The Rest Is History - 427. Titanic: The Tragedy Begins (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

"There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers." The sinking of the Titanic, on a freezing Sunday night in April 1912, claimed more than 1500 lives. But how this state-of-the-art ocean liner came to be is also a story full of drama, encapsulating the turn of the century’s spirit of competition and drive for modernity. The booming financial world of the 1900s, rising immigration, the excitement of speed and steam, and an ever-growing transatlantic rivalry between Britain and the U.S. all played a part in the liner’s inception. And from this era emerged three men who would shape the Titanic’s journey: J.P. Morgan, an American titan of business; Thomas Ismay, the English magnate who owned the ship’s parent company; and William Pirrie, a leading British shipbuilder. Between these three men and two pivotal cities - New York and Belfast - the origins of the disaster that defined a generation can be traced…  Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the context behind the building of RMS Titanic. From the rivalries of the transatlantic liner industry, to the tensions surrounding the Irish Home Rule movement, the story of the “unsinkable” began in a tumultuous age. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I was 11 when the war started. If I honestly sort out my memories and disregard what I have learned since, I must admit that nothing in the whole war moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier. This comparatively petty disaster shocked the whole world, and the shock has not quite died away even yet. I remember the terrible detailed accounts read out at the breakfast table

in those days. It was a common habit to read the newspaper aloud, and I remember that in all the long list of horrors, the one that most impressed me was that at the last, the Titanic suddenly upended and sank bow foremost so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than 300 feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly, which I can still all but feel. Nothing in the war ever gave me quite that sensation. So that, Dominic, was top man of the people, George Orwell, in My Country Right or Left. And he wrote that in 1940, which of course was the middle of the Second World War. But the war there, he's talking about the First World War. And he is saying that nothing in the Great War, as it was known, impacted him quite

like the shock of something that had happened two years before the outbreak of the First World War, namely the sinking of the Titanic. Yeah, isn't that extraordinary? But actually, it's a really interesting sign of how deeply the loss of the Titanic affected people in the 1910s. And now in our collective consciousness, Tom, the sinking of the Titanic is generally treated as a kind of precursor to the First World War, isn't it? Yeah. It's a kind of metaphor. Yeah, it's a metaphor. It's the sense in which industrial society was so rich and powerful,

and it was heading for an inevitable smash. Crash. Yeah. So you might say that Europe was a great ship steaming towards the iceberg of industrial warfare. But that's what people have said since the 1910s itself. Yeah. So there's the great line in The Onion announcing the sinking of the Titanic. World's largest metaphor hits iceberg. So I think that we should come to all these in due course. And we should also come to the way that the Titanic has

been shown in film as well. Because actually Orwell's describing how the stern upends and people cling onto the edge and then it just plummets down. In the 1997 film with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, that is the bit that stuck in my mind. And I actually found it so upsetting and traumatic that I never watched the film again until yesterday evening I watched it. Tom, and did you enjoy it? I really enjoyed it, but I still found it traumatic for reasons that perhaps we'll come to when we talk about that. But I think that for now, in this episode and the next, let's park all that metaphorical stuff, let's park all the way that the Titanic has been

reimagined over the century and more that's followed it. And look at it as an episode within history because it is brilliant, isn't it? It is. As a kind of opening up huge vistas of historical analysis and all kinds of topics. It is. It's one of those stories that actually until we sort of sat down to research it, I had rather dismissed. I think because of the film, I'd seen it as a sort of slushy melodrama. sort of Julian Fellow's The Downton Abbey Guy. He did his own miniseries about it. And I always thought for that reason, oh God, out of slight snobbery, actually, I thought the Titanic is beneath me. And some of our listeners may be thinking that, by the way.

But I completely agree with you. I think it is one of the best topics we've ever done on The Rest is History because it's a window into so many things, into kind of late Gilded Age New York, into the sectarianism and the political violence of Belfast, the technological advancements of the early 20th century, class, immigration, all of these kinds of things. And also I thought, fascinatingly, the ambivalent relationship between Britain and America at the point where kind of not just global and industrial leadership, but maritime leadership is starting to shift from Britain to America. Absolutely. And that's the focus really of what we want to talk about today, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. And there's actually a German dimension to this as well, which is why it is quite a nice prelude to the Great War, because there's an Anglo-German rivalry that's very important in the story of Titanic. So yeah, so the background, the origins, I think it's a story of three men in particular. So they're J.P. Morgan, Bruce Ismay, and William Pirrie. And two cities in particular, New York City

and Belfast. And I guess we should start right at the very top, as it were, Tom, of the pyramid. And that is the man who comes to embody the ruthless empire-building capitalism of late 19th, early 20th century America, of the Gilded Age, what is now seen as the arrogance and hubris. And it's a man whose name has become one of the most recognisable kind of capitalist brands, J.P. Morgan. Yeah, because it's still a bank to this day, isn't it? Absolutely. So the US at the end of the 19th, early 20th century, it's the China of its day. It's the coming power.

