How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Lightoller later wrote in his memoirs: ‘The Board of Trade had passed that ship as in all respects fit for sea, in every sense of the word, with sufficient margin for everyone on board. Now the Board of Trade was holding an inquiry into the loss of that ship — hence the whitewash brush.’2 It was not only the public who had little confidence in Mersey as an impartial assessor. The Bradford and District Trades and Labour Council sent the Home Office a resolution of ‘no confidence in the Court of Inquiry’. It was, they concluded, ‘an attempt… to whitewash those who are the most responsible for the terrible loss of human life’. 3 When it was over, the British Seafarers’ Union announced that ‘the Whitewashing “Titanic” inquiry has cost the nation £20,231… It will be seen that the lawyers take between them just on £13,000… The ruling classes rob and plunder the people all the time, and the Inquiry has shown that they have no scruples in taking advantage of death and disaster.’ As far as Conrad was concerned, Lord Mersey could be taken no more seriously than the Mikado’s ridiculous Grand Pooh-Bah, who was First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Archbishop of Titipu, Lord Mayor, and Lord High Everything Else.

  The response of the British press to the wreck of the Titanic had been to celebrate Britishness rather than allocate blame. Several papers commented on the analogy between the heroism and discipline of the men on the Titanic and those on the Birkenhead, and on the alleged fact that musicians were performing as each ship went down. The two journalists who produced the first book-length accounts of the wreck agreed that this was to be a story without a villain, a narrative decision which left the behaviour of Ismay problematic. Filson Young’s Titanic, a work of high Romanticism and the first recorded instant book, appeared in the shops on 22 May. Young declared that ‘there is nothing so entirely dignified, as to be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror’, adding of Ismay, with Marlow-like empathy, that he carried his cross with the stoicism of an Englishman: ‘he bore on his shoulders the burden of every sufferer’s grief and loss, and he bore it, not with shame, for he had no cause for shame, but with reticence of words and activity… and with a dignity which was proof against even the bitter injustice of which he was the victim in the days that followed’.4 In ‘The Deathless Story of the Titanic’, published by Lloyd’s Weekly News two weeks after the wreck, Philip Gibbs came up with the phrase: ‘Yet greater than tragedy is the glory.’ The British felt more anger towards Senator Smith than they did towards Bruce Ismay, but the general mood was one of sorrow. ‘Slowly, with infinite reproach,’ wrote the Daily Mirror, ‘the whole world turns towards those responsible and asks them, why ? There is no tone of vulgar recrimination, no calling of names and bringing up of useless bitterness in this gesture. It is simply the sorrowful turning of all those who sympathise towards those who might know, followed by their breathless question: Why?’

  The British inquiry divided this overwhelming question into twenty-six specific areas, to which 25,622 answers were given by ninety-four different witnesses. They covered the issue of safety provision, the arrangements for the manning and launching of boats, the route taken by the ship, her speed at the time of the collision, the cause of her foundering, and the number and class of her survivors. The inquiry would focus its energies on the role of the Marconigram given to Ismay by Captain Smith, but nothing was asked about the origin of the messages which had reassured the world that the Titanic and her passengers were safe, a mystery which was currently occupying Senator Smith in New York, or the ‘Yamsi’ messages which suggested that Ismay was trying to escape the US inquiry. None of Lord Mersey’s questions directly addressed the issue which would became the dominant concern of the inquiry, the thread on which the entire proceedings were strung: what was Ismay’s status on board the ship?

  Senator Smith’s report into the findings of the US Senate Committee, in which he concluded that the presence of Ismay had ‘unconsciously stimulated’ the Captain to increase his speed, was published on 28 May. ‘We shall leave it to the honest judgement of England,’ Smith concluded, ‘in its painstaking chastisement of the British Board of Trade, to whose laxity of regulation and hasty inspection the world is largely indebted for this awful fatality.’ Meanwhile, the only interruption to the greyness of the British Board of Trade’s proceedings had been the appearance, on 20 May, of the glamorous Duff Gordons. Lord Duff Gordon had been accused of paying the seven crew members in his otherwise empty lifeboat not to return to pick up any of the bodies in the water. Two German princes, the Russian Ambassador, Margot Asquith, and a group of the Titanic’s stewardesses dressed in black turned up to hear him try to clear his name.

