The Band That Played On (6 page)

Ships’ musicians were now not only poorer but also lower in status. “A musician on board a ship is still but a queer creature,” complained the Orchestral Association in its journal. “He is a square peg in a round hole. There is really no place for him on board unless he does a bit of waiting at table. He is not a seaman, fireman, steward, or any article mentioned in the regulations of the mercantile marine. Not even a chattel!” The
New York Times
ran a story on March 24, 1912, headlined “Bandsmen Now Passengers” that ended with the observation “This method takes them out of the jurisdiction of the Captain, as they are not members of the crew.” The archives of the White Star Line are incomplete, making it impossible to know the exact terms of the contract with C. W. & F. N. Black.

There’s no extant correspondence to reveal how the brothers managed their coup. They may have known J. Bruce Ismay through Liverpool business connections or through social circles on the Wirral peninsula. They lived in a seven-room house on Heron Road. Ismay’s inherited family mansion, Dawpool (designed by Richard Norman Shaw, architect of New Scotland Yard, the Savoy Theatre, Bedford Park, and the Piccadilly Hotel among other London buildings and Albion House in Liverpool), was only six miles away, overlooking the River Dee at Thurstaston.

The Blacks would have followed the progress of the building of the
Titanic
and the battle between Cunard and White Star for supremacy on the transatlantic route. The two shipping lines had a lot in common. Thomas Henry Ismay, the founder of White Star, was born in 1837, Samuel Cunard in 1839. Ismay’s Oceanic Steamship Company was formed in 1869, the Cunard Steamship Company in 1879. Both lines were built out of the remnants of previous companies.

The formative years of Cunard and White Star witnessed the transition from sail to steam and from wood to iron. It also saw a rapid increase in emigration from Europe to America. The question both lines faced was how to best capitalize on the lucrative North Atlantic route. Cunard opted to sell speed. It reasoned that most of the passengers were one-way ticket holders who weren’t sailing in order to pamper themselves but to get to their destinations in the shortest time. White Star instead chose to highlight luxury, reasoning that it was possible to transform the journey from an ordeal into a memorable experience by the addition of comfort, splendor, and style.

The innovations on White Star liners were impressive. First-class accommodation was shifted from the back of the ship to the middle where there was less noise from the engines. Spacious promenade decks, more portholes, and grand dining saloons were introduced. The capacity for third-class passengers was doubled and they were given their own dining room with linen napkins, silverware, and printed menus.

Thomas Ismay died in 1899 and J. Bruce Ismay, his son, inherited his company and his position. In 1902 the line was acquired by John Pierpont Morgan (J. P. Morgan), whose International Mercantile Marine Company was slowly swallowing up British shipping. Along with White Star, it would acquire Dominion, Red Star, Leyton, and Atlantic Transport. To avoid high U.S. port taxes and potential violation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, however, Morgan ensured that the ships remained registered in Britain and had British captains, crews—and orchestras.

The British government saw White Star’s access to American money as a threat to the supremacy of its country’s shipping, and so it bolstered Cunard with a £150,000 annual subsidy plus a low-interest loan of £2.5 million. As a direct result, Cunard began an ambitious building program for two of the fastest liners ever constructed—the
Lusitania
and the
Mauretania
. The
Lusitania
made its maiden voyage in September 1907 and the next month made history by slashing more than eleven hours from the existing record for a westbound crossing and ending German dominance of the Blue Riband, an unofficial accolade given to the ship with the fastest transatlantic crossing.
³
It was the first time a ship had made the crossing in less than five days.

For years White Star had worked exclusively with the Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff. Thomas Ismay had met a Liverpool merchant, Gustavus Schwabe, who offered financing if Ismay had his ships built by his nephew Gustav Wolff, who was in partnership with Edward Harland. Ismay accepted the deal. Harland died in 1895, but the arrangement continued under his successor, William James Pirrie, later Lord Pirrie.

The legend is that the
Titanic
was conceived in the spring of 1907 during an after-dinner conversation between Pirrie and Ismay at Downshire House, Pirrie’s London home in Belgrave Square (now the Spanish Embassy). Sometimes the tale is rounded off with Ismay making provisional sketches of the great ship on his table napkin. Several aspects of the story don’t ring true. The most obvious is that the
Lusitania
had already been launched by then, and so it was a bit late for a White Star response. Also, Ismay was a ship owner, not a ship designer. What details could he have communicated in a crude sketch that he couldn’t explain in words?

Swiss
Titanic
scholar Gunter Babler has picked up on several other inconsistencies in this story based on the preparations made at Harland & Wolff for the construction of a bigger class of ship. The earliest of these was the building of the large Thomson dock in 1904. Babler believes that the
Olympic-
class liners were decided on in 1903, although the specifics were kept under wraps for obvious reasons. The earlier date makes sense in light of the purchase of White Star by J. P. Morgan in 1902, which made the larger ships possible, and the response to this by Cunard.

Babler traced the dinner story back to a single source: the 1961 book
The Ismay Line
by William J. Oldham. No previous account had mentioned it. As Oldham had access to Ismay’s widow before she died in 1937, it’s likely that she told him the story. It may be that the dinner happened but in another year or that the talk of the
Titanic
at a 1907 meal was merely the culmination of a four-year planning process. Possibly Mrs. Ismay didn’t know the year of the dinner, and Oldham guessed based on the fact that the orders for ships 400 and 401, as the
Olympic
and the
Titanic
were initially known, were registered in Harland & Wolff ’s books on April 30, 1907.