It has fought this war in 1898 and gained the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain. And there's a sense of enormous self-confidence and swagger about America, about American capitalism in 1912. And the man who embodies this is John Pierpont Morgan. So he was educated in Switzerland, wasn't he? And he's a very grim kind of doer man. But his uncle, am I right? Have you seen this? His uncle wrote Jingle Bells.

Yeah. It's like Kennedy's grandfather being the first person to put the lights on a public Christmas tree. Yeah. It's one of those bizarre kind of unexpected intersections

between high American politics and American popular culture. But I mean, you say he's doer, but he is a cultured man. Oh, yes, he is. Yeah. He speaks French and German. He hangs out in Rome. He's goter, but he is a cultured man. Oh yes, he is. Yeah. He speaks French and German. He hangs out in Rome. He's got Savile Row tailors, all this kind of thing.

Yeah, it's true. He's very interested in European culture. But in a slightly joyless way though, Tom, don't you think? Yes. Well, the kind of accumulative way, because European culture becomes something to invest in and to buy and to take over the Atlantic. And this is, of course, one of the aspects of why there are so many American millionaires on the Titanic. He's not alone in doing that. It was like a character from a Henry James novel. So Henry James was actually writing during this period, these novels about very rich Americans going to Europe and collecting things, collecting people, sort of paying homage to the cultural achievements

of Italy or France. But also looting it. I mean, not looting it, but I mean, buying it up. He's absolutely one of these people. Now he's made his money back in the US by basically investing in modernity. So he's made his money by investing in railroads and streetcars and all of these kinds of things. But he's also, he is seen as the personification of Wall Street's new importance in the US and world economy.

So he had intervened effectively to bail out the United States after the panic of 1893. I mean, to cut a very long story short, he'd effectively sold gold to the US government in return for a massive bond. So he had saved the US treasury. There was no central bank in the US at this point. So he basically is the United States' central titanic about him when he really gets to work. And that adjective titanic is capitalised. So the sense of Morgan being titanic is part of the kind of the common vocabulary that is used to describe him again and again and again.

Because this is the first point really where people are talking about these gigantic business tycoons, more powerful than any government. You know, these are not the industrialists of the kind of industrial revolution. They are bigger than that. They are people who are, as you said, collecting art, as Morgan is. So the people talk about them as like the Caesars or the Emperors. But they're also collecting companies. So Morgan is the king of what are called at the time the trusts. So these are huge merged conglomerates. Monopolies.

Monopolies. The most famous one is US Steel. So he had bought out Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie, again, is a kind of representative figure, perhaps of an earlier age because he comes from Scotland in 1848. So he is emigrating out on the age where, you know, Atlantic crossings are really, really tough. There's a kind of definitely a Logan Roy quality to him. I mean, maybe there's a kind of deliberate allusion to that, a Scot going out and making it big in the United States. And he owns this vast steel company and Morgan buys him out, gives him $240 million so that in paper terms, Carnegie becomes the richest man in the world. But of course, Morgan as the man who now controls this,

I mean, he's the most titanic figure of all. And there's another kind of intriguing figure involved in that, isn't there? In the buyout of Carnegie and the founding of US Steel. There's a man called Peter Widener, who again is a kind of archetypal Gilded Age figure. So he's from Philadelphia. He begins as a butcher's boy. He very rapidly sets up this huge chain of butcher's shops across the United States. Then he invests in trams. So he kicks off with the Philadelphia Traction Company, and then he gets traction companies and cities across the whole of the us he's literally picking up traction tom he's literally picking up traction very good and he like morgan it ends up obscenely rich invests in art he's spotted by

henry adams who's kind of very much an old school bostonian brahmin collecting art in paris adams calls him an odious old american and his son and indeed grandson will follow the tradition of going across the atlantic to france to collect art and then coming back and they may feature later in the story dominic exactly and they of course come back on the Titanic, Tom. So Morgan has been collecting companies. U.S. Steel is his most successful, the most famous. So U.S. Steel was 1901. At the same point, 1901 to 2, he decides to extend his dominion to the seas as well as the land.

