Read Voyagers of the Titanic for Free Online

other men to their will and impressed their characters on their age. Pirrie worked long hours, but his vitality was never slaked: he took ten-minute power naps, and woke invigorated. He was a master salesman, who made a point of being seen smiling and spoke with an unabashed Belfast accent, which convinced other businessmen that he was sincere and trustworthy. It was said of him while the Titanic was being built, “Lord Pirrie has a sort of magic by which he charms orders for ships out of customers.” 4
    Pirrie’s father had died in New York in 1849 when his only son was two. The fatherless boy was intensely close to his mother, who instilled in him the precepts that made him industrious, persevering, and forceful. When he turned fifteen, in 1862, she paid for him to be apprenticed to a young Belfast shipbuilder, Edward Harland. Harland’s shipyard covered part of a man-made island created by the soil and rubble when a new channel was cut to straighten the river Lagan as it meandered through Belfast, and was only a few miles from the Irish Sea. Harland was an innovative shipbuilder who installed iron instead of wooden upper decks in his steamers, thus strengthening hulls by creating a box of metal girders, and he increased the capacity of his ships by having flat bottoms and square bilges. He dispensed with bowsprits and figureheads, though his steamships still carried masts and sails until the late nineteenth century. Belfast technical expertise was melded with Hamburg Jewish financial skills when in 1862 Harland took Gustav Wolff as his business partner.
    Pirrie achieved a partnership in Harland & Wolff at the age of twenty-seven, traveled abroad seeking orders from foreign shipowners, studied the amenities in top European hotels, and adapted them for the public saloons of Belfast-built liners. He became chairman of the shipyards following Harland’s death in 1895, and after 1906, when he bought Wolff’s shareholding, turned them into his personal fiefdom. He kept control by hugging all crucial information jealously to himself. His fellow directors were marginalized: when he was away from Belfast, meetings were chaired by his wife. Copies of all letters sent from the shipyards were submitted to his scrutiny. His managers were never privy to the shipyard’s finances or contractual details with shipowners. A ship’s architect who discussed finance with a shipowner was fired by Pirrie, who ordered that the man’s locked desk be broken open to find what further indiscretions had been committed. He was so secretive that when he died, no one else in the company knew the state of negotiations with its potential customers, which threw the business into crisis.
    Ships were built to Harland & Wolff designs: Pirrie consulted shipowners only as to general specifications, sketching rough designs for every vessel personally in consultation with the owners, and charging building costs plus 4 percent profit. * Under Pirrie’s propulsion Harland & Wolff was by 1900 the biggest shipbuilder in the world (employing nine thousand workers and producing one hundred thousand tons of shipping a year). The English newspaper editor W. T. Stead, who perished in the Titanic disaster, profiled Pirrie shortly before the liner’s maiden voyage: “He is the greatest shipbuilder the world has ever seen. He has built more ships and bigger ships than any man since the days of Noah. Not only he builds them; but he owns them; directs them; controls them on all the seas of the world.” 5
    Pirrie’s control of the seas was enforced by his involvement with Pierpont Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company, incorporated in New Jersey, which in 1902 bought the White Star Line. As a result of this deal, IMM contracted that all orders for new vessels, and for repairs undertaken in Britain, were to be placed with the Belfast shipyard if its prices were competitive with those of U.S. shipyards. Harland & Wolff was thus practically constituted as