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How to Survive the Titanic: Or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay
A brilliantly original and gripping new look at the sinking of the Titanic through the prism of the life and lost honor of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner
Books have been written and films have been made, we have raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, and one thousand men, lighting their last cigarettes, prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner and inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety.
Accused of cowardice and of dictating the Titanic’s excessive speed, Ismay became, according to one headline, “The Most Talked-of Man in the World.” The first victim of a press hate campaign, he never recovered from the damage to his reputation, and while the other survivors pieced together their accounts of the night, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again.
In the Titanic’s mail room was a manuscript by that great narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, the story of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honor and lives on under the strain of intolerable guilt. But it was Conrad’s great novel Lord Jim, in which a sailor abandons a sinking ship, leaving behind hundreds of passengers in his charge, that uncannily predicted Ismay’s fate. Conrad, the only major novelist to write about the Titanic, knew more than anyone what ships do to men, and it is with the help of his wisdom that Wilson unravels the reasons behind Ismay’s jump and the afterlives of his actions.
Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay to the beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage, Frances Wilson explores Ismay’s desperate need to tell his story, to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living with the consciousness of lost honor. For those who survived the Titanic, the world was never the same. But as Wilson superbly demonstrates, we all have our own Titanics, and we all need to find ways of surviving them.
387 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2011
61 people are currently reading
1413 people want to read
About the author
Frances Wilson
50 books78 followersFrances Wilson was educated at Oxford University and lectured on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature for fifteen years before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She reviews widely in the British press and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her time between London and Normandy.
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April 24, 2022
“Chief Officer Wilde was at the starboard collapsible boat in which Mr. Ismay went away, and…he told Mr. Ismay, ‘There are no more women on board the ship.’ Wilde was a pretty big, powerful chap, and he was a man that would not argue very long. Mr. Ismay was right there. Naturally he was there close to the boat, because he was working at the boats and he had been working at the collapsible boat, and that is why he was there, and Mr. Wilde, who was near him, simply bundled him into the boat…”
- Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller, testimony before the United States Senate Inquiry into the Sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, April 24, 1912
There’s a book about the Titanic that you’ve never read. It’s called MGY (after Titanic’s wireless call sign) and weighs in at 620 Microsoft Word ’95 pages. It was written in a wood-paneled basement from 1996 to 1999. It was never edited, spell-checked or proofed. It was printed on a rickety printer, using two reams of paper and an extra ink cartridge. Each page was inserted into a clear plastic protector, and placed in a massive teal binder, so that it resembles the safety protocols of a nuclear reactor. This binder is the only known copy of MGY in the world. The digital version was once placed on a set of hard disks, which have long since disappeared; the original computer on which it was written has also been discarded.
The author is my sixteen-through-eighteen year-old self.
I trace my obsession with Titanic to a 1986 National Geographic special that followed Robert Ballard’s expedition to the sunken wreck. That obsession expanded each year, until I finally had to act.
I poured all the collective knowledge I’d collected from books, articles, movies, documentaries, and my parents’ AOL internet connection into this book. MGY is a novel, but the novelistic elements serve only as an excessively shoddy framework into which I stuffed Titanic facts and figures. Unless you’re a prodigy, good writing comes from a lot of reading, and I hadn’t read enough yet to understand even the most basic concepts of characterization, storytelling, or narrative momentum. The dialogue is cringe inducing; there are long, pedagogic monologues; and despite the fact that there are two (two!!) love triangles occurring simultaneously, there is no sex. (There is no sex because I hadn’t the experience to write a credible sex scene. This is known to occur when you spend high school working on a Titanic novel).
When I finished MGY, James Cameron’s Titanic had already come and gone, and I was exhausted with the subject. I became like John Laroche in Adaptation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y410SQ.... I was done with the Titanic. I renounced it.
Eleven years later, I was poking around Barnes & Noble trying to find a general history of World War I when I stumbled across Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic. Its unique angle – the Titanic as seen through the prism of its most infamous survivor, White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay – caught my attention. So too did the fact that Titanic scholarship has advanced in the last decade, leaving me with gaping knowledge-gaps that I wanted to fill.
I’m glad I did.
How to Survive the Titanic is a combination of history, biography, and literary criticism. It begins on the plunging decks of the famous ocean liner, when Ismay, the man who essentially built Titanic, took a spot onboard Collapsible C and was lowered to safety (Titanic had sixteen regular sized lifeboats and four collapsible boats, which had wooden keels and canvas sides). Titanic’s survivors (between 705-713 out of 2200) were picked up by the Cunard Line’s Carpathia the next morning. When Carpathia sailed into New York, an American senatorial inquiry awaited, thus beginning the long pillory of J. Bruce Ismay, the rich first-class man who survived, while so many others were consigned to the sea.
The sinking of the Titanic is one of those events that create a passionate following. People who love the Titanic really love the Titanic, to the point where therapeutic intervention seems warranted. I count myself among that community, and I have an expectation that any writer who tackles this subject knows the story of every rivet. In other words, the Titanic isn’t something you can simply learn, in order to write a book. Titanic is a subject that needs to be lived in for awhile.
Early on, I was given pause that perhaps Wilson, a literature professor, wasn’t entirely comfortable with the Titanic tale. For instance, she continuously refers to the Titanic’s fatal wound as a “three hundred foot long gash.” While there is a great deal of debate about where she struck the iceberg (i.e., whether it was her side that glanced off the berg, or whether her keel ran over an ice shelf), all sources agree that the damage inflicted on the Titanic amounted to popped rivets and burst plates, which caused flooding in her first six watertight compartments. The iceberg did not tear through Titanic like a knife, or open her hull like a sardine can (to use Wilson’s evocative but inaccurate phrase). At one point, Wilson also refers to William McMaster Murdoch as the Chief Officer, when in fact, Henry Wilde served in that capacity, while Murdoch was First Officer (at other points in the book, Wilson gives his correct rank).
Mainly, though, I felt I was in competent hands. Moreover, this is not the usual Titanic story, which dwells on the well-worn tropes of what amounted to a Victorian death pageant. Titanic enthusiasts know the legend as a Christian knows the Stations of the Cross: Benjamin Guggenheim “dressed in his best” in order to die as a gentlemen; John Jacob Astor placing a woman’s hat on Billy Carter’s head to get him on a lifeboat (“Now he is a girl and can go with his mother”); the band playing “Nearer My God to Thee”; Murdoch blowing his head off after steering the ship into the berg. The familiar notes of the Titanic have been played before, and while Wilson does not neglect them when necessary, she has a bit more up her sleeve.
Wilson’s focus is on the Titanic-event as seen from and felt by her creator. Part I of How to Survive the Titanic takes us through Ismay’s survival story (what Wilson terms his “jump”); includes an in-depth and empathetic portrait of his childhood (with a domineering, spiteful, and distant father); and concludes with a detailed look at Ismay’s humbling experience in front of the American Board of Inquiry. This part is very good, but fairly standard, treading as it does over beaten path.
Part II is far more interesting, even spellbinding. Wilson undertakes to deconstruct Ismay using techniques gleaned from literary criticism. In one long section, she discusses Ismay’s unrequited love for Titanic widow Marian Thayer. Thayer and Ismay carried on an extensive correspondence following the disaster. By analyzing their letters line by line, Wilson gives you an incredible feel for this man. At times, it’s so personal you’ll find yourself cringing (I shudder to think of the awkward and embarrassing Tweets Ismay would have sent). The portrait that emerges is horribly and expectedly complex. He is not the dark villain created by the contemporary American press; but neither is he wholly sympathetic. He is the embodiment of the truth that all tragedy is local (by the end of their pen-pal relationship, Ismay has convinced himself that he is the true victim of the sinking).
Even better is Wilson’s comparison of Ismay to two other men: one real, the other literary.
The first comparison, a study in contrasts, is to Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller. The impressively-named Lightoller (is there a better surname for a 19th century British sailor? I say no) was the most senior deck officer to survive the sinking. Unlike Ismay, who in Wilson’s words “jumped” from the ship, Lightoller never left the Titanic. To the contrary, in Lightoller’s own words, the ship left him. He was swept off the boat deck when Titanic’s bow dove beneath the ocean. He nearly drowned when he was sucked against an exhaust vent, and he spent the night on an overturned lifeboat. The consummate company man, Lightoller staunchly defended his employer for the rest of his life. At the American inquiry, he was disingenuous, brashly prevaricating, and an outright liar (and for all the good that did him; the White Star Line never gave him a captaincy).
The confident, square-jawed Lightoller stands in stark relief when posed next to Ismay, who floundered through his interrogations, couldn’t keep his story straight, and who rowed from the doomed liner without a blot of seawater on his pajamas. It is one of the odd coincidences of the night that Ismay only survived because he avoided Lightoller after Titanic’s collision. Lightoller was in charge of loading the portside lifeboats, and his rule was women and children only. On the starboard side, First Officer Murdoch operated under a self-imposed rule of women and children first. This distinction (appropriately noted by Wilson, who has a keen eye towards textual distinctions) allowed Ismay to take an open seat in Collapsible C, which was lowered from the starboard side. Had Ismay been on the port side, he would have been turned away by the rigid and inflexible Lightoller. (And doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about the total command breakdown on Titanic? So far, in my experience, no book or movie has properly explored Captain Edward J. Smith’s absolute psychological breakdown, which led to a disastrously flawed evacuation).
The other comparison Wilson makes is between Ismay and Jim, from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. In Lord Jim, the title character is a young officer on the Patna, a ship full of Mecca-bound pilgrims. The ship strikes something and the officers, fearing the Patna will founder, abandon ship, leaving the sleeping pilgrims onboard. Unfortunately for Jim (but good for the pilgrims!), the Patna does not sink, but is towed back to port by another vessel. The captain and other officers flee, leaving Jim to face a judicial court of inquiry alone.
Jim’s story is told by Conrad’s ubiquitous Captain Marlow. The essence of Lord Jim is Marlow’s ultimately futile search for an explanation into Jim’s actions.
I’ve read Lord Jim, so I appreciated Wilson’s ability to unpack and clarify a difficult novel. Still, reading Conrad isn’t necessary to enjoy this book. Wilson will tell you everything you need to know, without having to suffer Marlow’s endless soliloquizing. Indeed, she is at her giddy best as a textualist, drawing insight and inspiration from these competing sea stories. There is a wonderful moment, for example, where she imagines Marlow telling Ismay’s story:
How to Survive the Titanic is a wonder. I’ve read so many Titanic books that I’m left to marvel that anything about that ship can feel fresh (by now, Titanic studies are at the micro level, with maritime architects arguing about the stress levels of her expansion joints). At points, it feels a bit freewheeling, dizzyingly hopping from one topic to the next. Wilson will touch on a subject worth a longer look, but just as quickly leap to the next topic, her mind and prose racing. (For instance, I’m intrigued by the suffragette backlash that followed the sinking, which Wilson mentions in passing). Still, the end result in an incredible mosaic-like approach that splendidly reveals the soul of a man.
Back in high school, when I wrote my turgid, overlong, regrettably sex-free Titanic “novel” (for lack of a better word), I conceptualized J. Bruce Ismay in the cheapest, most obvious manner possible. I viewed him as the embodiment of hubris; in the final scene of my book (again, if you want to call it that), I placed Ismay on a fog-draped beach, staring out to sea, his thought-process mimicking (if not plagiarizing) George C. Scott at the end of Patton, ruing the fact that all glory is fleeting.