  The Duff Gordons were followed to the witness stand that day by Lightoller, at which point the spectators drifted back out to feed the ducks in St James’s Park. Lightoller, who would answer 1,600 questions during fifty hours of interrogation, spoke with his usual fluency and his description of the ‘extraordinary combination of circumstances, which you would not meet again once in 100 years’, made a decisive impact on Lord Mersey. On the night of 14 April, Lightoller said, ‘everything was against us… In the first place, there was no moon; then there was no wind, not the slightest breath of air. And most particular of all in my estimation is the fact, a most extraordinary circumstance, that there was not any swell. Had there been the slightest degree of swell I have no doubt that berg would have been seen in plenty of time to clear it.’ It was a magnificent description, so magnificent that Lightoller later used it again in his memoirs. ‘The disaster’, he then wrote, ‘was due to a combination of circumstances that had never occurred before and would never occur again.’ It was language worthy of Conrad, who described the conditions of sea and sky on the night that the Patna had her accident as ‘rare enough to resemble a special arrangement of malevolent providence’. Lightoller led his audience in the Drill Hall by the wrist into the uncanny world of the ancient mariner, who had killed the bird who brought the breeze. In Coleridge’s mesmerising ballad, ‘ice mast-high came floating by/ As green as Emerald’, before the ship finds itself stuck on a ‘silent sea’, without ‘breath nor motion,/ As idle as a painted ship/ Upon a painted ocean’. ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mersey, when Lightoller had finished his account of the climatic conditions. ‘No moon, no wind, no swell? The moon we knew of, the wind we knew of, but the absence of swell we did not know of. You naturally conclude that you do not meet with a sea like it was, like a table-top or a floor, a most extraordinary circumstance, and I guarantee that 99 men out of 100 could never call to mind actual proof of there having been such an absolutely smooth sea.’

  Lightoller was asked nothing about Ismay, other than whether he had seen him on board the ship. Nor was anything asked about the meetings between the two men in the doctor’s cabin on the Carpathia. The relationship between Lightoller and Ismay, which had been of such interest to Senator Smith, was of no interest at all to the British inquiry, who were concerned only with the question of speed, visibility, and the role the Second Officer had played during the lowering of the lifeboats. Lightoller handled, he later said, ‘sharp questions that needed careful answers if one was to avoid a pitfall, carefully and subtly dug, leading to a pinning down of blame onto someone’s luckless shoulders’. Those shoulders, which had been luckless Yamsi’s in America, were now, Lightoller believed, his. On this occasion he did not mock the court. Lightoller took his inquisition seriously. He ducked and dived and dodged the ‘cleverest legal minds in England, striving tooth and nail to prove the inadequacy here, the lack there, when one had known, full well, and for many years, the ever-present possibility of just such a disaster’. He was proud of his performance, which he called a ‘long drawn out battle of wits’, and he was keen afterwards to let it be known that he held ‘the unenviable position of whipping boy’ for the White Star Line. He defended the company from the accusation that the ship was undermanned when it came to launching the lifeboats; he stated that it was common practice not to slow down
in ice regions; if it was considered reckless to head into an ice field at full speed, Lightoller said, then ‘recklessness applies to practically every commander and every ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean’.

