Titanic (eBook)

The Evil Dream

In the 1860s, British industry was entering the most expansive and prosperous era it has ever known or is ever likely to know. In particular, shipbuilding and transatlantic traffic were growing in volume year by year. It is impossible to understand the genesis of the Titanic without looking at the men who conceived the idea of a giant ship, and impossible to understand them, and the reasons why they ever imagined such an extraordinary vessel, without some notion of the tortuous and ruthlessly competitive international shipping business--British, German, American--of which they were part.

The man behind the Titanic, as it happens, was Canadian. He was born in Quebec in 1847 as William James Pirrie, the son of A. J. Pirrie, an Ulsterman of Scottish descent. His mother was also from Ulster, a member of the Montgomery family. After the father died, mother and son returned to Ireland, where the boy was apprenticed at the age of fifteen to the shipbuilding and engineering firm of Harland & Wolff. Pirrie was a partner in Harland & Wolff by the time he was twenty-seven. During the next half century, largely thanks to his leadership, it became the greatest shipyard in the world and the birthplace of the Titanic.

People these days are inclined to think that the Titanic was a freak, a huge ship of unique size and luxury. This misunderstanding underrates the scale of the enterprise. Pirrie's idea, conceived in 1907, was that his firm, in partnership with the White Star Line, would build not one but three monster transatlantic liners. They would sweep the opposition off the seas. The first would be named the Olympic, the second the Titanic, and the third--the Britannic.

All three were built. The Olympic had an illustrious career, carrying more troops than any other vessel in World War I. The Britannic was sunk by a German mine in 1916 while serving as a hospital ship. Nowadays, nobody outside the passionate fraternity of lovers of old ships remembers this useful pair. But the Titanic became, as she has remained, the best known of all ships to the man in the street, her name springing to mind more readily than the Golden Hind, the USS Arizona, or HMS Victory.

It is odd that Pirrie, the bold prime mover, has disappeared so completely from the story. Had he sailed in the Titanic on her maiden voyage, as he fully intended, he would have been better known. He would either have drowned, in which case he would have been as closely associated with the ship as her skipper, Captain Smith, and her richest passenger, Colonel J. J. Astor, or he would have escaped, in which case he would have been as universally reviled as the chairman of White Star who got away in one of the last lifeboats, J. Bruce Ismay. As it was, his doctor forbade Pirrie to take the trip because of prostate trouble, he did not testify in the much-publicized official inquiries that followed though by June his health was much improved, and after their reports came out it was too late for anyone to ask him awkward questions. His role receded into the past. His hair turned white during his illness, but he remained the great shipbuilder. Indeed the business done by his world-beating yards actually boomed, because they reconstructed many ships after the disaster to make them conform to the new rules officially imposed as a result of the defects exposed in their prize product. In World War I, Lord Pirrie was in charge of all British merchant shipbuilding. He was made a baron in 1909 and became a viscount in 1921. He died at sea in 1924 from pneumonia in the Panama Canal, returning with his wife from a voyage on Harland & Wolff business to South America.

To find the source of...