Wilson gets at something that feels far more like the truth: that we don’t always live up to our best selves. Or better yet, we don’t always live up to our expectations of our best selves.
Whenever a disaster strikes, I can’t help but to imagine how I’d react in a similar situation. Would I run screaming out of a burning building, trampling old women as I went? Or would I stop to pick up that baby? Would I follow the charge towards the cockpit of a hijacked plane? Or would I be frozen in my seat, unable to form a clear thought?
The reality is, we just don’t know. We like to think that we’d act with nobility, calmness and courage, but we can’t assume that. And unless we’ve undergone actual training to prepare ourselves for the unbelievable stressors in these situations, it’s likely to be a crapshoot whether we end up among the heroes or the goats.
When the Titanic went down, it created that (thankfully) rare moment when humans are put to the ultimate test. If Ismay hadn’t gotten into Collapsible C, he would’ve been one more famous name on a star-studded death-list. He did not take anyone else’s spot. His refusal to “jump” would not have saved a single life. Yet he saved himself while others drowned. The woefully inept Captain Smith and the tragic First Office Murdoch had the good taste to go down with their ship, while the pugnacious Lightoller fought the sea and won.
For whatever reason, Ismay could not do that.
There must have been a moment, with one foot on the slanting deck, the other foot in the lifeboat, where Ismay pondered his choice. He must have searched the depths of his soul, briefly, and then, without much more hesitation, but with a bit more knowledge about his inner self, he escaped.
And for the rest of his life he carried the knowledge with him: that for fraught seconds he had lived along that borderline between life and death; that he had been gifted with that rare glimpse into the abyss.
And that he had blinked.
- Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller, testimony before the United States Senate Inquiry into the Sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, April 24, 1912
There’s a book about the Titanic that you’ve never read. It’s called MGY (after Titanic’s wireless call sign) and weighs in at 620 Microsoft Word ’95 pages. It was written in a wood-paneled basement from 1996 to 1999. It was never edited, spell-checked or proofed. It was printed on a rickety printer, using two reams of paper and an extra ink cartridge. Each page was inserted into a clear plastic protector, and placed in a massive teal binder, so that it resembles the safety protocols of a nuclear reactor. This binder is the only known copy of MGY in the world. The digital version was once placed on a set of hard disks, which have long since disappeared; the original computer on which it was written has also been discarded.
The author is my sixteen-through-eighteen year-old self.
I trace my obsession with Titanic to a 1986 National Geographic special that followed Robert Ballard’s expedition to the sunken wreck. That obsession expanded each year, until I finally had to act.
I poured all the collective knowledge I’d collected from books, articles, movies, documentaries, and my parents’ AOL internet connection into this book. MGY is a novel, but the novelistic elements serve only as an excessively shoddy framework into which I stuffed Titanic facts and figures. Unless you’re a prodigy, good writing comes from a lot of reading, and I hadn’t read enough yet to understand even the most basic concepts of characterization, storytelling, or narrative momentum. The dialogue is cringe inducing; there are long, pedagogic monologues; and despite the fact that there are two (two!!) love triangles occurring simultaneously, there is no sex. (There is no sex because I hadn’t the experience to write a credible sex scene. This is known to occur when you spend high school working on a Titanic novel).
When I finished MGY, James Cameron’s Titanic had already come and gone, and I was exhausted with the subject. I became like John Laroche in Adaptation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y410SQ.... I was done with the Titanic. I renounced it.
Eleven years later, I was poking around Barnes & Noble trying to find a general history of World War I when I stumbled across Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic. Its unique angle – the Titanic as seen through the prism of its most infamous survivor, White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay – caught my attention. So too did the fact that Titanic scholarship has advanced in the last decade, leaving me with gaping knowledge-gaps that I wanted to fill.
I’m glad I did.
How to Survive the Titanic is a combination of history, biography, and literary criticism. It begins on the plunging decks of the famous ocean liner, when Ismay, the man who essentially built Titanic, took a spot onboard Collapsible C and was lowered to safety (Titanic had sixteen regular sized lifeboats and four collapsible boats, which had wooden keels and canvas sides). Titanic’s survivors (between 705-713 out of 2200) were picked up by the Cunard Line’s Carpathia the next morning. When Carpathia sailed into New York, an American senatorial inquiry awaited, thus beginning the long pillory of J. Bruce Ismay, the rich first-class man who survived, while so many others were consigned to the sea.
The sinking of the Titanic is one of those events that create a passionate following. People who love the Titanic really love the Titanic, to the point where therapeutic intervention seems warranted. I count myself among that community, and I have an expectation that any writer who tackles this subject knows the story of every rivet. In other words, the Titanic isn’t something you can simply learn, in order to write a book. Titanic is a subject that needs to be lived in for awhile.
Early on, I was given pause that perhaps Wilson, a literature professor, wasn’t entirely comfortable with the Titanic tale. For instance, she continuously refers to the Titanic’s fatal wound as a “three hundred foot long gash.” While there is a great deal of debate about where she struck the iceberg (i.e., whether it was her side that glanced off the berg, or whether her keel ran over an ice shelf), all sources agree that the damage inflicted on the Titanic amounted to popped rivets and burst plates, which caused flooding in her first six watertight compartments. The iceberg did not tear through Titanic like a knife, or open her hull like a sardine can (to use Wilson’s evocative but inaccurate phrase). At one point, Wilson also refers to William McMaster Murdoch as the Chief Officer, when in fact, Henry Wilde served in that capacity, while Murdoch was First Officer (at other points in the book, Wilson gives his correct rank).
Mainly, though, I felt I was in competent hands. Moreover, this is not the usual Titanic story, which dwells on the well-worn tropes of what amounted to a Victorian death pageant. Titanic enthusiasts know the legend as a Christian knows the Stations of the Cross: Benjamin Guggenheim “dressed in his best” in order to die as a gentlemen; John Jacob Astor placing a woman’s hat on Billy Carter’s head to get him on a lifeboat (“Now he is a girl and can go with his mother”); the band playing “Nearer My God to Thee”; Murdoch blowing his head off after steering the ship into the berg. The familiar notes of the Titanic have been played before, and while Wilson does not neglect them when necessary, she has a bit more up her sleeve.
Wilson’s focus is on the Titanic-event as seen from and felt by her creator. Part I of How to Survive the Titanic takes us through Ismay’s survival story (what Wilson terms his “jump”); includes an in-depth and empathetic portrait of his childhood (with a domineering, spiteful, and distant father); and concludes with a detailed look at Ismay’s humbling experience in front of the American Board of Inquiry. This part is very good, but fairly standard, treading as it does over beaten path.
Part II is far more interesting, even spellbinding. Wilson undertakes to deconstruct Ismay using techniques gleaned from literary criticism. In one long section, she discusses Ismay’s unrequited love for Titanic widow Marian Thayer. Thayer and Ismay carried on an extensive correspondence following the disaster. By analyzing their letters line by line, Wilson gives you an incredible feel for this man. At times, it’s so personal you’ll find yourself cringing (I shudder to think of the awkward and embarrassing Tweets Ismay would have sent). The portrait that emerges is horribly and expectedly complex. He is not the dark villain created by the contemporary American press; but neither is he wholly sympathetic. He is the embodiment of the truth that all tragedy is local (by the end of their pen-pal relationship, Ismay has convinced himself that he is the true victim of the sinking).
Even better is Wilson’s comparison of Ismay to two other men: one real, the other literary.
The first comparison, a study in contrasts, is to Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller. The impressively-named Lightoller (is there a better surname for a 19th century British sailor? I say no) was the most senior deck officer to survive the sinking. Unlike Ismay, who in Wilson’s words “jumped” from the ship, Lightoller never left the Titanic. To the contrary, in Lightoller’s own words, the ship left him. He was swept off the boat deck when Titanic’s bow dove beneath the ocean. He nearly drowned when he was sucked against an exhaust vent, and he spent the night on an overturned lifeboat. The consummate company man, Lightoller staunchly defended his employer for the rest of his life. At the American inquiry, he was disingenuous, brashly prevaricating, and an outright liar (and for all the good that did him; the White Star Line never gave him a captaincy).
The confident, square-jawed Lightoller stands in stark relief when posed next to Ismay, who floundered through his interrogations, couldn’t keep his story straight, and who rowed from the doomed liner without a blot of seawater on his pajamas. It is one of the odd coincidences of the night that Ismay only survived because he avoided Lightoller after Titanic’s collision. Lightoller was in charge of loading the portside lifeboats, and his rule was women and children only. On the starboard side, First Officer Murdoch operated under a self-imposed rule of women and children first. This distinction (appropriately noted by Wilson, who has a keen eye towards textual distinctions) allowed Ismay to take an open seat in Collapsible C, which was lowered from the starboard side. Had Ismay been on the port side, he would have been turned away by the rigid and inflexible Lightoller. (And doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about the total command breakdown on Titanic? So far, in my experience, no book or movie has properly explored Captain Edward J. Smith’s absolute psychological breakdown, which led to a disastrously flawed evacuation).
The other comparison Wilson makes is between Ismay and Jim, from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. In Lord Jim, the title character is a young officer on the Patna, a ship full of Mecca-bound pilgrims. The ship strikes something and the officers, fearing the Patna will founder, abandon ship, leaving the sleeping pilgrims onboard. Unfortunately for Jim (but good for the pilgrims!), the Patna does not sink, but is towed back to port by another vessel. The captain and other officers flee, leaving Jim to face a judicial court of inquiry alone.
Jim’s story is told by Conrad’s ubiquitous Captain Marlow. The essence of Lord Jim is Marlow’s ultimately futile search for an explanation into Jim’s actions.
I’ve read Lord Jim, so I appreciated Wilson’s ability to unpack and clarify a difficult novel. Still, reading Conrad isn’t necessary to enjoy this book. Wilson will tell you everything you need to know, without having to suffer Marlow’s endless soliloquizing. Indeed, she is at her giddy best as a textualist, drawing insight and inspiration from these competing sea stories. There is a wonderful moment, for example, where she imagines Marlow telling Ismay’s story:
Marlow would stretch out his legs after dinner on the deck of some barque, light his cigar, fill his glass, and tell Ismay’s tale to an audience of men who also follow the sea. First he would paint on his dark background the details so essential to the myth of the Titanic: there would be a ship the size of a cathedral, her monstrous birth in the Belfast shipyard; the decision to limit her lifeboats so as not to clutter the decks; her doomed beauty; the cheering, the pride, the jubilation as she slides down her cradle to taste the first drop of water; the ice warnings; the Captain driving her on and on, the moonless sky, the sudden appearance of the berg…the order to turn ‘hard-a-starboard’; the opening up of the ship like a tin of sardines; the torrential rush of water; the sleeping passengers; the dutiful crew; the Captain losing control; the band playing ragtime…the steerage passengers trapped down below; the half-filled boats dropping into the water; the men in their dinner jackets going down like gentlemen…the wives who chose to die with their husbands; the other wives in the lifeboats refusing to save their husbands…Marlow would linger over the many different languages spoken in the steerage compartments, the four Chinese sailors of Collapsible C, and he would save for his finest canvas the splendor of the Titanic’s final dive and the death-music that followed. But at the heart of his story would be Ismay’s jump and his subsequent battle with his moral identity, because for Marlow ‘the ship we serve is the moral symbol of our life’ and nothing can be said with certainty about a man until he has been ‘tested’ by his ship.
