Was the coward Titanic of the a hero all along?
He was the boss of the White Star Line whose split-second decision to escape in the last lifeboat saw him vilified for decades. But now an intriguing new book raises the question...
ONE hundred and ten years ago this week, the Titanic was holed by an iceberg in the mid-Atlantic and sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. The tragedy threw up many heroes — and one villain. But has he been unfairly blamed for his actions that night?
BRUCE ISMAY turned in for the night on the luxury liner that was his latest masterpiece. A fastidious gentleman, he probably trimmed his immaculate Kaiser Wilhelm moustache and brushed his neatly cut hair before climbing into his pyjamas, freshly pressed and laid out by his valet, Richard, then into the comfortable master bed of what was more a plush suite than a cabin.
B52-56 on the Bridge deck, taking up the space of five normal-sized First Class cabins, was the owner’s cabin, built with no expense spared for the ultimate boss of the shipping company, the fabulously wealthy American banker J .P. Morgan.
But he had declined a trip on this maiden transatlantic voyage from Southampton to New York, so Ismay, the 49-year-old Liverpoolborn chairman of the White Star Line — which his late father had created and Morgan had later bought — had the honour instead.
To be fair, it was only fitting that he should have the star accommodation. An inspired businessman and leader, he had set the high standards of customer service that distinguished White Star vessels as something out of the ordinary in the highly competitive transatlantic market.
He had also been the driving force behind the expansion of the company to take on its
‘Allow the ladies to pass,’ Bruce Ismay was heard to say
rivals Cunard with the building, in Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyard, of its two latest four-funnelled super-ships — the Olympic and the one he was on now, for its first voyage, the even more fabulous Titanic.
Since leaving Southampton four days earlier on April 10, 1912, he had been feted by the First Class passengers, receiving their congratulations for the unrivalled opulence of the new liner: the magnificent Grand Staircase, the Turkish baths, the Palm Courts, the Cafe Parisien, the libraries, the squash court.
Even in steerage, the cheap end, the Third Class passengers seemed happy enough with the facilities. In his careful commissioning of the ship, the meticulous Ismay had been mindful of their needs, too.
So he turned out the electric light — another of the ship’s innovative selling points — and went to sleep a contented man that Monday night. There would be one more night on board before she was due to dock in New York on Wednesday morning and the 2,208 passengers — not far short of her full complement of 2,453 — could disembark on schedule.
That safe arrival never happened, of course. Just before midnight, he was shaken awake by a violent vibration. His first thought was that the ship had lost a propeller — a setback, certainly, but not disastrous. He pulled on a dressing gown over his pyjamas, put on his slippers and stepped outside his cabin into the corridor.
He asked a passing steward what had happened. The steward didn’t know, so Ismay got an overcoat from his cabin before making his way to the bridge. There he found the captain, Edward Smith, who told him the unthinkable — the unsinkable Titanic was sinking.
An iceberg had loomed out of the dark. The lookouts had seen it at the last minute and warned the helmsman, who frantically turned the wheel hard to port, pushing round the bow of the colossal ship but not fast enough to avoid scraping the side and opening up gashes below the waterline.
‘Do you think the ship is seriously damaged?’ Ismay asked.
‘I’m afraid she is,’ Captain Smith replied. An urgent radio message had been sent out to any ships near by: ‘SOS Titanic calling. We have struck ice and require immediate assistance.’
Ismay hurried below to the engine room. There he found the chief engineer, who explained that the ship was taking on water fast and the supposedly watertight buoyancy compartments below deck were rapidly filling. The pumps might only be sufficient to keep the ship afloat for two hours at most, before the weight of water in the hull dragged Titanic down by the bow.
By now, the lifeboats were being prepared — just 20 of them, room for less than half the passengers and crew. On the boat deck, Ismay took an active part in loading them. He was seen by witnesses ordering the men to stand aside, giving priority to ‘women and children’, as was the custom. ‘Allow the ladies to pass,’ he was heard to say.
But when the last boat came to be lowered from the doomed ship, he did what for ever after would be considered something utterly reprehensible — he jumped in himself. And while 1,500 of those on board died in the icy waters on that terrible night, he survived.
For this he would be universally vilified. American newspapers labelled him the ‘Coward of the Titanic’ and suggested his name should be changed to ‘Brute’ Ismay. They also suggested changing the company’s name from White Star to Yellow.
