Eighteen people, including Second Officer Lightoller and Jack Th ayer, survived balancing atop this upturned lifeboat.
Marconigram sent by Captain Rostron of the Carpathia to Captain Haddock of the Olympic on the morning the Titanic survivors were rescued.
Rostron had been Captain of the Carpathia for three months when he rescued the Titanic survivors. It had been ‘absolutely providential’, he said, that the modest Cunarder picked up the mighty White Star Liner’s distress call.
The deck of the Carpathia. The Carpathia’s female passengers formed a relief committee to provide clothing for those Titanic survivors who had arrived in their dressing gowns, and ship’s blankets were cut up to make warm coats for the children. One survivor later said that on the Carpathia, ‘I learned a great deal of the fundamentals I have built a happy life on, such as faith, hope, and charity.’
When the Carpathia arrived at 4.30 a.m, expecting to find a damaged ship, there was nothing to see but boxes and coats and what looked like oil on the water.
On 19 April, the morning after the Carpathia had landed in New York, the US Senate Inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic opened at the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria. Ismay, seated to the right at the top of the table, surrounded, was the first witness. Headed by Senator William Alden Smith, the Inquiry produced the official version of the story of the Titanic, a narrative which would unfold over eighteen days, fill 1,100 pages of testimony, and destroy the reputation of J. Bruce Ismay.
Hounded and vilified in America, the British Press, indignant at his treatment across the pond, gave Ismay a warm welcome on his return. Florence can be seen in the two left-hand pictures; Lightoller, in a bowler hat, is in the top right photograph.
Letter to Ismay from Lucille Carter, whose husband William E. Carter also jumped into Collapsible C but whose survival was of no interest to the press or inquiries. Mrs Carter would later divorce him on the grounds that he had abandoned her on the Titanic.
Signed photograph of Marian Thayer, with whom Ismay had fallen in love on the Titanic: ‘I often think of where our friendship would have taken us if that awful disaster had not taken place’, he would write to her the following year.
In Fortunio Matania’s illustration of the British Inquiry Ismay has massive presence and no presence at all, he is both the smallest and the largest man in the room. In contrast to the crowded table in the Waldorf-Astoria, the British Inquiry was grey and formal. The accoustics were so bad that the assessors had to cup their hands to their ears to hear what Ismay said.
Bruce and Florence outside their house in Costelloe, Connemara, where Ismay was believed to be ‘living among the missing’.
Ismay’s garden at Costelloe was designed by Gertrude Jekyll. ‘It is awfully wild and away from everybody,’ Ismay wrote to Mrs Thayer. ‘I will enjoy the place.’ His last summer in Ireland was in 1936.
About the Author
Frances Wilson was educated at Oxford University and lectured on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature for fifteen years before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She reviews widely in the British press and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her time between London and Normandy.
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Also by Frances Wilson
Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers
The Courtesan’s Revenge
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life
Cover Credits
Jacket design by Richard Ljoenes
Front jacket painting of Titanic © Look and Learn/The Bridgeman Art Library International
Front jacket photograph of Ismay © The Granger Collection
All other art by iStockphoto
Copyright
HOW TO SURVIVE THE TITANIC. Copyright © 2011 by Frances Wilson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Bloomsbury.
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ISBN: 978-0-06-209454-4
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062094568
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Footnotes
1
In June 1907, the “White Star Line had moved their terminal from Liverpool to Southampton to make it easier for the smart passengers from London to reach”.
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2
The northern track, 200 miles shorter than the southern track, was followed between August and December. The southern track was followed for the rest of the year.
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3
In his memoirs, Lightoller wrote: ‘Wireless reports were coming in throughout the day from various ships, of ice being sighted in different positions… the one vital report that came through but which never reached the bridge, was received at 9.40 p.m. from the Mesaba… the position this ship gave was right ahead of us and not so many miles distant. The wireless operator was not to know how close we were to this position, and therefore the extreme urgency of the message.’ (Lightoller, Titanic, p. 280.)
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4
The Titanic contained an internal telegraph signalling system by which commands from the bridge could be shown on the engine room telegraph indicator. The positions on the clock-shaped indicator went from Stop, to Slow Ahead, Ahead One Quarter, Half Ahead, Ahead Three Quarters and Full Ahead.
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5
Lawrence Beesley agreed. He describes how the Titanic, having initially stopped dead still, then ‘resumed her course, moving very slowly through the water… I think we were all glad to see this: it seemed better than standing still.’ (Beesley, The Loss of the SS Titanic, p. 30.)
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