The Titanic, a Cumbrian town and the world’s biggest coward
Why did privileged son of a Maryport shipowner flee sinking liner leaving women and children to drown?
J Bruce Ismay has been labelled one of history's greatest cowards after he fled the Titanic while there were still women and children aboard.
The transatlantic media savaged him, saying that as the vessel’s owner he had a greater responsibility for the disaster than anyone, and therefore he should have gone down with the ship. His father gave him an elite education at Harrow.
The expensive private school claims to produce men of integrity dedicated to the service of others. Its alumni include eight prime ministers, three Nobel Prize holders and twenty winners of the VC.
He knew the price of failing to live up to the school’s chivalrous Victorian ideal. So why did he nevertheless jump into the lifeboat? This chapter is not an attempt to exonerate the wealthy chairman of the White Star Line whose father was from Maryport. But it does try to shine a light on a factor that contributed to making Ismay the flawed man he was.
That ingredient was Bruce's toxic relationship with his brilliant but dictatorial, bullying, manipulative and narcissistic father Thomas who tried to turn Bruce into an idealised facsimile of himself so that his son never, apart from a brief few years 4,000 miles away in New York, lived his own life.
In his attempt to turn his son into a worthy successor, a tool for establishing the ship-owning dynasty he dreamed of, Thomas disastrously detached Bruce from his own family's local culture, its deep roots in Cumbria and the town of Maryport that Thomas never lost and took care to maintain for himself.
He lavished Bruce with comforts and status symbols, then criticised him for having it easy. He punished Bruce severely for any tiny failure to fulfil his fatherly ambitions. When the tyrannical father died it was not surprising that Bruce instantly sold the company and privately announced his resignation as White Star chairman.
His journey on the Titanic's maiden voyage was to be his last official duty. Before boarding the doomed liner he had shed every vestige of the identity his father had thrust on him. So in the light of this, let's now try to understand why J Bruce Ismay jumped. The explanation begins with the nature of his father.
Thomas Henry was a bullish, thrusting, optimistic Victorian. He was born in 1837, the year Queen Victoria was crowned, in a tiny cottage in Whillan's Yard, Maryport. He was part of a family with deep roots in the tough seafaring town.
The Romans originally established Maryport with a fort and supply base and called it Alauna. From the Middle Ages it was called Ellenfoot. In 1749 Humphrey Senhouse renamed it after his wife Mary as he began developing the town as a fully-fledged port aimed at rivalling Whitehaven. In the 19th Century the booming town quickly developed coal mines, an iron foundry and shipyards, such as Wood's yard and Ritson's yard.
The latter was famous for launching ships side-on into the River Ellen because it was not wide enough to allow them to be launched the usual way. In 1810 Joseph Middleton, Thomas's great-grandfather, opened a third Maryport shipyard with his brother Isaac. Some time after Thomas's birth, his father Joseph started his own timber, shipbroking and shipbuilding business.
He bought five shares in ships plying in and out of Maryport. The family began to prosper and when Thomas was six the Ismays moved to a much larger house in Grasslot, Maryport. The house was called "The Ropery", after the ropes laid out in the shipyard immediately opposite where Thomas's grandfather Henry worked as a timber merchant.
Thomas spent much of his childhood playing around the harbour, working at the shipyard, bantering with the sailors and carving model ships from driftwood. He acquired the nickname "Baccy Ismay" because of his habit of chewing tobacco imitation of the seamen.
At twelve he was sent to a good school in Brampton where he was an outstanding sportsman and took special studies in navigation. Thomas was self-assured, gregarious and admired. Friends remembered him as a short and tanned boy with sharply observant eyes, determined on a sea-faring career.
His father died when he was thirteen and he became head of the family, though he stayed on at school until he was sixteen. Then he started as an apprentice with shipbrokers Imrie in Liverpool, where he shrewdly befriended fellow apprentice William Imrie, son of the company's owner.
At the end of his apprenticeship he proved himself a reliable, steady shipmate while voyaging to Chile on the small sailing ship Charles Jackson. On his return to Liverpool in 1858 he exploded into action. Aged 22, he set up a ship broking business and married Margaret Bruce, daughter of another shipbroker Luke Bruce.
When he reached 30, he bought the rights to the bankrupt White Star Line, aiming to profit from the tide of immigrants flooding to the United States. Over a game of billiards, it is said, Thomas agreed to form a company with William Imre to run steam-power ships across the Atlantic, built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
Thomas pursued a transatlantic speed record with his ship the Baltic in order to snatch a contract to transport mail to America from its rival Cunard. Their most prized early vessel was the Oceanic, the first modern ocean liner, with berths for 2,000 people. With this ship the emphasis was put on splendour and comfort.
Innovatively, he put the first class staterooms in the centre of the ship where there was least motion, and fitted it out with the finest features copied from the best English and Continental hotels. There were even coal fires and curtains. The dull long sea crossing was transformed into an opportunity for parties, concerts, dinners, dances and fancy dress balls. As the company grew, Thomas was offered honours and positions galore but turned down a baronetcy, probably because he felt insulted by being merely a "sir" when he hoped to be a lord.
J Bruce Ismay was as different from his father as it is possible to be.
Bruce was born in the riverside suburb of Crosby, Liverpool, in December 1862, and was raised in the glare of his father's brilliant, dictatorial light. He has been compared to the son of Midas, Lityerses.
Midas had an unfortunate way of turning his children into paralysed gold statues. Bruce ended up the odd-child-out, sandwiched between two elder siblings who died and six younger ones who formed pairs that left him out. Liverpool at that time was a smoky, busy gateway to the New World presided over by an ostentatiously wealthy merchant class.
The authoritarian Thomas decreed that his son would be the first Ismay to receive the education of a gentleman. After an expensive prep school in Elstree where Bruce was unpopular, lonely and distraught after being torn from his beloved mother Margaret, his misery increased by passing the entrance exam to Harrow school, the epitome of repressive, philistine anti-intellectual private education.
As a nouveau riche Cumbrian he could not have been more out of place at the supremely snobbish school whose alumni include eight former British or Indian Prime Ministers. The other boys made Bruce an object of derision. His masters taught him to feel ashamed of his home and the Cumbrian accent of his half-educated father. Meanwhile Thomas also developed ambiguous feelings about elite schooling.
He had not given Bruce an expensive education to foster notions of superiority within him; he was being prepared to fill his father's shoes. To conceal his deep-seated sensitivity, Bruce developed a brusque, bullying outer shell that made most pupils hate and avoid him as a menacing loner.
He never identified himself as a Harrovian nor felt any connection to the school later in life. Thomas removed him after only eighteen months. The school had done its work: Bruce could present himself as a Harrovian and that is all that mattered.
After a brief stay at a crammer in Dinard, France, he went, not to Oxford, but back to Liverpool where he started as a lowly apprentice at Ismay, Imre & Company. One witness recounted how on Bruce's first day of work he left his hat and coat on his father's stand as he had throughout his childhood. "Please inform the new office boy," Thomas barked at one of his clerks, "that he is not to leave his hat and coat lying about in my office."
This article is an extract from a chapter from my book Huge & Mighty Forms which you can buy here
My books are available at the New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle and Sam Read in Grasmere.
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