But was this condemnation fair? A distant relation of Ismay, Cumbrian Clifford Ismay, thinks not, and in a new book argues that his kinsman not only acted honourably but was haunted for the rest of his life by the thought that he had put his own preservation above that of others.
There is no doubt Bruce Ismay worked tirelessly in those last two frantic hours. Putting aside his natural aloofness, he helped scores of women to board the lifeboats before they were lowered away down the listing side of the ship.
He persuaded a group of women from First Class who thought themselves too posh (or too scared) to get in a lifeboat to do so. When a stewardess held back because she was ‘only crew’, he told her: ‘Never mind that. You are a woman. Take your place.’
(Afterwards, her husband wrote to Ismay with the highest praise. ‘She was only a stewardess but that made no difference to you. You saved her. God bless you.’)
At times he got overexcited and called out for a boat to be lowered away when it was unsafe. When the ship’s officer in charge swore at him and told him to back off, he did so without complaint and didn’t try to pull rank.
‘Mr Ismay was just the same as any of us,’ a crewman remembered. ‘He was doing all he could to assist to get the boats out.’
The new book argues that Ismay went from one lifeboat to the next — eight in all — helping as best he could, never letting up .
In the chaos and confusion, men
‘He was just the same as any of us,’ said a crewman. ‘He was doing all he could to get the lifeboats out’
were trying to get in the boats ahead of women and had to be removed. Shots were fired in the air by officers supervising the loading. Finally, Ismay came to what was designated as ‘Collapsible C’. (Sixteen of the Titanic’s 20 lifeboats were of wooden construction. The other four were rafts of kapok and cork, with canvas sides that could be raised to form a boat.)
He helped load this boat and then, as it was hanging over the side and about to be lowered, a call went out for any more women. None came forward and at that point, with spaces spare in the 47-seater lifeboat, he stepped in and took a seat.
Some reports later suggested he was bundled in by another man, who climbed in, too. Others said he was down in the boat already, helping women and children to settle, when it was lowered.
But Ismay’s own explanation was that he could see no other women waiting to be rescued and, at the very last minute and without premeditation, as the boat began to lower, he got in.
When it hit the water, he helped to row the boat away.
At 2.20am, her back broken, her stern towering high in the air, Titanic plunged head first into the depths of the ocean. A thousand souls were still on board, hundreds more floundering and drowning in the water or dying from cold and exhaustion.
Lifeboats milled around in the dark, their occupants stunned and frightened, sending flares into the night sky and praying for rescue.
An hour and 40 minutes later, the Cunard liner Carpathia arrived.
Having picked up the Titanic’s distress call at 12.25am, she had steamed the 60 miles between them as fast as she could, dodging ice floes along the way. She came upon an eerie scene of desolation and death.
One by one, the lifeboats discharged their passengers onto the Carpathia. In Collapsible C,
Ismay was one of the last to be rescued, hauling himself up a rope ladder and on deck, where he was offered a hot drink and soup.
He refused, just standing there, his back against a bulwark, appearing dazed and distracted. It was only now dawning on him that all the women passengers had not escaped after all, as he had believed. He was inconsolable, too, on learning that his valet and secretary were among the missing.
Seeing his distress and realising who Ismay was, the ship’s doctor ushered him into his own tiny cabin and he remained there until the Carpathia, with 710 survivors on board, docked in New York two days later.
There was criticism of Ismay for this — why had he had preferential treatment when other survivors were on deck with just a blanket for warmth? But Ismay’s condition was dire, as a fellow survivor who knew him would later explain.
Jack Thayer was the 17-year-old son of a U.S. railway tycoon and had been a First Class passenger on board Titanic with his parents. His father died but he survived after jumping into the water.
Asked by the Carpathia doctor to see if he could help Ismay, Thayer went into the cabin. ‘He was seated in his pyjamas on his bunk, staring straight ahead, shaking all over like a leaf. My entrance apparently did not dawn on his consciousness.
‘Even when I tried to engage him in conversation, telling him he had a perfect right to take the last boat, he paid absolutely no attention and continued to look ahead, with a fixed stare.
‘On the Titanic his hair had been black with slight tinges of grey, but it was now snow white. I have never seen a man so completely wrecked. Nothing I could do or say brought any response. As I left, he was still looking fixedly ahead.’
Charles Lightoller, the most senior of the Titanic’s officers to survive the sinking, also tried to bring Ismay back to his senses. ‘But he was obsessed with the idea that he ought to have gone down with the ship because women had gone down. He kept repeating it.
