The Rest Is History - 428. Titanic: Kings of the World (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

The Titanic was a product of the furious competition of the late Gilded Age, and no expenses were spared to make her the most extraordinary and luxurious ship ever built. The height of an eleven-story building, fully electric, and with first class suites designed for the world’s wealthiest, the Titanic embodied the Edwardian obsessions with grandeur and greatness. But the ship was also designed to accommodate immigrants, who made up the majority of its passengers, in third class, or “steerage”. But is their any truth behind the myths surrounding class-based mistreatment of the poorer passengers, in contrast to the over-pampered rich? Was safety sacrificed in favour of a hubristic lust for luxury and grandeur?  Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the Titanic’s sumptuous, modern interiors, her gargantuan proportions, and the stories of builders who brought her to life. They dive into a world of butlers, stewards, maids and crewmen, and look into the man whose name would later become synonymous with disaster: the Titanic’s captain, Edward Smith.  *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 was nothing that had the faintest lightness to a ship. Only something that might have been the iron scaffolding for the knaves of half a dozen cathedrals laid end to end. Far away, furnaces were smelting thousands and thousands of tons of raw material that finally came to this place in the form of great girders and vast lumps of metal, huge framings, hundreds of miles of stays and rods and straps of steel, thousands of plates, not one of which 20 men could lift unaided, millions of rivets and bolts, all the heaviest and most sinkable things in the world, and still nothing in the shape of a

ship that could float upon the sea. The scaffolding grew higher, and as it grew, the iron branches multiplied and grew with it, higher and higher towards the sky, until it seemed as if man were rearing a temple which would express all he knew of grandeur and sublimity. So that was the Irish journalist Filson Young, a very distinguished journalistic figure in Ireland who covered the Burr War, was also a big admirer of James Joyce, a kind of early enthusiast. But he's probably best remembered for a book he published five weeks after the Titanic sank, called Titanic. And in that brilliant description of the gradual emergence of the Titanic in the Belfast dockyards, he was drawing on first-hand experience because he had been there to see the

construction of this, well, Titanic ship in 1911. Very good, Tom. And Dominic, in the first episode, we looked at how the plans for the Titanic, the largest ship ever built, emerged from the rivalry between various capitalists who were investing in the transatlantic route, how the Titanic was built specifically to be not only stupendous in scale, but unbelievably luxurious in terms of its fittings. The most luxurious hotel ever imagined only on the sea. And we were looking at how it was built in the specific context of Belfast in the age of agitation over home rule. And the sense of, well, a terrible beauty being born, one might almost say. Yeah, very good.

To adapt Yatesates in this episode we're going to look at how the titanic itself was built how it came to be named how it came to be put on the sea and the thing that struck me in that is how philson young talks about it's made of stuff that sinks yeah you know it's not being made of wood and that of course is going to be very important isn't it in due course it is going to be very important, isn't it, in due course? It is important. But as we will discover, Tom, there's always this suspicion that hangs over the Titanic. I think partly because of what we talked about in the last episode, because it's so obviously

the product of kind of late Gilded Age capitalism and competition and so on. There's always this suspicion, well, they must have cut corners. They didn't care about safety, the safety of the passengers. And we'll come on to the question of the lifeboats and all that kind of thing. But I think it's important to say, actually, that a lot of that is just not true. The Titanic, no expenses spared, really, to make the Titanic the most extraordinary ship that has ever been built. And probably, ironically, in many ways, the safest. And Dominic, to this day, you can buy t-shirts in Belfast that have the slogan,

Titanic, built by Irishmen, sunk by an Englishman. That's harsh, Tom. Harsh, but true. So yes, it is built by Irishmen. So at the end of the last episode, we talked about the great Harland and Woolf shipyards and its place in the ecosystem of Belfast, this kind of red brick, industrial, smoky, rough, tough, hard city in the north of the island of Ireland. And the man who designs it is a man of Belfast. We haven't talked about him yet, but we talked about Lord Pirrie who runs the shipyard. But the guy who designs it is his nephew. This is a man called Thomas Andrews so andrews is one of these

people there's so many of them in this story who had joined the shipyard as a teenager i think at 16 he was apprenticed for five years that's 1889 and he'd gone through all the different parts of the shipyard so the cabinet makers the shipwright the smiths and so on, finished off with 18 months in the drawing office as a draftsman. And he is the man who designs these ships. And, you know, there's a description of him wearing a bowler hat. You were talking last time, weren't you, about the bowler hats that the foreman would wear? Marker of status and religious identity. Yes, exactly.

Protestant identity and social status. And he would be there, you know, he's ubiquitous in the shipyard, poring over the kind of plans and whatnot, talking to the foreman, talking to the men who are actually going to do, you know, the riveting and the joining and all of these different things. And what Andrew specializes in is big, beautiful, very luxurious, frankly, very safe ships. So Cunard are famous for speed, and they will sacrifice anything for speed. They want to get, what is it, the Blue Ribbons?

