhaps, he now writes to Mrs Thayer, ‘something may turn up. My wife says it will but I am very disheartened.’ He asks to be remembered to Jack, and wishes that he could ‘have a talk with you. It would be a great help to me.’ While Ismay has not yet been over to Ireland to see his new house, a friend visiting on his behalf reports that the place is primitive and unmodernised and needs a good deal of work.

  In February the nation is gripped by the tale of another voyage out when the body of Captain Scott is found frozen in the Antarctic. The explorer was, according to the Daily Mail, ‘a true and spotless knight’ and the journey to the South Pole an example of ‘modern chivalry’. The failure of Scott’s party to be first to reach their goal is redeemed by the nobility of their deaths. Ismay must seem the only Englishman to ever return from a voyage alive. He continues to send Mrs Thayer letters on the White Star mail ships, but she now no longer replies. By the end of the month Ismay tells her that ‘it is ages and ages since I have had a word from you’. He has no idea of her ‘doings’ or her plans for the summer. Perhaps, from what Florence tells him, she has ‘not been very well lately?’ Marian corresponds with Florence more than she does with Bruce. He tells her that he has been over to Ireland to see the house, which he fears that Florence, who loves London, will find dull. Never mind. He can personally no longer bear the city, and they have let their London house until the end of July. He is currently in Liverpool, where his ‘business career is drawing to its close’. He still has ‘mixed feelings’ about life without work.

  He next hears from Mrs Thayer in April, a week after the first anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking. He has by now ‘almost given up waiting’. She has been unwell and is thinking of going to Switzerland; she asks if he has read the books she sent him and which ones he likes best? He tells her that ‘they were all so nice and comforting. You have been much in my thoughts.’ He asks God in his prayers to give her strength to bear her loss. ‘It is awfully difficult at times to realise the awful thing that has happened.’ He hopes she might pay him a visit if she is in Europe, as ‘I would dearly love to have a good talk with you.’ He has not been doing much; one of his nieces is getting married. ‘I have to go but there is nothing I dislike more than a wedding.’ He is looking ahead to life
in Galway and wondering how to ‘occupy my time when I go out of business’. It still ‘makes me very unhappy to think that I am severing my connections with a concern made by my father the most successful in the world, one of which I was so proud. I loved the ships.’ He fears he is ‘boring’ her and says she is ‘always in my thoughts’.

  She replies almost instantly with words of wisdom and sympathy, and he reads her letter many times: ‘it has helped me so much’. His own reply is filled with self-recrimination: how do his friends put up with him? He is so anti-social, he doesn’t like people or crowds. He has been ‘shooting’ and ‘praying’, she is ‘much in my mind’, she knows his faults better than anyone else, only she understands that he is someone who ‘feels very deeply and [is] extremely sensitive and undemonstrative. I cannot show myself as I really am and always put my worst side forward. I don’t know why I unburden myself to you in this manner.’ Mrs Thayer waits for a month before replying with a cable, asking him to remind her of the names of the three books she had sent him, which she is evidently now recommending to someone else. ‘Please do not think a cable message is satisfying,’ Ismay responds, ‘you owe me at least two letters and they can’t be cables.’ He is going to Ireland this week and ‘looking forward to getting away and living in the country. I’m sorry to say I never liked people and am now worse than ever in this respect.’ He hopes that Florence will not be ‘bored to death’, otherwise he will have to sell the house. He has been fishing in Dorset, playing a good deal of golf (‘I know of no game that takes one so out of oneself’) and in August will go shooting in Scotland. His philandering brother, Bower, won the Derby, to then have the prize ‘taken from him owing to the wrong riding of the jockey. Everybody feels he has been most unfairly treated.’ Will Mrs Thayer ever be ‘coming to this side?’