How to Survive the Titanic is a wonder. I’ve read so many Titanic books that I’m left to marvel that anything about that ship can feel fresh (by now, Titanic studies are at the micro level, with maritime architects arguing about the stress levels of her expansion joints). At points, it feels a bit freewheeling, dizzyingly hopping from one topic to the next. Wilson will touch on a subject worth a longer look, but just as quickly leap to the next topic, her mind and prose racing. (For instance, I’m intrigued by the suffragette backlash that followed the sinking, which Wilson mentions in passing). Still, the end result in an incredible mosaic-like approach that splendidly reveals the soul of a man.
Back in high school, when I wrote my turgid, overlong, regrettably sex-free Titanic “novel” (for lack of a better word), I conceptualized J. Bruce Ismay in the cheapest, most obvious manner possible. I viewed him as the embodiment of hubris; in the final scene of my book (again, if you want to call it that), I placed Ismay on a fog-draped beach, staring out to sea, his thought-process mimicking (if not plagiarizing) George C. Scott at the end of Patton, ruing the fact that all glory is fleeting.
Wilson gets at something that feels far more like the truth: that we don’t always live up to our best selves. Or better yet, we don’t always live up to our expectations of our best selves.
Whenever a disaster strikes, I can’t help but to imagine how I’d react in a similar situation. Would I run screaming out of a burning building, trampling old women as I went? Or would I stop to pick up that baby? Would I follow the charge towards the cockpit of a hijacked plane? Or would I be frozen in my seat, unable to form a clear thought?
The reality is, we just don’t know. We like to think that we’d act with nobility, calmness and courage, but we can’t assume that. And unless we’ve undergone actual training to prepare ourselves for the unbelievable stressors in these situations, it’s likely to be a crapshoot whether we end up among the heroes or the goats.
When the Titanic went down, it created that (thankfully) rare moment when humans are put to the ultimate test. If Ismay hadn’t gotten into Collapsible C, he would’ve been one more famous name on a star-studded death-list. He did not take anyone else’s spot. His refusal to “jump” would not have saved a single life. Yet he saved himself while others drowned. The woefully inept Captain Smith and the tragic First Office Murdoch had the good taste to go down with their ship, while the pugnacious Lightoller fought the sea and won.
For whatever reason, Ismay could not do that.
There must have been a moment, with one foot on the slanting deck, the other foot in the lifeboat, where Ismay pondered his choice. He must have searched the depths of his soul, briefly, and then, without much more hesitation, but with a bit more knowledge about his inner self, he escaped.
And for the rest of his life he carried the knowledge with him: that for fraught seconds he had lived along that borderline between life and death; that he had been gifted with that rare glimpse into the abyss.
And that he had blinked.
February 19, 2012
Firstly, if I wanted to read about Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim," I'd read the novel myself rather than someone else's book report on the subject. That Frances Wilson decided to pepper her book with detailed descriptions of the Conrad novel is to the book's detriment. I found myself skipping over those sections until I found content relating to Bruce Ismay or the Titanic story because I found the "Lord Jim" content irrelevant. True: Conrad's story is eerily similar to what Ismay did as the Titanic sank, but this coincidence does not warrant such attention.
Secondly, if Wilson disliked her subject as much as she disliked Ismay, why did she spend two hundred and fifty pages writing about him (and "Lord Jim")? Her dislike of him seeps, no, oozes off of every page. Several times she refers to his behavior as cowardly and insults him at every turn. While I don't think every author needs to like their subject, when one writes so negatively about them as Wilson does about Ismay, I tend to find that I trust the author less. Wilson presents nothing but a deeply biased portrait of what is really an interesting man, a victim of his time, and a victim of public opinion.
No matter what you may think about him, J. Bruce Ismay deserves better than this sinking catastrophe.
Secondly, if Wilson disliked her subject as much as she disliked Ismay, why did she spend two hundred and fifty pages writing about him (and "Lord Jim")? Her dislike of him seeps, no, oozes off of every page. Several times she refers to his behavior as cowardly and insults him at every turn. While I don't think every author needs to like their subject, when one writes so negatively about them as Wilson does about Ismay, I tend to find that I trust the author less. Wilson presents nothing but a deeply biased portrait of what is really an interesting man, a victim of his time, and a victim of public opinion.
No matter what you may think about him, J. Bruce Ismay deserves better than this sinking catastrophe.
March 12, 2015
J. Bruce Ismay was the managing director and chairman of the White Star Line, the company that built the Titanic. Ismay was on board and had seen a warning about ice sent from the Baltic, but went to bed after dinner apparently unconcerned. When the collision occurred at 11:40pm Ismay awoke and went to the bridge. One of a handful of people on board who realised the ship would sink he failed to warn his secretary, valet, dining companion or others of the danger. However, he did help load the lifeboats on the starboard side and was helping load Collapsible C, one of the four life rafts when he claimed, "I helped everybody into the boat that was there, and, as the boat was being lowered away, I got in." On this one action, Ismay was judged by the media as a coward. There were conflicting reports in the confusion - that Ismay was ordered to go, that he was virtually thrown into the boat by an officer, that he left on the first boat, that women already in the boat begged him to accompany them or that he was pressured to leave by members of the crew or the Captain. Ismay himself claimed he only took a seat when no women were there to take a place before him, but his actions were a defining moment in his life. William E. Carter, an American polo-playing millionaire, jumped into Collapsible C at the same time as Ismay and also claimed the deck was deserted and both men got into the lifeboat only after checking no women were there. However, Carter also claimed his wife and children had already left the ship and later, his wife Lucille, sued for divorce claiming he had deserted her and her children to their fate. Other passengers claimed there was pandemonium around the boat and that Ismay pushed his way on. So, was there a crowd, no people in sight, a panic or had Ismay made sure all women and children on his side of the ship had been put into the boats? The general confusion and panic meant that stories conflicted and people remembered things differently.
Ismay certainly did not seem to understand the general mood after the sinking of the Titanic and seemed disconected with people. On the Carpathia he hid in a cabin, refusing to see other passengers and not trying to help. He wanted to return to England as soon as he arrived in New York, but was virtually coerced into remaining for an inquiry led by Senator William Alden Smith. He was questioned on the stand for hours and the press made up their mind he was to blame. Ismay complained, saying "I did not suppose the question of my personal conduct was the subject of the inquiry." Neither Smith nor newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst gave him an easy time. The story of Ismay's survival was bigger than the story of the Titanic itself. The most serious accusation was that he had not wanted the Titanic to slow down in dangerous waters because he wanted to break the speed record to New York. The most common accusation was that he did not behave like a gentleman. Indeed, it was Ismay who was responsible for turning down suggestions for more lifeboats. Although, in his defence, the Titanic carried 10% more than the British Board of Trade's official requirements. A White Star Official said, "If a steamship had enough lifeboats for all there would be no room on deck for the passengers". Instead of lifeboats, there was luxury and the ship was seen as unsinkable - the whole ship was, in effect, a lifeboat.
This then is the story of the unlucky Mr Ismay, who survived one disaster to endure another sinking at the hands of the press and public. It is a fascinating story of his life, career and events leading up to the Titanic disaster and the events which happened afterwards. There is also a very interesting parallel with the story of "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad, which the author of the book discusses. The opening chapter, which deals with the night of the actual sinking is brilliantly written and the author is always fair and presents all the evidence and all sides of the arguments. Ismay was, in many ways, an unsympathetic character, but the author always tries to explain why he reacted the way he did to events. It is understandable that survivors, and the families of those lost, felt it was wrong that Ismay did not go down with the ship. In the event of such a disaster, it is impossible to judge someone, and you can't help but feel some sympathy with Mr Ismay when the public was looking for a scapegoat and found one in him. Excellent and very enjoyable book and very highly recommended. Anyone with any interest in the Titanic will enjoy this.
Ismay certainly did not seem to understand the general mood after the sinking of the Titanic and seemed disconected with people. On the Carpathia he hid in a cabin, refusing to see other passengers and not trying to help. He wanted to return to England as soon as he arrived in New York, but was virtually coerced into remaining for an inquiry led by Senator William Alden Smith. He was questioned on the stand for hours and the press made up their mind he was to blame. Ismay complained, saying "I did not suppose the question of my personal conduct was the subject of the inquiry." Neither Smith nor newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst gave him an easy time. The story of Ismay's survival was bigger than the story of the Titanic itself. The most serious accusation was that he had not wanted the Titanic to slow down in dangerous waters because he wanted to break the speed record to New York. The most common accusation was that he did not behave like a gentleman. Indeed, it was Ismay who was responsible for turning down suggestions for more lifeboats. Although, in his defence, the Titanic carried 10% more than the British Board of Trade's official requirements. A White Star Official said, "If a steamship had enough lifeboats for all there would be no room on deck for the passengers". Instead of lifeboats, there was luxury and the ship was seen as unsinkable - the whole ship was, in effect, a lifeboat.
This then is the story of the unlucky Mr Ismay, who survived one disaster to endure another sinking at the hands of the press and public. It is a fascinating story of his life, career and events leading up to the Titanic disaster and the events which happened afterwards. There is also a very interesting parallel with the story of "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad, which the author of the book discusses. The opening chapter, which deals with the night of the actual sinking is brilliantly written and the author is always fair and presents all the evidence and all sides of the arguments. Ismay was, in many ways, an unsympathetic character, but the author always tries to explain why he reacted the way he did to events. It is understandable that survivors, and the families of those lost, felt it was wrong that Ismay did not go down with the ship. In the event of such a disaster, it is impossible to judge someone, and you can't help but feel some sympathy with Mr Ismay when the public was looking for a scapegoat and found one in him. Excellent and very enjoyable book and very highly recommended. Anyone with any interest in the Titanic will enjoy this.
January 4, 2012
Part I of the book was an interesting read about the coming of age of J Bruce Ismay as well as the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic told through the lens of senate inquiries.
Part II so far seems as it should be a wholly separate book. It begins with a critical analysis and Cliff Notes version of Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad then becomes a biography of Conrad's life with cursory linkages to Ismay and the Titanic incident. It thus far appears to be wholly irrelevant to the supposed purpose of the book which I had been led to believe was the stigma placed on Ismay by the events of that fateful day. If it does not reveal its purpose as part of the subject, I will be greatly disappointed however much I appreciate the information. It would be like buying a book whose cover is for Stephen King but whose contents are Jane Austen.
Having read this far at page 200, I shall continue and finish this book. There are after all only about 80 more pages before I reach the appendices which contain the endnotes.
Part II so far seems as it should be a wholly separate book. It begins with a critical analysis and Cliff Notes version of Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad then becomes a biography of Conrad's life with cursory linkages to Ismay and the Titanic incident. It thus far appears to be wholly irrelevant to the supposed purpose of the book which I had been led to believe was the stigma placed on Ismay by the events of that fateful day. If it does not reveal its purpose as part of the subject, I will be greatly disappointed however much I appreciate the information. It would be like buying a book whose cover is for Stephen King but whose contents are Jane Austen.
Having read this far at page 200, I shall continue and finish this book. There are after all only about 80 more pages before I reach the appendices which contain the endnotes.
November 24, 2011
I gave this book 2.5/5 stars
Before I start this review I have to say that I'm a huge Titanic fan, if I ever see a book I don't have I buy it even if it's the same story over and over again.