And he puts together a huge combine called International Mercantile Marine. And this includes a British company called White Star, a shipping company. And The Economist at the time, like a lot of British publications, was very shocked at this. So Tom, you were saying, and I think quite rightly, that part of the story of the Titanic is the story of the emergence of American capitalism at the expense of British. So The Economist said, to the patriotic Britain, it is not a pleasant thought that the great transatlantic trade is in future to be bossed by a syndicate of American capitalists. And this is what the story of IMM is all about. Although, Dominic, intriguingly in America, because it turns out that ultimately Morgan

has paid too much for White Star, and for reasons that we'll come to, he is unable to establish a complete monopoly. People in America see this as a triumph for British capitalism. The British have fooled him. Yeah, the British have fooled him, that they've tricked the great master of the universe. And I think that that reflects something about the status of this company, White Star, that it is an absolutely marquee brand, isn't it? It is, because this is the point at which steamships are seen as, you know, like cars or like telephones, electricity. Steamships are part of that world.

They are embodiments of the sort of exciting modernity of the day. So all of the men who sail on the Titanic, the crewmen, are called sailors. And some of them, the older ones, would probably remember the age of sail, wouldn't they? Because the age of sail in the 1870s or something, if you had taken a ship to New York, it could have been a sailing ship and it could have taken you 40 days. Now it's taking you less than a fortnight and you're doing it by steamship. Steamships have conquered the waves. They are much faster. They are also much safer. So there's an extraordinary statistic in Richard Davenport Hines' book,

Titanic Lives, an absolutely brilliant book, I have to say, that one in 184 passengers on sailing ships will die making the Atlantic crossing. But on steamships, it's one in 2,000. So in other words, steamships are much, much safer. But steamships are also... Well, they're much faster, aren't they? Also the stat in Richard Davenport Hines' book. In 1872, the average crossing from Liverpool to New York by sailing vessel took 44 days by steamship under a fortnight. And of course, the notion of the blue ribbon, the first ship across the Atlantic becomes something that people on both sides of the Atlantic become obsessed by. Yeah. So steamships to us, they seem old fashioned. At the time, they seem absolutely the Atlantic becomes something that people, you know, on both sides of the Atlantic become obsessed by.

So steamships to us, they seem old fashioned. At the time, they seem absolutely thrilling. The Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti. When's that? 1909, something like that. 1908. In the Futurist Manifesto, the world's splendor has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. We will sing of the fervid nighttime vibrations of armaments factories and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons, bold steamers sniffing the horizon,

the sleek flight of aircraft whose propellers turn like banners in the wind. So in other words, steamships are part of that world of aircraft. They're incredibly exciting. And speed itself, it's not just convenient, but speed itself is seen as something unbelievably ecstatic, something to be celebrated above all else by the futurists. And so do you think that now the marker of an absolutely cutting edge economy is to have a massive tech company? And today, famously, America has all the tech companies and Europe doesn't have any. But is the white star line a British equivalent of Apple or something. It's a marker of a really, really successful

company at the cutting edge of technology. And so that's why the question of who owns it is so potent. Yeah. These steamship companies are seen as emblems of a nation's virility to some extent, aren't they? Yeah. We've come to the Anglo- the anglo-german competition right which is why the ships have to be bigger and bigger and bigger bigger and bigger and faster and faster absolutely absolutely then there's a general obsession with speed davenport hines in his book points out that you know one of the most famous passengers in the titanic john jacob aster was one of the first americans to buy a motor car he had had 18 cars. Some of these American passengers with two surnames rather than a first name and a surname. It's a guy called

Washington Rubling II who designed a racing car. He's one of the millionaires in the Titanic. Another millionaire in the Titanic, a man called Dickinson Bishop. He has a car waiting for him in New York. The most expensive car in the world, a Losea. He's paid $7,750 for. And there's actually a car on the Titanic, isn't it? There's a Renault. One of the American millionaires takes a car with him. So this worship of technology, machinery, and speed, I mean, it's connected to that

thing that you're talking about, which is the idea of nation's sense of success and virtue and virility being bound up with the ownership of the companies that embody those virtues. Yeah. And so that's why White Star matters. And it's been founded by a man from the Lake District, Dominic. Yeah, Cumbrian. Yeah. Thomas Ismay, who, I mean, he's not highly educated.

