Frances Wilson - How to Survive the Titanic

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The Marconi operators, ‘joked’ as they sent out the distress signal CQD: ‘The humour of the situation appealed to me’, Harold Bride recalled, ‘and I cut in with a little remark that made us all laugh, including the Captain. “Send SOS, it’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”’

Artist’s impression drawn for the Sphere , April 1912. The collision occurred at 11.40 p.m.; the ship’s speed was 22 knots.

Artist’s impression drawn for the Sphere , April 1912. The sound, one woman recalled, was like the scraping of a nail along metal; to another it felt as though the ship ‘had been seized by a giant hand and shaken once, twice, then stopped dead in its course’.

Artist’s impression drawn for the Sphere , April 1912. It took ten seconds for the iceberg to tear a 300-foot gash along the Titanic ’s starboard side, slicing open four compartments.

There were several versions of Captain Smith’s final moments, in one of which he exhorts the passengers to ‘Be British’.

Second Officer Lightoller on the bridge of the Titanic .

Illustration by Fortunio Matania of the Titanic ’s last moments, with annotations taken from eye-witness accounts. The Titanic went down two hours and forty minutes after she hit the iceberg — the same length of time as a performance in the theatre. ‘I did not wish to see her go down’, Ismay told the US inquiry, ‘I am glad I did not.’

Artist’s impression drawn for the Sphere , April 1912. In Lawrence Beesley’s account of being lowered from the Titanic in a lifeboat, he asks his readers to measure seventy-five feet of a tall building and then look down.

Lifeboat thought to be Collapsible C. A Titanic stewardess recalled Ismay ‘sitting on his haunches on the stern of the boat that was cleared by the Carpathia … He sat there like a statue, blue with cold, and neither said a word nor looked at us. He was nearly dead when taken on board, for he was wearing only his nightclothes and an overcoat.’

Eighteen people, including Second Officer Lightoller and Jack Th ayer, survived balancing atop this upturned lifeboat.

Marconigram sent by Captain Rostron of the Carpathia to Captain Haddock of the Olympic on the morning the Titanic survivors were rescued.

Rostron had been Captain of the Carpathia for three months when he rescued the Titanic survivors. It had been ‘absolutely providential’, he said, that the modest Cunarder picked up the mighty White Star Liner’s distress call.

The deck of the Carpathia . The Carpathia ’s female passengers formed a relief committee to provide clothing for those Titanic survivors who had arrived in their dressing gowns, and ship’s blankets were cut up to make warm coats for the children. One survivor later said that on the Carpathia , ‘I learned a great deal of the fundamentals I have built a happy life on, such as faith, hope, and charity.’

When the Carpathia arrived at 4.30 a.m, expecting to find a damaged ship, there was nothing to see but boxes and coats and what looked like oil on the water.

On 19 April, the morning after the Carpathia had landed in New York, the US Senate Inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic opened at the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria. Ismay, seated to the right at the top of the table, surrounded, was the first witness. Headed by Senator William Alden Smith, the Inquiry produced the official version of the story of the Titanic , a narrative which would unfold over eighteen days, fill 1,100 pages of testimony, and destroy the reputation of J. Bruce Ismay.

Hounded and vilified in America, the British Press, indignant at his treatment across the pond, gave Ismay a warm welcome on his return. Florence can be seen in the two left-hand pictures; Lightoller, in a bowler hat, is in the top right photograph.

Letter to Ismay from Lucille Carter, whose husband William E. Carter also jumped into Collapsible C but whose survival was of no interest to the press or inquiries. Mrs Carter would later divorce him on the grounds that he had abandoned her on the Titanic .

Signed photograph of Marian Thayer, with whom Ismay had fallen in love on the Titanic : ‘I often think of where our friendship would have taken us if that awful disaster had not taken place’, he would write to her the following year.

In Fortunio Matania’s illustration of the British Inquiry Ismay has massive presence and no presence at all, he is both the smallest and the largest man in the room. In contrast to the crowded table in the Waldorf-Astoria, the British Inquiry was grey and formal. The accoustics were so bad that the assessors had to cup their hands to their ears to hear what Ismay said.

Bruce and Florence outside their house in Costelloe, Connemara, where Ismay was believed to be ‘living among the missing’.

Ismay’s garden at Costelloe was designed by Gertrude Jekyll. ‘It is awfully wild and away from everybody,’ Ismay wrote to Mrs Thayer. ‘I will enjoy the place.’ His last summer in Ireland was in 1936.

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