Harland and Wolff were shipbuilders in the most complete sense. Not only did the yard construct the hull and superstructure of the ships they designed, but the yard also produced the heavy machinery, engines, turbines, boilers, and most of the associated equipment as well. This not only made for a more efficient construction but also eliminated the costs of subcontracting, which saved the owners money. More importantly, it allowed Harland and Wolff to set and maintain the unusually high standards of quality that came to characterize their ships.
The first ship ever built for the White Star Line was the Oceanic, launched in 1870. She was constructed almost entirely of iron, as all-steel construction did not become standard in the shipbuilding industry until the mid-1880s. She was a large ship for her day, 420 feet long and displacing just over 3,700 tons. In many ways she would set the standard for all the White Star ships to follow. She lay long and low in the water, sporting a straight stem, a single low funnel, and four gracefully raked hollow cylindrical iron masts. Her staterooms were larger and brighter than any of her contemporaries : they had electric bells for summoning stewards; taps were available for hot and cold running water, fresh or salt, instead of the traditional pitcher and basin; lighting came from adjustable oil lamps instead of guttering candles ; and each cabin was provided with steam heat. With her unparalleled accommodations and stunning appearance—“more like an imperial yacht than a passenger liner” wrote one observer—the Oceanic established the White Star Line as the arbiter of comfort on the North Atlantic.
Within a year she was joined by three identical sisters—the Atlantic, Baltic, and Republic—and followed a year after that by the slightly larger Adriatic and Celtic (all White Star ships had names ending in -ic). All were built by Harland and Wolff, and soon the Belfast shipyard found itself building ships almost exclusively for the White Star Line. The firm operated under an unusual “cost plus” basis with its client, building the finest ships possible, then billing White Star for the cost of construction plus a fixed percentage of the cost for a profit. By all accounts this was an eminently satisfactory arrangement all around, for it guaranteed the shipyard a reasonable return for its investment in time, labor, and material, while assuring White Star ships built by a yard whose reputation for quality and probity were already becoming legendary. It is a matter of record that each and every bill submitted to the White Star Line by Harland and Wolff was paid on time, without question.2
The shipyard at its peak employed more than 14,000 men, from marine architects and draftsmen, interior designers and decorators, electricians and plumbers, carpenters and woodworkers, to a bewildering assortment of caulkers, moulders, cloot men, heater boys, holder-ups, and shell platers. To guarantee a steady supply of workmen trained to Harland and Wolff’s exacting standards, an extensive apprenticeship program was introduced.
One of these apprentices came to the drafting department in 1862, a fifteen-year-old lad of Canadian birth and Scottish ancestry. His name was William James Pirrie, and he was hardworking and ambitious. By the time he was twenty-seven he had become a partner in the firm, and upon Harland’s death in 1894 he became chairman of the board. A year later he was created a peer, so it was as Lord Pirrie that he sat down to dinner with Bruce Ismay that summer night in 1907.3
J. Bruce Ismay’s father, Thomas, had been able to buy the White Star Line in 1867 with, curiously enough, the financial assistance of the same Gustavus Schwabe who had backed Edward Harland. It was a calculated business move by Ismay to abandon the Australian trade, which was making the White Star Line a handsome profit, for the North Atlantic run, but Ismay was perceptive enough to realize, a full quarter century before the passenger trade on the Atlantic reached its flood tide, the vast money-making potential that existed there. He was also clever enough to throw out conventional ideas of shipboard accommodation and passenger comfort. Establishing a new standard of luxury at sea—or more correctly, establishing a standard of luxury at sea at all—by introducing the Oceanic and her sisters, Ismay not only gained a head start in a race between British, German, and American shipping lines to build faster, more comfortable ships for the North Atlantic run, but also laid the foundation for White Star’s reputation for an unequaled elegance that the line would not relinquish for another half century.
