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pleasurable rather than gustily high speed.
    Thomas Ismay—backed by Harland & Wolff—was challenging Cunard for North Atlantic business by the 1870s. In business he was prone to tyrannize. At home he was a martinet. Every self-made Victorian ogre had a domestic citadel built for himself: Ismay’s was an ornate mock-Elizabethan house south of Liverpool. Each morning at eight he began his daily walk to Thurstaston station. If he saw a fallen leaf on his carriage drive, he would put a stone on top of it, and woe betide his ten gardeners if the stone and leaf were still there when he returned in the evening. This was the sort of attention to detail, slyness, and intimidation in which Victorian businessmen took pride. Ismay cut a great figure in the world. The naval review at Spithead of 1897, a display of imperial might to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, was attended by all the Home Fleet, many overseas squadrons, and the Prince of Wales on the royal yacht, plus Thomas Ismay with his son Bruce on their liner Teutonic, sporting its eight guns as an armed merchantman. A few years later, in 1899–1900, both the Teutonic and the Majestic carried thousands of troops to the war in South Africa.
    At the age of twenty-nine, in 1892, Bruce Ismay became managing director of White Star, after a spell as its New York agent, and he took charge after his father’s death in 1899. He was described (at the time of the Titanic disaster) as “a quietly dressed, rather youthful man of unassuming mien . . . speaking in a low, well-modulated voice that carried well . . . He looks and speaks so unlike the commonly accepted type of commercial monarchs as could well be conceived. A cultured cosmopolitan, if you like, but not a strong ruler of strong men.” 8 He is often presented as a typical English upper-middle-class public schoolboy because he had good manners and Who’s Who recorded that he had been educated at Harrow. But this is misleading, for Ismay spent less than eighteen months at Harrow, which he left at the age of fifteen; he was, moreover, there in an undistinguished generation, for none of his classmates achieved distinction, and few of them enjoyed even middling hereditary privileges. Ismay was inescapably the son of a northern millionaire, who was trained in commerce after his interlude at Harrow and then sent to New York to be toughened in the transatlantic rate wars. He stood six feet four inches tall and was a robust sportsman, though not in the class of the shipping tycoon Hermann Oelrichs, who was ostracized in the New York Athletic Club because he was an insufferably successful all-rounder who thought nothing of swimming several miles out into the Atlantic alone.
    Like many self-made millionaires, old Ismay was stormy, egotistical, and showy; and like many sons of such men, Bruce Ismay disliked brouhaha and was guarded in his reactions, only relaxing when in the company of those he trusted. Bruce Ismay, though, commanded high prestige, for shipowners stood at the apex of British business. It was only in the 1880s that prime ministers began recommending to Queen Victoria that she bestow peerages on men who were company directors. Bankers and brewers secured the earliest peerages, but in 1897 Sir John Burns of Cunard became the first shipowner with a coronet, Lord Inverclyde. In the next quarter century—Britain’s shipping apogee, with the Titanic ’s maiden voyage about halfway through—another eight peerages went to shipping directors. It is likely that but for the Titanic disaster a peerage would have gone to Bruce Ismay, as it eventually did to his shipping son-in-law Basil Sanderson.
    Ismay came to power at White Star at a time of keen competition from the two leading German shipping lines. Until the 1890s, Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd had specialized in emigrant traffic and left first-class passengers to Cunard and White Star. By 1903 German lines owned the four fastest ships in the world: