Back to the Titanic: back to the future
Revisiting the reputation of J. Bruce Ismay
Image: Mr J. Bruce Ismay1
Ms Angela Rayner
I don’t wish to appear uncharitable, but the litany of excuses listed by Angela Rayner to explain why she committed an act of fiscal fraud makes me wonder why she didn’t just add stubbing her toe on a doorpost. She has been right to resign her government post, but she’s wrong to have put herself in a position where she needed to. And the excuses are just that. Her resignation, however, stuns me for its honesty. It does not restore my faith in the humanity of government officers, however. I reckon she was pushed, and rightly so. Nevertheless, it is a contemporary event that dovetails with the theme of this essay: how prepared are those in positions of responsibility to own up to their failings?
Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet
There is a scene in the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic in which the third-class passengers down in steerage become aware not only of the icy brine rushing in around their feet but also of the chained lattice gate that bars their way to above decks, to escape, to, if you want to call it that, freedom.
Barricaded as they are, below the rising waterline, someone pleads, “There are women and children here—at least give us a chance?” Cue the indomitable Jack Dawson, who, aided by others, rips out a conveniently placed bench to use as a battering ram against the object that hinders their freedom. The steward, who has till then assured them that everything will be quite all right, remonstrates: “That’s White Star Line property. You will be charged for that!” Someone slugs him, just to add … injury to insult, I suppose.
So, with Jack Dawson running around this ship righting so many wrongs before his final demise, how come he ends up dying? Why him? And why do we, the audience, care so much about him, and not so much about the other 1,490 real deaths? Why does he not just drown in steerage, along with the other immigrants?
The smashing of the gate and the slug on the steward’s chin are depicted in the film to serve a purpose: as moments that appeal to our innate sense of fairness. But, according to the court of enquiry into the ship’s loss, they are yarn spun out of fancy. That there were third-class passengers among those who were rescued from the sinking Titanic is without question. The Final Report on the Loss of the S.S. Titanic puts the figure at 499 of them, out of a total of 1,316 third-class passengers. So, despite the difficulties dramatically depicted in the film, not all of them perished. However, the Report does confirm that the percentage saved—37.94 per cent—was the lowest of the three classes (second class, 41.4 per cent; first class, 62.46 per cent (page 42)).
Part of the difficulty of alluding to fiction as support for, or a parallel to, a point of relevance in real life, even if it draws on unquestioned fact, is that fiction frequently incorporates such moral and other lessons precisely because it has the occasion to do so and factual narration of real events often misses, or elides over, the acts that constitute bravery or heroism in real life, or it gets disputed, say, in a shoot-out scene: which of the two was the brave one and which the cowardly provocateur?
For example, the famous case of Chad Oulson, who was shot dead at point-blank range in a cinema in Wesley Chapel, Florida, in 2014 after having attacked his killer with popcorn. The question remains a thorny one: although Mr Curtis J. Reeves, a retired special weapons and tactics commander, “had never been so terrified in all [his] life” when ex-Gulf War veteran Oulson launched his handful of popcorn at him, one would expect a man of such timid propensities to really think twice before challenging a fellow cinema-goer to switch his mobile phone off. In fact, any form of confrontation could trigger untold fear in a man of such fragile sensibilities. However, Florida law is clear: Mr Oulson was the antagonist in the episode, and Mr Reeves was the hero and therefore lawfully entitled to kill Mr Oulson. It just goes to show the kinds of emotions that can be released in a cinema auditorium, even before the film’s started.
Although the wreck of the Titanic is by far old hat by now, and corrections have been made to assumptions and figures in the years since, Lord Mersey’s Final Report on the disaster offers us the benefit of his conclusions at a time before commentators had gotten to grips with the whole aftermath. The utility of that proximity (the Report is dated 30 July 1912) is especially telling on page 40 (the section headed up The third-class passengers). It is reproduced below in full.
