Book Review: How To Survive The Titanic, Or, The Sinking Of J. Bruce Ismay

Ismay as the owner of the Titanic travelled on its maiden voyage and acquired instant notoriety for jumping onto one of the last lifeboats.

I started reading this for personal interest. My maternal great grandfather was a ship's captain in Liverpool in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was shipwrecked many times, as was common then. It is included because of its relevance as an exploration of more everyday wrongdoing – an 'enormous mistake' made in a moment of extreme stress. Contemplating this brings us back to ourselves, and our clients, it may be hard to imagine being Fred West but we can easily imagine being Ismay.

Wilson gives us a thoughtful probing of both Ismay's personality and the difficulties of living on after you've let yourself down terribly in the eyes and those of others. His jump was not an illegal act nor wicked (in my view) but a betrayal of two codes of honour – that women and children should be saved first and the owner/captain should be the last to quit, going down with the ship if necessary. It was a case of what Midgley describes as the 'deep, pervasive discrepancy between human ideals and human conduct' (Midgley, p 73).

A somewhat 'kangaroo court' was held immediately afterwards in the US and another more measured (but probably biased) one later in the UK. People were mesmerised by the hubris and hyperbole about Titanic being 'unsinkable', they believed Titanic was itself a lifeboat so it became a huge media story.

Witnesses' narratives of events were muddled and contradictory. Confusion was hardly surprising given the shock, chaos and trauma of the sinking. Wilson lists the 'factual' causes of confusion – we all know there were insufficient lifeboats but may not have known the Marconi room, where several iceberg warnings were received, was owned by Marconi Company whose staff were not under the command of the captain hence messages

were not automatically relayed to the bridge. Plus the Captain didn't trust this newfangled technology preferring instead to rely on his experience. The star witness was an uncommunicative Ismay who seemed to be trying neither to incriminate nor justify himself. The public and the press wanted a villain to blame and Ismay was the perfect choice.

The Titanic sank in April 1912 when Ismay was 49. He 'carried on living, keeping out of the way' (p 261) according to his granddaughters who described him as 'emotionally inhibited…inapt for normal family and social life… a corpse' (pp 262 & 268). He had always been a loner and became more so after the sinking although he continued working in various directorships, set up a pension fund for maritime widows and gave generously to charity. He lived on unforgiven for 25 years.

Wilson suggests no one survived really. Many people behaved at least as 'badly' as Ismay and some much worse: women in half empty lifeboats who refused to return to save drowning men, men who dressed as women, millionaires Mr & Mrs Duff Gordon accused of bribing the crew to not allow anyone else in their lifeboat capable of holding 70 people (Ismay took the place of just one person). Wilson concludes he was 'an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances, who behaved in a way which only confirmed his ordinariness. Ismay is the Figure we all fear we might be. He is one of us' (p 282).