The Blue Ribbons, yeah. The record for crossing the Atlantic quickly. White Star don't bother competing with that. Andrews doesn't make that kind of ship. So in 1911, they had launched Olympic, which is the first one of this kind of class. These three ships that are going to recapture the Atlantic market from Cunard and from the Germans. An Olympic, which is an Andrews design, is slower than the Cunard. It's bigger, but it is to go on it. You're transported into another world. So there's a wonderful description by a guy called Lord Winterton, who crossed from New York on the Olympic in 1912. And he wrote in his diary, she really is a fine ship, exceeds one's imagination. Rackets caught, gymnasium, swimming bath, restaurant, public rooms are splendid.

The thing he really likes, he says, there's no shippy smell. Anyone who's been on a cross channel ferry will know what a shippy smell is oh i see yeah ferry yeah yeah that's generally the smell of people being sick and stuff isn't it tom i mean well exactly i mean that is a part of it isn't it yes i guess so you don't get sick on the titanic no you don't no you don't so thomas andrews had traveled with bruce Ismay, the owner of White Star. So they went on the Virgin Voyager, didn't they? Of the Olympic.

And Ismay is busy taking notes, ready for the Titanic. And so he goes into the crew's galley and he notices that they don't have potato peelers. So he wants to change that. He goes into the toilets and he notices there aren't cigarette holders. And so he wants to change that. He goes into the toilets and he notices there aren't cigarette holders. And so he wants to change that for the Titanic. He thinks that the reception room should have more tables, more cane chairs, and he tests the mattresses and he thinks they're too springy. So very, very close attention to detail with the aim of making the Titanic just that much better, even than the Olympic. Yes. So a lot of the things you're describing are for the first class passengers. So obviously the first class passengers are going to generate a huge amount of income for the company. And one of the things that Ismay says is the Olympic's great,

but when we do the Titanic, I think we should fit in even more cabins on the top deck. And he says, let's have some really, really super duper first class suites. So they put in two extraordinary suites that have two bedrooms, a sitting room, servants' quarters, and their own little promenade deck that you can step out. So your own private sort of balcony. And this is the suite that is being built with Morgan in mind. Yeah. JP Morgan, who we talked about last time. Yeah. Because obviously Morgan ultimately is bankrolling the whole thing. Exactly. And so they're building it with the richest man in the world at the back of their mind. And the price tag. So the price tag would be for the height of the season, they are going to charge £870 a trip.

So I've worked out what that is. There's a website called Measuring Worth, brilliant website done by academics, because it's very hard to compare values then and now. But those sweets, Tom, would cost you £400,000 in today's money at the height of the season. So in other words, they are for billionaires. They're astronomically rich, not just quite rich, but people who are astronomically rich. But Dominic, the intriguing thing about this, that obviously we have immediately focused in on the accommodation for the first class passengers because the display of incredible luxury is always a source of fascination. But there is a truth about Titanic and her sister

ships that is often buried. And it's brilliantly summed up by Frances Wilson in her wonderful book about J. Bruce Ismay, How to Survive the Titanic, where she writes, the Titanic was only superficially a liner for the rich. She was actually an emigrant ship. Yeah. And so that is a crucial part of why the Titanic is so large, isn't it? It is, because they're going to pack onto it hundreds and hundreds of people who are not paying 870 pounds, the equivalent of almost half a million pounds today, but are second and third class passengers. Now, what a lot of people listen to this podcast will probably assume straight away is, oh, this is a story of the rich and the poor. The rich are in great comfort. Nobody cares about the poor. They're kind of locked into their cells below decks.

Rats, bilge water, all that. Yeah, but this is just not right. This is not the case. Facilities for second and third class passengers on White Star liners are better than they are on any other competing liners. And they are better on the Titanic than they are on any other ship in history. So to be a third-class passenger, you would much rather be in the Titanic. And we will come to the experience of the passengers later, what they eat, what they do. But just to anticipate,

I think it's fair to say of the third-class passengers that, ironically, the days they spent on the Titanic, for many of them, were the best days they'd ever spent in their lives. Until obviously the last two hours. Yes. Pretty bad ending. Yeah. But up till then, brilliant. But they are in, by the standards that they're used to, tremendous comfort. They have more spacious accommodation. They have better facilities.

They have better food. They have area. They're better lit. All of these kinds of things. They're determined that the Titanic will be the best in every department, not just the first class cabins. taken to the seas and the stats are designed to be overwhelming so it's a sixth of a mile long yeah so 882 feet 92 feet wide and uh it's decks i mean it's kind of the equivalent of an 11-story building so anyone who's seen the james cameron film this is brilliantly evoked with the lifeboats going down i mean you just get the sense of how high this is. I mean, it's designed to be Titanic, isn't it? It is indeed. That's the whole point. It is. Tom, have you ever been on an ocean liner?

