Abandon ship!

“Fifteen hundred people died,” she said at Bath Lit Fest in conversation with Christopher Cook. “And those who didn’t die lost everything.” Wilson’s book tells the story of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner who jumped into a lifeboat with women and children on that fateful night of 14 April 1912 and rowed to safety. Accused of cowardice in a spooky twist exactly a century before the similar abandoning of ship by the Costa Concordia’s captain Francesco Schettino, Ismay’s split-second decision caused him a lifetime of press hate and his reputation was never revoked. 

 

Wilson called Ismay a “reluctant hero” – but on the surface his actions that night were far from heroic. Perhaps his biggest mistake was to show a Marconigram (wireless message) the captain had received warning of icebergs up ahead to a married woman - Mrs Marian Thayer – with whom he was reportedly in love, hours before the collision. Wilson said he was doing it to impress – the Marconigram being a new-fangled invention – and then pushed it back into his pocket and forgot all about it. Why – Ismay declared in his defence in the enquiry – would the captain give an ordinary passenger a message when that person didn’t understand latitude or longitude? He insisted in the enquiry that he had "every right to leave the Titanic because he was not a member of the crew".

 

Wilson described Ismay as a “pathologically inarticulate” man, and blamed his father – Thomas Ismay, the founder of White Star Line – for the heir’s social discrepancies. “He was the Edwardian son of a Victorian patriarch. He was single-handedly made and destroyed by his father.” Ismay’s father was a self-made man from a working class background in Cumberland, who made his fortune in shipping in his mid-twenties. He was “tyrannical”, and ran his home as he would his company, determined that White Star Line would be his dysnasty. 

 

The reason Ismay left that ship, Wilson believes, was “to do with his relationship with his father.” He never quite fit in anywhere or felt he belonged to the environment of rich men who smoked and gambled with confidence. Ismay was a Liverpool man, who went to Elstree and Harrow on his father’s newly made fortune. Wilson said he “didn’t like being a kid of new money taught with old money. He was bulled, ridiculed, and was in neither one place nor the other.” When Cook asked her if Ismay was a victim of society, Wilson replied firmly: “absolutely. He was feeling his way into the new age, and didn’t know how to do it.” 

 

Determined to see this inarticulate man as a heartless coward, Wilson suggested that the main reason he saved himself was because “he was a man newly in love” with Mrs Thayer. He attempted to continue their correspondence after the disaster, and misread her communication as love letters – something she resolutely denied in the American enquiry. 

 

Wilson said that Ismay “never spoke about the Titanic again”. She said she contacted his living grandchildren when writing the book, who “had no idea” who their grandfather was. He “didn’t manage to redeem himself at all,” she said, living out the second half of his life uneventfully, contrary to the press’s reportage that he was a cocaine addict and a cantankerous shadow of a man. 

 

“It would have been much worse for a man of Ismay’s character to carry the story for the rest of his life,” Wilson finished. “He would rather have been a coward.”

 

 

How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay is out now, published by Bloomsbury.