It had been suggested before2 the Enquiry that the third-class passengers had been unfairly treated; that their access to the Boat deck had been impeded, and that when at last they had reached that deck the first and second-class passengers were given precedence in getting places in the boats. There appears to have been no truth in these suggestions. It is no doubt true that the proportion of third-class passengers saved falls far short of the proportion of the first and second class, but this is accounted for by the greater reluctance of the third-class passengers to leave the ship, by their unwillingness to part with their baggage, by the difficulty in getting them up from their quarters, which were at the extreme ends of the ship, and by other similar causes. The interests of the relatives of some of the third-class passengers who had perished were in the hands of Mr Harbinson, who attended the Enquiry on their behalf. He said at the end of his address to the Court: “I wish to say distinctly that no evidence has been given in the course of this case which would substantiate a charge that any attempt was made to keep back the third-class passengers … I desire further to say that there is no evidence that when they did reach the boat deck there was any discrimination practised either by the officers or the sailors in putting them into the boats.”
I am satisfied that the explanation of the excessive proportion of third-class passengers lost is not to be found in the suggestion that the third-class passengers were in any way unfairly treated. They were not unfairly treated.
This all looks and sounds fairly conclusive: even the representative of some of the third-class passengers at the enquiry tells of an utter lack of discrimination. So, from where, then, had these suggestions to which Lord Mersey alludes come? Wherever they came from, they have survived the Final Report and are still in circulation today. And when a suggestion is that robust in its longevity, there’s usually some truth behind it. But Lord Mersey dismissed it, pretty much on the strength of the statement made by Harbinson. It’s interesting to speculate what conclusion Lord Mersey would have arrived at had Harbinson made the contrary assertion as to the conduct of the ship’s officers and sailors.
One has to stop and analyse for a moment the language used in this Report. No evidence has been given … which would substantiate a charge. What does that mean? No evidence? Well, no, not no evidence, but not such as would support a charge. A charge in law must, for a conviction, be supported by evidence beyond reasonable doubt. That is not, however, the standard of evidence required at an enquiry, for which the standard, even in 1912, was anything. When they existed, Board of Trade enquiries looked into the causes of accidents, mainly at sea or on the railways. But there’s no standard of evidence. The chairman and members will weigh up evidence as they hear it. But the qualification which would substantiate a charge is nonetheless there. It could mean nothing, but then why would the representative of the very parties which could benefit from the contrary case then assert it with such strength?
What if he had said there was evidence? If it was suggested before the enquiry, then someone must have suggested it. That is evidence, there is no other word for it. But it is also a possible source of a case in slander, and I can only suggest that it is perhaps that which Harbinson wished, beyond anything else, to rule out. People’s lives had been at stake. And now it was their reputations that were on the line.
That of James Cameron, who directed Titanic, has seemingly been on the line over the same matter. Lord Mersey is quite unequivocal: they were not unfairly treated. Perhaps that’s why, in the film, they do get out. The reasons stated by Lord Mersey as to why a greater proportion of third-class passengers died than other classes seem to me like grasping at straws: properly informed of the impending danger, and bearing in mind we are talking here of thinking individuals who had made a conscious decision to emigrate and start a new life, would they really have clung to their possessions rather than try to save themselves and their loved-ones? And, if their accommodations on board were so remotely located at the extreme ends of the vessel, that fact should rightly and properly have been a prime cause of concern for the Board of Trade when issuing the ship with its certificate, just like the fire extinguishing facilities of a night club are today. They perished because their berths were too far away for them to come above decks in a period of two hours, just doesn’t wash.
Enquiries enquire
The task of a court of enquiry is predicated on one necessary prerequisite: an open mind. Whilst there is little controversy around what led to the ship sinking, there is a little more controversy around why she sank so quickly, including the nature of the materials from which she was built, and the reactions of other ships to her distress calls, etc. The reason for the lack of controversy in those quarters stems from a lack of detailed knowledge on our part, as members of the general public, to comment upon such things as the tensile characteristics of iron as manufactured in the years when the ship was being laid down, just to name one factor among many. Nor do we generally have detailed knowledge of the skills required to navigate a steamship through a potential ice field, certainly not such as was widespread in the year in question.