I have once, yes. My mother was desperate to go on a cruise and so I got a chance to go and lecture on a cruise ship. I hated it. Did you? There was definitely a shippy smell on that, I can tell you. I went on the QM2. So lecturing again. Queen Mary. Yeah, the Queen Mary. So that was about, what was that? 15 years ago or something. I have to say I didn't massively enjoy it either. And that was from Southampton to New York. So it was the Titanic's route. Did you get seasick? I didn't get seasick. I got bored

because you're there for kind of four or five days. There's nothing to see in the middle of the Atlantic. The one thing I will say, the experience of sailing into New York at dawn is incredible. You sort of sail in, it's five o'clock in the morning, everybody's got up there on the decks. You're looking out, you see the Statue of Liberty, you see the bridges. That is amazing. Anyway, that's by the by. But the thing about that is it's a slightly retro experience, isn't it? Yeah, it is, which is not at the time. That is the point, which of course, for people sailing on the Titanic or sister ships, the whole point is the modernity. Totally. Electricity.

Electricity, yes. Marconi wireless stations. So you can send Marconi grams, can't you? So it's equivalent to being able to email someone. Yeah. It would now be, you're doing Zoom calls. They've got a special Zoom room on the ship or something. They have huge fridges powered by electricity. So people marveled at the food later on. We might come to this. One of the British aristocrats says, oh my gosh, strawberries in the middle of the Atlantic. This is the height of luxury. That's all possible because of the modernity of the ship. As you say, there's no retro feel about it to these people. They are living in the future as they see it. A question on the name Titanic. We've mentioned before how J.P. Morgan is described as a Titanic figure. Maybe that's floating behind it. Obviously, it's an allusion to its size. There is something hubristic about it, isn't there? I mean, the Titans are the gods who ruled the world before Zeus and his generation

of Greek gods emerged and were overthrown. I just wonder whether there was ever any sense that perhaps it was asking for trouble to name a ship Titanic. I wouldn't have said so because it could have been the Olympic that hit the iceberg. And in that case, wouldn't you be telling the same story and saying the hubris of comparing yourself with the Olympians? Or an even better metaphor, Tom, if it had been the Britannic that had hit the iceberg? Well, Britannic, yes, would have been very sad. But Olympic and Titanic, I mean, the Olympians are the guys who survive and the Titans are the one who end up kind of in chains at the bottom of the world.

I mean, so Churchill's very keen on the name, isn't he? Yes, Churchill loves the name. He uses it a lot. He says, we have arrived at a new time. Let us realize it. And with that new time, strange methods, huge forces, larger combinations, a Titanic world have sprung up around us. And that kind of, we talked in the last episode about the grandiosity of the Edwardians.

They are conscious that they are standing on the shoulders of their Victorian fathers and mothers, but there is a sort of an obsession with size and grandeur. Do you not think in kind of the 1900s? But I also think that that is why the story of the titanic has the resonance that it does i think if it hadn't been called the titanic i mean if it had been the olympic or even if it had been the britannic it wouldn't have the kind of global resonance that it has i do think the name is yeah kind of incredibly important and it's a conscious kind of grasping after greatness isn't it it? Definitely it is. Also, it's seen, I think, as being the embodiment of, I mean, Anglo-Saxon. They're very keen on the idea of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Again, a very Edwardian, you know, Kipling. Kipling's always going on about the Anglo-Saxons. Yeah. The owners, White Star, they say explicitly, the Olympic and the Titanic are not only the largest vessels in the world, they represent the highest attainments in naval architecture and marine engineering they stand for the preeminence of the anglo-saxon race on the ocean so people can hardly be surprised when later on they treat it as a metaphor yeah because they have deliberately courted that haven't they so the idea of design

it's not just about the luxury it's not just about the size it's also about the design we talked about thomas andrews who in the james cameron film you know he's in just about the luxury. It's not just about the size. It's also about the design. We talked about Thomas Andrews, who in the James Cameron film, he's in a way the conscience of the ship in absolute despair when he realises that he hasn't built in enough safety features, as it were. Now, regular listeners to this podcast will know there is nothing we enjoy more than explaining naval technology to people. Isn't that right, Dominic? I love it, Tom. I love it. So I know that this is a topic that you're particularly interested in. So I'm just going to sit back and listen to you explain why actually-

Total cowardice on your part. The Titanic is famously described as unsinkable. Why do people think it's unsinkable? Right. What are the features that Andrews has put in? Okay. I'm very happy to do this. I'm prepped for it, Tom. Take it away. Because people listening to this podcast will know, of course, the Titanic sank, and therefore they will say, well, terribly flawed, hubristic, all the rest of it.

I think it's important to stress, as counterintuitive as it sounds, that the Titanic probably has the best safety features of any ship ever built up to this point. So Harland and Wolfe, the ship builders, Thomas Andrews, the designer, thought quite carefully about this. First of all, they've given it a double bottom in case it runs aground. So that is a problem sometimes for ships.

You know, they end up on shoals or something. And so they have put two sets of steel plates so that if the keel is penetrated by running aground on rocks. I love it when you talk nautically. That is a sinister, that's a sinister moment. So if the first set of steel plates is broken, the second will still be intact. So that's number one.

