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How to Survive the Titanic

Page 32

by Frances Wilson


  40 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 146.

  41 Ibid.

  42 Ibid., p. 152.

  43 To Sir Clinton Dawkins, quoted in Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 158.

  44 The Times, 3 December 1903.

  45 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 145.

  46 Michael Moss and John R. Hume, Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of Harland & Wolff, Belfast, 1861-1986 (Blackstaff, 1986), p. 92.

  47 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 140.

  48 Moss and Hume, Shipbuilders to the World, p. 108.

  49 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 161.

  50 Filson Young, Titanic (Grant Richards, 1912), p. 12.

  51 R. A. Fletcher, Travelling Palaces, p. 225.

  52 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 171.

  53 On the night of the disaster, James Ismay is said to have come out of his coma and said, ‘Bruce is in trouble, Bruce is in trouble.’

  54 LMQ/1/3.

  55 The Titanic Commutator, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1987, p. 41.

  56 Oldham, The Ismay Line, p. 18.

  Chapter 4: These Bumble-like Proceedings

  1 Robert Hughes, The Real New York (Hutchinson, 1905), p. 50.

  2 James Remington McCarthy, Peacock Alley: The Romance of the Waldorf Astoria (Harper, 1931), p. 163.

  3 This is also pointed out by Filson Young, Titanic, p. 81.

  4 Strouse, Morgan: American Financier, p. 643.

  5 Lightoller, ‘Titanic’, p. 301.

  6 Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1912.

  7 Edward Hungerford, The Story of the WaldorfAstoria (The Knickerbocker Press, 1925), p. 131.

  8 Stephen Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 30.

  9 Ben Proctor, William Randolph Hearst, the Later Years (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.

  10 Quoted in Michael Davie, The Titanic: The Full Story of a Tragedy (Bodley Head, 1986), p. 156.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Following the wreck of the Titanic, the publishers of Futility reissued the book as The Wreck of the Titan.

  13 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 303.

  14 Patrick Stenson, Lights: The Odyssey of CHLightoller (London, 1984), p. 206.

  15 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 287.

  16 LMQ/7/1/20.

  17 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 285.

  18 Louise Patten, Good as Gold (Quercus, 20i0), p. 24i.

  19 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 277.

  20 Ibid., p. 282.

  21 Ibid., p. 305.

  22 Ibid., p. 288.

  23 George Behe, On Board the RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage (Lulu.com, 2011), p. 335.

  24 H. M. Marriot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (William Heinemann, 1935), p. 340.

  25 Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (Penguin, 2006), p. 443.

  PART II: ON LAND

  Chapter 5: The Convergence of the Twain

  1 Conrad, letter to James B. Pinker, 22 April 1912, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge University Press, 1983-2008), Vol. 5.

  2 Conrad, letter to Ted Sanderson, 12 October 1912, Collected Letters, Vol. 2.

  3 Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 86.

  4 Conrad, letter to Galsworthy, 20 July 1900, Collected Letters, Vol. 2.

  5 Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Harvard, 1958), p. 142.

  6 Conrad, Author’s Note, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1902), p. vi.

  7 Conrad, to John Quinn, 10 May 1912, Collected Letters, Vol. 5.

  8 Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1921).

  9 Ibid.

  10 Virginia Woolf, ‘Joseph Conrad’, Collected Essays (London, 1968), vol 1:302.

  11 Quoted in Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, translated by Halina Najder (Camden House, 2007), pp. 31-5.

  12 Conrad, A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1919), p. 194.

  13 Najder, Joseph Conrad, p. 41.

  14 Ibid., pp. 182-3.

  15 Conrad to Agnes Sanderson, 22 April 1896, Collected Letters, Vol. 9.

  Chapter 6: The Secret Sharer

  1 TRNISM 1/1.

  2 LMQ/7/2/32.

  3 Thayer, The Sinking of the SS Titanic, pp. 29–30.

  4 The letters from Ismay to Marian Thayer, sections of which have been published in Pauline Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, are in private hands.

  5 TRNISM/1/1.

  6 Wilton Oldham, ‘The Titanic and the Chairman’, The Titanic Commutator, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1989, p. 25.