I was so excited when I received this book to review it was about the Titanic and I was always interested to know what happened to Ismay after the sinking of the Titanic and the American and British Inquiries into the sinking.
Unfortunately I wasn't a big fan of this book at all, the parts about the Titanic and Ismay were good, but then for some unknown reason the author decided to compare Ismay's life to some story called 'Lord Jim', and then proceeded to it seemed, put the whole story into the book (which I wasn't even remotely interested in) then after as if that wasn't enough, then decided to give us the life story of this guy who wrote the 'Lord Jim' story and after that his bibliography, everytime it came to one of these bits (and they're spread out throughout the book, so it's not like you could skip a chapter or whatever) it got to the point where I was like not this again, it was too much and didn't really have anything to do with the story.
But there were some good bits, I learned Ismay grew up in a household with a Father who didn't like his kids, and subsequently Ismay treated his own children the same way, he had fallen out of love with his wife after the death of their oldest son and while on the Titanic, seemed to fall in love with one of the 1st class passengers Marian Thayer.
We read about how he contradicted himself quite a few times at the inquiries and after never ever spoke of the Titanic again.
It's hard to say whether Ismay deserved to be the scapegoat that he became after the sinking, he says he got into the lifeboat because there were no other women or children around, other's say he was forced into the lifeboat but we do know around 1,500 people died that night and he could I'm sure easily have found women and children somewhere on the ship to take his spot in the lifeboat.
But it's something we'll never know, only the people there that night knew the truth, it's something that will forever remain a mystery.
Before I start this review I have to say that I'm a huge Titanic fan, if I ever see a book I don't have I buy it even if it's the same story over and over again.
I was so excited when I received this book to review it was about the Titanic and I was always interested to know what happened to Ismay after the sinking of the Titanic and the American and British Inquiries into the sinking.
Unfortunately I wasn't a big fan of this book at all, the parts about the Titanic and Ismay were good, but then for some unknown reason the author decided to compare Ismay's life to some story called 'Lord Jim', and then proceeded to it seemed, put the whole story into the book (which I wasn't even remotely interested in) then after as if that wasn't enough, then decided to give us the life story of this guy who wrote the 'Lord Jim' story and after that his bibliography, everytime it came to one of these bits (and they're spread out throughout the book, so it's not like you could skip a chapter or whatever) it got to the point where I was like not this again, it was too much and didn't really have anything to do with the story.
But there were some good bits, I learned Ismay grew up in a household with a Father who didn't like his kids, and subsequently Ismay treated his own children the same way, he had fallen out of love with his wife after the death of their oldest son and while on the Titanic, seemed to fall in love with one of the 1st class passengers Marian Thayer.
We read about how he contradicted himself quite a few times at the inquiries and after never ever spoke of the Titanic again.
It's hard to say whether Ismay deserved to be the scapegoat that he became after the sinking, he says he got into the lifeboat because there were no other women or children around, other's say he was forced into the lifeboat but we do know around 1,500 people died that night and he could I'm sure easily have found women and children somewhere on the ship to take his spot in the lifeboat.
But it's something we'll never know, only the people there that night knew the truth, it's something that will forever remain a mystery.
July 21, 2018
Could've been better without the garbage relating to Lord Jim. Total waste of space and I skipped those sections completely, as they were not relevant no matter how the author tried to make them so.
August 5, 2012
Ever have a really bad day where, say, you call someone names at work and maybe back into someones car on the way out of the grocery parking lot and then, I don't know, cut a thumb off while cooking dinner? Well next time this happens you can take comfort in the thought that it could have been much worse. You could be J. Bruce Ismay, and spend your life known as the man who jumped on a lifeboat as the Titanic was sinking. While hundreds of women and children were still on board. Oh right, and he was a sort of owner of the boat.
See? It could totally be worse.
I lucked into this book at the Ontario Book Blogger gathering back in late October/early November. There were these gift bags filled with a random assortment of books, and by some act of luck I ended up with a bunch of YA and one historical biography. And not just any historical biography but a super interesting one about a topic I've always been fascinated by- the Titanic.
It's interesting to me, that in all the many, many, Titanic books nobody has ever before looked exclusively at the reviled Ismay. He's been turned into one of those caricatures of thoughtless, wealthy, self-serving villains on par with Marie Antoinette and the "let them eat cake!" myth, and this is the first time I've seen someone sit down and actually look at him and his actions in the light of facts instead of emotion.
It was a fascinating biography and expose´ on many levels. Without a doubt Ismay was a socially awkward man with many failings, but he was far from the only man to get on a lifeboat that night. Nor did he actually perpetrate any of the heinous actions that happened from various lifeboat members over the course of that night. Like Lord and Lady Duff Gordon who commandeered the first life boat for them and their staff plus some crew, leaving in a boat with room for a large number of other people, and who were rumoured to have paid the crew not to return to pick any of the survivors out of the freezing waters. There was in fact even another 1st class male passenger who got in Collapsible C with Ismay as it launched. So why was Ismay so maligned? Was it because of his sort of owner status as the heir to the White Star line (even though he'd already sold it to J.P. Morgan, and was just the acting president)?
Wilson digs into the mysteries surrounding the accident and the 25 unhappy years Ismay lived through after, in a thoroughly engrossing manner. Highlighting the actions of supposed heroes and villains alike in a way where the line becomes thoroughly blurry. By the end of the book it seems a miracle anyone survived or that any of the survivors were able to look each other in the eye afterwards. Anyone who's lived through a serious tornado warning, car crash or other disaster will immediately identify. It's impossible to know how you'll act in a crisis until you have to do it, and lets face it, most of us aren't up to the task. And although many heroes of that fateful night did a wonderful job, everyone did things that seemed in bad judgement when looked upon on dry land later.
My only complaint about the book, which was relatively small, was Wilson's use of a Joseph Conrad's story of Lord Jim. She goes to great lengths to compare the story to Ismay's life, and I mean great lengths as in she even dedicates a chapter to a small biography on Conrad, but I never really got the point. The comparison seemed to be her hypothesis for the whole book, but somehow there never seemed to a be a punch line. It left me a bit mystified. Also, although I love Conrad's work (Heart of Darkness got me through a hospital visit while suffering through a kidney infection in my early 20's, 2 provinces away from any family members), his biography and the details of the Lord Jim story were very out of context for me, and thus kind of boring. I wanted stuff about Ismay, what did I care about a fictional character's moral plights?
Conrad comparisons aside, this was a fascinating read, definitely one to add to your list if your looking for a Titanic book that's not about the same old things.
See? It could totally be worse.
I lucked into this book at the Ontario Book Blogger gathering back in late October/early November. There were these gift bags filled with a random assortment of books, and by some act of luck I ended up with a bunch of YA and one historical biography. And not just any historical biography but a super interesting one about a topic I've always been fascinated by- the Titanic.
It's interesting to me, that in all the many, many, Titanic books nobody has ever before looked exclusively at the reviled Ismay. He's been turned into one of those caricatures of thoughtless, wealthy, self-serving villains on par with Marie Antoinette and the "let them eat cake!" myth, and this is the first time I've seen someone sit down and actually look at him and his actions in the light of facts instead of emotion.
It was a fascinating biography and expose´ on many levels. Without a doubt Ismay was a socially awkward man with many failings, but he was far from the only man to get on a lifeboat that night. Nor did he actually perpetrate any of the heinous actions that happened from various lifeboat members over the course of that night. Like Lord and Lady Duff Gordon who commandeered the first life boat for them and their staff plus some crew, leaving in a boat with room for a large number of other people, and who were rumoured to have paid the crew not to return to pick any of the survivors out of the freezing waters. There was in fact even another 1st class male passenger who got in Collapsible C with Ismay as it launched. So why was Ismay so maligned? Was it because of his sort of owner status as the heir to the White Star line (even though he'd already sold it to J.P. Morgan, and was just the acting president)?
Wilson digs into the mysteries surrounding the accident and the 25 unhappy years Ismay lived through after, in a thoroughly engrossing manner. Highlighting the actions of supposed heroes and villains alike in a way where the line becomes thoroughly blurry. By the end of the book it seems a miracle anyone survived or that any of the survivors were able to look each other in the eye afterwards. Anyone who's lived through a serious tornado warning, car crash or other disaster will immediately identify. It's impossible to know how you'll act in a crisis until you have to do it, and lets face it, most of us aren't up to the task. And although many heroes of that fateful night did a wonderful job, everyone did things that seemed in bad judgement when looked upon on dry land later.
My only complaint about the book, which was relatively small, was Wilson's use of a Joseph Conrad's story of Lord Jim. She goes to great lengths to compare the story to Ismay's life, and I mean great lengths as in she even dedicates a chapter to a small biography on Conrad, but I never really got the point. The comparison seemed to be her hypothesis for the whole book, but somehow there never seemed to a be a punch line. It left me a bit mystified. Also, although I love Conrad's work (Heart of Darkness got me through a hospital visit while suffering through a kidney infection in my early 20's, 2 provinces away from any family members), his biography and the details of the Lord Jim story were very out of context for me, and thus kind of boring. I wanted stuff about Ismay, what did I care about a fictional character's moral plights?
Conrad comparisons aside, this was a fascinating read, definitely one to add to your list if your looking for a Titanic book that's not about the same old things.
Want to read
October 10, 2011I will not be finishing this one. There was a time when I would have read every word and been fascinated by it. It is extremely well researched and fairly comprehensive in describing the Titanic and Bruce Ismay's life and fall.
Frances Wilson has gathered documents and interviews of survivors of the Titanic and those surrounding Ismay, the token White Line Shipping owner who hopped aboard a lifeboat while the Titanic was sinking. This is significant because he and Captain Smith, and Thomas Andrews were the top three who understood the perilous tragedy that was unfolding. Ismay knew how many lifeboats were available (he being the executive to only outfit the ship with enough boats for half of the passengers in lieu of more spacious accommodations for the first class passengers) and he knew that the lifeboats were not filled to capacity. He knew the boat would sink long before the regular passengers understood this fact. It was also a time of chivalry. Women and children were supposed to board the lifeboats.
Although Ismay is not the only man to survive the Titanic's demise, he rated somewhere between the captain of the ship (who went down with the ship) and a passenger, many of whom did not survive. Accounts differ and it is believed that not all passengers held boarding passes, over 700 people survived while over 1500 did not.
The subject fascinates me not only because the Titanic is simply a fascinating tragedy (I know, not cool that it is fascinating but it is) but also my grandfather was a passenger on its sister ship, The Olympic in the same time period and heading towards Australia (it took 3-6 months each way). So I did a lot of reading about the Titanic about 15 years ago. This book includes new information but it is compilation of many first hand reports, court documents and different perspectives. It reads much like a history book without telling the reader how to form an opinion.
Like I said, it is comprehensive, well organized and more information than I want at this point in time.
Frances Wilson has gathered documents and interviews of survivors of the Titanic and those surrounding Ismay, the token White Line Shipping owner who hopped aboard a lifeboat while the Titanic was sinking. This is significant because he and Captain Smith, and Thomas Andrews were the top three who understood the perilous tragedy that was unfolding. Ismay knew how many lifeboats were available (he being the executive to only outfit the ship with enough boats for half of the passengers in lieu of more spacious accommodations for the first class passengers) and he knew that the lifeboats were not filled to capacity. He knew the boat would sink long before the regular passengers understood this fact. It was also a time of chivalry. Women and children were supposed to board the lifeboats.