Now, the other thing that might happen, of course, is it might run into something. An iceberg, for instance. An iceberg, or a ship might run into the side of it. So those are the other two perils that await you on the sea. And they have thought about this as well. Now, unlike any other ship ever built, the Titanic has been built with 15 bulkheads. Imagine them as vertical lines drawn down the ship. They divide the ship into 16 compartments, all of which are watertight. And they have doors that can be shut automatically.

The Titanic has been designed such that if the front four compartments are totally flooded, it will not sink. So in other words, if it hits something straight on. Equally, if a ship crashes into it in the middle, if two of the central compartments are flooded, again, it still won't sink. There is, however, Tom, I know we love a classical reference. Is there an Achilles heel, Tom? There is an Achilles heel. so the bulkheads are very expensive these are state-of-the-art things and the designers have concluded that the chances of you being hit such that more compartments than that are flooded is so unlikely the bulkheads don't

need to reach up right to the very top as it were so So in some places, the bulkheads are only about 15 feet higher than the waterline. So the height, more than two men. So in other words, if the front six compartments of the Titanic are flooded, not the front four, but the front six, then the water will rise up over the top of the bulkheads and they'll go into the next compartment. And once they fill that compartment, then they go over and then it will start to tip and it'll go over into the ones at the back. Now, they don't even really consider that as a possibility. It is so unlikely that that would happen because if you ram into an iceberg, let's say, I mean, that does happen. And generally you don't sink. Yeah. You know, it's fine, I mean, that does happen. And generally you don't sink.

Yeah. You know, it's, it's fine. You can do that. And actually people often say, if there's an iceberg coming straight at you, the safest thing you can do is to keep going. It's just to ram it. It's just to ram it. Okay. But let's imagine, I mean, they still have to think the unthinkable. They have to think what happens if you do have to abandon ship lifeboats. And the famous thing that again i imagine most people listening to this will know is that there weren't enough lifeboats does this reflect a reckless lack of safety consciousness on the part of the builders or is it more complicated than that dominic it is more complicated tom we should be sponsored by white star do they still

exist because i don't want to sound like we're total apologists for White Star, but it is much more complicated than that. So Peary goes to a meeting with the general manager of Harland & Wolfe, Thomas Andrews, the designer, and they talk about the lifeboats. Now, government regulations are very lax when it comes to lifeboats. The government regulations allow for about 20 lifeboats, and they've got plans because they think the government are going to beef up their regulations.

So they have plans for 48 lifeboats, maybe even 64 lifeboats and they've got plans because they think the government are going to beef up their regulations so they have plans for 48 lifeboats maybe even 64 lifeboats but actually they talk about it and it becomes clear that the government are not going to introduce these new regulations as quickly as they thought so there's no pressure to increase the number of lifeboats and they say well you know the lifeboats create a lot of clutter on the deck. They cut down on the amount of facilities that we're able to offer. And of course, luxury is our thing. Luxury in space and airiness. Yeah. So we'll just go with the 20 or so lifeboats.

What that means, as you rightly say, is they only have lifeboat space, therefore, for one third of their passengers and their crew. So to be precise, they have 14 wooden lifeboats that can carry 65 people each. They have two kind of collapsible boats that can take 47 people each. And they have two little cutters that they can sort of shoot off to collect people who've fallen overboard. They can take 40 people each and they have two little cutters that they can sort of shoot off to collect people who have fallen overboard. They can take 40 people each. What that means is there are almost 2,400 people for whom there are no places. And so Dominic, that is a huge part of the kind of the metaphorical potency of the story. So in Frances Wilson's wonderful book on Ismay, she writes, instead of lifeboats, the patrons had luxury,

a palm court, a gymnasium, and a Louis XVI restaurant. So there seems to be a very obvious moral point being made there, except that I hadn't realised that that imbalance, the fact that you'd only have kind of lifeboat space for a third, by the standards of the time, that's very impressive. I mean, that's unusually good. Yeah, I think that quote is too harsh. That Francis Wilson line implies that they're recklessly dispensing with safety standards to pander to the rich.

In their minds, they are the height of health and safety. I know that will sound mad to 99% of our listeners because they will say, how could that possibly be the case? 2,400 people have no lifeboat. But exactly that, when you look at other companies, other liners, so the Lusitania, for example, has a deficiency of 2,000 people. The German liners, the Hamburg America and the Norddeutsche liners, they have a deficiency of more than 2,000. In fact, Norddeutsche Lloyd's George Washington ship has a deficiency of 2,752 spaces.

And actually the worst of all, Tom, the one people you don't want to travel with, the Dutch. No. Holland America, their Rotterdam liner, has a deficiency of 3,000 places. I mean, you definitely don't want to travel across the Atlantic on a Dutch ship.