  7 Oldham, The Ismay Line, pp. 219–20.

  8 TRNISM/1/1.

  9 Ibid.

  10 ‘The Titanic and the Chairman’, The Titanic Commutator, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1989, p. 46.

  11 Oldham, The Ismay Line, pp. 220–24.

  12 John Masefield, Manchester Guardian, 16 October 1912.

  13 In ‘The Titanic and the Chairman’, his sequel to The Ismay Line, Wilton Oldham describes wanting to be Ismay’s secret sharer himself. ‘Bruce Ismay would have talked about it [the Titanic] with the right person, who had a sympathetic understanding and who was a complete outsider. I am not praising myself at all but Mrs Bruce Ismay, her sister Mrs Bower Ismay, Bruce Ismay’s favourite child, Mrs Margaret Cheape, and Mrs Mary Quirk, a very old friend of the family, have all said that he would have talked to me if I had known him.’ (Titanic Commutator, Vol. 12, No. 1).

  Chapter 7: The Super Captain

  1 Illustrated London News, 4 May 1912.

  2 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 304.

  3 Michael Davie, The Titanic, p. 173.

  4 Filson Young, Titanic, p. 189.

  5 Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 305.

  6 Rabelais, Gargantua andPantagruel, p. 830.

  7 ‘The Titanic and the Chairman’, Titanic Commutator, Vol. 13, No. 1, i989.

  Chapter 8: Ismay’s Unrest

  1 The author is aware that the details of his poem are not in all cases factually correct.

  2 Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, p. 24.

  3 The transcripts of the Limitation of Liability Hearings are available at www.titanicinquiry.org.

  4 Emily Ryerson gave her evidence first in a letter sent to her lawyer on 18 April 1913 (LMQ/7/2/22), and then in an affidavit for the Limitation of Liabilities hearings.

  5 Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, p. 71.

  6 Ibid., p. 19.

  7 Conrad, letter to Edward Garnet, 12 November 1900, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (New York, 1927), i, pp. 298-9.

  8 Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, p. 18.

  9 ‘Fear’ was written by Basil Sanderson in an army issue notebook. Never shown to his children - who discovered it only after his death — it is now kept with his papers in Trinity College, Oxford.

  10 Conrad, letter to John Quinn, 27 March 1912, Collected Letters, Vol. 5.

  11 Conrad, letter to J. B. Pinker, early April 1912, Collected Letters, Vol. 5.

  12 Thayer, The Sinking of the SS Titanic, p. 9.

  13 Lightoller, ‘ Titanic, p. 305.

  14 From Walter Lord, foreword to Patrick Stenson, Lights, p. 8.

  15 From Sylvia Lightoller to Walter Lord, LMQ/2/4/i53. I am grateful to Louise Patten for drawing my attention to these letters.

  Afterword

  1 The Titanic was a tale of fatal convergence for other writers as well. Unknown to Hardy, on the day that his poem was being read by mourners in London, Helen Candee, who had been on board the Titanic, had the account of her experience, ‘Sealed Orders’, published in the American weekly Collier’s. Mrs Candee began: ‘When all the lands were thrilling with the blossomed month of shower and sun, three widely differing craft spread out upon the sea. One sailed from the New World’s city of Towers, plowing east. Another coquetted with three near ports of Europe and then sailed West. The t
hird slipped down unnoticed from the glacial North.’ The first was the Carpathia, the second the Titanic, and the third the iceberg. All three were given ‘sealed orders’, and the meeting of the ‘greatest ship on earth’ and the ‘sinister’ iceberg is described as a ‘tryst’. ‘Across the starlit sea’, the frozen groom awaits his ‘virgin’ bride: ‘it was nearly midnight when she shuddered with horror in the embrace of the northern ice’. The same image had been used sixteen years earlier in a little-known poem called ‘A Tryst’, by the American writer Celia Thaxter. A ‘fair ship’ and ‘an iceberg pale’ are drawn together on a moonless night. The iceberg arrives at the appointed spot, ‘Like some imperial creature, moving slow’, and the ‘stately ship’ meanwhile, ‘with matchless grace’ and ‘unconscious of her foe,/ Drew near the trysting place.’