Where our input becomes more valid is in areas that are less time-bound than, for instance, industrial developments in iron production, or in navigational aids, and which also concern matters by which we are ourselves concerned (as in affected), aside from the fact that they concern us, in the sense of being a potential source of worry. Moreover, because they concern us, we have a natural urge to want to voice that concern, its nature and what we feel would be reasonable remedies to allay those concerns.
This may sound vague, so let us home in on the point: we are not ships’ captains, so I cannot comment on the correct speed with which to approach a potential ice floe in the dark of night in 1912. I cannot comment on the resistance offered to a blow by an iceberg against a ironclad ship in respect of plating as it existed in 1912. But I can imagine myself a passenger on a conveyance such as a ship, or an aircraft, or a bus. And, because of that, I am entitled to comment on what I see as the fairness of airline ticket prices, their environmental burden, their contribution to the economy, and their detraction from it. But, in short, my greatest worry is, in common with many, the premature ending of my life.
That is why I have a doctor and consult him when I feel unwell. It is why I look both ways when crossing the road. It is why I lock my doors at night. And it is why I am concerned by the Final Report on the Loss of the S.S. Titanic, and in particular the human aspects. Let’s look at some of them, because they are becoming of relevance in our modern age, even if we are not on an ocean-going liner, but somewhere else entirely.
Mr Joseph Bruce Ismay
The Report may or may not be right in summing up the facts as were presented to it, and it may or may not be right about the evidence that leads to its recommendations, but there are aspects of its narrations that are not open to judgment as to whether they are right or wrong. That, however, in no way deflects from a judgment on whether or not it was right or wrong for Lord Mersey to have viewed the matter in question in the way he did. For, I would contend, the manner he deploys in dealing with the extensive facts laid before him bears witness to a less-open mind than might ordinarily be appropriate. Lord Mersey is long since gone from us: he died in 1929, after an illustrious career in commercial and trade law, chairing inquiries into other disasters, like the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania. But evaluations of his contribution tend to the conclusion that he was no trailblazer, that he defended more the establishment position, that his digging skills were less spadework and more the action of a casual hoe.
The Titanic Report contains probably the best two examples of his approach, first, at page 39:
There was a tendency in the evidence to exaggerate the numbers in each boat, to exaggerate the proportion of women to men and to diminish the number of crew. I do not attribute this to any wish on the part of the witnesses to mislead the Court, but to a natural desire to make the best case for themselves and their ship.
First, the desire to make the best case referred to is stated to be natural. And not the desire to be bound by the oath one has just sworn? And, second, because that desire is natural, Lord Mersey does not take it as stemming from a wish to mislead the Court. I really wish I could ask him: what, then, my lord, is it a wish to do? To furnish the court with true and exact evidence, according to law? Fifteen hundred people died in the sinking, and Lord Mersey is brushing aside exaggerations in the evidence. I wonder how he knew they were exaggerations?
Second, at page 40:
As to the attack on Mr. Bruce Ismay, it resolved itself into the suggestion that, occupying the position of Managing Director of the Steamship Company, some moral duty was imposed upon him to wait on board until the vessel foundered. I do not agree. 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 think it’s correct that Ismay had assisted others, although I suspect the prime evidential source for that conclusion may be Ismay himself. Maybe there were no other people around, although that depends on what is meant with the word around: it was a ship, not Gloucestershire; but what of the men who lowered the boat away? Did they survive? You can argue that Ismay should better have told one of them to get into the boat, and have lowered it away for them, but there we have the nub of what this is all about: how easily we prescribe morality to others, and how easily we evade it ourselves.
When you read about the material comfort albeit soulless loneliness in which Ismay lived out his years (he died in 1937), you may also wonder whether he might not have been happier if he’d gone down with the ship: at least you’re still alive can have a negative connotation. Passenger Vishwash Ramesh, the sole survivor of the Ahmedebad air crash, may well, as did the sole survivor of the fact-based film Sole Survivor (with Richard Basehart and William Shatner), either count his lucky stars or shower himself with recriminations at his stroke of fortune or of fate, as the case may be.