And the reason why people feel this is okay is basically because it's not just the Titanic that is seen as being unsinkable, but all ships of this caliber and size. Yeah. Later on when we, you know, in episode 324 of this series, when the Titanic has finally been hauled by the iceberg, a ship called the Carpathia comes and rescues a lot of the lifeboats and at the inquiry arthur rostron who was the captain of this ship he was asked about this issue of lifeboats you don't think it's terrible they didn't have enough on the titanic and he said it was fine he said the ships are built nowadays to be practically unsinkable what an ironic thing for him to have said after the event and each ship is supposed to be a lifeboat in

itself so in a way the lifeboats are the equivalent of the life jackets on an aeroplane ultimately they do put life jackets on an aeroplane don't they yeah and you know there's the whistle for inflating or whatever it is it's like making the sound of the evil eye i mean it's not meant to be real it's just meant to reassure people yeah it. It's to reassure you. Realistically, you can take 10,000 flights. You're never going to leave that life jacket. That's how they think about the lifeboats. They just think they're there for rescuing people who've fallen overboard, or maybe particularly going to the aid of another ship that is itself in distress, and we will help them out with our lifeboats. That's what they're for. I think it's Ismay who said that after the Titanic disaster. That was the point of our lifeboats.

Of course, Tom, as lots of our listeners will be thinking, it's all very well to say that, but the fact that it did sink and that obviously there weren't enough lifeboats is a flaw in their health and safety thinking, I think it's fair to say. It is a flaw, yes. All right, so that's the backdrop to it. When we come back in the second half, let's look at the process by which it is built, launched and set sail and embarks on its transatlantic maiden voyage. I'm Marina 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. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are Titanic-ing and Dominic, let's get it launched.

Sure. What's the process? Well, I know you like the naval terminology, don't you, Tom? Love it. They laid down the keel on the 31st of March, 1909. What's the keel? The keel is the bottom. Very good.

That's the bottom. And then it takes about two years to build, like the Olympic. So it's a big investment from the company. You know, you're building it a long time. And they're built next door to each other. So outside the Titanic Museum, the two, whatever it is, docks, where they build both the Olympic and the Titanic are next door to each other. And you can kind of trace the length. It's very, very powerful.

The three inches. Is it three inches that's difference between the two yeah size matters dominic it does so 26 months it takes to build and it's ready at the end of may 1911 so for people who know a lot about irish and british history it's being built during the period where it's all kicking off isn't it yeah politics and the sort of sectarian tension is becoming more and more intense. So on the 31st of May, the three characters that we talked about in episode one, Lord Pirrie from Harland and Wolfe, Bruce Ismay from White Star, and J. Pierbont Morgan from the holding company IMM, they are all there to see it.

So it's launched. Now they can get onto the interior and it takes them the best part, IMM. They are all there to see it. So it's launched. Now they can get onto the interior and it takes them the best part of a year. So until the end of March, 1912, fitting it out inside, making it as good as possible. And then on the 2nd of April, 1912, they're not going to hang around. They're going to go for the maiden voyage straight away. Well, why would they? Because they need to get their money back. So there are 12 hours of sea trials. This is standard. So they practice turning, reversing the ship, doing an emergency stop, all that kind of thing. Everything is fine. There's no recklessness. Nothing is wrong with it. So at seven o'clock that evening, the 2nd of April, 1912, comes back into belfast perfect it's all

done the crew some of them come on board the people are going to sail it to southampton it takes basically two days to sail it round down the irish sea around the bottom of england to the port of southampton in hampshire Southampton has replaced Liverpool as the main British end point, hasn't it? Yes, it has. And we'll explain why in a second. So Southampton is the Edwardians' sort of port of choice. So it's in the south of England, just above the Isle of Wight. And it docks at berth 44 in Southampton.

It's ready to take on the crew that will take it across to New York. And of course, his passengers. Extraordinary to think, Tom, that at this point, there are only 11 days to go until the Titanic sinks. Yeah, incredible. So all this, as we said, has overlapped.

And just on this issue, the overlap with the home rule crisis. So the Liberal government of Herbert Henry Asquith is preparing to introduce the third home rule bill for Ireland at the very moment that this is happening so Asquith will actually introduce that bill on the floor of the house of commons the day after the titanic sales from Southampton so as they're making the final preparations you know the last bits of fitting out the trials all that stuff people are holding military drills in the streets of belfast preparing for what they see as a possible civil war so it's against that background

that all this is happening and actually this is an important detail when it comes to the guy who runs the shipyard, Lord Pirrie. Lord Pirrie, as we said last time, is a very unusual being a supporter of the liberals and of home rule. And he actually books a hall in Belfast during the final months of the Titanic being in Belfast for Winston Churchill in his capacity as a radical firebrand. A liberal. Yeah, as a liberal. Yeah. To come and give a speech in favour of Home Rule. And there was tremendous controversy about this. They have to change the venue to a Celtic Park football ground,

which is in the Catholic area. Churchill and Pirrie go through, and there are Protestants kind of jeering at them, shouting at them, throwing things and whatnot. Churchill sort of gets out relatively unscathed. But a couple of days later, Pirrie leaves to go back to England. And when he leaves at Larne, there are mobs pelting him with eggs and herrings and shouting traitor at him. He's only able to get on the ship under police protection. He goes back to England and he is cheered at a big liberal dinner. And Tom, you've got this detail, haven't you?