  Bibliography

  The best sources of information about Ismay and the sinking of the Titanic are contemporary newspaper reports. Those consulted for this book are:

  Newspapers

  Atlanta Constitution

  Boston Globe

  Daily Graphic

  Daily Mirror

  Daily News

  Daily Sketch

  Daily Telegraph

  Denver Post

  Emporia Weekly Gazette

  Frankfurter Zeitung

  Glasgow Evening Times

  Guernsey Press

  Illustrated London News

  Jersey Journal

  John Bull

  Liverpool Daily Post

  Lloyd’s Weekly News

  London Evening News

  New York American

  New York Evening Post

  New York Globe

  New York Herald

  New York Post

  New York Times

  New York Tribune

  New York World Telegram

  Northern Whig

  Orleans American

  Philadelphia Evening Bulletin

  San Francisco Examiner

  Sharon Herald

  St Louis Post Dispatch

  The Chronicle

  The Ogden Standard

  The Sphere

  The Times

  The Times Democrat

  Uttoxeter Advertiser

  Washington Post

  Journals

  Blackwood’s

  Christian Science Journal

  Christian Science Sentinel

  Country Life

  Engineering

  The English Review

  Fairplay

  Financier

  International Marine Engineering

  Journal of Commerce

  National Magazine

  New York Times Book Review

  Pall Mall Gazette

  The Critic

  The Review of Reviews

  The Semi-Monthly Magazine

  The Syren

  The Titanic Commutator

  The World’s Work

  The Woman’s Protest

  Witness Accounts

  Barratt, Nick, Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History (Arrow Books, 2009)

  Beesley, Lawrence, The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Lessons (Heinemann, 1912)

  Behe, George, On Board the RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage (Lulu.com, 20ii)

  Jessop, Violet, Titanic Survivor, introduced, edited and annotated by John Maxtone-Graham (Sutton Publishing, 2007) Thayer, John B., The Sinking of the SS Titanic April 14–15,1912 (Philadelphia, December 1940)

  Winocour, Jack, ed., The Story of the Titanic as Told By Its Survivors, Lawrence Beesley, Archibald Gracie, Commander Lightoller, Harold Bride (Dover, 1960)

  The Sinking of the SS Titanic

  Barczewski, Stephanie, Titanic: A Night Remembered (Hambledon and London, 2004)

  Behe, George, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy (Patrick Stephens, 1988)

  Behe, George and Goss, Michael, Lost at Sea (Prometheus Books, 1994) Booth, John and Coughlan, Sean, Titanic: Signals of Disaster (White Star, 1993)

  Bryceson, Dave, ed., The Titanic Disaster, as Reported in the British National Press April–July 1912 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997)

  Davie, Michael, Titanic: The Full Story of a Tragedy (The Bodley Head, 1986)

  Eaton, John and Haas, Charles A., Titanic: TriumphandTragedy:A Chronicle in Words and Pictures (Patrick Stephens, 1994)

  Everett, Marshall, Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic (L. H. Walter, 1912)

  Gibbs, Philip, The Deathless Story of the Titanic (Lloyds of London, 1985)

  Heyer, Paul, Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth (Praeger, 1995)

  Lord, Walter, A Night to Remember (Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1955)

  ------The Night Lives On (Penguin, 1986)

  Loss of the Steamship Titanic, British Investigation (7Cs Press, 1975)

  Marcus, Geoffrey, The Maiden Voyage (Allen and Unwin, 1969)

  Marshall, Logan, Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters (John C. Winston Co., 1912)

  Pellegrino, Charles, Her Name, Titanic: The Untold Story of the Sinking and Finding of the Unsinkable Ship (McGraw-Hill, 1988)

  Report on the Loss of the SS Titanic (Blackstaff Press, 1990)

  The Titanic Disaster: Report of the Committee on Commerce, US Senate (7Cs Press, 1975)

  Wade, Wyn Craig, The Titanic: End of a Dream (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) Young, Filson, Titanic (Grant Richards, 1912)

  The White Star Line

  Beaumont, J. C. H., Ships and People (Geoffrey Bles, 1936)

  Cooper, Gary, The Man Who Sank the Titanic? Life and Times of Captain

  Edward J. Smith (Witan Books, 1992) Eaton, John P. and Haas, Charles, Falling Star: Misadventures of White Star Line Ships (Patrick Stephens, 1989)

  Fletcher, R. A., Travelling Palaces: Luxury in Passenger Steamships (Pitman and Sons, 1913)