He hasn't been to an expensive public school or any of that stuff, but he's an absolute, dare I say, titan. Yeah, he's a really interesting figure because that earlier generation of kind of the rough-hewn entrepreneurs who've built themselves up from nothing, he bought this shipping firm called Whitestar. And what they were specialising in was shipping people to the goldfields in Australia. Which is a long way away. Yeah, and he apparently, he was playing billions with a bloke, shipping people to the gold fields in Australia. Which is a long way away. Yeah.

And he apparently, he was playing billions with a bloke. And the bloke said, why do you bother doing that? Why don't you ship people to America? It's much closer. And he started to ship people to the United States. And the thing is, he's doing that in 1867, 68, 69, at just the point when the American Civil War has ended. So there's a big demand now.

It's starting to boom. Yeah, it's booming again. People want to go to the United States. Now to do this, he signs a deal with a particular shipyard called Harland and Wolfe in Belfast. They lend him the money to expand his building program to do this on the condition that they will all be built in Belfast and we will come back to Belfast and to Harland and Wolfe. But his particular wheeze, as well as kind of moving to the transatlantic crossing, is to offer people luxury travel. So if you think back, we talked in a previous episode about Dickens crossing the Atlantic to go to America. So he goes on a steamer

that has been built by a rival British company called Cunard. And they are saying, oh, we've got amazing cabins. And Dickens is very, very sniffy about this. So he complains that his luggage could no more be got in at the door of his cabin than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower pot. So even in the 1840s, luxury is still very, very gruelling. But what Ismay does is really to go in hard and to basically kind of start looking to luxury hotels as a source of inspiration. And so to go on a white star liner, it's not an ordeal. It's a positive pleasure. Yeah. So what they do, it's an unusual example, actually, of a company being incredibly successful by going very, very high end.

Reassuringly expensive yeah it's antithesis of the sort of the lord sugar for our british listeners or the sort of cut costs drive down your overheads is may doesn't do that at all what is may does is you say he has electric bells he has hot running water in the baths it's a floating hotel yeah and he has a series of ships oceanic is the first one then adriatic britannic you'll see how we're going to get to titanic well they all end in ick don't they coptic ionic doric seasick well no well no not seasick no because you don't have seasick yeah as you say it's a holiday it's a treat to go on a white star yeah crossing and so ismay as you say i mean he's kind of pulled

himself up by his bootstraps and he's very tough, very hard. And in the 1870s, you know, there's a particular crisis that could have derailed the entire company when in 1873, one of his steamships, the Atlantic, runs out of coal on the way to New York. They divert course to go to Halifax to pick up coal and they end up hitting a rock and the lifeboats are swept away 250 lives about a third of the people on board the ship are lost and you know it creates an enormous scandal it could have completely derailed the company it doesn't because ismay is the kind of man who's not going to be diverted by a crisis like that right but tom that's a reminder isn't it that it is a floating hotel these are holidays for some people, not for most people, arrogance, but still a hint of danger in the Atlantic crossing, isn't there? It's not entirely on it. It will be like a hotel and all risk of

danger has effectively gone. And this is obviously a massive boom area of development because essentially you can build bigger and bigger ships and you can make them more and more luxurious. And this is why it's a really good business to be in. And so Ismay, looking ahead to the future, he wants to establish a dynasty. He has three sons. Of these three sons, only one develops an interest in the sea. And this is his middle son, Bruce. And Bruce, on one level, is a classic example of what happens when British industrialists become very rich.

They send their children to private schools where basically the sons are taught to be ashamed of their parents for having the wrong accent, which is what happens. But at the same time, you know, daddy is not interested really in the airs and graces that his young son has been taught. I mean, it's purely a marker of status that he can send him off to private school. What he really wants is a guy who is going to be effective at running the company. And so that is what Bruce does. The other two sons go off and become members of the landed gentry. Bruce Ismay does stay true to the source of his family's wealth. So it's brilliantly summed up by Francis Wilson, who wrote a wonderful book called How to Survive the Tanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay. She said, Thomas, so Thomas

Ismay, the father was a Victorian, Bruce and Edwardian. The father stood for entrepreneurial strength and imperial greatness, the son for decline. And maybe the kind of symbolic resonance that shadows the whole of this story, Thomas Ismay dies one year before the death of Queen Victoria. It's not just a British event of note. It has international resonance. The Kaiser sends a telegram of condolence to Ismay's widow. All the flags in Liverpool are hung at half mast. And Bruce Ismay takes over. And the first thing he does, Dominic, is to sell the company to J. Pierpoint Morgan. So there's a real succession element to this, isn't there? You mentioned the logan roy comparison so for people who haven't seen the succession is the great great

tv series model on the murdoch family and in that series there's this sort of ferocious scottish self-made man played by brian cox and then his sort of feckless sons and daughter who are competing to replace him who are never going to be as good, never going to be as hungry because they've been reared amidst wealth. That's the story that Bruce Ismay, because he'd gone to Harrow, hadn't he? He is going to travel on the Titanic. He is a very tall man. He's very polished.