In 1874 Ismay ordered a pair of new 5000-ton ships from Harland and Wolff, the Britannic and Germanic, both capable of 19 knots and crossing the Atlantic in seven and a half days. In 1889 the Teutonic and Majestic appeared, nearly 10,000 tons each, with a designed speed of 20 knots, and every bit as handsome and sleek as their forebears. But these ships represented a point of departure for the White Star Line. Ismay had been studying the North Atlantic trade very closely, and came to some very definite conclusions about the line’s future in it.
It was at this time that Ismay’s son, J. Bruce, entered the family business. Born in 1862, the younger Ismay was educated at Elstree and Harrow, two of the most exclusive preparatory schools in England, and had spent a year as a pupil at the fashionable finishing school of Dinard in Paris, France, though he never acquired a university degree. After the year-long “world tour” that was customary for young men of Ismay’s station in that day, he went to work for the White Star Line. His first day was to be an illuminating experience, highlighting as it did the elder Ismay’s character as well as the nature of the relationship between father and son. Having left his hat and coat in his father’s office, the younger Ismay was startled to hear his father, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, tell a subordinate to instruct the new office boy to leave his hat and coat elsewhere. Despite his imposing physical appearance—he stood six-feet-four and had grown up to be a handsome young man—and a carefully cultivated air of self assurance, Bruce Ismay found himself never quite able to move out of his father’s shadow, to follow comfortably in his footsteps, or to escape his dominating presence altogether. It created a hidden defect in his character that would follow him aboard the Titanic and in one night shatter him.4
In the meantime, Thomas Ismay had decided that it was becoming too expensive to continue to pursue both unrivaled speed and unparalleled luxury in White Star ships. Instead, since luxury had made White Star’s reputation, luxury would continue to be White Star’s hallmark. The Line’s ships would continue to be nearly as fast as its competitors’, but the out-and-out race for the Blue Ribband would be run without the White Star Line.
The quest for the Blue Ribband, the mythical prize that went to the liner making the fastest Atlantic crossing, east- or west-bound, was by the end of the nineteenth century a competition filled with jingoistic overtones, becoming far more than a simple commercial rivalry between shipping firms. When the Cunard Line’s Campania captured the Blue Ribband with an average speed of nearly 21 knots in 1896, the title had been in British hands for nearly two decades, usually being handed off between White Star and Cunard ships. Despite a slow start, however, two German shipping firms, Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd, began gathering momentum and prospering from the burgeoning immigrant trade, and soon German ships began to establish a style all their own on the North Atlantic. Before long the directors of Norddeutscher-Lloyd decided that their ships should also set the pace. Approaching the Vulkan shipyard of Stettin, East Prussia, they had a simple proposal: “Build us the fastest ship in the world and we’ll buy it; anything less and you can keep it.”
The result was the mean-looking, imposing Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. She was the first in a series of German steamships notable not only for interiors where, as John Malcolm Brinnin put it, “the landscapes of Valhalla enscrolled on the walls and ceilings of grand saloons would all but collapse under their own weight,” but also for a succession of increasingly more powerful engines that drove them at ever faster speeds across the Atlantic. Almost inevitably the pretensions of the ships’ interior appointments were a reflection of the bombast and pomposity of Wilhelmine Germany, and they quickly became easy targets for the wits of the day,
who referred to the decors as “hideously” or “divinely” “North German Lloyd,” meaning, as one American contemporary put it, “two of everything but the kitchen range, then gilded.”5
Her ostentation slowed her not a whit, for the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse romped across the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage in early 1897 at nearly 22 knots. Great Britain was aghast. “In that jubilee year [Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee], England was not feeling modest,” wrote Humphrey Jordan.
