Articles with the Tag Thomas Henry Ismay

Olympic & Titanic: Triumph and Disaster – Chapter 1

The first copies of Olympic & Titanic: Triumph and Disaster will be landing on readers’ doormats over the coming weeks!

It is an enormous book 416 pages in length (excluding the colour section) and so it is divided into three main parts.  The first part opens with Chapter 1, ‘The North Atlantic Run’ (34 pages), which examines the early history of the modern White Star Line from its purchase by Thomas Henry Ismay.  It is a remarkable story of a newcomer’s success on the highly competitive North Atlantic route.  We trace the basic details of the company’s early history as it orders a new fleet of ships exclusively from the Belfast shipbuilder Harland & Wolff, which competitors scramble to match.  Although the company’s policy turned to focus on comfort rather than speed in later years, data for 1872 shows their fleet’s average crossing times as being significantly less than their older, long established rival Cunard.

The Atlantic disaster was the first serious blot on the company’s record and involved a heavy loss of life.  We see Thomas Henry Ismay and his company making strenuous efforts to clear themselves from the charge that the ship had left port without sufficient coal.  The heartbreaking conclusion is that she had plenty of coal onboard when Captain Williams took the fateful decision to divert to Halifax.  This was based on erroneous information from his Chief Engineer, whose figures substantially under-represented the amount of coal onboard.  The diversion was the first in a chain of events that led to his command being wrecked on the rocks.  What emerges from the disaster is the impression of a strong, well-built ship which was lost through poor navigational practices and extraordinary complacency.

White Star survived the calamity and continued to grow.  There was even a suggestion in the late 1870s of a merger with Cunard.  We follow the company becoming immensely prosperous even though it faced tough economic times and see J. Bruce Ismay join the management in the early 1890s, followed by Harold Sanderson in 1895.  Cunard’s annual reports for this period read like a tale of woe and contrast with the White Star Line’s financial strength.  We see that White Star was not alone in experiencing ill-fortune: Cunard experienced a number of shipwrecks in the late 1880s. J. Bruce Ismay’s previously unpublished comments about the loss of Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Elba in 1895 illustrate that he was well aware of the potential risks in a shipowner’s business, perhaps even more so after the baffling loss of Naronic in 1893.

The increasing competition from German Lines and the move to a policy of comfort rather than speed are covered in some detail. Comments from White Star and Cunard personnel show clearly the benefits of larger, slower ships such as the ‘Big Four’ from the point of view of their seakeeping qualities and the financial results they generated.

The acquisition of a controlling interest in the White Star Line by IMM illustrates how keen the American combine was to get its hands on the shipping line.  There were many critics of the move and plenty of concern that British interests were being sold out to a foreign country.  These prompted comments from Lord Pirrie to a newspaper reporter in 1902:  

The first is the interests of the country – and I wish, by the way, you would invent some comprehensive word which would, unlike Briton, include Irishmen – my second is in shipbuilding, and my third in shipowning. In which of these capacities could I possibly be an assenting party to a scheme which threatened injury to Imperial interests and ruin to British shipbuilders and shipowners?

J. Bruce Ismay’s own discussions about the combine’s future show his shrewd eye for detail as a businessman.  We see him considering exactly the sort of strategic questions essential to IMM’s future, including consideration in 1902 of making Southampton the terminal for the fast passenger and mail service to New York – something which has particular relevance to the decision to order Olympic and Titanic five years later.  He looks at issues such as the amount of debt the combine will have (a prescient question considering its later history) and how they can make it run more efficiently, such as using bulk purchasing of coal supplies to try and negotiate better prices.

The details of the White Star Line’s relationship with Harland & Wolff and the growth of the shipbuilder in the late 1880s are covered, ending with the expansion of the shipyard’s facilities which enabled the new large ships to be built.  We then see Cunard’s perspective competing against the White Star Line through little-known correspondence from company management.  By 1902, Cunard was in dire need of capital and felt paralysed against its competition (White Star and the major German Lines):

The result was that if the Government did nothing, the Company must face either absorption or annihilation.

State support from the British government saved Cunard but left White Star with a choice of how to respond to both their principal British competitor and continental lines including HAL, HAPAG and Norddeutscher Lloyd. Their decision to move their express service to Southampton in 1907 leads into the strategic rationale for Olympic and Titanic.  No shipping company could realistically match the speed of Cunard’s new Lusitania or Mauretania.  It was simply not feasible economically.  White Star’s strategic choice was to opt for new ships which would nonetheless be competitive from a speed point of view, as well as providing more luxury and comfort for passengers – with a particular eye on the continental passenger traffic they were now competing more directly for. 

How they and Harland & Wolff went about meeting those objectives that is covered in Chapter 2…