  Of the ship’s movements after the collision, he repeated what he had told the US inquiry: that the engines had stopped while he was lying in his bunk, he had gone to the bridge in his pyjamas and seen that the ship was slowing down, he had returned to his bed for between fifteen and thirty minutes (he told the US inquiry it was ten minutes) when he was roused by Boxhall, who told him that the water had reached F Deck. By the time Lightoller was up and dressed and on the deck, the engines had stopped completely and the boilers were letting off steam. If he was covering up the knowledge that the ship had previously been going ‘Slow Ahead’ under Ismay’s orders, Lightoller did it without obvious effort. He afterwards said he felt more like ‘a legal doormat than a mailboat officer’, but the man who was appointed as the Titanic’s First Officer to then be demoted to Second Officer, was treated by the inquiry as though he had been the Captain.5

  By the time Ismay took to the stand at midday on 4 June he was no longer the most talked-of man in all the world. Talk was now of the royal visit to the zoo and the rain on Derby day, but for Ismay the hours of talk that his jump had generated hung on in the air like an aura. ‘It was clear’, the Telegraph wrote, ‘that the appearance of so important a witness was wholly unexpected by the general public, because the attendance was one of the very smallest which the inquiry has yet brought together.’ A ‘ripple of mild excitement’ went through the hall at the thought that the investigation might at last be ‘lifted out of the severely judicial groove’ in which it had been gently moving, and ‘directed into more or less personal channels’.

  This was Ismay’s second chance. The US inquiry had been a dress rehearsal; what mattered was his reputation amongst Englishmen, particularly those in Liverpool who remembered him as his father’s son. Wearing a dark grey suit and black tie, he was, the Daily Sketch noted, ‘visibly nervous’, but he was in marginally better shape than he had been in America. Florence was with him; his London home was a pleasant walk through the park from the Drill Hall, and he had not been required to sit in the audience for the previous month as a great narrative web spun itself around him.

  Bruce (smoking) and Florence Ismay with Harold Sanderson, walking to the British Inquiry

  The American press had described Ismay as a figure of regal imperiousness but no one looking at him today, wrote the Daily Sketch, ‘would have pictured this man as the head of one of the wealthiest and most powerful shipping corporations in the world. He looks and speaks so unlike the commonly accepted type of commercial monarch as could well be conceived. A cultured cosmopolitan if you like, but not a strong ruler of men.’ Often standing with nothing to do as Lord Mersey and his counsel discussed his answers amongst themselves, Ismay folded his arms, clasped his hands behind his back, slipped his left hand in and out of his pocket, and fiddled with an open foolscap envelope. The Telegraph, which thought that Ismay showed ‘no trace of nervousness’, suggested that for a man who ‘claimed no higher status on the Titanic than that of a passenger, he looked just the part’.

  Sir Rufus Isaacs began by questioning Ismay about the relationship between the White Star Line and the IMM. Although these ships, including the Titanic, are registered under the British flag, they are in fact American property? Ismay replied without hesitancy in what was reported to be a ‘low, well-modulated voice’ that he had not the slightest idea. This was an example of what the Telegraph referred to as his disarming ‘modesty’. Astonished to learn that the White Star Line was no longer in any real sense a British company, Lord Mersey then asked the witness to explain the object of an American company managing its affairs through the English laws affecting English companies: Why do they do it? Ismay replied that I am afraid I cannot answer that question, My Lord. I should think, intervened Isaacs, you ought to know. Like Lord Mersey, Rufus Isaacs was familiar with Ismay and his background. The son of a prosperous East London Jewish fruit merchant, Isaacs had left school aged fourteen, became a ship’s boy at sixteen, sailed to Rio and Calcutta, briefly jumping ship mid-journey, after which he read for the Bar and joined the House of Commons as Liberal MP for Reading. His one year at sea left him with an abiding love of the ocean and its traditions. A good friend of Lord Mersey’s, Isaacs was yet to be promoted to Attorney General, Lord Chief Justice, Ambassador to Washington, Viceroy of India, and Foreign Secretary. When he died in 1935, he was Marquess of Reading, the first commoner to receive such a promotion since Wellington. Now aged fifty-two, he was enjoying one of the most spectacular legal careers of his generation. Sir Rufus Isaacs was, according to Margot Asquith, the most ambitious man she had ever known.