  Here the correspondence, as it exists, comes to an end. Perhaps they continued to write and the letters are lost, but it seems unlikely. They had nothing further to say to one another and Ismay, who told his story to Mrs Thayer as best he could, gave up the hope that he would one day be able to talk to her in person. Instead, he may have had an affair with another Titanic survivor, the fashion journalist Edith Russell, whose life he had saved by insisting that she get into a lifeboat when she was standing on the deck. Miss Russell, who became famous for leaving the ship with her ‘lucky pig’, later confided to William Macquitty, who produced the film of A Night to Remember, that she and Ismay were to become ‘more than just friends’. There is no further evidence of their relationship, but it is easy to believe. Ismay needed a secret sharer and Edith Russell was one of the few survivors who saw him as a hero. What remains of their correspondence, however, shows that he had no particular feelings for Miss Russell in the years immediately after the Titanic.

  Mrs Thayer came to England on several occasions but never saw Ismay again. She spent the rest of her life on the ‘other side’, making contact with her lost husband through her new discovery of mirror-writing.

  Chapter 7

  THE SUPER CAPTAIN

  The isle is full of noises

  The Tempest, III, ii

  On 2 May 1912, as the Adriatic steamed out of New York carrying Ismay in one of its cabins, the British Board of Trade inquiry into the wreck of the Titanic began in London. The Scottish Drill Hall at Buckingham Gate, armoury of the Scottish Rifles, had been chosen as a venue because it could hold several hundred spectators, most of whom would be, it was anticipated, ladies with time on their hands. Described by the Daily Mirror as resembling ‘a gigantic swimming pool’, the grim building proved too capacious by far; an audience of less than one hundred, including only ten women — of whom one was Virginia Woolf — settled into the galleries for the opening proceedings. Two hundred further seats were taken on the floor by presiding lawyers and pressmen.

  Now that the mariners were dry and the narrative was no longer unravelling in real time, interest in the Titanic was beginning to wane. The public had feasted on the tragedy for long enough; the weather was getting warmer and the forthcoming summer promised a brilliant social season. Londoners were looking for distractions, and J. M. Barrie’s gift of a statue of Peter Pan to Kensington Gardens received more press attention than the inquiry’s opening session. The essentials of the wreck were now widely known and the dramatis personae — Ismay, Lightoller, Rostron and Captain Smith — were familiar figures in every household. The US inquiry had been reported in full by the British press; Ismay’s statement of self-defence had been read over breakfast by the whole country and his second examination by Senator Smith had been transcribed in the pages of The Times only the day before. The British inquiry, it was assumed, would be no more than an echo. The assessors would take the script produced by William Alden Smith and dignify it a little, introducing a new interpretation here, a different character-reading there. As it was, the British inquiry added to the mystery of Ismay’s actions one vital scene which had been overlooked by Senator Smith, while they moved another from the margins of the drama to the centre.

  Despite the arrival of the assessors in mourning, the inquiry began on a note of triumph rather than tragedy. Sir Robert Finlay, representing the White Star Line, announced in his opening statement that ‘this disaster has given an opportunity for a display of discipline and of heroism which is worthy of all the best traditions of the marine of this country’. The following day, lookout Archie Jewell and Able Seaman Joseph Scarrott gave the first witness accounts on home ground of the wreck of the Titanic to a gallery now containing only one woman and a policeman. Reports of the crew’s statements, described by The Times as ‘thrilling narratives of the last scenes on the doomed ship’, could be found nestling in the heart of the Daily Mirror while the paper’s headlines announced ‘Britain’s First Aeroplane Warship To Take Part in Next Week’s Naval Inspection By the King’.

  What had drawn the crowds to the US Senate inquiry was the promise of language unrehearsed and under pressure, of voices betraying their speakers. The US inquiry had proved a conundrum; as the events of the night of 14 April unravelled, the truth became more and more elusive. Nothing made any sense: while everyone told the same story (‘I went to bed, I heard a scraping sound, I went on deck, I got in a lifeboat, I was cold’), no two accounts appeared to agree. Speech became fraught with danger as witnesses tried to steer their answers around the traps placed in their way by William Alden Smith. Sentences subsided, imploded, broke down into babble. Those who had attended the British inquiry in the hope of hearing language at breaking point found that the acoustics of the Scottish Drill Hall were such that they could hear nothing at all. The proceedings, so far from the galleries that they had to be watched through binoculars, were closer to a silent newsreel or a series of lantern slides than a live event. Even the assessors cupped their hands to their ears in order to catch what was said.