A droopy moustache. He's polite. He's the quintessence of a gentleman. I mean, that's what Thomas Ismay wanted. Also, he is going to survive the Titanic, and this will make him notorious. But just for now, Dominic, why does he want to sell the company? Well, basically, because Morgan has deeper pockets than anyone in the world and is offering him an obscene amount of money for it.

Yes. So we talked about the foundation of IMM. Morgan basically pays him 10 times the value of White Star's earnings, plus a premium of $7 million in cash. So he ends up buying it for $35 million. Now there's a bit of a fudge, isn't there? Because the ships will still have a British flag. They'll still have British crews. And Ismay, as part of the deal, will carry on running White Star within the IMM combine. So that's why he does it. But it's very like kind of anxieties in Britain at the moment about tech companies kind of listing themselves on the New York Stock Exchange rather than in London. There's that kind of feeling that prestige companies, cutting edge companies are being taken over by the might of American capitalism. And an additional anxiety is that ships are needed to transport troops. So Thomas Ismay had loaned his ships to the British government during the Boer War to transport troops. And there's a real feeling of anxiety about what this might be. And so the British government then lean in and they give Cunard a massive bung. So Cunard is the rival British company effectively to compete with this

would-be monopoly that Morgan is setting up. And because Morgan cannot buy Cunard, it means that he doesn't actually establish a monopoly. And so therefore he is embroiled in exactly the kind of competition that he didn't want to have. Yes. Because the whole point with all of these American capitalists at the beginning of the 1900s is, as you say, to establish complete market dominance and then to basically fix the prices to suit themselves. He can't do this partly because the British government is sponsoring Cunard as a competitor, but also because, Tom, some other people have entered the story.

The Germans. The Germans. So the Germans have turned up and they have two big companies. One is called Hamburg America and the other is Norddeutsche Lloyd. And of course, the story of the 1890s, 1900s is one of tremendous German growth in all kinds of areas, science, engineering, and so on. Shipbuilding is one of tremendous German growth in all kinds of areas, science, engineering, and so on. Shipbuilding is one of these things. So that at this point, 1903, which is the first full year of the existence of IMM and the existence of White Star under Pierpont Morgan's banner,

the four fastest ships in the world are all German. And they all have these very Germanic patriotic names. Imperator. Waterland. Bismarck. Yes. So White Star had always been the company that set the standard for luxury. But Hamburg America in 1903 have a ship called America that has been designed by the people who designed the Ritz-Carlton hotels in London. And they have Ritz-Carlton standards. And this is beyond anything that White Star have ever done. And now the British companies have to fight back. So first of all, Cunard build three very famous ships, the Mauritania, the Aquitania, and the Lusitania.

Of course, there's your Great War connection, two of which make their maiden voyages in 1907 that of course then puts greater pressure on morgan and his combine yeah so clinton dawkins who we mentioned the guy who describes him as titanic i mean he says what threatens to swamp us is this monstrous indebtedness for shipbuilding and i don't feel satisfied that we're not putting more big ships into the atlantic than it can. So there is massive overcapacity in the shipping, but they have no choice but to compete with Cunard and with the German firms. And of course, you know, the White Star reputation is for absolute luxury. And so that basically is where the idea for the Titanic and its two sister ships comes from. Exactly. the Titanic and its two sister ships comes from. So Ismay gets together with a guy who we'll come to in a little bit called Lord Pirrie.

Lord Pirrie is the head of the shipyards, Harland and Wolfe in Belfast. And Ismay says, listen, what we could do is we could just go bigger. And better. I mean, just go bigger than Cunard, bigger than the Germans. And again, let's think about three ships and they're going to call them the Olympic, the Britannic, and the Titanic. And these three ships will allow us to recapture the momentum and the reputation, which we need to justify our existence as part of the J.B. Morgan business empire that has been created. And that effectively, Tom, I mean, these are the origins of the Titanic, the financial world of the 1900s, the Anglo-German competition, the new Anglo-American kind of business relationship with all of its anxieties, the excitement of the age of steam and speed and technology. And also, of course, something we'll come to later on, which is the boom in emigration

to the United States, because that's, of course, what's driving so much of this, that so many people want to start lives in the new world. But Dominic, this is the transatlantic context, but these ships in the Titanic, the Olympic and the Britannic have to be built somewhere. And it's a very specific place. It's Belfast in the north of Ireland. And I think we should take a break now. And when we come back, let's look at the specific Belfast context for the making of this extraordinary ship.