Yes. So I got sent this photograph by Nicholas Tate, very much a friend of the show who has interviewed us on BBC Ulster. And when I was in Belfast, gave me a wonderful tour. And he sent me this photo of anti-home rule slogans scrawled all over the keel of the Titanic, which had to be washed off, obviously, before the ship was launched. So the idea of the Titanic as a kind of billboard for Irish politics in 1912, I mean, I had no idea. No, it's fascinating, isn't it? Because when you think about it, many of those men who built that ship, who are painstakingly putting the finishing touches to what they regard as their greatest creation.

They're the same men who are most active in the politics of the day. Who'll be signing up to Sir Edward Carson's paramilitary organisations. Yeah. Who may be after work, going to the Orange Lodge, drilling, talking about taking up arms, all of that kind of thing. It is fascinating. And this has an impact on Piri himself because two weeks, well, less than two weeks actually after this incident, he falls ill and he has to have a prostate operation. And who can say whether the stress or the pressure or whatever has an effect. But what that means is he will not sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

Very Kaiser Wilhelm behavior, Tom. He goes off to the regatta at Kiel instead, where he hobnobs with lots of German ship owners. But of course, as Richard Ebenport Hines says, if he had sailed on that voyage, either he would have died and he would have been the biggest name British fatality, or he would not have died and he would have been the biggest name British fatality, or he would not have died and he would have been the biggest scapegoat because he'd escaped. But as it is, it's another British person involved in this. Who does become the scapegoat. Bruce Ismay, who is also going to sail, who will play that role, as we will see. So the Titanic leaves Belfast. It leaves a city where there are huge crowds, demonstrations. The conservative leader,

Bonalor, has gone over to Northern Ireland to review paramilitaries. Like a workman in the bounds of the Titanic, he is stoking the fires, isn't he, Dominic? Very good, Tom. Yes, he is. He's a fireman stoking the fires of sectarianism. Driving the United Kingdom towards the iceberg of potential civil war. Exactly so. But anyway, the Titanic has left all that behind because the Titanic is now in Southampton. And Southampton, as you were saying, has an interesting history itself. So Southampton had not been the primary transatlantic port for the Victorians, but again, it has been transformed by capitalist modernity because the London Southwestern Railway had bought the Southampton Dock Company in 1892 for £1.3 million because the railway people want to transform the port to London's port of choice.

So they poured money into the port. Of course, it's closer to London than Liverpool was. It's also closer to the continent, isn't it? Yeah. So you can get to France really quickly. So yes, you can pop over to Cherbourg where they've likewise really developed it. You can't actually land in Cherbourg, but you can send out little boats that will bring people from Cherbourg. Exactly so. So in 1907, White Star, Bruce Ismay's company, had scrapped its Atlantic liner service from Liverpool and moved it to Southampton.

Although it's interesting, isn't it, that Liverpool is still the name that is painted on the back of… Yes. Yeah, there's a sentimental attachment to Liverpool indeed, as we'll come on to. Some of the crew, they've moved to Southampton, but they're originally from Liverpool. In the James Cameron film, you know, the bit where it gets upended, you see the great turbines and you see the name Titanic, and then you see Liverpool just before it plunges into the icy depths. So the last thing you might see was the word Liverpool. It's not ideal branding for the city. There you go. So yes, it's got Southampton, which is, you know, the new hub for the kind of transatlantic trade. So it will go Southampton, as you said, Tom, Cherbourg and Normandy. Then it will go across to Ireland, to the port of Queenstown, which is known today as Cove. And then it will go from there to New York.

And while it's in Southampton, the first thing they obviously need to do is they load it with all the stuff. So much stuff. So much stuff. So you read those stats, Tom, on the length of the ship and all that stuff. Yeah. But to me, it's this that is actually mind-boggling. Yeah. 800 bundles of asparagus. Yeah.

16,000 lemons. 1,000 pounds of grapes. What would 2,500 pounds of sausages even look like? And imagine how many they have on the German ships. That's true. Some of it actually seems quite, so 1,500 bottles of wine, that seems inadequate to me. Yeah. Yeah.

Only 12 mops. Yes. I would have more mops. Yes. And one potato peeler that Bruce Ismay has insisted be thrown in. But then, you know, 400 sugar tongs, 8,000 tumblers, 50 boxes of grapefruit, 40 tons of potatoes, 6,000 pounds of bacon and ham.

100 grape scissors. All of this stuff. So all of this stuff is loaded. And then, of course, they have the crew. So the crew, this is the most high profile, the most exciting voyage in White Star's history. So they want their very best. Yeah, the creme de la creme.

Tip top. Yeah. So they've got 892 crewmen. 700 of them are from Southampton. And of those, just under half are from Southampton originally. They're from Hampshire. But quite a lot of them are people who have moved from Merseyside, who have moved down from Liverpool when White Star changed the route. So actually, when the disaster happens, Liverpool is a stricken city in the same way that Southampton is or New York is or Belfast is.