She despised all foreigners without troubling to conceal the fact; she recognized herself, with complete assurance, as a great nation, the head of a mighty empire, the ruler of the seas. But with the jubilee mood still warming her citizens with a fine self-satisfaction in being Britons, England lost, and lost most decisively, the speed record of the Atlantic ferry to a German ship. The Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was a nasty blow to British shipping; her triumphant appearance on the North Atlantic came at a moment particularly unacceptable to the English public.6
Not content in merely besting the British, the Germans embarrassed them next by introducing the Deutschland, which belonged to the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and crossing the “Big Pond” at a speed of nearly 23 knots. Long, low, with a sleek four-funneled superstructure, the Deutschland looked the very part of the Atlantic greyhound. Yet her preeminence was to last less than a year when the new Kronprinz Wilhelm set a new record at 23 ½ knots; the year after that the Kaiser Wilhelm II proved a shade faster still. This Teutonic monopoly on the Blue Ribband was more than Great Britain could stand: a head-to-head showdown was approaching between these upstart Germans and the established maritime power of the British. France and the United States, once serious contenders, were soon left in the wakes of these two great rivals.
A key to German success was that the German shipping lines were being heavily subsidized by their government, a course of action the British government was loathe to follow. Conversely, if the British hoped to overtake their German rivals, it would have to be done with government funding and naval design expertise. It was a race that Thomas Ismay had anticipated and refused to be drawn into.
What Ismay hadn’t counted on, though, was the Americans, specifically one Junius Pierpont Morgan, who had the green gleam of money in his eye. Morgan, the greatest of a generation of trust builders, had conceived of a vast freighting monopoly that would control the shipping rates of goods and the fares of passengers being transported from Europe, from the moment they left the Old World until they arrived at their destination in the New. Since the American rail barons, and especially Morgan, had already monopolized U.S. railroads, all that remained for Morgan’s dream to become reality was to gain control of the North Atlantic shipping lines.
Morgan’s first move in that direction came in 1898, when he acquired the financially troubled Inman Line. The elder Ismay had attempted to form a consortium of British shipowners that would keep Inman out of Morgan’s hands, but the attempt fell apart because too few of Ismay’s colleagues believed Morgan was serious. It was one of the few failures in Ismay’s career, and foreseeing a fierce rate war on the North Atlantic, he rued it until his death in 1899.
He was right. The same year Thomas Ismay died, Morgan purchased a controlling interest in both Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd. A year later he gained either ownership or control of the .Leyland Line, the Dominion Line, and the Red Star Line. Setting his sights on both White Star and Cunard, Morgan began cutting fares until his lines were offering a Third Class passage to America for as little as £2.7
J. Bruce Ismay, who succeeded to the directorship of the White Star Line after his father’s death, was every bit as determined as his father to resist Morgan. Morgan, however, received help from an unexpected ally: Lord Pirrie. Realizing that a rate war would leave White Star with little capital for new ships, and having made Harland and Wolff dependent on White Star almost exclusively for new shipbuilding orders, Pirrie began to pressure the younger Ismay to accept Morgan’s offer to buy the line. Thomas Ismay would have told Lord Pirrie to be damned and fought the “Yankee pirate” tooth and nail, but though Bruce Ismay was his father’s son in many ways, he didn’t possess the innate ruthlessness his father had. Rather than stand up to Pirrie, the younger Ismay eventually caved in, and in 1902 Morgan’s shipping combine, now known as International Mercantile Marine (IMM), acquired control of the White Star Line.8
Cunard, meanwhile, had skillfully exploited Morgan’s attempt to purchase White Star, and was ultimately able to wring considerable concessions from the British government to allow the company to remain in British hands. These included sizable annual operating subsidies, low-interest loans, and Admiralty assistance in designing two new superliners. Undoubtedly, had Ismay held out long enough, he would have gotten similar concessions from the government, but in a contest of wills with Lord Pirrie he was no match for the older man, and so Morgan gained the White Star Line.