Ismay’s fortune, or misfortune, as that case may be, did stem partly out of the circumstances that constitute the shit that happens, if a ship sinking can be called shit. Whether they were in any way engineered by facts as alleged on oath by passenger Elizabeth Lines is itself a matter of controversy. She features as a character in the 1997 film as overhearing Ismay’s urging of Captain Edward Smith to set a time record.
First, what is a transatlantic time record? It’s not a single voyage: the Blue Riband is not even a real award, but is accorded by consent to the ship that averages the best crossing speed between Europe and America. What Lines said she heard was Ismay encouraging Smith to beat, not the record per se but that of her sister ship, the S.S. Olympic. This was about in-house rivalry.
What does urge mean? You can convey a wide spectrum of meaning starting with an offhand remark such as Would it not be splendid if the Titanic could match, or even surpass, the speeds attained by the Olympic? That’s innocuous enough, isn’t it? In fact, Ismay had had the Titanic designed (all the detailed design work over and above the initial sketches) by the draughtsmen at Harland & Wolff itself, i.e. without specific oversight by the shipping line, and the brief was that the ship should be capacious. White Star wanted a large ship. It needn’t drag in the water, but speed was not Ismay’s great ambition, maybe not until the heat of that moment: perhaps it was a case of him having by that juncture ticked one box, but did he now need to tick another?
The criticism of Lord Mersey comes down to his all-too-ready support, generally, for the sensibilities of the shipping lines and of the upper set of which he was himself a member. Leaving Mr Ismay aside for the second, there was condemnation of Sir C. Duff Gordon’s behaviour that night, which was likewise dismissed by Lord Mersey (“I do not believe that the men were deterred from making the attempt [to return in his lifeboat to scout for remaining survivors] by any act of Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon’s”). So, with relationship management between superiors and underlings such that the superiors can be relied upon to provide mutual support to each other and to tend in all but the most extreme of cases to dismiss any suggestion of impropriety on their part, in how far can we be sure that a phrase like “would it not be splendid if” will not be construed as “that’s an order”?
The Wikipedia article for the Titanic makes an interesting point that’s rarely considered:
[I]f the ship had carried the full complement of about 3,339 passengers and crew, only about a third could have been accommodated in the lifeboats.
In other words, if she’d been full, another thousand people might have perished. So why all the arguments about one, Mr Ismay? Well, a ship can have any number of crew and passengers, but it only has one managing director. And, so, what? Are managing directors under the same moral responsibility as ships’ captains to observe the Birkenhead drill (i.e. women and children first)? In fact, the duty incumbent on a ship’s captain to remain at his post until all others have evacuated is not enshrined universally in law, although failure in the moral duty can itself trigger legal duties (such as charges of manslaughter). Abandoning the ship to the vagaries of the sea can also affect things like salvage and insurance, so it is certainly not an act without legal consequences. Captain Schettino of the Costa Concordia, which capsized off Giglio in 2012, left 300 passengers on his stricken vessel and received a custodial sentence of one year in addition to 15 years for manslaughter of 27 victims, all of which was conditioned by the fact that the disaster itself was the result of a daring manoeuvre of the ship under his command: he not only fled the scene of the accident, he negligently engineered the accident to boot.
But J. Bruce Ismay was not the captain of the Titanic. He wasn’t even a member of its crew. He was, by proxy, the ship’s owner. I suppose Captain Smith could have jollied him along, said they’re already doing top speed and there’s not much more to be hauled out of her anyway, and barrelling through the Atlantic’s waters despite ice warnings was usual practice at the time in any case. Smith was on his last voyage, he had nothing to lose from telling Ismay to shove it; and not much to gain from acceding to the suggestion. And the consequence of reducing speed by even five knots on whether the look-outs could have spotted the berg earlier, deflected from it, or whether the collision would have caused as much rivet-popping as it did is all … speculation.