Almost all of them are British, with the exception of some of the restaurant staff are Italians. So this is the kind of golden age of Italian people moving to Britain, restaurants, ice cream, coffee, all of that kind of thing. So there's more than 40 Italian restaurant staff who actually die in the disaster. And the way the crew works is it's divided into three. So there's the deck department, there's the engine department, and there's the stewards department. And the deck crew are the main officers, there's a surgeon, there are storekeepers, there's two window cleaners. A lamp trimmer. A lamp trimmer, yeah. But also there's a masseuse, a fish cook, then there's the stewards. They have it quite tough, don't they? Very kind of brutal working hours, kind of 16 hours a day. So there's a brilliant account of it by one of the stewardesses who survived the Titanic, Violet Jessop, which is a brilliant account of kind of below stairs

on the Titanic. Well, it's like being a domestic servant, isn't it? It is, yeah. I mean, they have to show unstinting deference, certainly to the first class passengers. Apparently the American millionaires thought that they were excellent because they didn't seem surly. Unlike American stewards who apparently were very surly and would make faces at you behind your back. So that's a nice kind of shift, isn't it? Yeah, that's nice. Because now it's our plucky British service workers who are famous for being rude. Yes. Golly. Yeah, that is a change. And then you have the engine room. I mean, everybody basically says the engine room is a total and utter inferno. It is hell on earth.

They have greasers, don't they? Imagine being a greaser. Yeah. There are 280 men in total. And people who ever go down there say, God, you don't want to go down there. Well, there's a Cunard officer, isn't there? Yes. A man called James Bissett, who says that no man have ever had such hard and brutalizing work as the firemen and the trimmers and the big coal burning steamers in the early years of the 20th century i felt pity for them as i saw them coming off watch and trudging wearily to their quarters utterly done in sweat squelching in their boots their faces blackened with coal dust and streaked with sweat had a dull animal-like look and they seldom smiled it was killing work

yeah people sometimes say it's like being a coal miner, but you're on a ship and it's just there forever. Yes, naturally, a lot of the firemen who come from Belfast, people hate doing long stints. So the people who come from Belfast to Southampton then don't want to go from Southampton to New York and they end up being replaced by new firemen. I mean, not all of them, obviously, but some of them. So a lot of the crew have come over from Belfast, not all of them. But when they get on the ship, they all say, amazing, what a brilliant ship this is, very exciting. And they write to friends and things, she is an improvement on Olympic. She's a wonderful ship. She's the latest thing in shipbuilding. This ship is going to be a good deal better than the Olympic, at least I think so,

steadier and everything. So the only thing that worries them is it's so big they'll get lost and there's two officers in particular that have stuck in i think the world's imagination one of them whose life story is just mind-blowing is this guy charles herbert lightoller yeah so he's second officer lots of people will have seen more than one fictional representation of him because he is Mr. Dawson in Dunkirk. Really? You know, the Mark Rylance character. Did you not know that, Tom? No, I did not know that. So you know Dunkirk? Yeah. You know Mark Rylance? You know his little

boat? Yeah. And he goes out. This is Charles Lightoller. Is it? Charles Lightoller's boat was called the Sundowner. Goodness. He took it across and he brought back 140 men from Dunkirk. And he managed not to sink this time. And this time he didn't sink. Exactly. Exactly.

Mr. Dawson is modelled on him. He's the most senior officer who survives, isn't he? He is indeed. And so that's why he's remembered. He is indeed. And of course, his handling of the lifeboats, as we will discover, becomes very controversial. Yes, but not perhaps as controversial as the senior officer on board the Titanic, who is Captain Edward Smith, who is an absolute icon for the White Star, isn't he?

He has basically captained all their steamships on their first voyages. And basically they feel, well, if he's at the helm, everything's going to be great. Nothing can go wrong. So he's in the film. Is he Bernard Hill? Is he Théoden? He is. Yes. Yeah, he's Bernard Hill.

So he was from Staffordshire. He was from Hanley in the Potteries. He'd actually worked in the Potteries at the Etruria Forge. He had captained 17 of White Star's ships, sailed for a total of 2 million miles for them. He's very well paid. He's paid £1,250 a year with a bonus of £1,000 a year if he brings the ships back in good order. So to give people an idea, I would say that's about £800,000 and then the bonus. So he could be looking to earn more than a million pounds a year in today's money.

And he looks like Captain Birdseye. He's got a kind of white beard. He's kind of stout. Yeah. He's a kind of jolly man. He looks as he should. Yeah. Yeah, you trust him.

