Frances Wilson - How to Survive the Titanic

This was to have been Ismay’s final voyage in a professional capacity; seeing no future in the IMM he planned to announce his retirement on 31 December 1912. In the autumn of 1911, he offered to hand Harold Sanderson the chairmanship of the White Star Line and presidency of Morgan’s combine. ‘I will not attempt to disguise the fact that having been identified with the White Star Line so long and so intimately, the prospect of terminating the connection causes me real distress,’ Ismay wrote, ‘and I dislike to think of it; but, on the other hand the strain of the Liverpool work is, I know, beginning to tell on me… I hope that, upon reflection, you will not harbour the thought that I am deserting the ship prematurely.’ 55Sanderson, believing that his own career had reached a plateau, was grateful to take Ismay’s place, after which Ismay changed his mind about the date of his retirement. It would now not be until 30 June 1913 because, he explained to Sanderson, ‘I can only look upon my prospective severance from the business with which I have been connected all my career with very mixed and doubtful feelings, and, perhaps selfishly, I am anxious to make it as easy as possible… I feel that making such an entire change in my mode of life as that contemplated would come less hardly if made in the summer than in the winter, as in the former case, I should have good weather, long days, and my shooting to look forward to, which would give me occupation for some months and this would enable me to better prepare for the time when I should have little or nothing with which to fill up my time.’ But, Ismay conceded, ‘the 30th June, 1913 is a “FAR CRY” and much may happen between now and then’. 56His retirement was to be kept a secret from the IMM.

He was forty-nine and lost in the middle of his life; these are the years in which Dante describes falling ‘into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me’. When Ismay boarded the Titanic, he had betrayed his father’s dream, he had discussed his resignation with Sanderson, and he had given away in marriage the only one of his children to whom he felt close. His own marriage was troubled and he had set in motion a future in which he had ‘little or nothing’ to look forward to but a prolonged emptiness. It is easy to show courage if you are part of a group or representing something in which you believe, but Ismay was alone on board and representing nothing, no one. He had no family to wave off in a lifeboat, no son present to whom he could set a fine example of manliness. He was neither passenger nor owner.

When he jumped from the Titanic, Ismay had no status at all.

The Waldorf-Astoria had originally been two hotels. The thirteen-storey Waldorf was built in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor, to irritate his aunt who lived next door. When she duly moved uptown, his cousin, John Jacob Astor — described as the world’s greatest monument to unearned income — added four storeys to her house and turned it into the Astoria. In 1897, the twin buildings conjoined and, connected by an interior street known as Peacock Alley, became the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world. ‘The last word in grandeur’, the Waldorf-Astoria — which occupied the space of an entire city block and would later be demolished to make way for the Empire State Building — did not look like a hotel. It was described in a novel written in 1905 called The Real New York, as resembling ‘nothing so much as a huge iceberg of gingerbread — what Lewis Carroll would have called a “gingerberg”’. 1The interior was a stage set and professional guides were employed to give tours of the Marie-Antoinette drawing room, which mirrored the original in Versailles, the Astor Room, which reproduced the dining room of the family home before it became a hotel, the replica Louis XV gallery and the duplication of the Soubise ballroom in Paris. ‘There were more wonders,’ reported the Sun after the hotel’s official opening, ‘than could be seen in a single evening — magnificent tapestries, paintings, frescoings, wood carvings, marble and onyx mosaics, quaint and rich pieces of furniture, rare and costly tablewear… Louis XIV could not have got the like of the first suite of apartments set apart for the most distinguished guests of the hotel. There is a canopied bed upon a dais, such as a king’s bed should be… There are baths, elevators, electric lights.’ And to enter it all, you go through revolving front doors which are like ‘screw propellers’.

The purpose of the Waldorf-Astoria, as one wit put it, was to purvey ‘exclusiveness to the masses’. Only incidentally somewhere to stay the night, it was a restaurant before the days when eating in public was fashionable, it was ‘the club of all clubs’, the place to be seen. The hotel welcomed unescorted women, who promenaded in pairs down Peacock Alley, or came alone simply because they could. J. P. Morgan was a patron; here the Steel Corporation was born. The hotel contained 40 reception rooms, 1,000 bedrooms and 700 bathrooms; it was thought ‘big enough to hold the whole population’, but it could hold less than half the number who could be held by the Titanic, whose first-class survivors were housed in the Waldorf on the night the Carpathia landed. The doorman on duty recalled how ‘never before in all its history did the hotel witness such dramatic scenes as were enacted in the corridors and lobbies. So packed and jammed was the hotel that it was difficult to find room to move around.’ 2John Jacob Astor, returning with his pregnant teenage bride from their European honeymoon, was now dead and his gingerberg would provide the opening scene for the Senate’s interrogation of the gilded age.

When Ismay, flanked by bodyguards along with two of the IMM’s top attorneys and Philip Franklin, stepped through the Waldorf-Astoria’s revolving doors at 9.30 a.m. on Friday 19 April, John Jacob Astor’s final moments were already being imagined in papers across the country. In one version, he placed his wife in a lifeboat and then ‘with a military salute, turned back to take his place on the sinking Titanic . Another had him proclaim, after conferring with four other important men, Archie Butt, Benjamin Guggenheim, John Thayer and George Widener, ‘Not a man until every woman and child is safe in the boats.’ A steerage passenger described how he had been placed safely in a boat by someone he believed to have been Astor, and a song told how the millionaire parted from his wife with the words ‘Good-bye my darling, don’t you grieve for me/, I would give my life for the ladies to flee’. Most likely is the account given by Second Officer Lightoller of turning Astor away from the lifeboat when he asked whether he might join his wife, who was in a ‘delicate condition’. ‘Now,’ wrote the Denver Post, ‘when the name of Astor is mentioned, it will be the John Jacob who went down with the Titanic that will come first to mind; not the Astor who made the great fortune, not the Astor who added to its greatness, but John Jacob Astor, the hero.’ The heroic John Jacob Astor had replaced the decadent John Jacob Astor, the man who had divorced his first wife, whose second marriage six months before to a girl younger than his own son had been considered a scandal, and whose giant hotel, frequented by fops and feminists, was considered to be a site of sexual transgression and social disorder. The manly death of John Jacob Astor had reaffirmed conservative values.