Although Ismay is not the only man to survive the Titanic's demise, he rated somewhere between the captain of the ship (who went down with the ship) and a passenger, many of whom did not survive. Accounts differ and it is believed that not all passengers held boarding passes, over 700 people survived while over 1500 did not.
The subject fascinates me not only because the Titanic is simply a fascinating tragedy (I know, not cool that it is fascinating but it is) but also my grandfather was a passenger on its sister ship, The Olympic in the same time period and heading towards Australia (it took 3-6 months each way). So I did a lot of reading about the Titanic about 15 years ago. This book includes new information but it is compilation of many first hand reports, court documents and different perspectives. It reads much like a history book without telling the reader how to form an opinion.
Like I said, it is comprehensive, well organized and more information than I want at this point in time.
August 11, 2023
Bruce Ismay, as CEO of White Star lines, and survivor of the Titanic was vilified in the press after the disaster. It is somewhat understandable. When questioned before Congress and the British, he contradicted himself, he obfuscated. While the ultimate responsibility belongs to the captain, does he bear any blame? It is hard to tell due to the above. Did his decisions have any bearing on the number of life boats? Did he order the captain to try to sail faster? He certainly was a less than sympathetic character and rightly so at times. When he boarded the Carpathia he demanded (and received) a private cabin and refused to come out until they arrived in the US. He did not see to it any of his traveling companions were safe during the sinking of the boat. He claims to have rowed the lifeboat but this is much disputed.
September 5, 2012
The “Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay” showed another side to the Titanic story that most people today probably never give much thought. This story is more about what is going on when the Carpathia arrives in New York and what transpires thereafter than just the sinking of the Titanic. Frances Wilson goes over the trial and story that ensues when the survivors return to New York. It is hard to tell what Ismay thinks about this trial because he only shared his thoughts in his letters to Mrs. Marian Thayer, a surviving and now widow from the Titanic that becomes his friend after meeting on the Titanic. The Titanic’s sinking was a big story in the world at that time, and this is a big part of t heTitanic story that is left out of James Cameron’s movie and documentary’s too. The trials in New York and later in England could be a movie unto themselves. I have never read a book about the Titanic before, so this was very interesting to me, but the book did not really go into full details about the sinking of the Titanic. If a reader wants to learn more about that part of the Titanic story then this would not be the book for them, but to someone that has read about the Titanic and would like to know more about the events after the sinking. When the survivors arrive in New York and how the world is reacting to the sinking, then this will be an interesting book.
I found Bruce Ismay’s conduct at first in this book; called cowardice by most people, disturbing and reprehensible. He supposedly jumped into an empty seat on the last lifeboat on the starboard side as it was being dropped into the ocean. No other people were there at the time on the starboard side, stated in the British inquiry. Later in the book I was changed by the author and by the story of Bruce Ismay as his life unraveled and could somehow put myself into his place. I found him discharged from moral duty, if it his testimony was true. I am still not sure about that. Lord Mersey summed up my thoughts best during the British inquiry about Bruce Ismay’s. Lord Mersey said, ‘discharge of the moral duty of Mr. Ismay was relevant’ – he was cleared of blame. ‘Mr.Ismay, 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.’ I am not sure though that this is true, no witnesses survived so the reader will never know the actual truth. The author, Frances Wilson, relates Bruce Ismay to maritime novelist Joseph Conrad’s character Jim in his novel Lord Jim. I was not familiar with Joseph Conrad’s books, so this part of Frances Wilson’s book “How To Survive The Titanic”was more difficult to read and keep up with in this book. I thought it relevant and fitting and I think it should be in this book, but it was the hardest part of this book for me to read. I liked the pictures Frances Wilson put in this book and I am glad she did. All books about history needs pictures; if there are any, to help see the characters better. I liked looking at these old pictures in this book.
In closing why I think this book is interesting is because we are all curious how people react to extraordinary situations in life. We all hope to do the courageous and exemplary thing, but what defines courage and honor in our behavior sometimes is not always well defined. In this story about J. Bruce Ismay we will never know the real story because most of the witnesses died on the sinking ship. Somehow the story of the Titanic is like the ‘Battle at the Little Bighorn,’we are kept pulled to these types of stories in life and the real life characters that play out the history in them. Frances Wilson said it best about J. Bruce Ismay, she wrote, “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.” I really enjoyed this book, and Ismay means more than just his actions after reading this book.
I found Bruce Ismay’s conduct at first in this book; called cowardice by most people, disturbing and reprehensible. He supposedly jumped into an empty seat on the last lifeboat on the starboard side as it was being dropped into the ocean. No other people were there at the time on the starboard side, stated in the British inquiry. Later in the book I was changed by the author and by the story of Bruce Ismay as his life unraveled and could somehow put myself into his place. I found him discharged from moral duty, if it his testimony was true. I am still not sure about that. Lord Mersey summed up my thoughts best during the British inquiry about Bruce Ismay’s. Lord Mersey said, ‘discharge of the moral duty of Mr. Ismay was relevant’ – he was cleared of blame. ‘Mr.Ismay, 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.’ I am not sure though that this is true, no witnesses survived so the reader will never know the actual truth. The author, Frances Wilson, relates Bruce Ismay to maritime novelist Joseph Conrad’s character Jim in his novel Lord Jim. I was not familiar with Joseph Conrad’s books, so this part of Frances Wilson’s book “How To Survive The Titanic”was more difficult to read and keep up with in this book. I thought it relevant and fitting and I think it should be in this book, but it was the hardest part of this book for me to read. I liked the pictures Frances Wilson put in this book and I am glad she did. All books about history needs pictures; if there are any, to help see the characters better. I liked looking at these old pictures in this book.
In closing why I think this book is interesting is because we are all curious how people react to extraordinary situations in life. We all hope to do the courageous and exemplary thing, but what defines courage and honor in our behavior sometimes is not always well defined. In this story about J. Bruce Ismay we will never know the real story because most of the witnesses died on the sinking ship. Somehow the story of the Titanic is like the ‘Battle at the Little Bighorn,’we are kept pulled to these types of stories in life and the real life characters that play out the history in them. Frances Wilson said it best about J. Bruce Ismay, she wrote, “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.” I really enjoyed this book, and Ismay means more than just his actions after reading this book.
July 16, 2023
Since the headline-making implosion of the Titan submersible last month while diving down to the world's most famous shipwreck, I've been indulging my intermittent but ever-present fascination with all things Titanic, a fascination that's endured since childhood. As part of this, I raided my bookshelves for titles picked up over the years which I had never got around to reading, one of which was Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic.
Essentially the story of the Titanic disaster and its aftermath through the lens of one of its most notorious players, J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line who infamously stepped onto one of the stricken ship's lifeboats as thousands aboard awaited their horrifying deaths, How to Survive the Titanic, or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay is an excellent book. For those with a Titanic itch to scratch, it satisfies immensely by approaching the well-covered subject from an angle often obscured. While never a straight biography of Ismay, Wilson's book delves into his youth, his conduct on the ship and during that fateful night, and – most interestingly – in how he processed the disaster in the years after.
It's a fascinating character study, even if Ismay himself remains frustratingly obtuse. Whereas criticism of the late Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate and pilot of the doomed Titan submersible, seems (on current information) to be a pretty cut-and-dry case of corporate hubris and negligence, Ismay's lot as history's villain – not least his cartoonish depiction in James Cameron's otherwise impressive 1997 blockbuster film Titanic – comes across in surprising shades of grey. Wilson delves into the sensationalist US inquiry, which brought Ismay – clearly suffering from what we would now call PTSD – and the Titanic crew in front of a Senate hearing before their clothes had even dried, and also into the more sober, almost anti-climactic British inquiry. Much of our enduring impression of Ismay as coward and villain is in no small part due to the hasty and self-aggrandising first draft of history composed by the Senator who chaired that initial American congressional circus.
Frances Wilson isn't putting Ismay on trial in her book; although she presents to us the information as she knows it, it isn't necessarily in an attempt to redeem or condemn him. On questions such as the famous incident of Ismay showing a passenger the ice warning from the Baltic that Captain Smith had given him, Wilson is circumspect and her impressions of this woven into and returned to throughout the narrative. (My own pet theory is that this event, considered a smoking gun by both the US and British inquiries, is in fact one of those rare occasions of smoke without fire. I suspect Ismay had previously been dismissive of Smith's worries about the dangers of an Atlantic crossing, and when Smith later received the Baltic's warning, he kept hold of it and handed it to Ismay as proof – a silent way for this deferential captain to win a minor professional dispute with his boss.)
Rather, Wilson seeks to understand Ismay, and this both works to the book's advantage and, for some readers, provides some unusual flaws. To its advantage, it means the book is judicious and lacking in sensationalism; we're encouraged to see Ismay the man – who among us, being completely honest, can say we would not step into that lifeboat? – rather than the Ismay in the dock. "He was an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances," Wilson concludes, "who behaved in a way which only confirmed his ordinariness" (pg. 282). In a story of grand tragedy and potent metaphor, we've always struggled to accept that Ismay was neither hero nor villain: he was just a human being.
Where this approach may bring flaws in How to Survive the Titanic is when, in order to bring us Ismay the man, Wilson delves into a great number of literary tangents. Wilson devotes herself, almost to the point of exhaustion, to a comparison between Ismay's plight and the nautical stories of Joseph Conrad, not least that of Lord Jim. Her rationale for this is sound:
"Ismay is less sympathetic than Jim, just as an evening spent with Hamlet at a hotel bar would be less engaging than an evening spent watching him perform his indecision on the stage… The distance afforded by art adds depth of vision; art increases our capacity for sympathy… It is only when we place Ismay's crude, monotonous, absolutely unfinished narrative next to that of Lord Jim that his form begins to thicken… [he takes] on an essential extra layer." (pp276-7)
And it works. The literary insights do bring out facets of Ismay's character and his decisions. We do gain more sympathy for him – or rather, empathy, for he is not often a sympathetic character. The flaw in the book, for some, will be that Wilson over-eggs this. At a number of points, Wilson abandons her Ismay content entirely for some English-lit-degree discussion of Conrad's writing – sometimes for pages on end. Sometimes this relates back to the Ismay story, but on others it leads to irrelevant tangents like "for Conrad the modernist, meaning is always carved out of language but words are also 'the great foes of reality'" (pg. 181). On such occasions, Wilson is more often a literary critic than a popular historian, and the reader's interest begins to wane. And though Conrad dominates, he is not the only writer invited to intrude. Wilson peppers her prose with quotes from Dickens, Coleridge, Bram Stoker, John Galsworthy, and many more. An attempt to link Ismay's responses to the US inquiry to Lewis Carroll's use of the word 'unimportant' in Alice in Wonderland is laboured and perplexing (pp122-3), and at one point Wilson is so lost in her weeds that she contextualises Conrad, her literary reference point, by referring to another literary reference point (The Wind in the Willows on page 190). It is, at best, peculiar; at worst, it is a deal-breaker for some Titanic buffs who would otherwise be interested in this book.
But, to use a literary reference that Wilson might appreciate, all's well that ends well, and How to Survive the Titanic does fulfil its remit of grappling with the obtuse and contradictory J. Bruce Ismay. Wilson writes well, sometimes very well, and while some relevant points of the story remain under-explored (Ismay's alleged affair with the fashion reporter Edith Russell, for one, or the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst's dislike for Ismay, which perhaps accounts for some of the press hostility), the book does well to provide a comprehensive accounting of Ismay's ill-fated Titanic odyssey and penance without exhausting the reader (some odd literary digressions aside). The tragedy of the Titan submersible has reminded us of the fascination that this topic still holds for us, but Wilson's book reminds us that the story of the Titanic, which announced the chaos that was to characterise the rest of the 20th century, did not need this unfortunate 21st-century epilogue. Tales like those of Ismay have always, and will always, hold our interest tightly.
Essentially the story of the Titanic disaster and its aftermath through the lens of one of its most notorious players, J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line who infamously stepped onto one of the stricken ship's lifeboats as thousands aboard awaited their horrifying deaths, How to Survive the Titanic, or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay is an excellent book. For those with a Titanic itch to scratch, it satisfies immensely by approaching the well-covered subject from an angle often obscured. While never a straight biography of Ismay, Wilson's book delves into his youth, his conduct on the ship and during that fateful night, and – most interestingly – in how he processed the disaster in the years after.
It's a fascinating character study, even if Ismay himself remains frustratingly obtuse. Whereas criticism of the late Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate and pilot of the doomed Titan submersible, seems (on current information) to be a pretty cut-and-dry case of corporate hubris and negligence, Ismay's lot as history's villain – not least his cartoonish depiction in James Cameron's otherwise impressive 1997 blockbuster film Titanic – comes across in surprising shades of grey. Wilson delves into the sensationalist US inquiry, which brought Ismay – clearly suffering from what we would now call PTSD – and the Titanic crew in front of a Senate hearing before their clothes had even dried, and also into the more sober, almost anti-climactic British inquiry. Much of our enduring impression of Ismay as coward and villain is in no small part due to the hasty and self-aggrandising first draft of history composed by the Senator who chaired that initial American congressional circus.
Frances Wilson isn't putting Ismay on trial in her book; although she presents to us the information as she knows it, it isn't necessarily in an attempt to redeem or condemn him. On questions such as the famous incident of Ismay showing a passenger the ice warning from the Baltic that Captain Smith had given him, Wilson is circumspect and her impressions of this woven into and returned to throughout the narrative. (My own pet theory is that this event, considered a smoking gun by both the US and British inquiries, is in fact one of those rare occasions of smoke without fire. I suspect Ismay had previously been dismissive of Smith's worries about the dangers of an Atlantic crossing, and when Smith later received the Baltic's warning, he kept hold of it and handed it to Ismay as proof – a silent way for this deferential captain to win a minor professional dispute with his boss.)
Rather, Wilson seeks to understand Ismay, and this both works to the book's advantage and, for some readers, provides some unusual flaws. To its advantage, it means the book is judicious and lacking in sensationalism; we're encouraged to see Ismay the man – who among us, being completely honest, can say we would not step into that lifeboat? – rather than the Ismay in the dock. "He was an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances," Wilson concludes, "who behaved in a way which only confirmed his ordinariness" (pg. 282). In a story of grand tragedy and potent metaphor, we've always struggled to accept that Ismay was neither hero nor villain: he was just a human being.
Where this approach may bring flaws in How to Survive the Titanic is when, in order to bring us Ismay the man, Wilson delves into a great number of literary tangents. Wilson devotes herself, almost to the point of exhaustion, to a comparison between Ismay's plight and the nautical stories of Joseph Conrad, not least that of Lord Jim. Her rationale for this is sound:
"Ismay is less sympathetic than Jim, just as an evening spent with Hamlet at a hotel bar would be less engaging than an evening spent watching him perform his indecision on the stage… The distance afforded by art adds depth of vision; art increases our capacity for sympathy… It is only when we place Ismay's crude, monotonous, absolutely unfinished narrative next to that of Lord Jim that his form begins to thicken… [he takes] on an essential extra layer." (pp276-7)
And it works. The literary insights do bring out facets of Ismay's character and his decisions. We do gain more sympathy for him – or rather, empathy, for he is not often a sympathetic character. The flaw in the book, for some, will be that Wilson over-eggs this. At a number of points, Wilson abandons her Ismay content entirely for some English-lit-degree discussion of Conrad's writing – sometimes for pages on end. Sometimes this relates back to the Ismay story, but on others it leads to irrelevant tangents like "for Conrad the modernist, meaning is always carved out of language but words are also 'the great foes of reality'" (pg. 181). On such occasions, Wilson is more often a literary critic than a popular historian, and the reader's interest begins to wane. And though Conrad dominates, he is not the only writer invited to intrude. Wilson peppers her prose with quotes from Dickens, Coleridge, Bram Stoker, John Galsworthy, and many more. An attempt to link Ismay's responses to the US inquiry to Lewis Carroll's use of the word 'unimportant' in Alice in Wonderland is laboured and perplexing (pp122-3), and at one point Wilson is so lost in her weeds that she contextualises Conrad, her literary reference point, by referring to another literary reference point (The Wind in the Willows on page 190). It is, at best, peculiar; at worst, it is a deal-breaker for some Titanic buffs who would otherwise be interested in this book.
But, to use a literary reference that Wilson might appreciate, all's well that ends well, and How to Survive the Titanic does fulfil its remit of grappling with the obtuse and contradictory J. Bruce Ismay. Wilson writes well, sometimes very well, and while some relevant points of the story remain under-explored (Ismay's alleged affair with the fashion reporter Edith Russell, for one, or the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst's dislike for Ismay, which perhaps accounts for some of the press hostility), the book does well to provide a comprehensive accounting of Ismay's ill-fated Titanic odyssey and penance without exhausting the reader (some odd literary digressions aside). The tragedy of the Titan submersible has reminded us of the fascination that this topic still holds for us, but Wilson's book reminds us that the story of the Titanic, which announced the chaos that was to characterise the rest of the 20th century, did not need this unfortunate 21st-century epilogue. Tales like those of Ismay have always, and will always, hold our interest tightly.
May 6, 2012
The trouble with this book is it has a distressingly tendency to (forgive me) go off course.
When the book focuses on Titanic and the owner J. Bruce Ismay, it is a fascinating new examination of the one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters, filled with eye witness statements, interesting facts about the ship and her passengers and crew, and the fall out of what happened after the ship went under.
However, I did not pick up a book about Titanic in order to read about the life and works of Joseph Conrad. Seriously, the book contains more about the life and works of Conrad than I ever cared to know. It felt like filler as the author babbled about Conrad’s dad’s life as a Polish communist (or something) and gave summaries of the plots of most of Conrad’s book. Urgh.
Read the book for the eye witnesses describing what it was /really/ like to be there, and skip all the Conrad stuff.
November 5, 2011
What destroyed this book for me were the constant references to Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim," which was about a sailor who abandoned his ship leaving hundreds of passengers behind. The author was comparing fiction with fact but it ruined what could have been a much better book. Not having known anything about J. Bruce Ismay, the owner of the Titanic, he was certainly not a lovable kind of guy. He was depressed, morose, untalkative, undemonstrative, had a horrible marriage (treated his wife as if she didn't exist), ignored his children (he got this from his father), etc. The author reiterates this information almost every time Ismay's name returns. Obviously, Frances Wilson did not have enough material and she needed filler.
April 27, 2022
They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
Include me in your lamentations.
-- Derek Mahon, "After the Titanic"
Frances Wilson brings to life the story of J. Bruce Ismay; perhaps the most misunderstood man in the 20th Century, and the most hated man of 1912. As a boy, Ismay suffered the embarrassment and aggression of his father who mentally and emotionally assaulted young Ismay, teaching him to manipulate and bend the wills of those who got in his way. Described by some businessmen as 'a monster', Thomas Ismay founded the White Star Line, a British shipping company, in 1845. J. Bruce Ismay inherited his father's business and became President of the company only when his father manipulated him and Bruce's father-in-law in a hack-hearted move to domineer over his son's marriage, which effectively ruined the marriage for Bruce's remaining years.
This partly explains Ismay's behavior on April 15, 1912. Owning the White Star Line and a fleet of ships, Ismay is aboard one of his vessels that early Spring morning on her maiden voyage - the Titanic. As the Titanic scrapes the infamous iceberg, causing a 300 foot gash in the side of the vessel like the opening of a sardine can, women and children are called first to board the lifeboats and escape the sinking "unsinkable" ship. But Ismay, the owner of the finest vessel in the world does something so catastrophic it will haunt him for the rest of his life. He jumps ship. Labeled a coward and persecuted everywhere he goes, he becomes the most hated man of 1912.
This first part of this biography was one of the best I've ever read. Frances Wilson's language is deeply and romantically poetic. "J. Bruce Ismay died on the night of 14–15 April 1912, and died again in his bedroom twenty-five years later. He was mired in the moment of his jump; his life was defined by a decision he made in an instant. Other survivors of the Titanic were able, in varying degrees, to pick themselves up and move on, but Ismay was not. His was now a posthumous existence." I fell in love with her genuine gift of storytelling and her love of words. However, halfway through, Wilson dramatically changes course with the second part, almost as if she is telling a disparated story from the first part.
Wilson starts the second part by comparing Ismay (who jumped the Titanic) with Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (who also jumped ship). The story then evolves into telling us the whole plot in painstaking detail of the novel as well as an entire biography of Joseph Conrad, until finally it returns to Ismay and somehow tries to reconcile Lord Jim, Conrad, and Ismay in a grand ending. In my opinion, Wilson falls short of this as the whole Lord Jim metaphor for Ismay seems to be a black hole of distraction, rather than a rabbit hole of similarities. Wilson may be trying to follow Lord Jim in sequence in this way as Lord Jim was written from Jim's POV in the first half of Conrad's novel, and from a different POV in it's second half. It is because of this second part that this book doesn't achieve what the first half does and why I have given it less stars. For this reason, I believe the book should be divided when rating it into the said two parts.
The first half = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The second half = ⭐⭐
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
Include me in your lamentations.
-- Derek Mahon, "After the Titanic"
Frances Wilson brings to life the story of J. Bruce Ismay; perhaps the most misunderstood man in the 20th Century, and the most hated man of 1912. As a boy, Ismay suffered the embarrassment and aggression of his father who mentally and emotionally assaulted young Ismay, teaching him to manipulate and bend the wills of those who got in his way. Described by some businessmen as 'a monster', Thomas Ismay founded the White Star Line, a British shipping company, in 1845. J. Bruce Ismay inherited his father's business and became President of the company only when his father manipulated him and Bruce's father-in-law in a hack-hearted move to domineer over his son's marriage, which effectively ruined the marriage for Bruce's remaining years.
This partly explains Ismay's behavior on April 15, 1912. Owning the White Star Line and a fleet of ships, Ismay is aboard one of his vessels that early Spring morning on her maiden voyage - the Titanic. As the Titanic scrapes the infamous iceberg, causing a 300 foot gash in the side of the vessel like the opening of a sardine can, women and children are called first to board the lifeboats and escape the sinking "unsinkable" ship. But Ismay, the owner of the finest vessel in the world does something so catastrophic it will haunt him for the rest of his life. He jumps ship. Labeled a coward and persecuted everywhere he goes, he becomes the most hated man of 1912.