The importance of the scene in Cameron’s film is pretty large, and has led some to dismiss the movie out of hand, whilst the rest of it is still moderately entertaining. The importance comes from a number of angles: Elizabeth Lines swore she actually heard these precise words, although Cameron omits the reference to the Olympic, and makes it sound like it would be a record for all-comers. But, there you are: a sworn deposition about something that happened the day of the accident: is that not pure, unassailable authenticity, what the historical movie buff always demands? Its importance stems from something else, however: its conclusiveness. It plants in the minds of the audience that this, and this alone, was the prime cause of the accident. Cameron therefore assumes a huge responsibility when he portrays the scene in such an ostentatious manner, especially with the actor’s verbal flourishes and apparent nonchalance. One thing does leave me wondering as to how innocently the conversation can be interpreted when it’s clear from the scenario that Ismay had collared Smith and expressly brought him to that quiet spot for a chat on precisely those matters. It’s not as though they just happened to bump into each other.
Above is how Cameron presents the conversation, but it is not in fact how Mrs Lines remembered it, when testifying at the US enquiry:
I heard Mr Ismay—it was Mr Ismay who did the talking—I heard him give the length of the run, and I heard him say:
‘Well, we did better today than we did yesterday, we made a better run today than we did yesterday, we will make a better run tomorrow. Things are working smoothly, the machinery is bearing the test, the boilers are working well.’
Then I heard him make the statement:
‘We will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday.’
I heard ‘We will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday’ in those words.
Those words fixed themselves in my mind.
On the other hand, some historians dispute that the conversation ever took place. That I find a bizarre contention but, truth be told, I’ve not been able to ascertain whether Ismay confirmed or denied Elizabeth List’s statement when it came his turn to testify. That he was not cross-examined on it almost beggars belief.
As it happens, Smith did as had been suggested: he fired up the remaining four boilers and increased the ship’s speed. Only in an aircraft is there an argument that reducing speed can cause an accident. But did increasing this ship’s speed provoke one? The received wisdom at the time was that a modern ship colliding with ice at that speed would not result in its foundering; that the lifeboats were sufficient for a transfer of all passengers safely to a rescue vessel, and that that was all they needed to be; that women and children go first; that the captain is the last to leave his ailing ship. If anything’s to be said of the owner, perhaps the most logical is that, as a business entrepreneur, all are best served if he survives the disaster to devote his energies anew to the prospering of the business and the wellbeing of its stakeholders.
Eschede and Quintinshill
The Deutsche Bahn rail disaster at Eschede occurred in 1998. It was concluded that no one was to blame for a litany of errors resulting in 101 deaths. The Caledonian Railway’s disaster at Quintinshill occurred in 1915. It was concluded that two signalmen were to blame for one signalman’s error.
It can prove hard to keep distinct morality and law at the best of times. But separating both of those from what I would have done if I’d been there demands an exceptional lack of subject matter discipline. None of this should call for any moral judgment, certainly not by anyone who is not in that situation against somebody in it, if only because it is a situation in which no one can precisely know what they would do if they themselves were in it.
The temptation to hand down a moral judgment arises because we know an accident occurred, and here we encounter a dilemma: whether it is required of an operator to ensure it operates systems that will rule out the possibility of accident; or whether it is incumbent on them only to operate systems that have not to date been shown to produce an accident.
The criminal court cases that followed the Eschede rail disaster on Deutsche Bahn’s Hanover-Hamburg line all eventually got dropped, to huge public consternation: how could it be that a multimillion transport corporation could operate trains that could fail, cause over a hundred deaths and yet no one was to blame? Well, in part, that is the corporate world, where very often no one is to blame. Of course, an Aktiengesellschaft, which is what Deutsche Bahn is, is a person, a legal person, an entity, like you and me. But not just like you and me: it’s a very special like you and me.
