William James Pirrie – 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tried to work out the key details before they had been publicly announced (a highlight of the chapter is a previously unpublished drawing which apparently represented their ‘best guess’ of the new White Star ships’ design).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…

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…