  Hyslop, Donald, Forsyth, Alastair and Jemima, Sheila, eds, Titanic Voices: The Story of the White Star Line, the Titanic and Southampton (Southampton City Council, 1994)

  Jefferson, Herbert, Viscount Pirrie of Belfast (William Mullan, 1948)

  Louden-Brown, Paul, The White Star Line: An Illustrated History 1870–1934 (Ship Pictorial, 1991)

  Maxtone-Graham, John, The Only Way to Cross (Patrick Stephens, 1983)

  Moss, Michael and Hume, John R., Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of Harland and Wolff, Belfast, 1861–1986 (Blackstaff, 1986)

  Oldham, Wilton J., The Ismay Line: The White Star Line and the Ismay Family Story (Liverpool, Journal of Commerce, 1961)

  Sanderson, Basil, Ships and Sealing Wax: The Memoirs of Lord Sanderson of

  Ayot (Heinemann, 1967)

  Conrad

  The following works by Conrad are all published by J. M. Dent:

  Almayer’s Folly (1895)

  ‘Karain’ (1897), in Tales of Unrest (1908)

  Lord Jim: A Tale (1900)

  Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (1902) The Mirror of the Sea (1906)

  ‘The Secret Sharer’, in Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (1912)

  ‘Some Reflections, Seamanlike and Otherwise, on the Loss of the Titanic (1912), Notes on Life and Letters (1925)

  ‘Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic’ (1912), Notes on Life and Letters (1925)

  A Personal Record (1912)

  Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (1913)

  The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917)

  ‘Ocean Travel’ (1923), Last Essays, ed. Richard Curle (1926)

  ‘The Torrens: A Personal Tribute’ (1923), Last Essays, ed. Richard Curle (1926)

  General

  Baker, W. J., A History of the Marconi Company (Methuen, 1970)

  Barker, Dudley, The Man ofPrinciple: A View of John Galsworthy (Heinemann, 1963)

  Biel, Steven, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (W. W. Norton, 1996) Bloom, Harold, ed., Marlow (Major Literary Characters) (Chelsea House, 1992)

  Conrad, Borys, My Father Joseph Conrad (C
alder and Boyars, 1970) Conrad, Joseph, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 9 volumes, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge University Press, 1983–2008)

  Dupre, Catherine, John Galsworthy: A Biography (Collins, 1976)

  Eddleman, Ruth Ellie, The Function of Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction (MA thesis, 1962)

  Foster, John Wilson, The Titanic Complex: A Cultural Manifest (Belcouver Press, 1996)

  ------Age of Titanic: Cross-currents of Anglo-American Culture (Merlin, 2002)

  -------ed., Titanic (Penguin, 1999)

  Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (Yale University Press, 1981)

  Guerard, Albert J., Conrad the Novelist (Harvard University Press, 1958)

  Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (Chicago University Press, 1996)

  Hay, Eloise Knapp, ’Lord Jim and Le Hamletisme, ‘L’Epoque Conradienne’, 1990, Societe Conradienne Frangais

  Howells, Richard, The Myth of the Titanic (Macmillan, 1999)

  Hughes, Robert, The Real New York (Hutchinson, 1905)

  Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown s Schooldays (Macmillan, 1967)

  Hungerford, Edward, The Story of the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 1925.

  Jack, Ian, ‘Women and Children First’, in The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain: Writings, 1989–2009 (Jonathan Cape, 2009)

  Johnson, Bruce M., ‘Conrad’s “Karain” and Lord Jim , Modern Language Quarterly Vol. XXIV, No. 1, March 1963

  Jones, Max, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford University Press, 2003)

  Langewiesche, William, The Outlaw Sea: Crime and Chaos on the World’s Oceans (Granta, 2005)

  Lunn, Arnold, The Harrovians: A Tale of Public School Life (Methuen, 1913)

  Matarasso, Pauline, A Voyage Closed and Done (Michael Russell, 2005)

  McCarthy, James Remington, Peacock Alley: The Romance of the Waldorf-Astoria (Harper, 1931)

  Miller, Karl, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford University Press, 1985)

  Minchin, J. G., Our Public Schools: Their Influence on English History (Swan Sennenschein & Co., 1901)

 

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