hatred of Britain to place repeated orders with the firm.[28]
Many of the craftsmen who worked on the construction and decoration of Robinson and Cleaver, and then on the interiors of City Hall, had also laboured on the ships designed by Tommy Andrews for Harland and Wolff.[29] His car passed the earliest rising of these workers as they travelled on foot, by bicycle or by tram over the bridges linking the city centre to the east, Queen’s Island, and the shipyards. The majority of these dawn risers were on their way to work on Andrews’ latest and grandest creation, the Britannic, whose hull had been laid amid the driving Belfast winter rains six months earlier.[30] As the journey of a million miles begins with a single step, the foundation of the largest ship built on British soil for the next two decades was already taking shape in her embryonic form. Britannic was not scheduled to grace the waters of Belfast Lough for another two years and her maiden voyage to New York was timetabled for the spring of 1915, at which point she would become the flagship of the White Star Line, completing the Olympic-class.[31]
End of the day: workers from Harland and Wolff with an under-construction Titanic in the background.
Queen’s Island workmen homeward bound, by Robert John Welch (© National Museums NI)
The relationship with White Star Line was a source of pride to many in Belfast, which was hardly surprising considering the employment and revenue it generated, both of which were regularly cited in speeches by city officials and businessmen as among the many reasons for Belfast’s superiority over other Irish cities, a conclusion with which Andrews wholeheartedly concurred.[32] Even in the very poorest parts of Belfast, all houses were single-occupancy units for families. Unlike Dublin or Cork, Belfast’s leaders had worked hard to avoid the horrors associated with the special strain of poverty bred in tenements. Alongside the thick brogue of natives, Scottish and English accents could be heard in the jostling crowds that poured from the Protestant working-class neighbourhoods, their owners lured to Ulster by promises of affordable, good-quality housing through jobs at Harland and Wolff, in one of Belfast’s 192 linen manufacturers or in its behemoth-like rope or tobacco factories.[33] Belfast had one of the lowest urban rates of infant mortality in the British Empire; with eighty-two state-funded schools, it also had the highest rate of literacy for any area in Ireland, and it implemented provisions for the care of the deaf and dumb long before most other towns.[34] As its two synagogues, built by the migrant-turned-merchant-turned-city mayor Sir Otto Jaffe, attested, Belfast was also so far the only section of Ireland to welcome and nurture a Jewish community.[35] In the eyes of the loyal, all this was abundant proof that Belfast had benefited from the spirit of dynamic, self-fulfilling conservatism that guided its civic authorities and indelibly separated it – in spirit and soon, God willing, in law – from the south.[36]
Five years earlier, this march of progress and prosperity had been interrupted by strikes that erupted in Harland and Wolff and then spread to the adjacent dockyards. For Protestants to protest was, by 1907, an event so remarkable it shocked even seasoned observers. The dock riots erupted as work on the first of the Olympic-class was due to commence. Tommy Andrews, while concerned about his timetable being disrupted, was also protective of the workers who turned his projects into a reality.[37] He was appalled by some of the conditions in the yard, particularly on the gantries, where men too often fell to their deaths, lost limbs in preventable accidents or were dismissed when they burned themselves badly on the rivets. His argument that paternalism must remedy the situation before socialism seized it had been ignored by his superiors and by his uncle Lord Pirrie, though he took no pleasure in being proved right.[38] At the height of the dispute, about 3,500 workers were on strike, most of them organised by the charismatic trade union leader James Larkin.[39] Initially, the demonstrations had looked for support from their cousins across the Irish Sea – the 1907 dock protesters voiced many left-wing sentiments, but they did so in the spirit of British social democracy, expressing implicit faith in British trade unionism, rather than Irish republicanism. However, cries of ‘Go back to work!’ and even ‘Traitors!’ grew louder after the strike’s opponents, aided by most of Belfast’s newspapers, painted the protest as furthering a crypto-nationalist agenda which could lethally weaken Ulster’s economy, ultimately leaving it at the mercy of the Home Rule movement. These conspiracy politics were given regrettable credibility by the behaviour of certain Irish nationalist politicians, particularly west Belfast’s Joseph Devlin, who actively attempted to turn the protests into displays of anti-British sentiment.[40] The strike collapsed and Larkin left Ireland, repulsed by the sight of people in working-class districts taking to their streets to celebrate the strike’s defeat. The passing years did not lessen the contempt directed at those who had betrayed the side by striking. Weeks after the Titanic’s completion, 600 ‘rotten Prods’ were driven from their jobs at Harland and Wolff by their own colleagues for daring to sympathise with left-wing movements that allegedly threatened the productivity of the yard and, through it, Ulster’s unchecked evolution further and further away from the agrarian economies of the southern three provinces.[41] Incredibly, given its position as a major industrial city, there was no serious interest in trade unionism from Belfast for another twenty years. It was seen as somehow disloyal, destructive of the greater good. Nor were the 600 rotten Prods of 1912 expelled alone. At the same time, a sectarian pogrom in employment forced the shipyard’s 2,400 Catholic employees to quit.[42]
Belfast’s growth was as remarkable as it was undeniable, but to pretend that the fruits of that progress were evenly distributed is absurd. There were no laws in Edwardian Ulster that mandated discrimination against the province’s Catholic minority, but equally there were none to stop it and this left Protestants free to hire those of their own preference who were, overwhelmingly, their co-religionists. Protestant jobs were often marginally better paid and nearly always significantly more secure than a northern Catholic’s. As the Home Rule crisis accelerated, so too did Protestants’ antipathy towards their Catholic neighbours, resulting in appalling events like the aforementioned expulsion of thousands from their jobs at Harland and Wolff. Belfast’s reputation for anti-Catholic discrimination was so widespread that San Francisco’s civic authorities refused to name one of their streets in the city’s honour, despite a petition from Ulster-born immigrants.[43]
From the route Andrews’ car took, just visible on the horizon was the spire of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, another product of the construction bonanza, but one which a man like Tommy would likely never see save from a distance. Located in west Belfast, Holy Redeemer was described at the time of its completion as ‘a noble Church in the most Catholic quarter of a bitterly Protestant city’.[44] The two communities’ decisions to congregate themselves into working-class neighbourhoods in the west and east was a prophylactic kind of social engineering, which, like all such things, had the potential to fail.
Religion gave a toxic, defining flavour to this political quarrel. It was true, as many in the north of Ireland so strenuously insisted, that the troubles of their region were not caused by religion, in so far as no one ever rioted in defence of consubstantiation or tossed a brick over whether there are seven sacraments or two. But that is to miss the point, in that religious affiliation defined the boundaries of division. Although it was not universally true, overwhelmingly Protestants favoured retaining union with Britain, while Catholics hoped for the opposite. The years preceding the Titanic’s construction had witnessed an intensification of this trend. A series of mid- and late nineteenth-century evangelical missions into the working-class areas of Belfast had deliberately solidified a view of Catholicism as backward, tyrannical and superstitious.[45] Just as they pointedly began to eschew the adjective ‘Irish’ in favour of ‘northern Irish’ or simply ‘British’, many of the more zealous Ulster Protestants began to redefine the etymology of the word ‘Christian’ to mean axiomatically, and solely, ‘Protestant’. When a Catholic converted to Protestantism, the phrase ‘He has become a Christian’ was launched with depressing frequency. Meanwhile, the Gaelic Revival, a rejuvenated and sustained interest in the Celtic culture of Ireland, created a series of societies that defined being
