and the only survivor to experience public shaming.
Sadly not - the warped Edwardian morals of the time also destroyed J Bruce Ismay, chair of the White Star Line. Ismay who had overseen the building of the Olympic class liners survived the sinking and was publicly smeared by the great and the good on both sides of The Atlantic, not least by William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers.
After helping people to the lifeboats, Ismay left the ship on one of the last lifeboats just a short while before it finally sank. Witnesses said there were no more women and children in that part of the ship and the boat was already being lowered. Despite that, Ismay was publicly humiliated as ‘J Brute Ismay’. As his granddaughter wrote:
Having had the misfortune (one might say the misjudgement) to survive – a fact he recognised despairingly within hours – he withdrew into a silence in which his wife made herself complicit – imposing it on the family circle and thus ensuring that the subject of the Titanic was as effectively frozen as the bodies recovered from the sea.
He was utterly devastated by the disaster with multiple witnesses talking about his distress and inconsolable grief. Even after being cleared of any wrongdoing in both Inquiries, he continued to be slandered right up to the modern era - Cameron’s Titanic continued to tell falsehoods about a flawed man who did what most people would have done when faced with catastrophe.There is no evidence that he ordered Titanic’s speed to be increased; there’s none that he dressed as a woman to leave the ship (a myth that keeps reappearing with different male survivors),
Mike Brady over at Oceanliner Designs (great channel BTW) has a good piece about Ismay.
