by Brad Matsen
The price war didn’t send so much as a ripple through the flow of business to Harland and Wolff. Under the terms of his deal with Morgan, the shipyard prospered, with forty orders between 1902 and 1907 from the IMM companies. The Dutch and Germans followed along because Pirrie was the proven builder of big ships, which were far more competitive than smaller ships on the most heavily traveled routes. Pirrie used the cash from the surge in new orders to completely electrify his shipyard, which meant that he could be in production twenty-four hours a day. He also talked the Belfast harbor board into building a dry dock for repairs on liners up to 900 feet long.
Alarms again began going off in Pirrie’s mind in April 1904, when it became clear that White Star was losing the battle for dominance over Cunard. Ismay was running his company and the combine with increased confidence and skill, backed by Pirrie’s counsel, but Cunard fired a devastating salvo against White Star’s premier fleet, known as the Big Four. Celtic, Cedric, Baltic, and Adriatic were the first great ships of the twentieth century, each of them more than 20,000 tons, Celtic and Cedric 680 feet long, Baltic and Adriatic 709 feet long, all capable of cruising at 17 knots with crossing times of under eight days. The success of the Big Four also depended on their reputations for comfortable accommodations in all three classes and the easy passages that only big ships could offer. Only in summer did the North Atlantic promise anything other than rough seas, high winds, and queasy stomachs, so the bigger the ship, the smoother the ride.
That spring, just as Ismay and Pirrie were catching their breath from Morgan’s faltering assault on the shipping industry, a shipyard on the Tyne River at Newcastle laid the keel of a true giant for Cunard. RMS Mauretania would be 790 feet long and 88 feet wide, weigh 32,000 gross tons, and, most unsettling, cruise at 25 knots with four revolutionary steam turbine engines. It would have a sister, the slightly smaller Lusitania being built on the river Clyde in Scotland. The British government’s enormous gamble to prop up Cunard with more than £2 million against Morgan’s takeover bid looked like it was going to pay off. Together, the Cunard giants would offer unparalleled two-ship express service between Southampton and New York. The White Star Big Four would no longer be the first choice for the crossing.
Nothing like the big Cunarders had been even a figment of a shipbuilder’s imagination just a decade earlier, but the formula of building bigger to lower the cost of coal to carry each passenger and each ton of freight across the ocean was impossible to resist. Cunard and its shipbuilders learned, however, that building a big ship might not be as easy as simply scaling up a small ship. Lusitania was delivered first, and on its initial speed trial the stern shook terribly; the ship had to return to the yard for weeks of repairs and strengthening, which required tons of steel angle braces and girders.
At about the same time as Lusitania was limping back up the Clyde, Lord Pirrie (he’d recently been elevated to the peerage for his service to the city of Belfast) and Lady Margaret Pirrie invited Bruce and Florence Ismay to dinner at Downshire House. The Pirries had married in 1887, just before he moved his base of operations from Belfast to London. They were childless, so they poured their domestic energy into turning their elegant, rambling mansion on Belgrave Street into a showplace. Its drawing room, eighteen bedrooms, and ten bathrooms were open to visiting friends, and Pirrie liked nothing more than offering hospitality to his business associates.
The Ismays had become regulars at Downshire House since White Star had shifted its express service to Southampton, a convenient train ride from the center of London for passengers on their way to New York, South Africa, and Australia. Bruce Ismay was comfortable with Pirrie, who looked a little bit like his father but who was even-tempered, amusing, and tactful with him instead of a dreadful specter of authority. That night in the summer of 1907, dinner was intimate, just the four of them. Afterward, the men lingered in the library for cigars and, as Ismay had come to know from his time with Pirrie, straight talk. Pirrie was always working.
Even in summer, the damp London air welcomed a fire, which Pirrie himself kindled in a fireplace lined with soapstone and fronted with granite. Neither man was a drinker—a bit of champagne now and then—but that night, Pirrie produced a crystal decanter of cognac, which caught and scattered the gas light across his beaming, white-bearded face as he poured two glasses. Ismay wondered what could possibly be on the man’s mind that seemed to make him so happy and in the mood to celebrate.
