Belfast Shipbuilders: A Titanic tale by Stephen Cameron
Colourpoint Books, Newtownards, 2011, £16 (pb)
208 pages, with numerous black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, index
ISBN 978-1-906578-78-7
Belfast Built Ships by John Lynch
The History Press, Stroud, 2012, £19.99 (pb)
303 pages, with black-and-white illustrations, bibliography
ISBN 978-0-7524-6539-5
The Shipyard Apprentice by William Scott
W & R Scott, Nairn, 2011, £12.99 (pb)
168 pages, with 2 black-and-white illustrations
ISBN 978-0-9570994-0-1
For many years anyone wanting to study shipbuilding in Belfast had to rely on two, admittedly excellent, books: Hume and Moss's definitive history of Harland & Wolff, Shipbuilders to the World (1986), and David Hammond's wonderful evocation of shipyard characters, Steelchest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog (1986). This gave readers both an official top-down company history and its counterpart looking from the bottom up. Kevin Johnston's deeply flawed In the Shadows of Giants (2008) added little of value, but another small clutch of books has now been added which helps to shed more light on this fascinating story.
Stephen Cameron's Belfast Shipbuilders provides a broad historical sweep of the industry from the earliest times through to the death of William Pirrie in 1924. It explores the foundations of the industry with the Scotsman William Ritchie establishing the first significant shipyard in 1791 The fortunes of the industry changed radically with the arrival of Edward J. Harland in 1854, first as manager of Robert Hickson's newly established yard, and then subsequently, with Gustav Wolff, as founder of Harland & Wolff in 1862. This company was to become the largest shipyard in the world and naturally dominates any discussion of shipbuilding in Belfast. Cameron follows the growth of the yard and its success in building up a close relationship with the White Star Line which resulted in the construction of the largest ships in the world at the time Olympic (1910), Titanic (1911) and Britannic (1915). The Titanic naturally looms large in this story and the discussion of the Olympic class ships provides the longest chapter in the book. Of greater importance than any one ship, however, was the close relationship between the harbour commissioners and the shipyards which enabled the industry to develop with the dredging of channels and the construction of dry and wet docks.
Cameron is particularly interested in the people behind the industry and as well as a more general chapter on working conditions he devotes one chapter to the life stories of four shipyard managers and another to William James Pirrie. Pirrie joined Harland & Wolff in 1862 as a premium apprentice and rose through the ranks, eventually to take over from Edward Harland as Managing Director in 1894. He worked fearlessly to expand the yard and manipulated his various public positions as a harbour commissioner and mayor of Belfast to the benefit of the company and his own personal advantage. The Pirrie years are seen by Cameron as something of a golden era, but his legacy was to leave the shipyard, on his death in 1924, with no orders and very little capital. Cameron does not offer a particularly critical assessment of the industry, but has still provided a very useful overview, particularly of the early years.
As its title suggests, John Lynch's Belfast Built Ships focuses on the output of the yards. The bulk of the book is taken up with ship lists for each of the shipyards. This has been a mammoth task and as well as the basic details of name, yard number, dimensions, etc., there is also a short account of most of the ships' histories. Lynch has re-evaluated the official yard lists, correcting errors and reclassifying many of the ships to produce the most accurate picture to date of Belfast's shipbuilding output. However, he does not quite give the definitive list as lengthenings such as Augusta Victoria (1897), engineering work such as the Foyle Bridge (1979) or conversions such as RFA Argus (1988) are not included in the listings, even though they provided significant work. Argus does however sneak into a photograph on the frontispiece.
This is not simply a book of lists, though. The data has allowed Lynch to create a whole range of statistical tables which he uses to radically reevaluate the accepted history of the industry. In a relatively short, but insightful commentary, Lynch provides a précis and re-appraisal of his short monograph An Unlikely Success Story (2001). He argues that Belfast was not a natural place for large-scale shipbuilding to develop: the physical constraints were considerable, there was no indigenous skilled workforce, and there were no local supplies of iron or steel. A variety of factors were instrumental in its development including the import of skilled managers, the recruitment of skilled workers attracted by higher wages, better living conditions, and crucially opportunities for wives and daughters to find employment in the textile industry that would safeguard family fortunes during the notorious cyclical nature of the shipbuilding industry. Once established, the yards were able to grow through business methods that instilled loyalty in their customers and ensured repeat orders. Harland & Wolff instituted the ‘commission club’ whereby shipowners would pay the cost of construction, a proportion of overheads and a fixed five per cent profit to the builder. This linked the owner and the builder in a system of self interest that saw no fewer than nine shipowners each ordering ten or more vessels during the period 1880-1913.
Unlike Cameron, Lynch also pays full attention to the often neglected ‘wee yard’ of Workman Clark and the even smaller yards of Robert Hickson and McIlwaine & Co. Frank Workman and George Clark learned their trade at Harland & Wolff before establishing their own yard in 1879. It is often assumed that there was rivalry between the two yards and that the two survived by building different types of vessel. Lynch successfully argues that actually there was a great deal of co-operation between them and in fact, apart from the very large White Star liners, their product mix was very similar. On a number of occasions the output of the wee yard even exceeded that of its larger neighbour. Workman Clark failed following a disastrous takeover by the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company, which guaranteed share dividends to attract investment, but crippled the yard financially during the depression, forcing it to close in 1935.
Lynch devotes a whole chapter to debunking some of the myths that have grown up around Belfast shipbuilding, most notably those associated with the Titanic. Yes, it was a big ship, but it was not the only one to come out of Belfast and nor was it the only one to meet a catastrophic end. The prevailing view of those associated with its building was that ‘she was alright when she left here’. Lynch also takes Belfast shipbuilding out of its customary parochial setting and discusses it in terms of the wider British shipbuilding industry and the world economy.
The illustrations in Belfast Built Ships are to be commended with some stunning images drawn from the Lagan Legacy collection. Despite the short text this is an important book which significantly advances our understanding of shipbuilding in Belfast.
The Shipyard Apprentice is a different book entirely. It is the personal recollection of an engineering apprentice at Harland & Wolff in the 1960s. It follows in the wake of John Wilson Haire's semi-fictional The Yard (2002) and Tom McCluskie's excellent No Place for a Boy (2007) in giving a very personal view of life in the yard. Scott has provided a very readable account of his early years in Harland & Wolff as an apprentice fitter. He details his first impressions and progress around the various engineering departments in the yard. We hear of ruthless bosses, the high jinx of the men and the tough working conditions. However, most of the book follows his life outside the yard with his passionate interest in the Boy's Brigade, fishing and motorcycling. This reminds us shipbuilding historians that the majority of workers were not heroic sons of labour, militant trade unionists or romantic wise-cracking characters, but simply individuals with their own life stories and motivations. For Scott, a shipyard apprenticeship was merely a means to an end. The wages he earned allowed him to buy motorbikes, and the skills he acquired enabled him to leave the yard and pursue an engineering career as sea.
With much of Queen's Island being turned into a Titanic themed heritage park there is no possibility of another ship being built in Belfast. These books have added considerably to this now closed chapter in Belfast's history, but as John Lynch states, there is still a need for a truly comprehensive and detailed history of shipbuilding on the Lagan.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2013.767564
© Martin Bellamy