Titanic

Rupert Matthews

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848589490
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marine Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

'Goodbye Miss Young. Good luck to you and don't forget to remember me to the folks back home.'
Major Archibald Butt (1865-1912)The sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage in 1912 is one of the most dramatic stories in maritime history. The largest passenger steamship in the world, fitted with more advanced safety features than any of her rivals, she was proclaimed to be virtually unsinkable.More than 1, 500 people perished when the Titanic went down - many from drowning but more from hypothermia on one of the coldest but most beautiful April nights anyone could remember in the North Atlantic. The survivors of the disaster brought home tales of heroism and cowardice, of calmness and panic, of honour and disgrace.Just how and why the Titanic foundered on such a beautiful April evening is the subject of this fascinating book. Author Rupert Matthews explores witness accounts and evidence gathered at the inquiries, along with more recent discoveries, to piece together a complete picture of what happened on that fateful night in 1912.

Chapter 1

the north atlantic liners

With hindsight it could be said that the train of events that ended with such a terrible loss of life on that April night in 1912 began as far back as October 1867, when the Royal Bank of Liverpool suddenly collapsed.

Among the many Merseyside businesses caught up in the financial turmoil that followed the failure of the bank was the White Star Line, one of Liverpool’s premier shipping companies. The White Star Line had made its name running passenger and freight ships to and from Australia, but had recently begun to operate on the more prestigious and profitable New York route as well. Now, overwhelmed by debts and commitments, the directors of the White Star Line were forced to sell everything. Even that was not enough and eventually the company itself was put up for sale for the sum of £1,000. The company had nothing solid left on its books, only its name and its flag of a white star on a red, swallow-tailed pennant. As one of the best-known and most highly regarded shipping companies operating out of the Mersey River, these were worth something.

In January 1868 the name and flag were bought by an enterprising 31-year-old local man named Thomas Ismay. Young Ismay was working for the National Line and dreamed of operating his own shipping line. The purchase of the bankrupt White Star Line gave him his chance. It was a business he was born to, for he was a seaman through and through.

Ismay had been born just up the coast from Liverpool at Maryport, Cumberland, in a house overlooking the small harbour there. His father, also Thomas, was a prosperous timber merchant who owned shares in five small ships operating out of Maryport, where another member of the Ismay family ran a small shipbuilding yard. Young Thomas spent his childhood around the harbour, passing his school holidays working in his family shipyard or signed on to local ships as they plied to Ireland, Scotland and on the coastal trade. At 16 he was sent to Liverpool to be apprenticed to a shipbroker where he did well. Once the apprenticeship was over, Ismay went to sea. He served on several different ships bound for assorted ports around the Atlantic and Mediterranean. On his return to Liverpool he joined the National Line, getting his break into shipping line management through a family friend. By the time he bought the White Star Line, Ismay was a seasoned seaman and experienced shipping manager. What he lacked was money.

It was while he was relaxing one evening playing billiards that Ismay was approached by the well-known and staggeringly wealthy Liverpool merchant Gustav Schwabe. As his name might suggest, Schwabe had been born in Germany, at the great port of Hamburg, but had moved to Liverpool in his youth and by this date he had lived in the city for thirty years and had married a local girl. Schwabe was accompanied by his nephew, Gustav Wolff, who was a junior partner in the Belfast shipbuilding business Harland and Wolff. Schwabe offered to lend the White Star Line enough money to re-establish itself as a leading Liverpool shipping line and to do so on very reasonable terms. His only condition was that White Star had to agree to buy its ships exclusively from Harland and Wolff.

Understandably, Ismay did not want to lose financial control of the company he had only just bought. He therefore formed the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company which would borrow the money from Schwabe and own the ships, while the White Star Line operated the vessels. Ismay then travelled to Belfast to meet Edward Harland, the senior partner of Harland and Wolff. He found a man after his own heart.

Harland had been born in the Yorkshire port of Scarborough in 1831. Like Ismay he spent his childhood in and around ships of the coastal trade until he too was sent off to take up an apprenticeship – this time at the prestigious Stephenson engineering works at Newcastle upon Tyne. Having served out his apprenticeship learning all there was to know about steam engines, Harland moved to the Thomson shipbuilding yard in Glasgow. In 1853 he was hired to be manager of the Toward shipyard back on the Tyne, before moving to Hickson’s shipyard on Queen’s Island, in the estuary of the River Lagan at Belfast.

Owner Robert Hickson was happy to leave almost every aspect of the business to Harland, who was a firm believer that the future of shipbuilding lay with iron steam ships. Harland became a notorious stickler for detail. He kept an ivory ruler in his coat pocket at all times to check every precise detail of work going on in the yard – and a piece of chalk to mark anything that did not come up to his exacting standards. He also banned smoking in the yard, considering it to be a disgusting habit and something of a danger in a workplace with so much timber lying about.

