Frances Wilson - How to Survive the Titanic

Ismay replied in what had by now become his mantra: I was standing by the boat, I helped everybody into the boat that was there, as the boat was being lowered away, I got in.

That does not answer the question, said Edwards. You had been taking a responsible part, according to the evidence and according to your own admission, in directing the filling of the boats? Ismay disagreed; he had not been taking a ‘responsible part’, he had simply been helping to put the women and children into the boats as they came forward. Edwards sighed. I am afraid, he said, we are a little at cross-purposes. Is it not the fact that you were calling out ‘Women and children first’, and helping them in? Yes, Ismay conceded, itis. Then, reasoned Edwards, is it not the fact that you were giving directions as to women and children getting in? I was, Ismay said, helping the women and children in. Please, demanded Edwards, answer my question. Is it not the fact that you were giving directions in helping them? I was calling, Ismay explained, for the women and children to come in. Calling for the women and children and then helping them in was not the same thing, Ismay suggested, as giving directions. What I am putting to you, said Edwards, is this: that if you could take an active part at that stage, why did you not continue the active part and give instruction, or go yourself to other decks, or round the other side of that deck, to see if there were other people who might find a place in your boat? I presumed, said Ismay, that there were people down below who were sending the people up. But, Edwards drove in his rapier, you knew there were hundreds who had not come up… That is your answer, that you presumed that there were people down below sending them up? Yes. And does it follow from that that you presumed that everybody was coming up who wanted to come up? I knew, Ismay finally admitted, that everybody could not be up. There was a silence. Then, Edwards continued slowly, I do not quite see the point of the answer? Everybody, Ismay snapped, that was on the deck got into that boat.

Lord Mersey then intervened.

‘Your point, Mr Edwards, as I understand is this: that, having regard to his position, it was his duty to remain upon that ship until she went to the bottom. That is your point?’

‘Frankly,’ said Edwards, ‘that is so; I do not flinch from it a little bit.’ There were no more passengers to get into that boat, Ismay then repeated for the umpteenth time; the boat was actually being lowered away.

The next day, in anticipation of Ismay’s reappearance at the stand, the Drill Hall was filled to its capacity. ‘Fashionably dressed dames’, the Daily Sketch reported, ‘levelled lorgnettes and opera glasses,’ through which they saw ‘a quietly dressed and rather youthful man of unassuming mien step up to take the oath’. But anyone looking for a thrill was too late: they had missed the main event and the concluding session of Ismay’s part in the inquiry, which was dominated by the safe questioning of White Star’s own lawyer, Sir Robert Finlay, stayed firmly on technical lines. Only once did Ismay’s ‘quiet, stolid’ voice, the Telegraph reported, verge on the ‘dramatic’, and this was when he was again asked about the circumstances under which he left the Titanic. Where were the other passengers? I can only assume, he said, that the passengers had gone to the after part of the ship. He was no longer leaving behind him an empty ship; Ismay’s story was filling up.

At the back of the hall, amongst the myriad faces gazing at the witness stand, was a most discreet and understanding man. In his dramatic illustration of Ismay’s interrogation, ‘J. Bruce Ismay Before the British Titanic Inquiry’, which took up a double-page spread of the popular illustrated news journal, The Sphere, Fortunino Matania sees him as no one has seen him before. Ismay is an outcast marooned on an island, cut off from the rest of mankind by a sea of facts. He is a figure whose very simplicity complicates matters. The Drill Hall is a forest of shining pates, white collars and frock coats — all seen from the back — conferring, scribbling, and straining to hear. This is Conrad’s British Board of Trade, taking ‘its dear old bald head’ out for a moment from under its wing. The room is stuffed with words, talk crossing over more talk like radio waves, and the balconies overflow with feathered hats and craning necks. On ground level, in the centre of the first bench, Sir Rufus Isaacs fires his questions at the diminutive figure who is positioned far away on the stand with his back to the model of his now dead ship, one hand in his pocket, the fingers of his other hand touching the table. The only person to be represented in full length, Ismay advances straight at you, his feet treading lightly on the ground. Two weeks ago, he was indistinguishable from these featureless men; he belonged to the same realm of boardrooms and rapidly ascending power. Now he has the look of a man who has been to the edge of the world and back. To Matania, Ismay is an enigma, locked so tightly within that he seems like a missing person. He has massive presence and no presence at all, he is both the smallest and the largest man in the room, and we see him as clearly or as unclearly as we see ourselves. ‘At sea, you know,’ Marlow explains in Chance in words which could have been written to accompany Matania’s image, ‘there is no gallery. You hear no tormenting echoes of your own littleness there.’

