10 Ways You Think About The Titanic All Wrong

6. Bruce Ismay (Probably) Wasn't The Villain

One single fact that all Titanic movies can agree on is that Bruce Ismay, White Star Line chairman, was the closest thing the debacle has to a villain (unless you count the manipulative sharks in the worse of the two cartoon versions). Despite his position in the company behind the ship, he was for all intents and purposes a regular passenger on the maiden voyage, yet according to passenger testimony was the one constantly pushing for more speed and later jumped into a lifeboat, consistently presented an act of pure cowardice.

That's what the press at the time wrote, because information was scare and with the woman and children confusion it seemed he'd put self-preservation above all other concerns, and all accounts since have moved with this; the Nazi propoganda film on the disaster twisted so much, including making him the baddie, and James Cameron kept it in his movie because "that's what audiences expect".

But by all accounts all Ismay was was a victim of a smear campaign, a result of he and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst had fallen out years previously. Multiple alternative tellings of the night have him helping get people off the ship as it sank ever deeper, only stepping into one of the last lifeboats lowered because there was copious space. Like most elements of human interaction during the sinking, this is subject to misremembering, but it certainly doesn't sound like he's as malicious as the legend suggests.