RMS Titanic, the Ismay Brothers, and North Dorset

RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912, as the newest, largest, and undeniably the most luxurious, ocean liner yet built. She was entering the highly competitive trans-Atlantic market where her USP was the superb quality of first-class passenger accommodation and service, matching the standards provided by the world’s most expensive hotels. Passengers on Cunard and German rivals would have a faster crossing, but not in comparable comfort. This applied even to lesser facilities provided for second and third-class ticket holders. If first-class on Titanic resembled a floating Ritz designed to gratify American millionaires, second-class was a floating Lyons Corner House to soothe the English genteel. (Richard Davenport-Hines,Titanic Lives, p193)

Occupying one of the palatial suites was the British chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay. After White Star was acquired by the billionaire American financier J. P. Morgan in 1902, Ismay became president of the International Mercantile Marine conglomerate. His younger brother, James, took the opportunity to leave White Star to pursue a burgeoning interest in agriculture and land management, buying the Iwerne Minster estate in North Dorset in 1908. Ill health prevented him from accepting an invitation to join Titanic on her maiden voyage. This was also true of Lord Pirrie, the Chairman of Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff, with whom Bruce Ismay had planned the building of a trio of super-ships, Olympic, Titanic and Gigantic (later wisely named Britannic). Pirrie was recovering from prostate surgery, quite a big deal in 1912. If he had travelled on the ship and died, he would have been the most notable British fatality; and if he had survived in a lifeboat, he would have been an international scapegoat. (Titanic Lives p.43) That was to be the fate of Bruce Ismay. Also making a late and fortuitous cancellation was Pierpont Morgan, who preferred to oversee the shipment of his Paris art collection to America. (Titanic Lives, p.154)

Edward Smith had captained 17 White Star ships without any serious incident. After the Adriatic’s maiden voyage in 1907 he was reported as saying: “I never saw a wreck, and I have never been wrecked, nor have I been in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster.” (Titanic Lives p.251) Thus, there may have been a degree of complacency in his decision not to slacken speed as Titanic approached an icefield much further south than normal. On a moonless night and a flat calm sea, with no tell-tale waves breaking at the waterline of any iceberg, it was asking a lot of lookouts to spot even a berg 100 feet high. In trying to steer round this mountain of ice, while throwing Titanic’s three propeller shafts into reverse, First Officer Murdoch only succeeded in sideswiping projections on the underwater 8/9ths of the iceberg. Many passengers slept through the collision or were not alarmed by it. In first-class Ella White thought “It was just as though we went over about a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.” (Titanic Lives p.273) She and her maid survived, but her husband and his manservant did not.

By about midnight on 14/15 October Captain Smith and Naval Architect /principal designer Thomas Andrews, talented nephew of, and probable successor to Pirrie, had assessed the damage. While confident that two, and possibly four, of Titanic’s sixteen watertight compartments could flood and the ship remain afloat, Andrews reckoned that at least five compartments were breached. He knew that if the ship foundered by the bow, water would eventually cascade over the tops of so-called watertight bulkheads into the next compartments, because the bulkheads only extended part-way into the ship’s superstructure. If Titanic had rammed the iceberg head-on, as the German liner SS Kronprinz Wilhelm had done in 1907 and still limped to port, the damage would probably have been confined to a crumpled bow. A glancing blow at speed was sufficient to loosen the rivets holding hull plates together and prove mortal. Titanic was double-bottomed, to guard against running aground, but there was no inner skin of watertight longitudinal bulkheads. Her builders had allowed for a worst-case scenario where, say in thick fog, a collision might compromise the integrity of one transverse bulkhead and two adjacent compartments. In theory the ship should stay afloat long enough for rescue vessels to arrive and transfer passengers and crew in the limited number of lifeboats (20) required by current regulations. None of Titanic’s competitors had significantly more.

The British Enquiry Report calculated that there were 1178 spaces on 14 lifeboats plus two emergency boats and four collapsible rafts. These were not enough for over 1300 passengers, let alone nearly 900 crew. The loading of the lifeboats was little short of chaotic. Apart from the token lowering of two lifeboats for the benefit of a Board of Trade inspector at Southampton, There had been no proper boat drill nor a muster. It was explained that great difficulty frequently exists in getting firemen [stokers] to take part in a boat drill. They regard it as no part of their work. To be fair to the firemen, they remained stoically up to their waists in water shutting down the furnaces, as red-hot boilers and icy sea water make a lethally explosive combination. Many of these heroes did not escape. The first lifeboat was lowered at about 12.45a.m. with 3 crewmen, 23 passengers (all first-class, but they were accommodated nearest the boat deck) and 39 vacancies. Smith’s order was “Put the women & children in, and lower away”. At the starboard lifeboats, Murdoch interpreted this to mean women & children first. On the port side, Second Officer Lightoller took it to mean women & children only. He rigorously excluded all males, including teenage boys. It was difficult to persuade women to leave their husbands and partners. Early reluctance to abandon the apparent safety and warmth of the allegedly unsinkable ship was compounded by the deafening, cacophonous screeching of steam necessarily being vented from three of the funnels, and the prospect of the hazardous descent over sixty feet towards the inky blackness of the Atlantic. The American Report speculated that even fewer than 711 would have been saved had the boats been swinging in high winds and smashed against the side of the ship. There were more than enough life preservers for everyone but floating in icy water would not prevent death from thermal shock or hypothermia. Most of the boats pulled away from the vicinity of Titanic, for fear of being sucked down in a vortex, or swamped by desperate swimmers. Throughout all this horror the lights of another ship were visible, but they came no closer. They presumably belonged to the Californian, whose Captain Stanley Lord had stopped in the icefield to await daylight. The Marconi wireless operator on the Californian had retired to his bunk about 5 minutes before Titanic hit the iceberg at 23.40, and 35 minutes before the heroic operators on Titanic sent their first distress message. Crew on the Californian saw regular rockets being fired and reported them to Lord, but inexplicably he took no action. He was abstemious and so unlikely to have been intoxicated, as suggested later. At about 2a.m. Bruce Ismay and another male passenger boarded one of the starboard-side collapsible lifeboats. There were, he testified later, no women nor indeed any males in sight. At 2.20 a.m. Titanic finally sank. (To be continued)

At the time of writing, April 2026, interest in the Titanic story remains immense. The BBC recently broadcast a four-part dramatisation, based verbatim on survivors’ accounts. At a Devizes auction sale of artefacts and memorabilia held on 18 April, a canvas seat cover from one of the lifeboats, emblazoned with the White Star Line burgee, was anticipated to sell for £180,000, and made £390,000. On 19 April a Titanic Exhibition organised by White Star Heritage opened at the Birmingham NEC. On 18 June 2023 the OceanGate Titan submersible imploded while diving on the wreck of Titanic 2.5 miles down on the ocean floor, adding five more fatalities to the 1490 lost in 1912.