The inquiry, Ismay told Mrs Thayer, had been ‘the most trying ordeal to go through. They had me on the stand for seven hours and I was not in a fit condition either mentally or physically to give evidence.’ His appearance was followed by that of his friend and business partner, Harold Sanderson, and later by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Arctic explorer. Asked about speed, Shackleton replied that the case of the Titanic opened up the ‘very wide question of relationship between owners and captains’. Captains, Shackleton believed, act ‘under the instructions of their owners… when the owner is on board, you go’.

The proceedings dragged out until the end of the month, after which counsel considered their findings. During a speech which lasted three days — longer than any of Marlow’s monologues — Rufus Isaacs concluded that ‘We are left, I must say, in some difficulty in understanding what actually took place between Mr Ismay and Captain Smith.’ Despite the acumen and ferocity of his interrogation and the impact in the courtroom of Scanlan’s term ‘super captain’, Isaacs did not ‘think that there is any evidence that Mr Ismay interfered. The evidence that we have got all tends the other way.’ It was as though the Solicitor-General had heard nothing of the proceedings at all. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘as your lordship has pointed out, and it must be pretty obvious, the showing of the telegram to Mr Ismay was not such an act as would have been performed by the Captain to an ordinary passenger.’ Ismay was rather, as the Telegraph put it, a ‘super passenger’. Sir Robert Finlay then referred to a suggestion made during the proceedings that when Ismay read the Marconigram from the Baltic he ‘ought to have said to the Captain to “Go Slow”’. ‘Sometimes,’ Finlay sorrowfully concluded, ‘it seems Ismay was to blame for interfering and at others to blame for not interfering.’ 7

The commission’s report was presented on 30 July. It was less florid than the narrative produced by Senator Smith, more British in its restraint. Their verdict was, Ismay told Mrs Thayer, along the lines he expected and no doubt others expected it too, but for many people Mersey’s concluding remarks would come as a surprise. The British inquiry into the wreck of the Titanic decided that no one was responsible for the death of 1,500 people. There was some tut-tutting about more lifeboats clearly being needed, which in future should be manned by seamen rather than passengers, but otherwise the wreck was the result of excessive speed and extraordinary climatic circumstances. Lightoller’s rhetoric had won the day. If Captain Smith had indeed — and it was, Lord Mersey insisted, ‘pure surmise’ — questioned Ismay on the issue of navigation, he was given a rap around the knuckles, for ‘no one can suppose for a moment that the Captain did not know quite well that the whole responsibility of the navigation of the ship was upon him and that he had no business to take orders from anybody else’. As for Ismay, it was agreed that his status on the ship was ‘in a category all its own’ but that his ‘very presence… had an effect on the navigation… even though he never said a single word’. Here the British inquiry endorsed, indeed took its script from, the US Senate inquiry. As for the question of whether Ismay had performed his ‘moral duty’ — if, as Mersey put it, the ‘discharge of the moral duty of Mr Ismay was relevant’ — he was cleared of blame. ‘Mr Ismay,’ said Lord Mersey, ‘after rendering assistance to many passengers, found “C” collapsible, the last boat on the starboard side, actually being lowered. No other people were there at the time. There was room for him and he jumped in. Had he not jumped in he would merely have added one more life, namely, his own, to the number of those lost.’