Brilliant. So we'll be talking about Belfast after the break. Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. dot com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. We are looking at the story of the Titanic. And in the first half, we were exploring the background to the building of this colossal ship in Anglo-American relations, the transatlantic world of the early 20th century. But Dominic, now we want to zoom in on a particular place, don't we? Which is Belfast. Because Belfast is where the Titanic will be built. So let's do it, Tom, as we did the first half. Let's do it through a particular character,

one of the three individuals that are really responsible for the ship. And this is this guy called William Pirrie, the first Viscount Pirrie. So he was the person that Bruce Ismay was talking to at the end of the first half about how they were going to compete with the Germans and with Cunard. Let's build bigger and better. Pirrie is the head of the Harland and Wolfe shipyard in Belfast, Belfast's most famous employer. Pirrie, again, is a transatlantic character who was born in Quebec City in 1847. His father died in New York two years later, and his mother brings him back. They're a family from the north of Ireland, Northern Ireland, as we would call it now, though, of course, then the state, as it were, of Northern Ireland didn't exist as a separate state.

His mum brings him back to County Down. He goes to this very well-known private grammar school in Belfast, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, William Pirrie, and he joins Harland and Wolfe, the shipyards, as an apprentice when he is 15 years old. Now, Harland and Wolfe, their foundation is 1859 when it's bought by a guy called Edward Harland and he goes into partnership with a man called Gustav Wulf. Astonishing. Who'd have guessed it? And their business model is that they drum up custom from often foreign shipowning companies, and they do deals with them, and they will build the ships right there in Belfast. Lord Pirrie, who works his way up, is a brilliant kind of salesman. He will tour the land, making small talk with millionaires and persuading them, come to Belfast, we will build

your ship for you. Richard Davenport Hines describes him as, he says, a small masterful man with intrepid nerves and unshakable self-confidence. He thought nothing of removing grit from one of his shipyard workers' eyes with the blade of a knife. Wow. Which, of all the details of the Titanic story, is the one I find most terrifying. Yeah. Quite honestly.

So he is a workaholic, Pirri. He speaks with a very strong Belfast accent, which at the time people regard as reassuring. You know, it's not too smooth. Kind of like Scottish bank managers. Yeah, absolutely. He said that he has a magic and he will charm orders out of customers. And thanks to Piri's salesmanship, Harland & Wolfe becomes by far the biggest shipbuilder in the world by the end of 1910, when it is building the Titanic and the Titanic class ships. Harland & Wolfe employs more than 11,000 people and it absolutely dominates the landscape of Belfast.

But also, I think, the world's imagination because the world is obsessed with steamships and with ships and with speed. And Harland & Wolfe is the company. There's a brilliant comment on him by W.T. Stead, a big newspaper man who I think we've mentioned before. He's the guy who basically whips up the campaign to get General Gordon sent to the Sudan and all kinds of things. And he will feature again later in this story. And he said of Piri that he is the greatest ship

builder the world has ever seen. He has built more ships and bigger ships than any man since the days of Noah. Not only does he build them, he owns them, directs them, controls them on all the seas of the world. So there's a sense in which Piri is kind of being promoted as a kind of Irish equivalent of the great capitalists of Gilded Age America, do you think? Yeah, I totally think that. In fact, while you were reading that, I was just thinking, this is an age, isn't it, that worships great men. Yeah, absolutely. In a way that would not be the case today.