This first part of this biography was one of the best I've ever read. Frances Wilson's language is deeply and romantically poetic. "J. Bruce Ismay died on the night of 14–15 April 1912, and died again in his bedroom twenty-five years later. He was mired in the moment of his jump; his life was defined by a decision he made in an instant. Other survivors of the Titanic were able, in varying degrees, to pick themselves up and move on, but Ismay was not. His was now a posthumous existence." I fell in love with her genuine gift of storytelling and her love of words. However, halfway through, Wilson dramatically changes course with the second part, almost as if she is telling a disparated story from the first part.
Wilson starts the second part by comparing Ismay (who jumped the Titanic) with Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (who also jumped ship). The story then evolves into telling us the whole plot in painstaking detail of the novel as well as an entire biography of Joseph Conrad, until finally it returns to Ismay and somehow tries to reconcile Lord Jim, Conrad, and Ismay in a grand ending. In my opinion, Wilson falls short of this as the whole Lord Jim metaphor for Ismay seems to be a black hole of distraction, rather than a rabbit hole of similarities. Wilson may be trying to follow Lord Jim in sequence in this way as Lord Jim was written from Jim's POV in the first half of Conrad's novel, and from a different POV in it's second half. It is because of this second part that this book doesn't achieve what the first half does and why I have given it less stars. For this reason, I believe the book should be divided when rating it into the said two parts.
The first half = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The second half = ⭐⭐
February 18, 2025
Overall, I just thought this book was okay. Would give it a 2.8.
The trials were the most interesting part of the story.
But Ismay very much was a poor soul after the end of it all. A miserable life after the Titanic sank.
The trials were the most interesting part of the story.
But Ismay very much was a poor soul after the end of it all. A miserable life after the Titanic sank.
September 26, 2025
A somewhat similar to the experience of actually being on the titanic when it sank, quite bad.
June 3, 2015
Review title: A heart that would not go on
On the 100th anniversary of the Titanic (the ship's name a shorthand for both the event and its importance) is a poignant story that unlike so many about the ship is fresh and powerful in its impact. Wilson's biography of J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director and chairman of the White Star Line, is powerful in its simple presentation of the events and evidence that shattered Ismay's life that April night and left him alive for the rest of his 25 years.
Wilson relies heavily on the newspaper accounts and on the proceedings of the American and British hearings that attempted to answer the what, how, and why of this first and most unfathomable modern man-made disaster. But she takes the bare voices of legal and political proceedings and reconstitutes the humans who shaped and were shattered by them.
Ismay, in her hands, is both pathetic and sympathetic, guilty and innocent, trapped and free, shallow and a deep pool of mystery. He was roundly condemned for his survival, for voluntarily taking his place on one of the last (or the first, or the last, 'eyewitness" testimonies from that dark night varying so widely on this and many other points) lifeboats, while hundreds of passengers and crew, over half the lives on board, were indeed somewhere on board, but not there as that boat was being lowered. What good would have been served, other than his own legacy, had he left that seat empty to go down with the ship? What was his moral duty? What would I have done?
Ismay is a "double", a concept Wilson develops throughout the book as she compares the real Ismay to the fictional Lord Jim created by Joseph Conrad. In documenting his sometimes unhappy childhood she emphasizes his position between two favored siblings who died young, and later pairs of twins that absorbed his mother's time and caring as he struggled to please a father who disliked him intensely.
This was an impulse window-shopping purchase that attracted me by its title and cover description, and repaid the reading manifold. If you think you know everything about the Titanic from the books, the movies, and the documentaries, this is a silent side of that tragedy that deserves and rewards your quiet examination.
On the 100th anniversary of the Titanic (the ship's name a shorthand for both the event and its importance) is a poignant story that unlike so many about the ship is fresh and powerful in its impact. Wilson's biography of J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director and chairman of the White Star Line, is powerful in its simple presentation of the events and evidence that shattered Ismay's life that April night and left him alive for the rest of his 25 years.
Wilson relies heavily on the newspaper accounts and on the proceedings of the American and British hearings that attempted to answer the what, how, and why of this first and most unfathomable modern man-made disaster. But she takes the bare voices of legal and political proceedings and reconstitutes the humans who shaped and were shattered by them.
Ismay, in her hands, is both pathetic and sympathetic, guilty and innocent, trapped and free, shallow and a deep pool of mystery. He was roundly condemned for his survival, for voluntarily taking his place on one of the last (or the first, or the last, 'eyewitness" testimonies from that dark night varying so widely on this and many other points) lifeboats, while hundreds of passengers and crew, over half the lives on board, were indeed somewhere on board, but not there as that boat was being lowered. What good would have been served, other than his own legacy, had he left that seat empty to go down with the ship? What was his moral duty? What would I have done?
Ismay is a "double", a concept Wilson develops throughout the book as she compares the real Ismay to the fictional Lord Jim created by Joseph Conrad. In documenting his sometimes unhappy childhood she emphasizes his position between two favored siblings who died young, and later pairs of twins that absorbed his mother's time and caring as he struggled to please a father who disliked him intensely.
This was an impulse window-shopping purchase that attracted me by its title and cover description, and repaid the reading manifold. If you think you know everything about the Titanic from the books, the movies, and the documentaries, this is a silent side of that tragedy that deserves and rewards your quiet examination.
November 15, 2011
I won this book as a giveaway on Goodreads. I was somewhat disappointed with this book. Like a lot of people, I have a fascination with the Titanic, but instead of an intriguing new look at the Titanic story, I found a dry novel that reminded me of a long-winded scholarly article. I did like Wilson's approach as she looked at the Titanic through the lens of the ship's owner, Bruce Ismay. However, less than a story about the Titanic, this was a cultural/social analysis of the time period that condemned Ismay for surviving. Ismay had to undergo extensive investigations following the sinking of the ship and seemed to be on trial just because he lived when others didn't and society wanted someone to blame for the many deaths. It seems society could not forgive him for not having the chilvary to drown like a man should. However, the only thing Ismay seems to be at fault for are stunted emotional reactions after a childhood of suppression that was misintrepreted as cavalier indifference to the great loss of life.
Aside from being a bit dull, my dissatisfaction with this novel largely arises from Wilson's decision to spend significant time comparing Ismay's story to Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim. While the stories are certainly similar, I did not like the choice to compare fiction with Ismay's very real ordeal. I'm not sure what the purpose of including Conrad's novel really served, other than some psychological analysis through the literary prism.
All in all, a decently entertaining look at an individual who survived only to be punished for that fact for the rest of his life. I found myself feeling pity for Ismay and his rather unfortunate life. He seems like a strange, much misunderstood fellow.
Aside from being a bit dull, my dissatisfaction with this novel largely arises from Wilson's decision to spend significant time comparing Ismay's story to Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim. While the stories are certainly similar, I did not like the choice to compare fiction with Ismay's very real ordeal. I'm not sure what the purpose of including Conrad's novel really served, other than some psychological analysis through the literary prism.
All in all, a decently entertaining look at an individual who survived only to be punished for that fact for the rest of his life. I found myself feeling pity for Ismay and his rather unfortunate life. He seems like a strange, much misunderstood fellow.
April 29, 2012
I almost gave this book another star but there were sections that slowed down the narrative which kept me from saying "really liked it". The author tells the tale of J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, who jumped into one of the last lifeboats to leave the sinking Titanic and lived to regret that decision. He is painted as a very unlikeable individual and his personality added other dimensions to the scorn of the public when he had to face up to his actions. His appearance before the United States Senate committee and the British Board of Trade inquiries were farcical and his testimony was contradictory to that of other survivors. His life was basically ruined because he lived instead of going down with his ship and it leaves it to the reader to decide if he was a coward.
The author uses the parallel of Ismay's life with that of Jim, in Joseph Conrad's classic book "Lord Jim" who deserted his sinking ship leaving the passengers to drown. This is an interesting approach but it tends to get in the way of the overall story as the author dedicates many pages to Conrad and one of his most famous characters.
In this year of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy, this book is one that should be added to your reading list as it provides added depth to what we already know about that horrific event.
The author uses the parallel of Ismay's life with that of Jim, in Joseph Conrad's classic book "Lord Jim" who deserted his sinking ship leaving the passengers to drown. This is an interesting approach but it tends to get in the way of the overall story as the author dedicates many pages to Conrad and one of his most famous characters.
In this year of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy, this book is one that should be added to your reading list as it provides added depth to what we already know about that horrific event.
July 8, 2013
It was really quite interesting to see a new perspective on Bruce Ismay's life and his actions with regards to the Titanic. However, although this book did influence my knowledge of the Bruce Ismay significantly, I felt that Wilson didn't stick to the point, which personally I would have preferred. Throughout the book, Wilson compared Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and some other works, to Bruce Ismay's life. I felt this was unnecessary and drifted from the point of the book. I didn't need to know the story line of Lord Jim. I picked this book in order to learn about Bruce Ismay and if I'd wanted to learn about Lord Jim, I would have read that instead. Wilson also made references to other works of literature throughout the book which I think had little significance on the life of Bruce Ismay and just made me think that the author wanted to demonstrate her understanding of good literature, when maybe she ought to have strongly demonstrated her understanding of Bruce Ismay. However, I do feel I've learnt a lot from this book that I haven't read elsewhere. It was nice to see how blame can be cast on one man because of status, and it does make you think twice about your first opinion of what Bruce Ismay should have done. I do think that I would have enjoyed it more if Wilson had simply concentrated on Bruce Ismay and the Titanic but it isn't bad as an informative piece.
February 23, 2015
This book would be infinitely better had the author stuck simply to telling Ismay's story, and not gone off with constant comparisons to Joesph Conrad and his books. One reference would have been enough, constant links between the two men was tiresome and took away from the story I wanted to read, that of Ismay's. We get it, you discovered a wonderful coincidence, now please tell me the story promised by the the title 'The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay'.
The actual parts relevant were really good, and I would rate this book much higher for those alone. Slogging through the rest, as well as the constant use of a 'certain' way of presenting sentences (putting stress on each suspicious word does not make the meaning any more plain. We get it, we really do, we all know how to read and understand meaning without the author practically circling words) Unfortunately I know know more about an author (Joseph Conrad) than I ever really wished to know, since Heart of Darkness was one of the few books I read in school that I really disliked. Oh well, moving on.
The actual parts relevant were really good, and I would rate this book much higher for those alone. Slogging through the rest, as well as the constant use of a 'certain' way of presenting sentences (putting stress on each suspicious word does not make the meaning any more plain. We get it, we really do, we all know how to read and understand meaning without the author practically circling words) Unfortunately I know know more about an author (Joseph Conrad) than I ever really wished to know, since Heart of Darkness was one of the few books I read in school that I really disliked. Oh well, moving on.
May 27, 2012
Can a tragedy the size of the Titanic be blamed on just one man? This is the question Wilson attempts to answer by looking at Ismay's upbringing, the American and British investigations of the sinking of the Titanic, and shedding light on how he spent his later years. Throughout the book much mention is made of Joseph Conrad, especially his novel Lord Jim as the story can be seen as paralleling Ismay's life. I haven't read Conrad's novel, but I didn't feel like this fact alienated me from the story Wilson was trying to tell, but I do think a personal knowledge of that story probably would've aided my reading of this book. I learned many facts about Ismay that helped me to make my own judgment about his character as opposed to the judgments history has forced upon him and passed down through time. An important read as we approach the 100th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy in 2012.
June 10, 2012
oh dear. Started off well, ran through section one then came section 2, it all (pardon the pun) sank from there.
