On...um....let’s remember the day now - it’s all mashing together a bit (although that could be the champagne imbibed for today’s Royal Wedding). I think it was Wednesday. Yes, that will do. On Wednesday, Joy and I went to Belfast to do a “Titanic Walking Tour”. Word of warning - this blog needs a ‘nerd alert’ warning. I do get very excited about pump houses and the mechanics of ship-building.
Most people would know that the ill-fated ship and her much more successful Olympic-class sisters were all built in Belfast in the early 1900s, but there’s so much more to the story.
The Olympic class liners were the largest and most technologically advanced moving objects of their time and the most luxurious liners in their class. To get a sense of size, it’s not enough to hear the numbers. 882 feet doesn’t mean much to me other than ‘large’ in an abstract sense, but when you see the size of the dry dock and then see a picture of the ship dwarfing surrounding buildings, you suddenly realise just how large ‘large’ really is. The funnels themselves were 22 feet in diameter. That’s the height of of the building that the ship was designed in. That’s the width of the funnels - the height is 63 feet (so almost 3 times the height of said building) and there were 4 of them. The technology employed within the ship, the way it was designed and built, the pictures, artifacts and the historic remains of the shipyard all combined for a fascinating afternoon.
It’s completely mind boggling. No wonder Belfast was known as ‘the’ go-to place for cutting-edge ship building. No wonder the people of Belfast felt such a sense of pride and achievement at that time in history. And certainly no wonder Titanic’s sinking was an event of such enormity, the city couldn’t bring itself to talk about it for close to 80 years. It’s hard to think of another event in history that had such an impact on the psyche of a city. Our guide compared it to 9/11 and I guess in a sense there are some parallels but at least with 9/11 there was an ‘external’ villain that could be found and united against. In the case of the Titanic, there was no external villain. Thousands of men (pretty sure it was exclusively men) laboured for years to build something the world had never seen before. The largest moving object of the time - just imagine being a part of that! How could you not be proud? She was alright when she left Belfast - the city let her sail, having achieved the almost impossible. How could you not be devastated when the unimaginable happened?
Thankfully, enough time has now past that the tragedy of the sinking can be reconciled with the joy and pride of her creation. A permanent visitors centre is currently being constructed in the precise location the Olympic ships were built. There is already a wealth of interesting history in the area - the design and drawing offices of Harland and Wolff retain a sense of their era, the Thompson dry dock where Titanic had her last stay on dry land defies description, the pump house that pumped water out of the dry dock has been preserved and is extraordinary (the pumps evacuated the dock at a speed of two olympic sized pools every sixty seconds, the entire dock was dry in 100 minutes, the caisson gate at the end had two different methods of opening to cater to both ‘normal’ sized ships and the Olympic class liners, the water could be lowered out of the dock at a precision rate of 1/16th of an inch to ensure the keel of ships wasn’t damaged - this is technology from 100 years ago!!!) The visitors’ centre and the 25 year plan for the Titanic Quarter are impressive, to say the least.
If you’re planning a trip to Ireland and enjoy history, take a walking tour of the Titanic Quarter in Belfast and step back in time to experience a rare set of events.
Ania
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting stuff. Keep it up.
Peter H