It doesn't look to diminish greatness as we do. Our instinct is to undercut and to say of the tech billionaires, they're very annoying. They have ridiculous opinions. You know, all of this sort of stuff. That's our instinct. Theirs is to magnify. Well, not everybody. I mean, as we will see, there's quite a lot of subterranean hostility

to them, but yes. But W.T. Stead, as you said, he is by far the most influential newspaper man of the day. I mean, he is somebody who sets the tone of kind of populist conversation and he likes to inflate. The Edwardians do like to inflate. There is a sort of grandiosity about Edwardian culture, I think. Right. There's an obsession with the Titanic. Yeah, exactly that. Which is why the name is so resonant, isn't it? Exactly. Exactly. So Pirri, he becomes Lord Mayor of Belfast. He's Lord Mayor of Belfast in the Jubilee year of 1897. He buys a succession of great kind of mansions in Belfast, in Belgravia,

in London. He has a country house in Surrey, I think it is. He wants to go into politics. So he really wants to become the unionist MP for South Belfast. But interestingly, he is rejected by the party hierarchy because Tom is a supporter of home rule for Ireland. Right. So this plunges us back into a topic that we did last year, isn't it? Which is the tortured politics of Ireland and its relations to Great Britain in this period. Yeah, of course. And this is a really, really fascinating, a richly fascinating thread that runs through the story of the Titanic. I mean, Lord Pirrie actually ends up, because he wants to get ahead in politics, he can't do it with the Unionist party. He ends up

doing it with the Liberals. And the Liberals, the party of Gladstone, the party of Asquith, very much a friend of the rest of history, Tom, this is the party that within Ireland, Catholic Ireland, for home rule, great opposition and antipathy to it among Protestants in Ireland. Who are very much centred in Northern Ireland and specifically in Belfast. Exactly. The Titanic is against that background. So just on Belfast, Belfast in 1912 is by far the biggest and richest and most industrially important city in Ireland. You said it plunges us back into the world of the Irish episodes we did last year. So our guest in some of those episodes, Paul Rouse from University College Dublin, he wrote a thing about Belfast in 1912 for the, I think it was the Irish National Archives or something like that, a big thing about the world of Ireland in the beginning of the 20th century.

There's a line in that, it says, Belfast was a place unlike any other in Ireland. Wealth in Dublin and in other Irish cities was usually rooted in trade, in land or in lineage. Wealth in Belfast was the product of industry. So it makes, Belfast, it's a city that makes things, it makes cigarettes, it makes cars, it makes linen, especially more linen than anywhere else on earth. And Dominic, do you know what is brilliant on this? It's the Titanic Museum. Oh, right. Yeah. In Belfast, in what was the Harland and Wolfe shipyards. It's a wonderful museum. They have a brilliant section on this, all the kind of the clamor and the noiseyards it's a wonderful museum they have a brilliant section on this

all the kind of the clamor and the noise they evoke it very very powerfully so uh just a few details that i garnered from that they boasted belfast rope works which was the largest rope maker in the world and they had sirocco works which was the world's leading fan and ventilation manufacturer and both of these of course supplied lots of material to the Titanic. Of course, yeah. So Sirocco Works supplied 75 fans to the Titanic. So I'm guessing that's another reason why it's such a centre of shipbuilding, is that basically all the kind of raw materials that you need to build a huge ship are, you know, they're not just in the shipyards, but scattered around in the companies that dominate the industry of Belfast.

Yeah. So Belfast is more akin in many ways to a sort of Northern or Midlands British industrial city than it is with Irish cities, you know, Cork, Dublin, Limerick and so on further South. So actually there's a wonderful quotation in Richard Davenport Hines' book from an Edwardian visitor who comes from the South of Ireland. And he goes to Belfast, and he's really struck by how different it is. He says, I saw churches of all denominations, Freemason and Orange lodges, wide streets, towering smokestacks, huge factories, crowded traffic. And out of the water, beyond the custom house, dimly seen through smoke and mist rose some huge shapeless thing which i found to be a shipbuilding yard wherein 10 000 men were hammering iron and steel into

great ocean liners the noise of wheels and hoofs and cranks and spindles and steam hammers filled my ears and made my head ache so that's the the way that mid-Victorians talked about Birmingham or Manchester or something. And this is the way that people in Ireland talk about Belfast. It's this terrifying temple to industrial modernity. I guess one thing that Belfast has that most industrial cities, although not all, I mean, things Glasgow and Liverpool, but most industrial cities in Britain don't, is a very, very sharp sectarian divide. It does. Yeah. So Paul Rouse gives in his thing, Belfast has a pub for every 300 people. But of course, what pub you go to is determined by your religion in Belfast. So Belfast had been

founded largely Scottish and English Presbyterians in the 1600s, 1603, I think it is. But over time, as has happened with so many industrial cities all over Europe, not just in Britain, but in the United States, what has happened is it has absorbed migrants from the countryside who tend to be Catholic. So in other words, Irish Catholics. So by 1911, the sort of breakdown based on confessionalism is 34 of the people of belfast are presbyterians 30 of them are church of ireland seven percent of