In 1858 Hickson decided to sell up and retire. He offered the entire shipbuilding yard to his manager, Harland, for £5,000. Harland did not have anything like the required sum, but one of the clerks in his office was Gustav Wolff, nephew of the wealthy Gustav Schwabe. Wolff alerted Schwabe to the business opportunity, and Schwabe contacted Harland to offer him the necessary money if he would take on Wolff as a partner. Inspired as much by Wolff’s skill at designing ships as by the cash, Harland agreed. He bought the Hickson yard and so Harland and Wolff was created.

Harland’s greatest contribution to shipbuilding came early in the life of the new company when he and Wolff designed the SS Venetian for the Bibby Line. For its day, the Venetian was revolutionary. The decks were of steel, not wood, and the hull was of a deep square shape in place of the V-shaped hulls of earlier vessels. The new shape effectively made the ships into immensely strong iron boxes. The V shape had been necessary in sailing ships that needed to withstand sideways pressure when the wind was on the beam, but was useless in steam ships driven from the rear by a screw propeller. The inherent strength of the box shape allowed ships to be built that were longer in proportion to their width, increasing the capacity of the holds. The increased space for cargo helped boost the profits of each voyage for the increasing numbers of lines that bought Harland and Wolff ships.

In 1862 Harland and Wolff took on a young clerk named William Pirrie. Pirrie proved to be an extremely persuasive salesman and an adept financial operator. He rose rapidly through the managerial ranks at Harland and Wolff and by 1874 he was on the board and would soon be the third partner. Increasingly the company was dominated by the three men working as a team. Harland was the inventive engineering visionary who won patents for the company, Wolff was the practical engineer who designed and built the ships, while Pirrie negotiated the orders and handled the finances.

In the 1880s, when Harland was asked how he managed his company, he replied: ‘Well, Wolff designs the ships, Pirrie sells them and I smoke the firm’s cigars.’ He was being modest – his engineering skills were essential to the company’s success.

A prosperous partnership

Over the following years, the White Star Line and Harland and Wolff saw their fortunes rise together. Both companies grew rapidly and came to dominate their respective industries. The personal affinity between Thomas Ismay and Edward Harland was cemented into a profitable business relationship. Harland and Wolff boasted to customers that they supplied all the White Star vessels, while White Star boasted to their customers that they used only Harland and Wolff ships.

At this date most merchant ships were built and operated as multi-purpose vessels. Passengers were carried on cargo ships and passenger ships carried cargo. There were two exceptions, and Harland and Wolff built both for White Star.

The speedy passenger liners built specifically for the North Atlantic run were long, slim and elegant. They had passenger accommodation divided into first class, second class and third class – White Star did not use the term ‘steerage’ for its cheaper cabins as Ismay felt this to be a pejorative term and valued all his customers. In June 1841, the first of these liners, SS Columbia, set a new record for crossing the Atlantic of 10 days and 19 hours. She thus gained for her owners, the Cunard Line, the celebrated Blue Riband, the unofficial title given to the ship that was fastest across the Atlantic. By the 1850s, Cunard was in competition with the Collins Line of New York for the Blue Riband. It was not until 1872 that White Star first gained the Blue Riband with their ship the Adriatic. These ships carried the prefix SS, for Steam Ship.

The second type of specialist merchant ships were the Royal Mail Steamers, which had the prefix RMS. These were ships that had won the coveted and lucrative mail contracts from the British government. These contracts were established in 1840 and linked all the major ports of the British Empire. There were many designated mail ports, of which by far the busiest was Queenstown (now Cobh) in southern Ireland, which handled most of the mail to and from Britain itself. Most of the larger British shipping lines competed for the mail contracts, including White Star and their main Atlantic rivals Cunard.

The key feature of the mail contracts as opposed to other commercial freight contracts was that there were hefty fines for being late. These varied over time, but in the 1870s when White Star entered the contest for the mail business, the amount was a guinea (one pound and one shilling) for every single minute that a mail delivery was late. While the potential profits were huge, so were the possible losses. The mail steamers did not need to be fast, though some of them were, but they did need to be reliable. They were stoutly constructed, tough ships with awesome engines and were built to cope with terrible weather.

The mail ships did not stop for anything. They ploughed on through the most violent storms without pause. They plunged their tough bows into gigantic waves that dumped hundreds of tons of water on to the decks, then lifted the stern clear of the water so that the propellers thrashed wildly in thin air before being plunged back into the waters to surge the ship forward again. The crews took to tying themselves to rails and stanchions in rough weather to save themselves being hurled into the scuppers to end up with a broken limb – or worse. Quite often mail steamers made port with smashed masts, broken rigging, shattered windows and even twisted ironworks.

