A portrait of Sir Edward Harland late in life. Harland co-founded the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland & Wolff in 1861, which had a very close business relationship with the White Star Line.
The greatest of the Belfast shipbuilding companies, Harland & Wolff is still very much alive and well, and operating as always in Belfast. It was founded in 1861 when thirty-year-old Edward Harland, who had bought a shipyard from his former employer, Robert Hickson, for ?5,000 three years earlier, went into partnership with twenty-seven-year-old Gustav Wolff, his former personal assistant. Wolff also happened to be the nephew of the German-born merchant and financier Gustav Schwabe, who had helped Harland to buy the yard from Hickson. Schwabe himself had moved to Liverpool in 1838, at the age of twenty-five, and he remained based there until his retirement to London, where he died in 1897.
Both he and the younger Gustav came from a Hamburg family that had converted from Judaism to Lutheran Christianity in 1819. Gustav Wolff had been sent to join his uncle in 1849, and served an apprenticeship with the Manchester engineering firm Joseph Whitworth, later graduating to work as a draftsman with another engineering company, Goodfellows. It was through the influence of his uncle that he secured the job as Edward Harland’s assistant.
Harland himself was a hard-headed and exigent businessman. Born in Scarborough in 1831, the son of a doctor, he first studied engineering at the Robert Stephenson works in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (Stephenson was the son of the inventor of the pioneering Rocket locomotive.) Harland subsequently left Newcastle for Glasgow, then returned to Newcastle before joining Robert Hickson’s Belfast shipyard in 1854. His move into shipbuilding was prompted by meeting Gustav Schwabe during his apprenticeship. Schwabe, who was friendly with Harland’s uncle, was financially involved with the Liverpool-based shipping company of John Bibby & Sons, the oldest independently owned shipping line in the world, founded in 1807 and still operating today as the Bibby Line. It was
Schwabe who arranged for the young Edward to be employed at J. & G. Thomson Marine Engineering Company in Glasgow, where he rose to be chief draftsman at ?1 a week. He then returned to Newcastle to become manager of Thomas Toward Shipyard at the tender age of twenty-two. It was Schwabe too who encouraged Edward, a year later, to make the move to Hickson’s in Belfast.
Once in charge, Harland set about putting the somewhat ailing shipyard’s house in order by following a strict, very Victorian management policy. Wages were cut and smoking was banned to avoid the danger of fires and to discourage the workers from slacking. Harland went about his business
Harland went about his business in a very hands-on manner, equipping himself with a piece of chalk and an ivory ruler that he used to mark any mistakes he noticed in workmanship.
In a very hands-on manner, equipping himself with a piece of chalk and an ivory ruler that he used to mark any mistakes he noticed in workmanship. One worker remembered that “He had an all-smelling nose as well as an all-seeing eye. One day he was walking rapidly along, and he suddenly stopped dead and sniffed at a saw-pit. In a flash the trap-door was lifted and there, squatting in the sawdust, was a wizened little man, puffing at a clay pipe.”
How his workforce must have detested him. However, he restored the yard’s fortunes and thus ensured continuing employment for those prepared to toe the line and put their shoulder to the wheel. But it wasn’t long before this ambitious young man was casting around for ways of founding a shipyard of his own; he was no doubt very alive to the increasing market for new ships and the burgeoning shipping lines that needed them. After some initial frustration, his prayers were answered in September 1858 when Robert Hickson—perhaps at Schwabe’s instigation, for, as we’ve seen, it was Schwabe who put up the money for his protege to take over the company—wrote to Harland offering him “interest and goodwill in the shipyard at the Queen’s Island, Belfast. . . for the sum of five thousand pounds. . .”
The timing was good, for recent years had seen a revolution in design and potential thanks to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the grandfather of modern heavy engineering. Brunel’s ship, the Great Britain, made of wrought iron, was built in Bristol in 1843—only fifteen years before Hickson’s offer—for the Great Western Steamship Company. The design and construction set a template for all subsequent iron and steel vessels, and the ship’s appearance began a revolution in long-distance travel, which rapidly became not only much quicker, but much more predictable.
Brunel had originally intended to design the Great Britain as a paddle-steamer, but quickly changed his plans to embrace the newly invented technology of screw-propulsion, using propellers, which were far more efficient, especially in heavy seas. The Great Britain was in fact driven by one iron propeller whose diameter was a massive and daring 16 feet. But that wasn’t her only claim to fame. When she was launched in 1843 she was, at about 1,000 feet long, the largest ship afloat, and a third longer than her nearest rival. She was of course the very first ocean-going, screw-driven iron ship. She weighed an unheard-of 1,930 tons, and—significantly—she was designed for the transatlantic luxury trade. She had a crew of 130 and could carry 252 passengers in first - and second-class berths. At first, though, she was not a financial success, because—despite several safe crossings—relatively few people seemed prepared to sail in her. Great Western sold her to Gibbs Bright in 1846.