‘I tried to get that idea out of his head. The doctor tried, too. But we had difficulty in arousing Mr Ismay, solely owing to the fact that women had gone down in the ship and he had not.’
Meanwhile, as the news of the tragedy reached America, the papers there piled into Ismay, particularly those owned by press baron William Randolph Hearst, accusing him of cowardice.
According to Clifford Ismay in his book, this was unwarranted and deliberately vicious because of bad blood between the two men. Twenty-five years earlier, they had been part of the same fast social circle in New York, until
‘Ismay was staring straight ahead, shaking like a leaf ’ ‘I have never seen a man so completely wrecked’
Hearst invited his friend Ismay to become his business partner. Ismay, disliking Hearst’s brash brand of journalism, decided to turn him down.
The snub obviously still rankled, as Hearst took his revenge in print, blackening Ismay’s name far more than he deserved.
One of the charges made against Ismay was that the Titanic was going too fast to avoid the iceberg, and that this recklessness was down to his presence on the ship. Either he had ordered the captain to test her speed to the full, or the captain had been trying to impress the boss and threw caution to the wind.
The evidence was flimsy. An American passenger claimed to have overheard Ismay tell the captain he wanted to get to New York early and beat the record set by Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic. But when pressed, she had to admit she could not positively identify either of them with certainty.
To the U.S. inquiry into the disaster, Ismay conceded that there had been an intention to drive the ship at full speed on Tuesday, on the last leg of the crossing, but ‘owing to the unfortunate catastrophe, that never eventuated’.
Past experience showed that the White Star Line’s policy under Ismay was reliability — arriving on schedule — rather than setting speed records.
Official inquiries in both New York and London cleared Ismay of blame, though the Press continued to point fingers at him. He was tempted to justify himself in print but his lawyer advised him to stay
silent. The inquiries had exonerated him and he should let that be the last word on the matter.
He took the advice but was obviously still distraught about what he had done that night, because his lawyer ended his letter: ‘In the meanwhile, my dear Bruce, try to see things as they really are and not through glasses of a morbid tint’.
How long that ‘morbid tint’ coloured Ismay’s life is impossible to say. The year after the disaster he retired from the shipping line, although that was something he had always intended to do.
He retreated to a shooting estate in Ireland and lived happily enough for the next quarter of a century, until his death from a stroke in 1937, aged 74.
He never offered an elaboration or an excuse for that splitsecond when he decided to get into the lifeboat, except that he genuinely believed all the women had been saved.
Today, someone in his situation would be quizzed by breakfast news hosts and documentary-makers until every last emotion and explanation had been wrested from him. But not in 1912. He was left to come to terms with his conscience on his own.
There are countless ‘what ifs’ around the Titanic saga.
What if her sister ship, the Olympia, had not collided with a cruiser, HMS Hawke, seven months earlier in the Solent, damaging a propeller? It was replaced by one from the Titanic, then under construction.
That set back the completion of Titanic by three weeks, delaying her maiden voyage. Without that mishap, she would have sailed on a different day and in different circumstances.
What if a last-minute reshuffle of senior officers on the Titanic had not ended in the demotion of Second Officer David Blair to another ship? That was his good fortune — but he left in a hurry and forgot to hand in the keys to the locker where the binoculars for the lookouts were stored. They were unable to access them that night.
What if the sea hadn’t been exceptionally calm and clear that night, merging into the dark sky and making it difficult for lookouts to see far ahead?
But there is no ‘what if’ about Ismay’s behaviour. He could have done nothing to save the Titanic. Nothing he did led to loss of life. He didn’t shove anyone out of the way to make his escape at their expense.
If he had made a deliberate decision not to step into the lifeboat when it still had room, his self-sacrifice would have changed nothing, except to add one more death to the terrible toll.
The captain went down with his ship, as did 695 crew and Thomas Andrews of Harland & Wolff, her designer, who was on board to monitor her performance. It was said he made no attempt to save himself.
As for Ismay, just how much thought he gave his own decision will never be known. Did he act on the spur of the moment, instinctively choosing life over death? If so, each of us must wonder what we would have done in those circumstances, and judge him accordingly.
ADAPTED from Understanding J. Bruce Ismay: The True Story Of The Man They Called ‘The Coward Of Titanic’, by Clifford Ismay, published by The History Press at £15.99. © Clifford Ismay 2022. To order a copy for £14.39 (offer valid to 30/04/22; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 020 3176 2937.