Everyone’s heard of the loss of Titanic in April 1912, the world’s most famous peacetime shipping disaster. It lives on thanks to the scale of the human tragedy and a sense of hubris: the supposedly unsinkable ship that ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic.

One man’s reputation was ruined on that deadly night. J Bruce Ismay was on board as the chief executive of Titanic’s owner, the White Star Line. As the great ship set out on its maiden voyage he seemed to have it all: wealth, power and prestige. He had succeeded his late father in 1899 as head of White Star but within three years sold the company to JP Morgan’s new shipping conglomerate, International Merchant Marine (IMM). Ismay became president of IMM and masterminded the building of Titanic and its sister leviathans Olympic and Britannic, believing that these giant luxury ships would give White Star a competitive advantage over rival lines such as Cunard. (Their size also made them ideal for the thousands of people emigrating from Europe to the United States; those travelling steerage did so in greater comfort than on most rival liners.)

There are countless books and online stories about the Titanic’s fatal encounter with the iceberg, so here I’ll focus on Bruce Ismay’s dramatic fall from grace.

In the early hours of Monday 15 April 1912, Ismay stepped into starboard collapsible lifeboat C, and into infamy. He made it clear to the American Senate inquiry into the disaster that no one ordered him into the lifeboat, giving the following reason for his entering the boat:

‘Because there was room in the boat. She was being lowered away. I felt the ship was going down, and I got into the boat.’

According to most of the accounts of that tragic night, Ismay helped load the lifeboats, calling out for any remaining women to get in. He himself recalled complete calmness: no panic and no crowds of desperate passengers fearing for their lives as the last lifeboats were lowered. In reality, Titanic’s final hour was chaotic. The crew were nervous about filling the boats to capacity. So, although Titanic’s boats could carry 1,100 or the 2,340 people on board, only 705 were actually saved. Ismay’s own lifeboat had room for a few more to board, so he wasn’t condemning anyone to a freezing cold death by getting in. The White Star line boss couldn’t look as his great ship sank below the waves, accompanied by the shocking screams of those condemned to freeze to death in the ice-cold waters of the April ocean.

Within days of the disaster, Ismay and the White Star line had been condemned in a media and political frenzy. The Hearst press and others in the United States decided that reckless speed had caused the needless deaths of over 1,500 people. They accused Ismay of pressing Captain Smith – who went down with the ship – to race across the Atlantic regardless of the risk.

But above all else Ismay was condemned for surviving. The clear implication was that others died so he could live. That is surely wrong. Titanic commander Charles Lightoller, who oversaw the launching of the port side lifeboats, mistook the captain’s ‘women and children first’ rule to mean men should not be allowed onto lifeboats. By contrast, first officer Murdoch let men in if there were no women and children nearby. (Ironically, Lightoller survived but Murdoch didn’t.) Partly as a result, many of the lifeboats that left Titanic that night had empty places on board. Ismay didn’t leave anyone to die by getting into collapsible C. We will never know if Ismay considered whether he should go down with the ship, as his captain did. If so, it may have been a split second decision, which unfairly dogged him for the rest of his life. He later told journalists, ‘I took my chance to escape – yes. It came to me, I did not seek it … And why shouldn’t I take my turn? I was a passenger. It is true I am president of the company, but where do you draw the line?’

Ismay was desperate to return to Britain without delay after Carpathia landed him and the other survivors in New York. At first, the plan was for Olympic to carry them home, but as Ismay later explained it was thought inadvisable for surviving Titanic passengers to see her near-identical sister ship so soon after the catastrophe. Ismay sent several ‘marconigram’ messages from Carpathia urging his White Star line colleagues to hold RMS Cedric in New York until Carpathia landed and the survivors transferred to her. Ismay used the name ‘Yamsi’ in these messages – it didn’t take a code breaker to realise that was his own surname reversed. These messages were intercepted by the US Navy, and passed to Senator William Alden Smith, who arranged with President Taft for Ismay and other key witnesses to be prevented from leaving the United States, so they could give evidence to an immediate Senate inquiry led by Smith.

When Carpathia docked in New York, Senator Smith slipped on board and demanded to see Ismay, telling him that he would be appearing before the Senate investigation the very next morning.