When Britain’s worst train disaster occurred at Quintinshill in Scotland in May 1915, involving no fewer than five trains and a fire that raged for three days and three nights, indictments of culpable homicide were raised against the guilty signalmen, George Meakin and James Tinsley, and they served their sentences, and returned to employment with the Caledonian Railway (albeit not as signalmen). The logic of the facts is such that only one of them could really have been the signalman at the time of the accident, but their fault was deemed to lie in the shift change-over arrangement they had made between themselves, and so both were charged and both were convicted. The death toll was about 225 (one train was a troop train and the troop lists were consumed by the fire, along with many of the train’s occupants), so just as in Eschede, feeling ran high as to who would pay for this crime. And before anyone pays for a crime, there has to be a crime, and a criminal. But, if the crime is that of a board of management, there is no criminal, and culpability becomes a negotiable commodity, which can be bought with insurance and sold with settlements. The German Wikipedia page describes the proceedings following Eschede in terms of the typical corporate conduct of a criminal case, with unnecessary logistical requirements, reports upon reports running to hundreds of pages, and the seemingly bottomless corporate pockets with which criminal accusations are not answered but—what else?—managed. Here’s a translation:
On 7 November 2001, the public prosecutor filed the indictment. By decision dated 13 June 2002, the First Criminal Division at Lüneburg Regional Court accepted the indictment and opened the main proceedings. The defendants were a divisional manager of Deutsche Bahn, a senior technical official of Deutsche Bahn, and a plant engineer from the wheel tyre manufacturer, charged with causing bodily harm to 105 people and causing death by negligence in 101 cases (in Germany, only natural persons can be prosecuted criminally, not legal entities like Deutsche Bahn). They were accused of not having tested the wheels sufficiently. The indictment was based primarily on an expert report from the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt. This report, over 300 pages long, had been submitted to the Lüneburg public prosecutor in early 2000.
The prosecutor had identified serious shortcomings on the part of Deutsche Bahn in the approval and maintenance processes. According to a criminal investigator, almost half of the wheel measurements taken before the accident were implausible. The defendants made no statement at any time during the proceedings.
The bench consisted of a president, Michael Dölp, two associate judges, and two lay judges. Due to the expected high public interest, the proceedings were held not at the court building in Lüneburg, but in a hall at the district council in Celle. Over eight months, 93 witnesses were heard on 52 court days. The first court day was 28 August 2002. At the inception of the proceedings, Deutsche Bahn submitted a 500-page statement and expressed its conviction that the engineers who stood accused were innocent of the charges. Ten plaintiffs joined the proceedings as civil parties. From the fourth day onwards, victims were heard. Over 70 bereaved family members were represented by a lawyer from Berlin. Initially, five expert witnesses were called; their number increased to 16 over the course of the proceedings. A number of expert witnesses, including representatives from Japan, South Africa, and Sweden, questioned the expert report submitted by the prosecution from the Fraunhofer Institute.
On 4 October 2002, the 12th day of the trial was reached. From 15 January 2003, the 32nd day of the trial, expert witnesses were questioned regarding the foreseeability of the wheel axle fracture. For this purpose, booths for simultaneous interpreters for English and Japanese were set up in the courtroom. On 27 February 2003, the 49th day of the trial, the final expert reports were submitted. On 28 April 2003, the 54th day of the trial, the presiding judge proposed dismissing the case in exchange for a payment of 10,000 euros from each of the three defendants, as only further tests (taking approximately one to two years) could definitively determine whether the defendants should have recognised the risk of the wheel axle breaking. The bench stated that this would satisfy the public interest in the prosecution; in any case, any serious wrongdoing on the part of the employees could be ruled out. This proposal was widely criticised. The proceedings concluded on 8 May 2003, the 55th day of the trial. Bereaved family members protested against dismissal of the case. The Federal Constitutional Court did not admit for review a constitutional complaint filed by parties involved in the Eschede trial against dismissal of the criminal proceedings on 27 August 2003, as no violation of fundamental rights could be determined to exist.
In other words, if there’s someone to blame, blame them. If not—and if they have not already drowned in the incident in question—drown them in paperwork. That is corporate justice. If that doesn’t work, appeal. And if you lose on appeal, just don’t implement the court order. It’s that simple. It’s how the US government does things these days.
A metaphor
These are techniques and citations of past cases of corporate misfeasance. The reason why they strike a chord today is not because of today’s corporate misfeasance as such. It stems from a metaphor, in which our world, your world, America, Britain, wherever (the procedures are basically the same) stands for the Titanic, or for the Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in the case of Eschede. It is headed for disaster, unless someone can convince me that the wealth discrepancy is going to have nothing but a benign outcome. The captains who give the orders to the crews of the ship look as though they are in charge: certainly they give orders that lend the impression that they are their orders and theirs alone. Some say to hold course, and even laugh at the idea of posting lookouts to sense any impending danger. The regulators and inspectors have been laid off, because they are too costly. The hump, if we could see it, that pokes above the water ahead is of course only about one-third of the problem: the rest of the problem is there but can’t be discerned in the icy deep. Last, there is us. The passengers. Even in the days of the emigrants, the first and steerage classes had no choice but to view one another from afar. “We are good comrades where introductions are neither possible nor necessary,” comments one first-class passenger of her view over the steerage passengers. Nowadays, we may spot one another, but the introductions are still neither possible nor necessary. We are all still prisoners on this ocean-going liner, with our eminently trackable and traceable mobile devices in our pockets, all urging our captain to light the other four boilers. He knows where we are, when he needs to know it.
Screenshot from https://www.ggarchives.com/OceanTravel/Steerage/SteerageImageLibrary.html.
Perhaps most striking in this metaphor is, at least insofar as Cameron depicted it in his film, the readiness to take what is to hand to rise up against authority: Leonardo DiCaprio’s screwed-down bench. First, however, one must weigh up the possibility of actually being presented with the bill for the damage. It is when the cost-benefit analysis renders that possibility negligible compared to ripping it off its fixings that benches get ripped up. On ships, or even elsewhere. It depends on how reassured the passengers are by the steward’s promises that everything will be alright.
That said, what moral argument do I have to rail against a government for hastening at full speed towards what I perceive as disaster? Is the duty to avoid disaster legal or moral? If it is legal, the holder of the duty is legally responsible. But, if it is moral, he is morally responsible, but not legally. If you need to, we can go back and review again our judgment of J. Bruce Ismay. Remember him? He was under a moral responsibility to die on the Titanic, some said. Because, they said, he was its managing director. Failing which, well, because he was a man. I know that other men got into boats, so why shouldn’t he? In which case, obviously he had every right to. Whatever: the crazy thing about moral judgments is that what goes around can end up kicking you in the backside. But legal guilt isn’t dependent on others being innocent. It depends on the accused being guilty.
Mr Ismay owed his conscience much, if only because he seems to have acted as if that were so. But me, he owes nothing. And what I would do if I were in a government’s place? Well, I’m not, so I needn’t answer that.
Shit happens, but it still has to be someone’s fault
At least for a ship that is made of iron, water is a pliable obstruction, and, until the Titanic’s night to remember, a ship’s speed was never seen as an object to its progress (this was in the days before Donald Campbell): it went as fast as it could, until the accident-prevention precautions of entering harbour and such like presented themselves. So, why should I be morally restricted from travelling fast in my ship? And, more to the point, why should I be morally castigated for suggesting to a ship’s captain that he increase his speed, a speed that is not otherwise limited on the open seas? If the concern that should have been uppermost in Ismay’s mind was his duty to the passengers, then I’d venture that that was precisely his prime concern in asking, if ask he did, for more speed. Much as it looks from the 1997 film as though Smith’s passengers were enjoying a leisurely cruise, nothing could be farther from the truth: the ship was an enforced prison for most of them, until, that is, such time as she docked in New York. Getting them there six to twelve hours earlier than scheduled would have very much pleased them.
