Sir, – Frank McNally quotes Ben Hecht’s condemnatory poem about John Bruce Ismay (An Irish Diary, September 24th). Ismay owned the White Star shipping line, which was once based in Liverpool and whose fleet included the Titanic.
The poem casts Ismay as a coward who took a place on a lifeboat before potential women and children survivors when the doomed Titanic sank in the Atlantic on her maiden voyage in 1912.
The poem contrasts Ismay’s cowardice with the bravery of the ship’s captain, Edward Smith, who stayed aboard and went down with the ship. Ismay’s descendants have long sought to clear their ancestor’s name and point out that he was exonerated of any wrongdoing by both the British and United States inquiries into the disaster.
His evidence, accepted by both inquiries, was that he boarded the last departing lifeboat, not the first as was suggested widely at the time, that this was 20 minutes before the ship sank, and that he did this only after being satisfied there were no women or children in its whereabouts to take the last two remaining places.
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Had he not boarded the lifeboat, his descendants say, the only probable consequence was that another life, his, would have been lost without benefit to anyone.
Nevertheless, Ismay was repeatedly accused of cowardice, particularly in the US press of the time. After the tragedy, he withdrew from the public eye and spent his remaining years largely between his home in Costelloe, Co Galway, and his home in London where he died in 1937. A broken man, he did not speak publicly about the tragedy and he devoted considerable energy to charitable causes.
Ismay sold his Liverpool mansion and estate, Sandheys, in Mossley Hill, in 1920. The home was demolished to make way for a development of semidetached houses, one of which was our family home for many years. – Yours, etc,
PAUL COOPER,
Mossley Hill,
Liverpool.
