Book Review : How to Survive The Titanic or The Sinking Of J.Bruce Ismay

Format : Paperback/328 pages
Publication Date : 2012
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Publication Country : London, United Kingdom
Language : English
Author : Frances Wilson
Type : Non-fiction/True Story

Book Review :

When the Titanic hit the iceberg on 14 April 1912 and a thousand men prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay jumped into a lifeboat and was rowed away to safety. Had he been an ordinary passenger, little would have been said, but J.Bruce Ismay was the chairman of the White Star Line, the company that had built the Titanic. Accused of cowardice and dictating the ship's excessive speed, Ismay became,  as one newspaper called him, 'The Most Talked-of Man in the World'. Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay, Frances Wilson explores his 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 honour. 

Who is the Author

Frances Wilson is a critic, journalism and the author of three works of non-fiction, Literary Seduction, The Courtesan's Revenge and the Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2009. She lives in London with her daughter.

What is inside

'On the night his ship struck the iceberg, J.Bruce Ismay dined in her first-class restaurant with Dr William O'Loughlin, surgeon of the White Star Line for the previous forty years.'

'The collision occured at 11.40 pm, the ship's speed was 22 knots and it took ten seconds for the iceberg to tear a 300-foot gash along her starboard side, slicing open four compartments. The sound, one woman recalled, was like the scraping of a nail along metal; to another it felt as though the ship 'had been seized by a giant hand and shaken once, twice, then stopped dead in its course.'

'Twenty-one women, two men, fourteen young children and six crew were given seats; forty-three passengers so far in a boat which allowed for a maximum of forty-seven.'

'The Titanic went down 2 hours and forty minutes after she hit the iceberg-the same length of time, it has been noted, as a performance in the theatre.'

'In her bowels the ship carried 3500 mailbags containing 200,000 lettera and packages. One of them was tje the manuscript of a story by Joseph Conrad called 'Karain: A Memory', which he was sending to New York. 'Karain', is tje the tale of a man impulsively betrays a code of honour and lives on under the strain of intolerable guilt.'

'A few cries came to us across the water, then silence, and the ship seemed to right herself like a hurt animal with a broken back. The Titanic went down 'like a stricken animal', agreed Lawrence Beesley, a second-class passenger travelling to a Christian Science gathering.'

'The need felt by the survivors to tell their tales was, from the start, overwhelming and the need of those who were not on board to read their accounts, to see the films, to repeate the experience and work it through, to raise the Titanic and watch her go down again and again is one of the shipwreck's most peculiar effects.' 

'When the Carpathia arrived at 4.30 am, there was nothing to see but 'boxes and coats and what looked like oil on the water.'

'One survivor told a reporter that: 'While we were on the Carpathia we passed a seal that was floating on a cake of ice. A little father on we passed a big floe of ice on which there was a big white polar bear powling around.'

'The disaster, ismay decided, had nothing to do with him, it happened around him, not to him and certainly not because of him.'

'Ismay may have been less concerned that he had failed his passengers than that he had failed his father, a legendary man in the shipping world. '

'Captain Smith offered an uneventful but glamorous voyage it is part of the strangeness of the sea that a captain who on shore lives a quiet suburban life, becomes an object of fascination when on board his own ship. '

'On the Titanic, the Marconi operators received or intercepted eighteen separate ice warnings; some of these Captain Smith saw, one of them he passed on to Ismay, one he showed to Lightoller, while several never made their own way onto the bridge.'

'Smith told journalist that 'shipbuilding is such a perfect art nowadays that absolute disaster involving passengers is inconceivable. Whatever happens, there will be time enough before the vessel sinks to save the life of every person on board. I will go a bit futher. I will say that I cannot imagine any condition that would cause the vessel to founder.'

'He was 49 and lost in the middle of his lofe, these are the years in which Dante describes falling into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me. When Ismay boarded the Titanic,  he had betrayed his father's dream, he had discussed his resignation with Sanderson, and he had given away in marriage the only one of his children to whom he felt close.'

'When he jump from the Titanic, ismay had no status at all.'