Sailing towards disaster

BIOGRAPHY: How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of J Bruce IsmayBy Francis Wilson Bloomsbury, 306pp. £18.99

A POPULAR poster used to list a detailed itinerary of items carried on Titanic. They ranged from the useful (the criminally few lifeboats) to the grandiosely ornamental. I cannot recall if the itinerary included the presence of one owner – J Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line – or whether he was listed in the useful or ornamental category.

Two inquiries into his actions on Titanicsimilarly failed to establish which category Ismay belonged to. But his hounding by William Randolph Hearst's newspapers meant that history consigned him to a unique category: society's most talked about coward; a man despised for stepping onto a lifeboat on his own ship, leaving women and children to die, and for being the sole survivor who refused to look back at the awesome sight of his seemingly unsinkable liner capsizing.

This judgment was a social stain from which Ismay never recovered, an ignominy that caused him to retreat to a remote house in Galway – an isolation brilliantly captured by Derek Mahon's poem After the Titanic.

But Ismay, though he was a ruthlessly successful businessman, never easily fitted into any category. His manners reflected his having been educated at Harrow – thanks to his father’s wealth – so he could take on the appearance of a gentleman, but his classmates were never really his peers, having been born to look down on the vulgarity of earned money.

Ismay endured Harrow to fulfill his father’s social ambitions, although his father – a self-made shipbuilder from humble origins – was praised in the English press for turning down a baronetcy, claiming he preferred to be just an ordinary man. In reality, Ismay Snr refused the offer of a baronetcy in disgust, believing he should have been made a Lord.

Father and son were never close. Indeed, Ismay comes across as incapable of loving anyone or anything except his ships. When he slumped in that lifeboat, refusing to look back, Ismay’s thoughts may not have been focused on his drowning passengers, but on the fact of having failed his father.

Everyone else on Titanichad some reason to be there. The large crew was led by an ageing captain, Edward J Smith, blinded enough by his own celebrity status – despite having had several near accidents – to confidently tell reporters how shipbuilding was such a perfect art that any loss of life at sea was inconceivable. There were the idle rich, such as John Jacob Astor, who scandalised society by dumping his wife for the teenage bride he was bringing back to America. Hidden from sight were the poor, in cramped quarters, emigrating to new lives.

But Ismay had no reason to cross the Atlantic. He was neither passenger nor crew. He owned the ship, yet, in his testimony, claimed to have no more status than any ordinary passenger. Most emphatically he denied being in control and, technically, he was right: no owner can overrule a captain at sea, but once they reach land they can sack them.

The odium which surrounded Ismay was not just a result of his having entered a lifeboat, leaving passengers to drown, but of the accusation that despite knowing they were passing icebergs, he pressurised his captain to maintain speed to reach New York quicker and continued pressurising him to go forward after the ship was holed, still convinced it was unsinkable. If he did so, it hastened the ship’s sinking so that nearby ships had no time to rescue passengers.

There is no shortage of books about Titanic,but Francis Wilson's work is unique in trying to decipher the mindset of its abrasive, socially awkward owner, who saw the chance to live and, very humanly, took it. Ismay remained perplexed by criticism of his action. After all, he only stepped into a lifeboat when it was already being lowered, half-empty. There was lifeboat capacity for 1,100 of the 2,340 souls onboard but only 705 were saved, of whom 325 were actually men.

Wilson's book could almost be called The Man Who Wasn't There, because Ismay seemed incapable of articulating any response to the tragedy, beyond demands to be let return to England as soon as possible.

Second Officer Lightoller, on whom hero status was bestowed, said it was easy to be an armchair judge and forget that, amid the panic, individuals on board responded to the situation moment by moment.

Wilson cannot answer the vital question as to whether Ismay ordered his captain to speed through the icebergs or whether, as the American report suggested, his mere presence on board placed unspoken pressures on the captain to perform.

Other books provide more detail of the sinking, but Wilson pivots that clockwork era of shipbuilding dynasties around the one witness who claimed to have seen and done nothing. Using previously unseen letters to an American passenger with whom he fell in love, she rounds out the inarticulate Ismay.

Titanicdisappeared into a vast emptiness but this book gives the impression that Ismay drowned in the emptiness of his crippled soul: able to see only what he wanted to see, shaped by the ambitious father who belittled him, bewildered by how the world needed him to blame – because we need villains just like we need to invent heroes, such as John Joseph Astor, who retrospectively became a noble figure simply through his failure to cajole his way onto a lifeboat.

We are left with the impression that what haunted Ismay was not that he had failed his ship’s passengers, but that his ship had failed him. Wilson’s book shows him unable to come to terms with the fact that nothing is unsinkable and nothing is forgettable, even if you turn your back on tragedy and try to simply row away.

Dermot Bolger is a novelist, poet and playwright, whose most recent book is A Second Life: A Renewed Novel