Joseph, Pirrie said after he settled into a creaking cowhide chair (Pirrie was the only person other than Ismay’s mother who still used that name), I can build you ships a thousand feet long that will carry three thousand passengers, make twenty-four knots, and be as luxurious as a grand hotel. We’ll fill them by making third class more comfortable than any other line. First and second class will be pure profit. Let Cunard burn coal with King Edward’s money to break speed records. We will build floating palaces.
I’ve never doubted you, Ismay said, but you know we’d need two of them to make the service work—better even, three, to have one ship in reserve. And they would cost a fortune before we sold the first ticket. I don’t think we have the money.
All you have to do, Joseph, is borrow on the ships you have,Pirrie said. You own them free and clear except for the IMM shares, and Morgan is desperate enough to go along. You’ll have one of the ships four years from now, the second nine months later, and a third, if you decide that you want three, nine months after that. If you do it, you can leave Cunard, the Germans, and everybody else in your wake. If you don’t do it, and they do, you will lose everything.
Seven
ANDREWS
Thomas Andrews knew Titanic inside and out, her every turn and art, the power and beauty of her, from keel to truck, knew her down to her last rivet.
—Shan Bullock, A Titanic Hero, 1912
It was not a case of liking Tommy. We all loved him.
—Saxon Payne, secretary to William Pirrie
William Pirrie trusted blood. He married his first cousin, Margaret Carlisle, who became as essential to his success as the iron and steel he put into his ships. Margaret had adored Willie since childhood. He was ten years older than she, and during family summers in Antrim before he left for the shipyard, she hovered near him, hoping he would muss her hair. When it occurred to Pirrie that he needed a wife, he knew she was the woman for the job. Margaret kept his houses in Belfast and London, a gifted hostess for the stream of his colleagues, customers, and friends.
At the shipyard, she roamed freely, a gentle counterpoint to flinty Pirrie, devoting most of her attention to the families of men with troubles, grievances, and pain. Men died building the ships at a clip of two or three a month, and they were injured almost as frequently as the tides changed in the Irish Sea. They fell from ships and scaffoldings, were hit by falling wood and steel, and were cut, crushed, and burned. Margaret talked her husband into buying a pair of motor ambulances to rush wounded men across the river Lagan to Victoria Hospital.
Margaret was acutely aware of her role in her husband’s rise to the top of his profession. She made a point of letting Irish society know that she was delighted to be by his side. When Pirrie was made a viceroy in 1909, the new Lady Pirrie went to the celebration gala at Dublin Castle in a sea-blue linen gown embroidered with fish and ocean liners in White Star colors. She pinned a small White Star pennant in her powdered hair, and wore a silver comb depicting the bowsprit of a sailing ship, from which hung a veil of lace.
Pirrie’s managing director at Harland’s was Margaret’s brother—and his own cousin—Alexander Montgomery Carlisle, a gold-watch apprentice who hadn’t missed a minute of work during his first five years at the shipyard. Carlisle had a long, dour face, but he was a genial man whose passion, apart from building ships, was collecting autographs. He was known for stinginess and an instinct for bringing just the right amount of matériel and manpower to every stage of shipbuilding. Together, he and Pirrie had built more than a hundred ships,
beginning with the sailing steamer Britannic, completed in 1874 for White Star. Pirrie never deluded himself that his brother-in-law liked him. He knew that his insistence on absolute authority over the shipyard grated on Carlisle, but he admired his brother-in-law’s willingness to put the good of the company above his own emotions.
Pirrie’s chief designer was his sister’s son Thomas Andrews who had gone to work at Harland’s as a fifteen-year-old boy. Thomas loved ships so passionately that his family nickname was Admiral. The first ship he worked on as an apprentice, in 1889, was the 566-foot turbine steamer Majestic, designed by Carlisle for the White Star Line. Andrews could not imagine anything more wonderful than helping to build that incredible ship with the exterior lines of a rich man’s yacht and the interior of a grand hotel.
