What would you have done? The ship is sinking. There’s a place in the last lifeboat, which has begun to be lowered. To remain on deck means certain death. Christ, had I been there, faced with the choice, without hesitation I’d have chucked a few extra women and babies into the drink, to ensure myself plenty of room. But then, I’d never have been, as J Bruce Ismay was, chairman and managing director of White Star Line, owner of RMS Titanic. By the unspoken rules of chivalry, Ismay was meant to have saluted smartly and stoically gone beneath the icy waves along with his doomed vessel.
In the wake of the disaster, the press labelled Ismay the “coward of the Titanic”, and the many actors who have portrayed him – Ian Holm (in the TV film SOS Titanic, 1979), Roger Rees (in the 1996 Titanic miniseries), Jonathan Hyde (in the 1997 blockbuster) and James Wilby (in yet another miniseries, from 2012) – have fixed him in the popular imagination as a worm and panto villain. Clifford Ismay, a relative I surmise, is therefore brave, or possibly foolhardy, in attempting to rehabilitate his kinsman. Nevertheless, the conclusion is duly reached: calling Bruce Ismay a cowardy custard “does not stand up to scrutiny”.
Before we reach such an assertion, our author pads out his story by going back to the Ismays of Cumberland, a family of Old Norse stock, grocers, flour dealers and timber merchants. In 1867, Thomas Ismay founded a shipbroking business in Liverpool. His iron vessels worked the North Atlantic trade routes, the big White Star liners carrying both passengers and large cargoes.
A plutocrat in no time, Thomas had his portrait painted by Millais, and was offered (but declined) a baronetcy by Queen Victoria. He endowed Liverpool University and set up pension funds for his sailors. He paid for hospitals and for stained glass windows in Wirral churches, which “can be seen today”. Thomas took holidays in Windermere, which, Clifford usefully reminds us, “is located on the southern edge of the English Lake District”. He and his wife Margaret were “blessed with five daughters and four sons”, and one of the blessings was Joseph Bruce Ismay, born in 1862. Thomas croaked of gall bladder and liver disease in 1899, aged 62.
Ismay, therefore, was handed everything on a silver platter – a big thriving business, a place in Victorian and Edwardian society. He doesn’t sound the nicest of chaps, “being taciturn and abrupt” in company. “Those who did not know him well,” writes Clifford, doing his best to be even-handed, “found him to be arrogant and impatient”, and those who did found him worse – “many of his staff felt threatened by him”. Clifford says this was because Ismay was at pains to hide his “shy sensitivity.”