  The hall, which had been turned into a makeshift court with a great swath of velvet curtain covering up the brickwork, was focused around a witness stand, a twenty-foot model of the Titanic carrying sixteen miniature lifeboats, and a large chart of the North Atlantic. To the right of the witness stand was a dais on which was seated the Wreck Commissioner, Lord Mersey and, at a lower level, his five assessors. Facing Lord Mersey were the other members of the Board of Inquiry, who together made up the sharpest legal minds in the country: the Solicitor-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs QC; Sir Robert Finlay, Liberal Unionist MP for St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities, representing the White Star Line; Thomas Scanlan, MP for Sligo, representing the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union; and Clement Edwards, MP for the Welsh mining seat of East Glamorganshire, and representing the Dockers’ Union. A sounding board, resembling an enormous box lying on its side with the lid open, was installed on the dais, but the contraption made little difference. ‘Lord Mersey’s questions to counsel and witnesses’, reported the Daily Mirror, still ‘sounded like whispers.’ The hushed proceedings seemed symbolic of the fact, now increasingly apparent, that the witnesses
had very little to reveal about what had happened to the Titanic. As the Mirror put it, ‘in the midst of expectancy, as terrible almost as the silence of that frosty sparkling night on which more than fifteen hundred people went slowly into the depths, there is absolutely no answer to give! There is no answer. There is a pitiful stumbling of words.’

  Lord Mersey was not the effete aristocrat the Americans, misled by his title, assumed him to be. The son of a Liverpool merchant, John Charles Bigham, now aged seventy-one, had grown up around wealthy shipowners. His own father’s childhood had been, as he put it, ‘grindingly poor’ and before making his fortune in insurance, Bigham Senior had worked as a clerk in a shipping office. Mersey knew exactly where Bruce Ismay had come from; he had mingled socially with the Ismay family; he dined at the same clubs, he belonged in the same social rank, and in 1905 he had even spoken for Margaret Ismay in a suit she brought against a driver who had crashed into her Panhard-Levassor during a driving holiday in Scotland. Like Thomas and Bruce Ismay, Lord Mersey was a Liberal Unionist who was against Irish Home Rule, and for a brief moment he stepped down from the Bar to represent the Exchange Division of Liverpool in the House of Commons. In his legal career, Mersey had excelled in representing shipping lines and the title he took on his elevation to the peerage was no doubt the one that Thomas Ismay would have chosen for himself had he been similarly honoured. The Mersey was the road to Empire, Liverpool’s golden seaway. He would, Lord Mersey joked, leave the title of the Atlantic itself to one of his esteemed colleagues.

  Because the British Board of Trade inquiry into the Titanic was inquiring into its own failings, it was assumed by the public that the procedure would be self-serving and that Lord Mersey had been chosen as Wreck Commissioner because he was an old hand at dodging the issue. Mersey had, reported the New York Times, ‘a record for official blindness to well-known facts’. During his time as an MP, Mersey had cross-examined in the House of Commons inquiry into the role played by the British government in the South African Jameson Raid. When the government was duly cleared, Mersey was so generally regarded as having orchestrated a whitewash that his name became linked with the term. G. K. Chesterton, in an article dramatising the difference between the US and British inquiries, has the Englishman tell the American: ‘I know you and your popular persecutions. You will hunt poor Ismay from court to court, as if he were the only man that was saved — just as you hunted poor Gorki from hotel to hotel, as if he were the only man not living with his wife.’ The American replies: ‘I know you and your gentlemanly privacies and hypocrisies. You will shirk this inquiry just as you shirked the inquiry into the Jameson Raid.’1