Edward Wilding – Mark Chirnside’s Reception Room

Olympic & Titanic: Triumph and Disaster – Chapter 2

If you have reached the end of Chapter 1, you’ll have seen the background leading up to the decision to proceed with the new ships and the record of their order on 30 April 1907.

Chapter 2, ‘Yard Numbers 400 and 401’, explores the nature of the relationship between White Star and Harland & Wolff. They effectively outsourced their ship design to the shipbuilder, whereas other companies – such as Cunard – designed their ships ‘in house’ and went out to competitive tender from different shipyards. We come to understand more about Lord Pirrie, Alexander Carlisle, Thomas Andrews and Edward Wilding, both through biography and their roles at Harland & Wolff as they related to the new ships. They were keeping an eye on the competition, including the observation that the lavatory pans on Lusitania were too shallow (a rather unfortunate problem when the ship was rolling!). Thomas Andrews also drew a comparison, pointing out that the stability of the new White Star liners would be much greater than the Cunarders.

Press reports soon begin to appear about the new ships, with a wide variation in levels of accuracy. Cunard tried to work out the key details before they had been publicly announced (a highlight of the chapter is a previously unpublished drawing which apparently represented their ‘best guess’ of the new White Star ships’ design). Meanwhile, their size grew significantly as Harland & Wolff worked through the detail and the various design concepts. The earliest known estimate of size put them at about 38,000 gross tons, which eventually grew to over 45,000 – more than doubling the margin of size over Mauretania! By July 1908, design work had progressed far enough for the White Star Line to approve the proposed ‘Design “D”‘ concept which finalised all the fundamental details including the ships’ dimensions. (Many smaller details changed or remained to be worked out.)

We track all the preparations that Harland & Wolff had to make throughout the late summer and autumn of 1908, as the shipyard and engine works were ordered to proceed with all the practical details of construction. This included placing numerous orders for materials and component parts with subcontractors, such as the stern frame castings and propeller boss arms. Unusually, the orders for the enormous rudders contained particular specifications for quality of material and manufacture, including ultimate tensile strength of the material and its elastic limit.

One of the subjects that is not often covered is the close degree of cooperation between the various shipping lines’ technical staff, such as the marine superintendents. We follow a conference between major shipping lines which the White Star Line hosted in Liverpool during August 1910.

The White Star Line and Harland & Wolff had to cope with exacting demands from the postal authorities. Their new ships would be Royal Mail Steamers and, as such, the post office facilities and accommodation needed to be satisfactory. They spent more than a year going back and forth with the postal authorities to make sure the plans met requirements. One extraordinary request was that the post office accommodation be placed on the lower promenade (B-deck). White Star argued that this was simply not possible:

it is really impossible in a passenger steamer to put accommodation of this nature upon the upper decks, as it would interfere seriously with the earning power of such costly vessels

They reassured them that post office accommodation could be provided on a lower deck as well as being very well ventilated and comfortable. The original proposal for the post office accommodation to be placed towards the stern was also changed so that the facilities were at the bow.

We see some of the health and safety challenges common to all shipyards of the period. There were unfortunately a number of incidents and fatalities at Harland & Wolff. Incidents of theft were also recorded. One worker was caught stealing paintbrushes from the shipyard and pawning them. Another man, who was not even employed by Harland & Wolff, was caught stealing workers’ food. Their morning supplies had been vanishing daily for a number of consecutive days, naturally causing a lot of concern: the men were ‘getting wild’ and angry about it. All these details, great and small, shed light on what it was like at the Belfast shipyard as construction progressed…

Edward Wilding’s Hawke Collision Testimony

Edward Wilding had probably been looking forward to 17 April 1912.

It was expected that Titanic would have docked in New York on the conclusion of a successful maiden voyage. Perhaps he was anticipating news from Thomas Andrews concerning any of the observations he had made about the new ship’s progress. (A year earlier, Andrews had made 56 notes concerning Olympic’s maiden voyage.)

Instead, he was digesting the news that Titanic had foundered with a heavy loss of life, including his colleague Thomas Andrews and the other members of Harland & Wolff’s ‘guarantee group’. There was little time to try and process the news before he found himself in court that day, testifying as part of the appeal hearings following the Olympic-Hawke collision. The channel in the vicinity of the collision had been swept and wreckage from Hawke recovered. The White Star Line were hoping to use its location as evidence pinpointing the location of the collision, as part of their appeal against the December 1911 verdict (which allocated blame to Olympic but absolved her of liability on the basis of the defence that she was compulsory pilotage when the collision occurred).

He was asked about the damage to Olympic and the collision repairs. Harland & Wolff had sold the damaged hull plating to a scrapyard and ‘nearly all of it’ had subsequently been recovered for examination.

Wilding thought that the main wreckage now recovered from the bottom of the channel had fallen from Hawke ‘at the conclusion of the third cut, and just as the next blade [of Olympic’s starboard propeller] was beginning the fourth cut on the body of the Hawke’. His evidence emphasized the enormous stresses on Olympic’s structure and starboard engine as the collision occurred:

I find some difficulty in saying that it absolutely did jam, but there was no question that the plating, when the vessel arrived in Belfast, was driven hard in, and the frames doubled up inside by pressure of the fore foot on the boss plating, and that the boss plating and framing had been driven down on a big loose coupling which was beneath them, and that the [Olympic’s starboard] engine, in its effort to go round, or to continue going round, when the pressure came on it, had torn and done very considerable damage to the framing inside the structure of the Olympic; and it is quite in my mind conceivable – although, of course, it is not certain – that that was sufficient to bring up the engine momentarily. Then, as the pressure of the Hawke’s fore foot was lifted off by her movement over the big propeller casting, that the engine was sufficiently free to be enabled to go on again. I do not think many people who have not been there, realise the enormous power that there is got from the steam pressure in these engines; they move comparatively slowly even when at full power, and the power behind them is, I think I am correct in stating, larger than the power behind the biggest rolling mills in the world. That is, the biggest mills that are used anywhere for the rolling of steel plates, as distinct from the forging of armour plates; consequently, the power that is available for doing damage is enormous, so that it is almost impossible to say that the comparatively modest damage, such as the damage on the boss plating, did bring up the propeller. But, allowing for the fact that the weight of the Hawke, the whole weight of the forward end…, was sitting momentarily on the loose coupling, it is at least conceivable that it was brought up there… I may say that as far as we could tell – we made some estimate of it – the starboard engine of the Olympic, when running at 64 revolutions, was probably giving something like 12,000 horsepower…

Wilding faced a whole series of daunting tasks in those weeks. He would go on to give exhaustive information and testimony before the British Wreck Commissioner’s court, providing information about all the fundamental aspects of Titanic’s design…