The two new liners that Cunard was to build using Admiralty assistance were intended to outstrip any other vessel on the North Atlantic in sheer speed and outdo White Star’s best in pure luxury. Launched in 1906, they were the Lusitania and the Mauretania. Immediately they presented a challenge to the White Star Line that could not go unanswered. Fast, luxurious, and imposing (it would be stretching the truth to call them beautiful), they became the most celebrated ships on the North Atlantic passage—and no one else had anything that even remotely compared to them.9
It was this stark reality that Ismay and Lord Pirrie confronted over cigars and brandy in the summer of 1907. Producing a sketch pad, Pirrie began outlining the dimensions and proportions of the ships that would become White Star’s response to the Lusitania and Mauretania. The only concession that White Star would make, both men agreed, was in speed: the big Cunard ships had been designed using Admiralty expertise in the latest high-pressure turbine propulsion systems, an area where Harland and Wolff’s experience was limited. As a result, the ships Lord Pirrie’s yard would build would be a knot or two slower than Cunard’s two speedsters. Beyond that, the Lusitania and Mauretania would have to be beaten at their own game. If Cunard wanted to build big, White Star would build bigger; if Cunard wanted to offer luxury, then White Star would offer luxury on a scale never before seen on the North Atlantic, nor, as circumstances would have it, would ever be seen again.
It was necessary, Ismay decided, to have three ships, all built to the same design, so that the White Star Line could offer weekly sailing east- and west-bound and maintain a cargo and passenger capacity that would nearly double that of the two Cunard ships. As the two men continued to talk, the doodles and sketches became more defined, and by the end of the evening Pirrie and Ismay had outlined the trio of ships that were to become the Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic. 10
In the remarkably short time of six months, ideas from that night became reality, and in December 1907 the keel of the Olympic was laid in the newly designated Slip No. 2 at Harland and Wolff. The new liners were so huge that the space previously used to build three hulls was devoted to two of the new giants. The construction of the trio was to be staggered: the Olympic being laid down first, followed a few months later by the Titanic. Once the Olympic was launched the Gigantic’s keel would be laid in her old slip. The new liners were projected to be ready to go into service in the spring of 1911, 1912, and 1913 respectively.
Simultaneously with the laying of the Olympic’s keel, construction began on an enormous gantry that would surround Slips No. 2 and 3. This huge latticework of timber and steel was to be the largest such gantry ever constructed, standing until 1973, when it was demolished for scrap. The gantry served as a cradle of sorts, allowing workmen access to all parts of the ships as they were being built. 11
The size of the new ships was astonishing. Built in an age that was impressed by size, the shipping world recited their dimensions from memory: 882½ feet in length, with a beam (width) of 98 feet, the ships stood 175 feet from the keel to the top of their four tall funnels. With a di
splacement of 45,000 tons, the three new sisters would be in every way the largest ships in the world, over 120 feet longer than the Lusitania and Mauretania, and more than 12,000 tons heavier. Within their hulls would be nine decks, accommodating 3,300 passengers and crew.
Despite their immense size, the ships were strikingly beautiful. The Olympic-class ships were the final expression of the traditional yacht-inspired shapes that had been the hallmark of Harland and Wolff ships for forty years. Elegant, unbroken lines flowed from a gently angled stem to a dignified counter stern, with a carefully proportioned superstructure topped by four gracefully raked, equally spaced funnels imparting a sense. of power and balance to the appearance of the ships. Years later retired Harland and Wolff executives would regard the Olympic and the Titanic—especially the Titanic —as the yard’s finèst shipbuilding achievements.
The liners’ aesthetic perfection—slim grace rather than mere ponderous bulk—was evenly matched by their technical sophistication, and the most remarkable and highly touted feature of their design was their watertight construction. Above the keel lay a double bottom, seven feet deep, which ended at the turn of the bilge, but the hull itself was designed to incorporate a carefully thought-out arrangement of watertight partitions. Rather than being built with the usual one or two “collision bulkheads” in the bow, the hull was divided into sixteen watertight compartments of roughly equal length, formed by fifteen watertight bulkheads built laterally across the ship. The arrangement of these bulkheads was far from arbitrary: several ships had been lost in the past half century to collisions with other vessels, most recently the White Star Line’s own Republic in 1906, and the trio of new liners were designed to avoid a similar fate. These new ships were capable of floating with any two of their sixteen watertight compartments flooded, since a collision with another ship couldn’t do worse than open up more than two adjacent compartments. In fact, they could float with any three compartments flooded, and under certain circumstances even float with four compartments open to the sea.
Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic Page 2