How to Survive the Titanic – The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay

Thursday 20 October
The Electric Theatre 7pm £7 (£6 Friends of GBF, concessions) £11 joint ticket with Event 48

Books have been written, films made ... we have raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous occasions. But out of the wreckage Frances Wilson extracts a different story. While a thousand men prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner and inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat with the women and children and rowed away to safety. Accused of cowardice, Ismay's reputation never recovered. With the help of that great narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, whose Lord Jim so uncannily predicted Ismay's fate, Frances Wilson explores the reasons behind Ismay's jump, his desperate need to make sense of the horror and his search for a way of living with lost honour.

Buy tickets