FREE HOW TO SURVIVE THE TITANIC OR THE SINKING OF J. BRUCE ISMAY PDF Frances Wilson | 352 pages | 14 Mar 2012 | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC | 9781408828151 | English | London, United Kingdom The Life of Bruce Ismay After Titanic’s Sinking – Part Two How to Survive the Titanic. Or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury. Frances Wilson invokes Herman Melville to compare Ismay to Captain Ahab and even to Noah in this often ludicrous bookbut predominantly plumps for Joseph Conrad in her meditation on the life - and the elemental living - of this single individual, in whom is seemingly forever embarked the fate of fifteen hundred. The first syllable asserts enduring existence, the second an implication of twin alternatives. Ismay lived, and his reputation died. Had he not entered collapsible C it is scarcely imaginable that anyone would have branded him a coward. Instead mere mortality would have conferred its very opposite, in the palpable vein of an Isidor Straus or any other drowned potentate of the merchant classes. But such is a preserved-in-amber afterlife. With Ismay, though he now be dead, we can still poke the wounds. And so Wilson, as sanguinary soothsayer, enters into her very own launch — because this is a commercial voyage, complete with the richly absurd sales claim that Ismay fell in love with a married passenger on the maiden voyage. He did no such thing. It is as well that this work is largely a meditation — albeit with some interesting photographs and detail provided by the Cheape family — as the author seems only rudimentarily acquainted with the Titanic story. Indeed in many respects her escapist craft leaks like a sieve. The reverse jacket illustration claims to show collapsible C, whereas it is a well- known image of D. That How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay is repeated in the caption to a How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay inside — a pretty gruesome error when it concerns the lifeboat in which your literary subject was saved. D for dunce? Bull of the highest order! Anglo-Saxon passenger and other names are misspelt. Filson Young is described as an Irish journalist, the cork of lifejackets was apparently spread over where the ship went down it was insulating refrigeration corkand the author repeatedly claims that the deck was awash when collapsible C launched, yet also includes occupant accounts about the long descent to the sea, pushing the strakes off from the rivets along the side, and even avoiding the low pump-water jets. She sees no contradiction in any of this, or in the many more instances that might be cited, and is evidently a scatterbrain in both style and substance. He is one of us. The expectations of class station and honour do not exist to the same standard today, because elevations have been torn down. Ismay was vilified inyet recently another marine disaster gave rise to useful modern comparison not mentioned in these pages. Anger had its arrow point, and Hayward resigned. How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay his momentary personal reflection is understandable. Nobody went so far as to genuinely suggest that honour dictated that he should have been suffused in the surf like an oil-suffocated seabird. And should he now live out his life in endless self-recrimination? It would be an extreme response to answer in the affirmative. Those who fled were the smart ones, yet such nonsense gained traction. O tempora, o mores! The higher the class, the higher the bar, such that newspapers extolled sacrifice, even to needless and thus counter- productive levels. Thus the outrage was never really about Ismay personally. Had he died, the fickle finger of fate would have moved on to the next highest ranking, most especially if British. But Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon was only ever spattered with modest mud…. Ismay probably recognised cant for what it was. He had been through a fiercely searing experience in which his perspectives must have been instantly righted. Ismay insisted in evidence that he searched his own conscience, and found it clear. But the evidence is that he just got on with it as best he could, not that he was not immensely scarred by what he had undergone, in common with all others to escape. If Ismay in his soul-searching etched in letters subsequently written to Marian Thayer and discussed by the How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay had absolved himself of responsibility, who are we to thrust it back upon him? But Wilson rehashes apocryphal guff about Ismay booking two seats when going to the theatre — one for his hat and coat. But what about his other side? Why not book three seats, one each for the hat and coat, if a sociophobe? How attend at all for that matter? Too much indulgence is paid to such drivel. There are a lot of literary excursions in this book, which are diverting in every sense. Ah but she does cite Freud! Wells, Henry James, D. Lawrence, E. It would be unkind to say that Ismay gratefully slips into the background, away from such a delirium of the socially celebrated, but the truth is that this book is about the idea of him, rather than the reality. And that suits the author, who inveighs against armchair judges, because philosophising and name-dropping can be a soft option. Yes, perhaps it is a pleasant-enough boat trip in a harmlessly opposite direction. Two stars. Information about How to Survive the Titanic. Bruce Ismay PDF. Note by Frances Wilson regarding the Ismay family archive. I intensely disagree with Mr. Also, political journalist Mr. Leave a comment. Encyclopedia Titanica How to Survive the Titanic. Bruce Ismay Ismay as Ecce Homo. Bruce Ismay. Titanic Review Thursday 11th August Reviewed by Senan Molony. View : Reply. How to Survive the Titanic. Or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay At 6ft 4in, Ismay towered over the other survivors sitting on the boards, most of them Lebanese women and children, none of whom had any idea who he was. Thirty minutes later, those few who had been allocated places in the half-empty boats now rowing away from the sinking ship watched, mesmerised, as the she turned on her nose and made her final plunge, taking with her 1, people. Ismay, however, with his back to the scene, kept his eyes fixed on the distance. He said he had been helping with the rowing, but this seems unlikely: not only was he facing the wrong way, but he was in no state to do anything physical. When he left the sinking ship, Ismay stepped into a bottomless well. On board the Carpathia, while other survivors slept on dining room tables, Ismay insisted on a private cabin. Here, he spent the next four days under an opiate. Meanwhile, stories about his conduct began to circulate among the widows on board. In his public testimony, Ismay said that he jumped from the Titanic of his own volition, leaving behind him an empty ship. The mystery of his actions intensified when Emily Ryerson, a first-class passenger — returning to New York for the funeral of her son and now also burying her husband — revealed that she and her friend, Marian Thayer, had met Ismay on deck on the fatal day and been shown How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay him an ice warning. Instead, they would be speeding up. The news of an ice warning came as a shock. It is no exaggeration to say that men who went through all the experiences of the collision and the rescue… with hardly a tremor, were quite overcome by the knowledge and turned away, unable to speak. The only person to stand up for Ismay was Mrs Thayer, whose husband had also died that night. It seems that Ismay, who had met Mrs Thayer during the voyage, had fallen in love with her. He leaves his ship to sink with its powerless cargo of lives and does not care to lift his eyes. He crawls through unspeakable disgrace to his own safety. Why litter the deck, Ismay is said to have argued, when the ship is How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay a lifeboat? Within hours of landing in New York, Ismay was called as the first How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay at the hastily convened US Senate inquiry into the tragedy. Barely able to speak — Ismay had never made a public statement in his life — he described himself as a passenger and not a member of the crew, and thus justified in saving his own life. He knew, he said, nothing about navigation, but witness after witness described how he had behaved on board with the authority befitting a captain. Returning How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay England following the US inquiry, Ismay was a broken man. His nightmares woke the house, he received hate mail, an old friend turned him away from the front door. Other survivors published accounts of the night or told their stories to journalists. Putting together a narrative made some sense of it all, but apart from insisting that he had jumped from an empty ship, Ismay said nothing, in public or in private, about his experience. The horror and chaos remained unarticulated horror and chaos. What an ending to my life. Perhaps I was too proud of my ships and this is my punishment.