  Isaacs then asked Ismay about his position on the Titanic : You sailed in her as a passenger? I did, Ismay replied. Did you communicate with the Captain on the fateful evening? No, Ismay said, I never spoke to him at all; I had nothing to do with him at all. You travelled as a passenger because of your interest in the vessel and in the company which owned it? Naturally I was interested in the ship. I mean, you had nothing to do in New York; you travelled because you wanted to make the first passage on the Titanic? Partly, but I can always find something to do. I mean to say that you were not travelling in the Titanic because you wanted to go to New York, but because you wanted to travel upon the maiden voyage of the Titanic? Yes. Ismay’s answers were crisp and clear. Because in your capacity as managing director or as president of the American Trust you desired to see how the vessel behaved, I suppose? Naturally. And to see whether anything occurred in the course of the voyage which would lead to suggestions from you or from anybody? We were building another new ship, and we naturally wanted to see how we could improve on our existing ships. It was all, according to Ismay, in the natural course of things. Later in the day, Lord Mersey asked Ismay to ‘paraphrase “naturally” and tell me exactly what you mean by it?’ Ismay was unable to explain exactly what he meant, but he was using the word to mean ‘logically’, or what could be reasonably assumed. So, continued Isaacs, improving on future ships was the real object of your travelling on the Titanic? And, corrected Ismay, to observe the ship. What I want to put to you is that you were not there as an ordinary passenger? So far as the navigation of the ship was concerned, yes… I looked on myself simply as an ordinary passenger. Did you, intervened Lord Mersey, who called a spade a spade, pay your fare? No, admitted Ismay, I did not. There was general laughter. You recognise, said Sir Rufus Isaacs, that My Lord’s question is one which rather disposes of the ordinary passenger theory, does it not?

  The Marconigram from the Baltic, which reported ‘a large quantity of field ice today in latitude 41.51 N., longitude 49.52 W.’, was then read aloud. ‘We attribute very great importance to that particular message,’ said Isaacs, who would turn the Captain’s handing of the Marconigram to Ismay into a cordoned-off crime scene. ‘We think it is of very great importance. Now what I want to understand from you is this — that the message was handed to you by Captain Smith, you say?’ Yes. Handed to you because you are the managing director of the company? I do not know, said Ismay. It was a matter of information. Information, suggested Isaacs, which he would not give to everybody, but which he gave to you… he handed it to you, and you read it, I suppose? Yes. Did he say anything to you about it? Not a word. He merely handed it to you, and you put it in your pocket after you had read it? Yes, I glanced at it very casually. I was on deck at the time. Had he handed any message to you before this one? No. So this was the first message he had handed to you on this voyage? Yes. And when he handed this message to you, when the Captain of the ship came to you, the managing director, and put into your hands the Marconigram, it was for you to read? Yes, and I read it. Because it was likely to be of some importance, was it not? I have crossed with Captain Smith before and he has handed me messages which have been of no importance at all, countered Ismay. Were there
other passengers present? There were. Did you read the message to them? I did not. Did you say anything to the passengers about it? I spoke to two passengers in the afternoon. At that time I did not speak to anybody.

  Lord Mersey and Sir Rufus Isaacs then tried to ascertain at what time Ismay had been given the message. He now said it was before lunch, but at the US inquiry, they recalled, Ismay had told Senator Smith that he did not know if it was before or after lunch. ‘I suggest to you that what you said in America was accurate, that you were not certain whether it was in the afternoon or immediately before lunch?’ I am practically certain it was before lunch, Ismay recalled. The fact that he was heading off to lunch would explain why he had put the message in his pocket and then forgotten about it; the reason had been that he was otherwise occupied rather than that he did not want the ship to reduce speed. He had lunched alone, and later that afternoon he encountered Mrs Thayer and Mrs Ryerson on the deck. I cannot recollect what I said, he told the inquiry of the last time he had properly seen Marian Thayer, I think I read part of the message to them about the ice and the derelict — not the derelict, but that steamer that was broken down; short of coal she was. He was speaking rapidly.