The wish for a major disaster to be somebody’s fault is what drives investigations in the mind of the amateur. Maybe we have Sherlock Holmes, or even Scooby Doo, to blame for that precept. Every mystery story has to have its protagonist, someone has to end up being escorted away in handcuffs at the end of the story. We’ll never know why J. Bruce Ismay fell into a depression after returning to Europe, to his new home in Ireland. We may think we know, and it is true that the word Titanic was expressly forbidden in conversation at the family home. But whether he wished the project had never been started, or regretted making such a song and dance about the ship’s unsinkability, or about urging Smith to step on the steam, or even just being on the damned ship, or something else altogether, we can’t be certain.
Christmas 1936 brought his grandson by his daughter Evelyn to the house. The youngster had just learned for the first time that his grandfather had been involved in shipping at all and, around the festive dinner table, he asked his grandpa whether he had ever been shipwrecked. A stunned silence fell upon the gathering, and it was Ismay who broke it, not simply at the mealtime, but for the first time in nigh-on quarter of a century: “Yes, I was once, in a ship which was believed to be unsinkable.” The boy’s grandfather had passed away before Christmas would come around again.
Cruelty as an aggravating factor
There is much about disasters that enrages us more than just their occurrence, or that maybe even lessens the rage we’d otherwise feel. I have recently corresponded on this portal on the subject of Lockerbie, a disaster that touched me greatly when I lived but 70 miles distant from the town; but a few days afterwards seeing the scrape marks where an engine had careered across the main A74 road brought into focused reality what had till then just been a newspaper headline. I have wondered about what message the US president did not want to give by cynically replying to a reporter enquiring whether he would visit the site of the January 2020 Potomac River air collision, just seven miles from the White House, “Do you want me to go swimming?” And I have mused on why it is that distance, which normally keeps us protected, whether in time or in location, from the things that could harm us becomes contracted to that between me and my computer screen when the evils at work are procured by cruelty.
What thoughts must have coursed through Ismay’s mind before he settled on his decision, which held fast for 24 years, never again to speak a word about the Titanic? What it was that conditioned his silence must surely in part have been the world’s conclusion, arrived at at the goading of a newspaper magnate, that he, J. Bruce Ismay, had been guilty of irredeemable cruelty. Above, I draw into a single line those things that are born of our morality, those incumbent upon us by law, and those which we do anyway, regardless of law or morals and which we cannot predict. An indictment is a challenge drawn up by the state against the accused telling him of its belief that the addressee is guilty, and that all that remains to be done is to adduce before a jury of his peers the evidence that has brought it to that view. That is the judicial procedure, and it is the way of the law. But it is not the way of morality, for all its play-acting might have no truck with law, and for all law may make pretence of having truck with it. Morality is not a judgment by a newspaper. Nor by some body of enforcement such as exists in countries like Saudi Arabia (where the religious police’s powers were nonetheless sharply curtailed in 2016), Nigeria (where, in Kano, morality police frequently conflict with regular forces of law and order), and, of course, Iran (whose Islamic Revolution of 1979 created the momentum for such ḥisba-based policing, there and elsewhere). I’m really not sure whether a muhtasib would have even intervened in a comparable case to J. Bruce Ismay’s within his morality jurisdiction. In fairness, the theology of the Prophet Mohammed likely doesn’t spend overmuch time contemplating the moral dilemmas presented by ice. And such as ice does throw up are by no means exclusive to the daily practice of Islam, nor of any religion.
James Cameron answered his critics on how he had portrayed the character of J. Bruce Ismay as based on List’s testimony and fitting well with his semi-factual narrative. But it was underlined by his last statement on the matter: he wouldn’t be changing the script, and in any case it was what the audience were expecting to see.
That’s probably as true as anything in the 1997 film Titanic: it was what the audience was expecting to see. It’s something we should always bear in mind when we go to the movies.
By Hypontoto - Wilton J. Oldhams’ book The Ismay Line, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155244736.
Here, in the sense of at its proceedings.