He's absolutely as he should be. Ho, ho, ho. Yeah. Welcome to the Titanic. Welcome. So he's a kind of living embodiment of white star's commitment to service and safety and on that note he's interviewed by a newspaper in 1907 yeah and he says i never saw a wreck and i have never been wrecked nor have i ever been in any predicament that threatened to

end in disaster and i know that he didn't speak like that because he wasn't a pirate he was from staffordshire tom say he might have sounded like you know how you should do you're not power the great captain who doesn't let things happen that's not how it's daffodil people he would say well i never saw a wreck and i've never been wrecked nor have i never been in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster that's how he would speak like jack davenport the executive producer of the rest is history yeah so yeah he doesn't even think it would be fair to say, because his principle is that if nothing happens, then it's been a good voyage. And obviously that is correct. However, Dominic, however, the truth is, and this will be a point made by the American

press in the wake of the sinking of the Titanic, he should have been retired before he took the captaincy of the Titanic because eight months prior to the sailing of the Titanic, he had been involved in not one but two accidents. So the previous September, he'd been captaining the Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship, and he had rammed the Olympic into a British cruiser, HMS Hawk. Everybody makes mistakes, Tom, come on. And then in February, so that's only a couple of months before the sailing of the Titanic, he had driven the Olympic over a ship that had been wrecked and was kind of submerged under the sea and lost the propeller blade. So that's not really a good omen. And when he takes Titanic out of Southampton, across the channel towards Cherbourg, while he's Titanic out of Southampton across the channel towards Cherbourg,

while he's coming out of Southampton, he very, very narrowly avoids crashing into an American liner, the New York. See, I thought you were going to mention this because I think, doesn't Frances Wilson mention this? She does, yes. And I think this is too harsh because actually, interestingly, not only is this the period of Home Rule, the Home Rule controversy in Britain, but it's a period of enormous trade union unrest. And there's a coal strike in Southampton that means that all these other ships are stuck. They are, as it were, grounded. And as he sails, the New York gets sort of sucked in by his wash and almost crashes into him. And he very skillfully, Tom, steers away from the New York. And this time manages not to crash into a Royal Navy frigate or lose a propeller. I think he's a tremendous captain.

And I would happily take my chances with Captain Smith. Okay. But a counter view, Francis Wilson, like his first class passengers, Smith was pampered, celebrated and overconfident. I think she's only saying that because he's saying that's Titanic. I think that's too harsh. So anyway, they're about to leave. We will come to the passengers next time because they really have some extraordinary stories. They're in the most amazing range of rogues, rascals. It's like a novel, isn't it? Absolutely.

It's like a Victorian novel with a whole, you know, the whole of society is present in a single space. There's migrants from Armenia, from Lebanon. There are plutocrats, you know, incredible. Yeah, amazing. But let's just end with the issue of how much this whole story is an inevitable one. You know, a kind of Greek tragedy, as it were, or whether it's purely an example of chance in history. The way you tell the story is determined by how you think history works.

Yeah. And I think there is a lovely story which gives an example of how chance matters. I say lovely story, not lovely for everybody. so before they sail on the 10th of april the crew particularly the guys who work in the inferno they all go out and they get absolutely wasted so they have gone for a last pub crawl and this is what they always do isn't it because their life is so hard yeah that when you're on shore you just get as drunk as you can and the deal is they go for this great pub crawl through all the dockside pubs very hard environment, I imagine. And then they have to be back by midday.

And a guy, a fireman called John Podesta, later on, after the voyage was over, he described how he and his friend, William Nutbean, had gone to the Newcastle Hotel, a few pints. They went onto a pub called The Grapes. And they met three brothers called the slade brothers who worked with them and at 10 50 cutting it very fine they rush back to get to the ship and they're going towards the docks when they have to cross a railway line and a passenger train is coming towards them and podesta and nut bean run across the railway line to get to the docks because they don't want to be late. The Slade brothers hang back to let the train pass. The train is much longer than they expect. So they're waiting and waiting. The train finally goes. They cross the tracks and they get

down to the docks. Of course, they're now delayed a little bit. And as they run, they're now running to get there and the gangway is being swung aside and they shout at the officer in charge, sixth officer, who's a guy called Moody. And they say, we're here, we're here, we're here, let us on. And he says, no, you're too late. You're unreliable. You can't be trusted. And there were always people hanging around standby, hoping to get, you know, cause this is a time when people are desperate for work. So they're hoping to be taken on. And he gestures and he says to the standby, you guys come on instead. And the standby crew who were replacing these guys who waited for the train are Richard

Hosgood, Alfred Gere, Harry Witt, Leonard Kinsler, and two men, one called Lloyd and one called Black. We don't have their first names. And that stand-in crew who are only there because of that train all died five days later. So if that train had been a minute delayed or had been a little bit shorter, those men who died would have lived. Yeah. Okay. So everyone is boarded at Southampton. Soon they'll be boarding at Cherbourg. They'll be touching at Queenstown and then off into the vast expanse of the Atlantic. And that, Dominic, is where we will be in our next episode, where we look at the incredible

array of people who are on board the Titanic. So if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club, you can accompany us on that voyage right away. If you are not a member, I'm afraid if you're down in the steerage, you'll have to wait until whenever Theo in his wisdom decides to bring out the next episode. So you may as well just join the club. And on that bombshell, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina 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.