them are methodists so those are the protestants and then you have the catholics which is 24 and there is absolutely no love lost between them. Well, Dominic, you did mention the pubs. Yeah. The most beautiful Belfast pub, The Crown, which is opposite the Europa Hotel, which in the Troubles was always being bombed, and has kind of beautiful compartments that the ladies would sit in. You can still sit in them now. And this reputedly was owned by a Protestant and a Catholic. And the Protestant husband said that we would call it the crown. And the Catholic wife said,

all right, but we're going to put the image of the crown on the doorway so that everyone will trample it as they walk in. I mean, that's what I was told when I was there. I don't know whether that's true, but it's a kind of nice example of how, you know, maybe that's the way that you get both Protestants and Catholics into a pub.

Right. I mean, there's another visitor, 1907. Belfast hums with industry and calls itself progressive. Yet underlying all this commercialism, all this thrift, all this cult of the main chance, there is a cast iron bigotry, a cruel, corroding, unfathomable, ferocious sectarian rancour. And Dominic, that ferocious sectarian rancour, I mean, that is very evident in the Harland and Wolfe shipyards, isn't it? Because they are overwhelmingly Protestant, the people who work there. a furnace by Protestant workers in the shipyard until other Catholics with sledgehammers piled in to rescue him, threatening to kind of smash these guys' skulls to pieces. And this story was contested. So some people said, oh, this is totally not true. This is invented. But the very fact that

such stories were told tells you about the rancor, as it were. So there are riots in Belfast in 1909. There are more riots in 1911 and in 1912, as the two communities turn on each other. Protestants, obviously, the overwhelming majority, they hold the levers of power. But the talk of Home Rule is simmering the whole time. And they are terrified that they will be absorbed into a Catholic-dominated home rule island, which is the absolute last thing they want. And so all the time, without going back to some of our favourite Reston's History metaphors, the temperature is rising, Tom. Yes, the lava is bubbling. It is indeed. Waiting to erupt. I mean, the shipyards do seem to have been places where casual violence was kind of expected. Because another intriguing detail that I learned from visiting the museum was that the foreman

would wear bowler hats, partly as a symbol of status, but also they would be kind of lead-lined. Like our jobs hat. Yeah, in case a riveter would drop something on their heads. So there were clearly class tensions as well as sectarian tensions. But I guess the bowler hat also, I mean, it's the symbol of the Orange Order, isn't it? It's a kind of visual signifier of that. So again, the kind of class and religion is, I mean, it seems to have been a very potent factor in the shipyards that are building the Titanic.

Yeah. The Orange Order, which commemorates the victory of William of Orange over James II in 1690, the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism, that is very strong in the Harland and Wolfe shipyards. So as you say, those are these four men with their bowler hats, will be prominent figures in the Orange Order. Now, Lord Pirrie, interestingly, it's so interesting that he has set himself apart from that by backing Home Rule. And of course, as the temperature does rise, his support for Home Rule becomes ever more controversial. And he's shunned by Belfast Protestant establishment. They see him as a quizling, as somebody who's jumped into bed

with the illegitimate liberals over in London, who are trying to, as they say, give their country away to the Pope. Right. Okay. So Dominic, that's the background to the building of this ship, the Titanic. We've looked at the transatlantic context. We've looked at the specific context of the city and the shipyard in which it is built. And I think in our next episode, let's look at the Titanic itself. Let's look at why it gets the name it does, which it is built. And I think in our next episode, let's look at the Titanic itself. Let's look at why it gets the name it does, how it's built, the fittings, the crew, and we'll get it out onto the ocean,

ready for its maiden and what will prove its final voyage. Jolly good. We will see you next time. Now, we love a voyage and the rest is history, Tom, don't we? I see us very much as the Captain Smith and the Charles Lightoller. We are. We are. And we'd like to

see ourselves as the owner of the great ship that transports people. And we offer births, don't we, on this ship? We do. We love our crew. Now, if you are a member of the Rest is History crew, that club, you can sign up at therestishistory.com. You can listen to all our Titanic episodes instantly. No need to wait. No need for the Atlantic crossing. So don't delay.

Head to that website, therestishistory.com. Lift yourselves out of steerage and we will see you next time for the building of the Titanic. Then we'll get into the crews, the passengers. And then, minute by minute, we will tell the story of its voyage and the unfolding disaster. Its rendezvous with an iceberg. So, on that note, bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman

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