Like all apprentices being groomed for management, Andrews made his way from shed to shed to learn plating, punching, riveting, rigging, cabinetry, painting, plumbing, electricity, casting, and engine building, the same way a conductor studied the strings, winds, brass, and percussion in his orchestra. What delighted Pirrie most during Andrews’s apprenticeship was that his nephew spent most of his evenings after twelve-hour workdays taking classes in technical drawing, mechanics, engineering, and marine architecture.
If his rigorous routine ever exhausted him, Andrews never showed it. He wasn’t playful, frivolous, or outgoing, but people liked him because he never lost his temper, a rarity in the rough-edged society of the shipyard, where barking and quick fists were the rule. As Pirrie told his wife soon after his nephew came to work at Harland’s, Tommy Andrews was a good boy with a promising future. A year later, Pirrie knew for certain that the slightly built, earnest young man was a shipbuilder. Usually, a tradesman continued to wear the flat hat called a duncher for several years, but the day Andrews ended his apprenticeship, Pirrie handed him the black bowler of a boss.
On an ordinary morning as the summer of 1907 peaked and fell into September, Andrews arrived for work at dawn, as usual. The air had taken on a subtle chill, and the smoke of the banked riveting furnaces, forges, and kilns mingled with the carbon smell of cut, punched, and hammered steel. The mist over Belfast Lough was heavy and corrupted by the presence of industry, but Andrews was invigorated by the scents of the shipyard on such a morning. Just after the opening whistle, Pirrie summoned Andrews, Carlisle, and an assistant engineer named Edward Wilding to the drafting table he kept for himself in the drawing office.
Like everyone else who had ever set foot in the drawing office, Andrews loved the magnificent hall. Under a chalk-white, vaulted ceiling broken between its arches by enormous skylights, the drawing office contained ranks of ten-foot-long, waist-high tables where all Harland and Wolff ships began their lives. Everywhere a window was possible there was a window. The entire end of the room closest to the river was a wall of glass. Beyond it, and slightly to the right, were the dark, hulking shapes of the half-finished 650-foot Rotterdam IV, still in frames. Next to it were the remains of the scaffolding of the recently launched, 455-foot oil tanker Iroquois. To the west of the drawing office, the clerestory windows overlooked a courtyard the men called Market Square and the timekeeper’s gate, through which every man passed at the beginning and end of his shift. In Market Square, too, casual laborers gathered at dawn, ready to slip a boss a matchbox containing a shilling or two for the privilege of a day’s work. To the east, toward the lough and the Irish Sea, the view was interrupted by an identical wing off the main building that was the home of the company accountants.
Pirrie pulled a roll of drafting paper from a leather case, smoothed the sheets on the burnished wood of the table, and weighted their corners with shot bags. One glance told Andrews he would remember the moment for the rest of his life. Pirrie had been a gifted draftsman and designer when he’d worked in the drawing office, and the confidence in his freehand drawings had never left him. The hull shape was a variation on the tried-and-true iron sailing ship with a flat bottom, external rudder under an overhanging stern, and a nearly plumb bow, the same cross section as Oceanic’s and Rotterdam’s.
Andrews studied the dimensions that Pirrie had noted under the profile of the ship: 850 feet long by 92 feet wide by 65 feet deep. Ismay wants two of them, Pirrie said. They would be bigger, but he hadn’t been able to talk the harbor commission into building a dry dock in Belfast to handle more than 900 feet. The commission had dragged its feet about doing even that until Pirrie told them he would go to the Clyde or Liverpool to build his big ships if they didn’t give him a dry dock to finish them out and repair them. Ismay was tacking two hundred feet onto his piers in Southampton. Morgan convinced New York to add a hundred feet to theirs.
Andrews calculated the implications of what he was looking at. Each ship would displace over 55,000 tons. The hull and machinery, without cargo, coal, and passengers, would weigh 40,000 tons—80 million pounds. Half again bigger than anything else afloat. Bigger, in fact, than any man-made object that had ever moved. A few months earlier, the Ulster Echo had quoted Pirrie as saying that his dream was to build ships 1,000 feet long. Andrews hadn’t suspected that he would take so big a step so soon.