The plan was for three ships: first the
Olympic
, then the
Titanic
, and finally the
Gigantic
.
⁴
Responsibility for their design was given to Thomas Andrews, Pirrie’s nephew and newly promoted head of Harland and Wolff ’s design department. Ismay and the other White Star directors approved his drawings in July 1908. The
Titanic
would accommodate up to 2,599 passengers and 903 officers and crew. It would have twenty-eight first-class suites, four electric elevators (three of them in first class), a heated swimming pool, a squash court, a fully equipped gymnasium, two libraries, four restaurants, a medical bay, and an operating theater. In first class it would have all the luxuries of an English country house, a gentleman’s club in London, or a town house in New York, and rich passengers would pay as much as one hundred times more than those in steerage for the privilege.

All the latest advances in marine construction would accompany these embellishments. There would be sixteen watertight compartments with electronically operated doors and sensors to detect water levels. This was believed to virtually guarantee that the ship could deal with any puncture. It had three propellers, twenty-four double-ended boilers, and five single-ended boilers. Although the advance publicity did not specifically boast that the ship was unsinkable, it did state that it was “designed to be unsinkable,” and
Shipbuilder
magazine in 1911 declared it to be “practically unsinkable.”

Because the proposed liners were so much bigger than anything built before—50 percent larger than the
Lusitania
or
Mauretania—
the Belfast shipyards of Harland & Wolff had to be reconfigured to make room for them. Two new slipways were created from three old ones, and new gantries over 200 feet tall with electric lifts had to be built above the hulls. It would take an unprecedented three thousand men to work on the
Titanic
, and everyone concerned was aware that this was the largest man-made transportable structure ever built.

Charlie and Frederick Black would have known of the
Titanic
’s advancement not only through their connections in Liverpool but also because there was national interest in this feat of British engineering and example of twentieth-century progress. Ships were an indication of a nation’s wealth, power, and technological advancement. They were the most powerful form of transport then known, and the shrinking of the distance between Britain and America gained the sort of attention that the Space Race would get in the 1950s and 1960s.

News coverage of the ship’s building expressed awe and wonder. It was an age of record breaking, invention, and mankind’s seemingly limitless ability to master nature. Reports were full of dizzying statistics about the weight of iron plates, the numbers of rivets, and the measurements of decks. It was hard to know what to do with such facts as “the stern frame weighs 70 tons,” or “it would take 20 horses to haul one rudder.” The accumulative effect was to impress the average reader with the ingenuity of designers and the capacity of humans to construct on such a large scale.

White Star booklet featuring the
Olympic
and
Titanic.

The first report on the ships in the
Times
came on September 1, 1908, in a page-ten story headlined “The New White Star Liners.” It mentioned that all the preliminaries had been settled and that construction had been started.

They will be longer, broader, and deeper than the
Lusitania
and the
Mauretania
. The exact dimensions are not yet obtainable but the gross tonnage will be about 8000 tons more than that of the two Cunarders. It is reckoned that the vessels will take three years to build. One is to be called the
Olympic
; the name of the other is not yet decided upon, but it will probably be the
Titanic
. The question of speed, which will not be high in a record-breaking sense, is being left in abeyance, doubtless pending the result of an experiment which is now being made by Messrs. Harland & Wolff with a combination of reciprocating and turbine engines, in which exhaust steam from the first engine is utilized in the second.

In November 1909 the paper reported that Trafalgar Dock in Southampton would have to be rebuilt to take these huge ships. (Ismay had decided to switch his transatlantic operation to Southampton rather than compete directly with Cunard from Liverpool.) The new dock would be 1700 feet long and 400 feet wide, and would require four new cargo sheds to be built.

In April 1910 there was news that the channel leading to Southampton docks would need to be deepened. It had already been dredged to 30 feet for the American Line and then to 32 feet for the
Adriatic
and
Oceanic
. Now the bed beneath the shipping lanes would need to be lowered an additional 3 feet. The International Mercantile Marine Company then had to petition the federal government in America to allow the city of New York to lengthen its piers by 100 feet. The New York Dock Commission was happy to do it, but the government was concerned that the additional length would constrict the river.

News interest turned to insurance in January 1911. This was no small matter because sea travel still had a high element of risk. In its Mail and Shipping Intelligence column, the
Times
had a regular list of the latest wrecks and casualties, and in the January 6 edition that carried news of the
Titanic
and
Olympic
insurance, it mentioned fourteen calamities during the past two days, mostly involving collisions resulting in damage. The report claimed that the
Titanic
and
Olympic
had been insured for between £700,000 and £800,000 although the actual cost of each ship was £1,500,000.

The
Titanic
was launched on May 31, 1911, “in brilliant weather, and in the presence of thousands of spectators,” according to the
Times
, the same day that the
Olympic
, which had been launched in October, left Belfast for England to commence her maiden voyage. For the first and only time the ships that had grown up alongside each other were briefly seen together on the water. Despite the
Titanic
’s size it apparently slid with ease down an incline greased with twenty-four tons of tallow, soap, and oil, once the shores had been removed. With an eye on detail, the
Times
recorded that it took sixty-two seconds to move from land to river, that her maximum speed as she did so was twelve knots, and that “the wave produced as her stem dropped into the water was much smaller than might have been expected considering the mass of the structure.”

Although thousands of paying spectators and many dignitaries— including Lord Pirrie, J. Bruce Ismay, and J. P. Morgan—were present, there was no traditional naming ceremony, and tugs quickly towed her to a berth where she would spend the next eight months being fitted out. Flags hung on the side of the ship spelled out the word
success
. On February 3, 1912, she left the wharf and was taken to her dry dock for the final preparations.