This book reads like an academic study comparing ismay to conrad's character "jim" which would be fine, interesting if it wasn't so secondary school, no depth, no real insite. I fail to see why so much narrative is repeated over and over, we are introduced to the character and the author and whereas it is remarkable how similar they are....pages and pages are spend on explaining what feels like the same point without any further expansion. The book seems to drag on and feels very shallow in places. I really wanted to like this book and hoped it would give me some further insite into the man behind the Titanic, but i didn't really.
Very dissapointed. I felt as though i'd had my time wasted when i closed the cover.
This book reads like an academic study comparing ismay to conrad's character "jim" which would be fine, interesting if it wasn't so secondary school, no depth, no real insite. I fail to see why so much narrative is repeated over and over, we are introduced to the character and the author and whereas it is remarkable how similar they are....pages and pages are spend on explaining what feels like the same point without any further expansion. The book seems to drag on and feels very shallow in places. I really wanted to like this book and hoped it would give me some further insite into the man behind the Titanic, but i didn't really.
Very dissapointed. I felt as though i'd had my time wasted when i closed the cover.
August 15, 2012
This isn’t so much a biography as a book-length op-ed piece about the most reviled Titanic survivor. Author Frances Wilson editorializes with abandon, sometimes ascribing collective motives for whole groups of people. She also fixates with panache on nationalistically driven hearings that took place in the United States and Great Britain. It is often fascinating discourse. Still, it’s important to recognize that the top priority is not academic, rigorously objective biography. Chapter after chapter, spin after spin of the conflicting historical record, Wilson's top priority is rendering J. Bruce Ismay as a literary figure worthy of a cerebral Conrad novel. History may be the means, but iconography is the end. As such, the strongest presence in the book is not Ismay but the author herself.
April 19, 2025
This book was more annoying than it was interesting. The author needed to stop comparing him to Conrads Lord Jim.
It felt like the author was trying to be philosophical and poetic. Ismay was compared to Lord Jim multiple times. The author spent a entire chapter on it. It was like the subject of the book was suddenly different. The Author was constantly comparing the subject to other literary stories and poems as well. I skipped the chapter on Lord Jim completely. I also skipped other paragraphs where Ismay was compared to other literary characters and Lord Jim again in other chapters. When historical facts on Ismay were actually discussed in the book it was interesting
It felt like the author was trying to be philosophical and poetic. Ismay was compared to Lord Jim multiple times. The author spent a entire chapter on it. It was like the subject of the book was suddenly different. The Author was constantly comparing the subject to other literary stories and poems as well. I skipped the chapter on Lord Jim completely. I also skipped other paragraphs where Ismay was compared to other literary characters and Lord Jim again in other chapters. When historical facts on Ismay were actually discussed in the book it was interesting
April 27, 2012
This was thoroughly researched and comprehensive view of the Titanic, but at times I found myself skimming parts of this book, which I rarely do. It was interesting to hear the varying accounts of the different passengers: no two stories were the same. The author for some reason decided to view the Titanic "through the prism of Joseph Conrad's novel 'Lord Jim'.". I have not read that book, and didn't want to view anything through any particular prism. This was just okay for me.
May 27, 2017
This reads like a poorly thought-out research paper. There are some interesting moments, but you have to slog through musings about Conrad's works and long excerpts from transcripts of court proceedings to get to them. At the end I felt confused. Was there ever a conclusion as to what the true version of events on the Titanic was? Was Ismay guilty? Those are the questions I assumed the book would answer, and I'm not sure it did.
July 21, 2014
Not sure if it was the English writing style or too many added quotes from people but I skimmed through most of this book. I already know alot about the Titanic and Bruce Ismay's role in it. This didn't shed any new light on what I already knew. To sum it up the guy was a pussy. Period.
April 1, 2019
J. Bruce Ismay is infamously known as the owner of the Titanic, who, almost alone of notable men on board the ill-fated ship, simply boarded a lifeboat and was saved. Contemporaries and history were not kind to Ismay: some of his decisions contributed to the tragedy, such as not "cluttering" the decks with the additional lifeboats the Titanic's davits could have handled, and possible encouraging the ship's captain to proceed at speed, despite numerous ice warnings.
The author takes an in-depth look at Ismay, who despite his professional accomplishments, was almost neurotically introverted, and a not heroic man, and tries hard to provide an assessment that will allow a more even-handed consideration of Ismay, but in the end, Ismay as a man was a failure, and no amount of analysis or historical reflection will change that.
Most analysis of of the Titanic were made erroneously in hindsight: for instance, at the time, Titanic carried more lifeboats than was required, and no ship owner wanted the added expense and clutter of legally unneeded boats. Few captains of the time would have slowed their vessel because of a few ice warnings--and in fact, Captain Smith did steer farther south.
But as the author points out, Ismay's mere presence on the ship left the captain wanting to impress. Ismay's unclear answers at the inquests on whether he spoke to the captain about speed and ice made his case even worse. Equally unclear were how he got into the lifeboat-- he claimed he saw no other passengers even though hundreds were still on board. His own account was entered the lifeboat of his own accord as it was being lowered with available space. Others said the relatively unknown Chief Officer Wilde, shoved him in, which if true, would have put the matter into a different light. Regardless, Ismay's personal and professional reputation were forever ruined by his being saved in a lifeboat when 1300+ other people on his ship would die in the sinking.
While the analysis of Ismay is excellent, in two regards the author goes out on questionable limbs. She opines that Ismay became romantically attached to Marian Thayer, a beautiful young widow who he shared multiple letters with after the sinking. But it seems more like Mrs. Thayer simply befriended Ismay and in depression he may have read more into it than she ever did, yet another Ismay tragedy. Her letters ceased entirely once it became public knowledge Ismay had shown her a wireless message about ice the evening before the wreck.
The strangest digression in the book though is a long spiel about the great writer Joseph Conrad. While the musings on Conrad are well-written and informative, the link to Ismay is tenuous at best, and the reader is left wondering what they have to do with the overall book. Conrad was a great writer, and maybe Ismay could be seen in some of his characters, and Conrad did write a few articles on the Titanic, but this part of the book is not very convincing or relative.
This book also comes down hard on US Senator William Smith who held hearings on the Titanic tragedy in the immediate days after the sinking, before the witnesses could put spin on their stories. Overall, as is well related in Wyn Craig Wade's The Titanic End of a Dream, Smith in fact did a very good job bringing the truth out.
In the end Bruce Ismay spent the rest of his life isolated and mostly alone, ignored and spurred by his society and the world. While investigations proved he had done nothing wrong, on a night of heroes, he simply wasn't one.
The author takes an in-depth look at Ismay, who despite his professional accomplishments, was almost neurotically introverted, and a not heroic man, and tries hard to provide an assessment that will allow a more even-handed consideration of Ismay, but in the end, Ismay as a man was a failure, and no amount of analysis or historical reflection will change that.
Most analysis of of the Titanic were made erroneously in hindsight: for instance, at the time, Titanic carried more lifeboats than was required, and no ship owner wanted the added expense and clutter of legally unneeded boats. Few captains of the time would have slowed their vessel because of a few ice warnings--and in fact, Captain Smith did steer farther south.
But as the author points out, Ismay's mere presence on the ship left the captain wanting to impress. Ismay's unclear answers at the inquests on whether he spoke to the captain about speed and ice made his case even worse. Equally unclear were how he got into the lifeboat-- he claimed he saw no other passengers even though hundreds were still on board. His own account was entered the lifeboat of his own accord as it was being lowered with available space. Others said the relatively unknown Chief Officer Wilde, shoved him in, which if true, would have put the matter into a different light. Regardless, Ismay's personal and professional reputation were forever ruined by his being saved in a lifeboat when 1300+ other people on his ship would die in the sinking.
While the analysis of Ismay is excellent, in two regards the author goes out on questionable limbs. She opines that Ismay became romantically attached to Marian Thayer, a beautiful young widow who he shared multiple letters with after the sinking. But it seems more like Mrs. Thayer simply befriended Ismay and in depression he may have read more into it than she ever did, yet another Ismay tragedy. Her letters ceased entirely once it became public knowledge Ismay had shown her a wireless message about ice the evening before the wreck.
The strangest digression in the book though is a long spiel about the great writer Joseph Conrad. While the musings on Conrad are well-written and informative, the link to Ismay is tenuous at best, and the reader is left wondering what they have to do with the overall book. Conrad was a great writer, and maybe Ismay could be seen in some of his characters, and Conrad did write a few articles on the Titanic, but this part of the book is not very convincing or relative.
This book also comes down hard on US Senator William Smith who held hearings on the Titanic tragedy in the immediate days after the sinking, before the witnesses could put spin on their stories. Overall, as is well related in Wyn Craig Wade's The Titanic End of a Dream, Smith in fact did a very good job bringing the truth out.
In the end Bruce Ismay spent the rest of his life isolated and mostly alone, ignored and spurred by his society and the world. While investigations proved he had done nothing wrong, on a night of heroes, he simply wasn't one.
December 28, 2020
"J. Bruce Ismay died on the night of 14–15 April 1912, and died again in his bedroom twenty-five years later. He was mired in the moment of his jump; his life was defined by a decision he made in an instant. Other survivors of the Titanic were able, in varying degrees, to pick themselves up and move on, but Ismay was not. His was now a posthumous existence."
Before starting, I was slightly worried that this book would be less objective than it turned out to be, and that the author would feel the urge to insert personal opinions within what should be a factual text. I think everyone reading this or any other account about Ismay's ordeals before, during, and after the wreck will likely develop a stance on how just or unjust Ismay's actions were in the years that followed. But an account is not the place for that. Neither is a review for that matter, so you won't find anything here.
The work itself was highly engrossing. I'm not a stranger to the subject, but I haven't come across a book on the RMS Titanic that focused so heavily on the aftermath where the law was concerned. I was impressed with the amount of detail that was given, in despite of redundancy and repetition.
I'm also really glad I decided to read this after reading some of the other reviews. I highly doubt the reviewers that stated that the second half of the book was entirely about Lord Jim cared to read on after the first mention of Conrad. The author does include a sizable few chapters comparing and contrasting fact and fiction, but it in no way encompasses half the text.
Whatever one may think about J. Bruce Ismay, I think he deserved this text. I wouldn't go so far as to use the word "humanize", but it at least adds more depth to a figure, dare I say a man, that is entitled to have his full story told without Horner playing in the background.
Before starting, I was slightly worried that this book would be less objective than it turned out to be, and that the author would feel the urge to insert personal opinions within what should be a factual text. I think everyone reading this or any other account about Ismay's ordeals before, during, and after the wreck will likely develop a stance on how just or unjust Ismay's actions were in the years that followed. But an account is not the place for that. Neither is a review for that matter, so you won't find anything here.
The work itself was highly engrossing. I'm not a stranger to the subject, but I haven't come across a book on the RMS Titanic that focused so heavily on the aftermath where the law was concerned. I was impressed with the amount of detail that was given, in despite of redundancy and repetition.
I'm also really glad I decided to read this after reading some of the other reviews. I highly doubt the reviewers that stated that the second half of the book was entirely about Lord Jim cared to read on after the first mention of Conrad. The author does include a sizable few chapters comparing and contrasting fact and fiction, but it in no way encompasses half the text.
Whatever one may think about J. Bruce Ismay, I think he deserved this text. I wouldn't go so far as to use the word "humanize", but it at least adds more depth to a figure, dare I say a man, that is entitled to have his full story told without Horner playing in the background.
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