Pirrie’s fluently sketched details of the accommodations were as audacious as the dimensions of the ships. They showed a first-class dining room, its ceiling rising through three decks, capped by a stupendous glass dome; a Turkish bath; a swimming pool; a gymnasium; a squash court; first-class staterooms bigger than London hotel suites; and second-class staterooms the equal of first-class accommodations on any other liner. In steerage, there were private family cabins and men’s and women’s dormitories in place of the open decks of beds and hammocks that were common on long-haul steamers. The crew’s quarters up forward were also a far cry above the traditional hellholes endured by seamen on British ships for centuries. These ships would be floating palaces carrying 600 passengers in first class, 716 in second class, and an incredible 1,788 in third class, with a crew of 860.
Pirrie, whose fascination with propulsion had known no bounds since his apprenticeship in the engine works, then unrolled his preliminary plans for driving these three-screw behemoths across the ocean. Two triple-expansion steam engines—bigger than any that had ever been built—would power a pair of thirty-foot-diameter, counterrotating propellers on the port and starboard sides. The world’s most powerful low-pressure steam turbine, mounted slightly aft of the main engines, would drive a fifteen-foot propeller on the centerline.
Andrews asked Pirrie why, if the ships had only three engines, would they have four funnels, as shown in the profile sketch. The first three will be engine exhaust, Pirrie said. The fourth will be a dummy except for a ventilation fan. Ismay thinks ships with only three funnels might be seen by passengers as somehow less grand than Cunard’s new liners, which have four engines and four funnels.
He wants these ships to post decent speeds, Pirrie continued. But they don’t have to be record breakers. Twenty-three or 24 knots is enough. Ismay wants to let Cunard, the Germans, and the rest of them fight it out for the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing times between Southampton and New York. White Star will carry more people in more comfort in all three classes than any other line.
Ismay will be here with his pen and his checkbook next summer to look at the plans, Pirrie said. Then we’ll have less than three years to put the first one in the river.
Andrews had never seen Pirrie look happier in his life.
Before Pirrie left Belfast for London, Carlisle dashed his brother-in-law’s good mood. My health is terrible, Carlisle told him. I’m only fifty-three years old but I can’t seem to shake the pleurisy. Every day in the yard seems longer and longer to me. It’s time I retired to my autograph books, my garden, and my bicycle. I can give you another year, maybe two, but I won’t see these new White Star ships in the water.
Pirrie was furious that his managing director would abandon him after he had gotten an order that could make or break the company. There was no question in Pirrie’s m
ind that Andrews would succeed Carlisle, no question that Andrews could do the job. Or was there? His nephew had helped design Oceanic and dozens of other ships, but he had never seen one through from keel to delivery as the number one. And he had such a mild disposition. Could he manage fourteen thousand men? Could he handle the engineering? The supply and logistics? What if the pressure broke him? The last thing Pirrie needed just then was even a shred of doubt.
Pirrie went back to London, where he immersed himself in the even more uncertain world of industrial politics and intrigue. Cunard was coming hard at White Star, but there was nothing he could do about that except wait for the new ships to challenge them. The rest of Ismay’s fleet was keeping White Star and International Mercantile Marine in business. Just barely. There was no doubt that on the profitable Southampton–to–New York express route, Cunard had the upper hand.
Pirrie was also worried because shipbuilding in general was tailing off into yet another of its cyclical depressions. Just as his men in Belfast were putting pencil to paper for the new ships, Harland and Wolff got hit with a rash of cancellations. Hamburg-America killed its order for Europa, sister to the giant Rotterdam, two weeks before its keel was to be laid. One of Pirrie’s International Mercantile Marine customers, the Red Star Line, scrubbed a ship. And even White Star was forced to back out of an order for a new ship for its Australian route.
In Belfast, Andrews prepared to run the first leg of the race to build the gigantic sisters. By midsummer 1908—less than a year away—he had to present the single set of plans for two identical ships to White Star. Until Ismay approved them down to the last detail, he could not order the millions of pounds of steel and castings needed to build the ships. A single misstep—a late steel shipment, an engineering mistake, a workers’ strike, a fire, or any of a dozen other catastrophes—meant that Andrews would not meet his deadline of the summer of 1911 for delivering the first ship, and the spring of 1912 for delivering the second.