Nor did the mail steamers stop for fog. Lookouts at the bows and up the mast were doubled and the officer of the watch – usually the captain in such weather – never moved from the wheel. A special fog whistle was fitted to mail steamers and in fog it was sounded for five seconds every minute to warn other vessels that a mail steamer was coming, and coming fast. Any ship hearing this distinctive warning would blow its own whistle or ring its bell to alert the mail steamer’s lookouts – who were listening as much as looking. Some claimed that they smelled the air as well to pick up the distinctive odour of fishing boats or ice, both common off the east coast of Canada. As soon as a lookout called, the engines were flung into reverse and the helm put hard over to avoid whatever was looming up. Lookouts on the mail ships were specially chosen for their good eyesight, excellent hearing and quick reactions. The officers, and especially the captains, were chosen for their nerves of steel.

As well as being reliable, the mail steamers also had a second feature demanded by the government. They had to be capable of being quickly and easily converted into warships suitable to escort convoys of merchant ships. This meant that they needed to be built with gun platforms able to carry the weight of naval guns, and to have a structure strong enough to withstand the recoil of such weapons. Typically, there would be two main gun platforms, each able to carry a single gun. By the 1890s these were the cheap but reliable 4.7 in (12 cm) QF Naval Guns. One would be at the bows, the second at the stern, as these were the most stoutly constructed parts of a mail steamer. Smaller guns might be mounted elsewhere. In naval parlance these ships would become Armed Merchant Cruisers (AMCs). They were not expected to fight in battle but could prove useful in a convoy if a small enemy warship appeared.

With the need to batter their way through heavy seas, carry guns and the ever-present possibility of a collision in fog, the mail steamers were deliberately built strong. Any ship that collided with one would be guaranteed to come off worse, while piers and jetties simply crumpled. Even if a mail steamer were handled clumsily in port and bumped into a stone dock, there was rarely any real harm done. The steamer would bounce off with merely some scratched paint.

From the 1870s, White Star began to win the coveted Royal Mail contracts and so could call some of its ships RMS.

Development of the steamers

The mail steamers appealed greatly to a certain type of passenger. Businessmen and military officers often needed to arrive on time for meetings or for duty and so valued the reliability of the mail steamers. Young men liked to boast to their friends that they had ridden these Greyhounds of the Sea, as they were known; braving storm, fog and peril with dashing courage. Nobody pretended that the ships were comfortable. But they were undeniably glamorous.

Shipping lines began to realize that they could turn a healthy profit if they built mail steamers that carried passengers instead of freight. The freight holds were removed and cabins installed instead. Efforts were made to build the ships so that they were more stable in heavy seas and so more comfortable for passengers. The cabins were placed as much as possible in the centre of the ship where they would not pitch about as much, but no compromises were made regarding the tough engineering of the shipbuilding.

The culmination in this style of passenger mail steamer was widely regarded to be the White Star Line ship RMS Oceanic, built by Harland and Wolff. She was a ship of 17,272 gross tons, had a length of 704 ft (214 m) and a beam of 63 feet (19 m). Her engines produced 28,000 horsepower to drive her twin propellers and so speed the ship to a maximum of 19 knots, though her cruising speed was reckoned to be about 15 knots. RMS Oceanic could carry 410 first-class passengers, plus 300 in second class and up to 1,000 in third class. She was the first merchant ship to cost more than £1,000,000 to build and the first to be over 700 ft (213 m) long.

RMS Oceanic entered service in 1899 and quickly became known as the Queen of the Ocean by the men who served on her and, albeit grudgingly, by other Atlantic seamen. But even as this magnificent, tough and impressive ship took to the seas, changes were afoot that would lead to disaster.

Changes at the White Star Line

The first came in 1889 when Edward Harland retired, and he died in 1895. Then in 1892, at the age of 58, Gustav Wolff entered Parliament as the MP for Belfast East. Although he remained a partner at Harland and Wolff, he no longer spent every working day in the shipyards. At first he dropped in regularly to check on work and supervise design, but as the years passed his visits became rarer and less influential. Control of Harland and Wolff passed to William Pirrie. Pirrie was a fine businessman and a great salesman but, unlike Harland or Wolff, he was not a seaman.

The third change came in August 1899 when Thomas Ismay collapsed at his desk with chest pains. Within weeks he was dead. Control at White Star passed to his son, Joseph Bruce Ismay, who was then aged 37. Joseph Ismay had been born after his father had achieved wealth and status, so he was given the finest of upbringings. He was educated at the prestigious fee-paying school of Harrow and then set out on a tour around the world that lasted years, stopping off at universities and cultural centres approved of by his parents. After working in various shipping offices, Ismay came back to White Star in 1891 to be groomed in the arts of management that would prepare him to take over the business. Fine as his education and upbringing had been, however, it had not involved any time working at sea. Like Pirrie he was a businessman, not a seaman.

Barely was Thomas Ismay cold in his grave than Pirrie and Joseph Ismay ordered work to stop on the sister ships of RMS Oceanic. They had other plans for the future of the White Star Line.

Since the 1870s the passenger traffic across the Atlantic had been growing in leaps and bounds. The ...