It was under the new ownership, and on the much more ambitious Australian run, that she came into her own, redesigned as an immigrant ship and cashing in on the Australian gold rushes from 1851 onward. Now able to carry 750 passengers in three classes, she made thirty-two voyages in a twenty-four-year career and earned herself the nickname “the greyhound of the seas.” (She ended up in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands in the late 1870s, and remained there, more or less a hulk, for almost a century. Then, in 1970, she was restored and taken back home to Bristol, where she remains, as a museum ship.)
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Crowds flocked to the “floating out” of Great Britain on July 19, 1843. However, because of her unprecedented size, she was trapped in Bristol Docks for another year before she left.
The importance of the Great Britain’s legacy is clear, and Harland was one of many who were very quick to spot what Brunei had started. It wasn’t long before he was receiving orders from John Bibby (the company in which Gustav Schwabe had an interest), and he quickly built three ships for the line. Bibby promptly ordered six more in 1860.
After Gustav Wolff became a partner in 1861 and the firm formally became Harland &Wolff, the two men divided the work profitably between them. Wolff had good connections with Hamburg-Amerikanische shipyard in Germany, and Harland, who initially undertook design, created wider ships with flatter bottoms on the box-girder principle in order to increase capacity. The Civil War provided useful clients in the Confederate States who wanted steamers fast enough to outrun the Union blockade. The yard prospered, and in 1874 Harland recruited a new partner, William Pirrie, then twenty-seven years old.
Pirrie spent his entire working life at Harland & Wolff, starting there as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in 1862, and rising to become chairman on Harland’s death in 1895. He remained in that position until his own death in 1924. A staunch Unionist politically, he had two nephews who became eminent in the public life of Northern Ireland, while a third, Thomas Andrews, became the designer of the Olympic-class liners.
Pirrie was the third member of the Harland & Wolff triumvirate, taking over many of the duties, especially of Gustav Wolff, after his elevation to the board. Wolff famously remarked, “Sir Edward builds the ships, Mr. Pirrie makes the speeches, and, as for me, I smoke the cigars.” Harland picked up his baronetcy in 1885. Pirrie was made a viscount in 1921.
The unique position occupied by Messrs. Harland & Wolff in the shipbuilding world is due to many causes, but if we were asked to name that which in our opinion was the most potent we should not hesitate to declare for the personal element. Personality has undoubtedly been responsible for the high reputation which the firm possesses. . . not only has it the services of an able and experienced staff, but at the head of affairs is Lord Pirrie, a wonderful personality whose influence pervades the establishment from end to end. On a site without natural advantages, where all the fuel and material required have to be imported, he has raised up a colossal concern which gives employment to between 14,000 and 15,000 men, and pays out in wages over ?25,000 a week. . .
Syren & Shipping, June 28, 1911
Alongside these three main players was the chief of design, the Right Honorable Alexander Carlisle, who joined Harland & Wolff as a sixteen-year-old apprentice and spent his entire career with the yard. Indeed, he was principally responsible for the initial stages of planning the Olympic-class ships.
On Carlisle’s retirement, Thomas Andrews took over the design of the Olympic-class liners. He too had begun his career at the shipyard as a teenage apprentice, starting with three months in the joiners’ shop, followed by a month with the cabinet-makers, and then two
Months of manual labor in the yard itself. This rotation continued over an exhaustive and possibly exhausting five years, during which he learned every aspect of shipbuilding, and culminated with eighteen months in the drawing office. By 1901, having worked his way up the company and gained experience of many departments, Andrews was ready to become manager of the construction works, and in that same year he became a member of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects.
Six years later he was managing director in charge of the Harland & Wolff drafting department, and at thirty-four was experienced enough to play a major role in the company’s latest and most ambitious venture: the Olympic-class liners.
Titanic’s principal designer, Thomas Andrews, seen here in his crumpled working suit in 1911.
With great passion and attention to detail, he worked on the designs for the ships from 1907 onward, right up to the moment of Titanic’s departure from Southampton on Wednesday, April 10,1912. He sailed in her, still making notes for improvements, and on April 14 declared that he believed her to be “as nearly perfect as human brains can make her.” A matter of hours later, not long after midnight, having inspected the damage caused by the collision with the iceberg, Andrews was telling Captain Edward Smith that Titanic would sink within two hours. He was active in conducting passengers to lifeboats, and the story goes that he was last seen staring at the painting Plymouth Harbour by Norman Wilkinson, which hung above the fireplace in the first-class smoking room. He went down with the ship he’d designed. It was just two months past his thirty-ninth birthday.
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