Ismay did not help salvage his reputation with his performance at the American inquiry. He may, naively, have thought that Senator Smith’s aim was to find out what caused the disaster, rather than playing to a populist political gallery. Smith showed striking ignorance of the maritime world but Ismay himself was little better. His answers to pertinent questions about the Titanic and its fate were often empty: ‘That is all I know… I have no idea… I really could not say.’ As Frances Wilson says in her magisterial book, How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay, he did not know the names of the officers who died, or how many women and children were left on the ship. Ismay’s instinct was to save himself – and his reputation – by saying nothing. Even in 1912 this was not the best approach to protecting your reputation.

Titanic’s crew had received several warnings that the ship was entering an area with icebergs. Ismay told Senator Smith on the first day of the American inquiry that that he was not aware of any nearby ice, yet when the hearings resumed in Washington he admitted that Captain Smith had handed him an ice warning from Baltic. His defence was that he was a mere passenger, and even if he had had any concerns he ‘would not have ventured to make any suggestion top a commander of Captain Smith’s experience … for the navigation of the ship rested solely with him’.

For all Senator Smith’s grandstanding, his inquiry report did not treat Ismay badly. Ismay’s personal conduct, on which the inquiry had expended so much energy, was not discussed, and nor did Senator Smith comment on Ismay’s survival. As Frances Wilson notes in her book, despite spending much time at the hearings on Ismay’s personal conduct, the subject was absent from the colourfully-worded report. There was not a word about Ismay’s survival. Instead, Smith decided that the White Star boss’s presence onboard unconsciously stimulated endeavour – presumably meaning prompting Captain Smith to push Titanic faster.

In the weeks after the disaster, Ismay exchanged letters with Marian Thayer, whose husband died in the disaster. Ismaywho was emotionally stunted and awkward, mistook her empathy and friendliness as a sign of mutual attraction. He tells her by letter that they are the same in their grief and loss – she for her lost husband, he for his ship. He sends her a silver frame with lines of poetry accompanied by her initials and his, and the date Titanic sank. Yet she was coming to question her friendship with Ismay, especially after he told her he had no more responsibility for the tragedy than she did. She was shocked by the patronising way he brushes aside her request for his help presenting a claim for compensation for the lost of her husband to the White Star Line. He pompously says he is ‘satisfied you don’t really mean what you write. I am satisfied that if you will think this matter over you will agree that I am acting rightly. Don’t let us say any more about this please.’ The correspondence ends a year after Titanic was lost, after Ismay told Marian she owed him at least two letters. They had run out of things to say to each other.

In his self pity, Bruce Ismay bought a sanctuary in County Galway, Ireland. As I found when I cycled through the region last year, Connemara is a starkly beautiful part of Ireland. Ismay spent his summers here for 25 years, interrupted only when the IRA burnt the place to the ground in 1922. (Ismay had it rebuilt to a design by renowned architect Edwin Lutyens.) He died in 1937 just weeks after the hull of Titanic’s sister Olympic was sent to be scrapped.

One of his obituaries commented that Ismay was an enigma for most people. The New York Times noted that he had not commented further on the Titanic tragedy beyond what he told the American and British inquiries. Would his reputation have been revived had he spoken more about his role? Had the disaster happened 100 years later he is likely to have been more proactive in setting the record straight. That said, J Bruce Ismay is unlikely to have been capable of creating a sympathetic hearing, with his pompous manner, and tendency to see things only from his perspective.

PS: Titanic’s Irish heritage

Six years ago, my son Owen and I spent an enthralling few hours at Titanic Belfast, a modern museum on the site on which the ship was built. We got a sense of the shocking noise and danger involved in building a ship over 100 years ago – and Titanic’s Irish heritage, which is easily forgotten amidst the drama of its sinking.

More recently, in June 2024, I went round Titanic’s very last calling point: Queenstown, now Cobh, in County Cork, Ireland. Cobh, like Belfast, has told the Titanic story very well, with the Titanic Experience and the Cobh Heritage Centre – the Queenstown Story. I liked the way Cobh reveals the experiences of individual Titanic passengers. I was particularly moved by the story of Thomas and Hannah O’Brien – and how striking Welsh miners unwittingly doomed poor Tom to a watery grave.