On a Sea So Cold & Still: The Titanic—A Centennial Reader by Daniel Elton Harmon

Author:Daniel Elton Harmon [Harmon, Daniel Elton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Daniel Elton Harmon, Hornpipe Vintage Publications
Published: 2012-05-27T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Ismay: From Shipping Mogul

To Scapegoat

WOULD IT HAVE BEEN BETTER for the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line to have perished with the pride of his shipping fleet? In the judgment of millions of scorners then and now: a resounding yes. He must have wondered the same thing himself for the rest of his life. His eternal verdict and sentence, known only to him, was rendered by his Maker and Judge when Bruce Ismay did die—quietly, of a stroke—25 years after the Titanic went down.

Ismay, 49 years old at the time of the tragedy, was one of the visionaries who’d plotted the building of the Titanic and her two sisters in 1907. Son of the line’s founder, he was the logical target of commoners’ ire in the aftermath. He was haughty. A stickler for cleanliness, he was known to check for dust above the cabin doors of company liners. Accustomed to only finery in life, on the maiden passage he took one of the Titanic’s two ultimate parlor suites for himself (the suite that would have been J.P. Morgan’s, had the corporate owner been aboard).

Then the worst thing that could happen to a modern imperator such as Bruce Ismay did happen: He survived the sinking of his own nautical masterpiece.

Ismay’s wife Florence and family stayed behind when he boarded the Titanic at Southampton; they opted for a Welsh holiday rather than a transatlantic voyage. To other first-class passengers, Ismay coyly asserted that he was just one of them. But his very presence, historians suspect, could have influenced decisions by the captain and officers, particularly in regard to the ship’s daily progress.

Afterward, as for insinuations that he personally pressed the captain to proceed at full speed on Sunday night despite ice warnings, Ismay told the British inquiry panel, “If a man can see far enough to clear ice, he is perfectly justified in going full speed.” His obvious inference was that if the Titanic was going too fast for conditions at 11:40 p.m. on 14 April, the blame should be laid on those in command—not their employer.

Ismay was one of 39 people lowered aboard Collapsible C, the next-to-last boat put away, minutes before the ship foundered. A sympathetic account of his climactic moment described Ismay and another man as simply stepping into the boat as it was being lowered, there being space available and no one else around. In the recollections of others, his exit from the sinking superliner was somewhat more energetic. Jack Thayer recalled the scene: “There was some disturbance in loading the last two forward starboard boats. A large crowd of men was pressing to get into them. No women were around as far as I could see. I saw Ismay, who had been assisting in the loading of the last boat, push his way into it. It was really every man for himself.”

Ismay was branded a coward—and an outrageously arrogant one. One newspaper headline demonized him as “The Creature Ismay, Who Lived While Hundreds Died.

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