Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscountess Castlereagh, whose husband Charles was heir to the marquessate of Londonderry, one of the most prestigious peerages in Ireland. Edith, like Noëlle, was aghast at the Lords Act, not just because it was their class’s legislative equivalent of seppuku, but also for what it meant to the other great crisis of Edwardian Britain – Irish Home Rule, the movement born in the nineteenth century that sought some form of governmental independence for Ireland. Initially, the proposal had called for a Dublin Parliament that had jurisdiction over local matters, within a system that remained tied to Britain through foreign policy, which was to be left to the London Parliament at Westminster, and through the Crown, with the King and his heirs remaining kings and queens of Ireland.
Lady Rothes in the outfit she wore to George V’s coronation.
Countess of Rothes, 1911 (© The Randy Bryan Bigham Collection)
This seemingly mild proposal was hugely popular in Ireland’s southern three provinces and intensely feared in most of Ulster, Ireland’s northern segment. The Irish branch of the aristocracy, often referred to as the Ascendancy, were similarly alarmed, seeing in the Home Rule movement the first whisper of their requiem; as a result, the House of Lords had twice vetoed Home Rule Bills. Now, with that power of destruction softened simply to one of delay, Asquith had promised his Irish nationalist allies a Third Home Rule Bill which this time would almost certainly pass. Plans to prevent Home Rule being granted to any part of Ireland now looked hopeless, resulting in Ulster unionists adjusting their focus to populist agitation in the north of Ireland and, if necessary, arming their supporters as part of the new ‘Save Ulster’ campaign, the de facto headquarters of which were to be the north’s industrial centre, the city of Belfast.
The Parliament Bill was reintroduced to the House of Commons on 21 February 1911 and it had passed all its necessary stages there by 15 May. A brief lull in proceedings ensued, generated by cross-party deference for the kaleidoscope of patriotic festivities surrounding the opening of the Festival of Empire in London and George V’s coronation at Westminster Abbey five weeks later, alongside his Anglo-German wife, Mary of Teck, the first British queen consort to be born in the country since Katherine Parr, four centuries earlier.[31] As the morning of the coronation dawned, with his typical pragmatism the King noted in his diary that it was ‘Overcast and cloudy, with some showers and a strongish cool breeze, but better for the people than great heat’.[32] By the time Noëlle and her husband boarded the train to return north to Leslie House for the start of the grouse-shooting season on 12 August, the King had signed the Bill, the Home Rule crisis was one step closer and the British aristocracy’s greatest remaining form of tangible political clout was dead.
*
Between the Festival of Empire and the coronation, Belfast, the nexus of the coming crisis, celebrated the launch of a ship. Two minutes before she slid into the Lagan river for the first time, the Titanic claimed her sixth victim.[33] As workers wove in and out beneath the 26,000-ton hull, knocking away the massive timber supports which had cradled the Titanic’s belly during her construction, one collapsed on to James Dobbin, shattering his pelvis. The forty-three-year-old shipwright had worked at the Harland and Wolff shipyards for nearly two decades; he was carried to the company car, which rushed him to the Royal Victoria Hospital, recently completed thanks to the fund-raising of Harland and Wolff’s owner William, Lord Pirrie.[34] Pirrie himself, unaware that one of his employees was fatally haemorrhaging, remained in the specially erected stands with the 100,000-strong crowd, an extraordinary turn-out considering it was nearly one-third the size of the total population of Belfast; they had gathered to watch the launching ceremony of what would, within a year, become the largest moving object in human history.[35] Flags spelling out the word ‘SUCCESS’ fluttered from the grandstand.[36] Proceeds from ticket sales for the launch would be gifted to the hospital where James Dobbin was now fighting for his life.[37] Within twenty-four hours, Dobbin was another subject for the grim joke that did the rounds at Harland and Wolff when a colleague perished on the job: ‘He’s gone to another yard.’[38]
Joining Pirrie at the launch were his wife Margaret; his nephew Thomas Andrews, the yard’s Managing Director and a man largely responsible for designing the ship; the slender Joseph Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star Line, the new vessel’s operators; Ismay’s New York-born wife Florence, who had never quite accustomed herself to giving up a life spent shuttling pleasurably between homes on Madison Avenue and Tuxedo Park for residency in the Ismays’ faux-baronial pile outside Liverpool, and the Titanic’s de facto owner, the imposing American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, in declining health and painfully conscious of the inflammation of his nose caused by rhinophyma.[39] Morgan’s cabal of shipping companies, the International Mercantile Marine, had bought the White Star Line as the jewel in its crown in 1903, after several years of bumper revenue for the transatlantic passenger trade.[40] Eight years on, Morgan’s capital had created the Titanic, the second in a three-ship design that would give IMM the largest and most luxurious vessels in the world, operating a weekly run between Britain and America. Her elder sister, the Olympic, would be handed over from builders to owners that same afternoon, in preparation for her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York two weeks later.[41]
Despite their American ownership, White Star ships were still built by a British firm, were staffed predominantly by British crews and flew the British flag. The Titanic was thus the most recent child of Anglo-American cooperation, a product of British sensibilities and American money or, as the Belfast News-Letter put it, a demonstration of how the empire and ‘the mighty Republic in the West’ had produced a ‘pre-eminent example of the vitality and the progressive instincts of the Anglo-Saxon race’.[42] Keeping with White Star tradition of no inaugural speech or shattering-on-the-bow champagne, at 12.13 p.m. a firework streaked into ‘the glow of the turquoise sky, from which the piercing rays of the sun descended, making the heat exceedingly trying’.[43] With the signal given, two foremen turned the release valve. It took sixty-two seconds for the Titanic’s 882-foot hull to move through 21 tons of lubricating tallow as she ‘glided down to the river with a grace and dignity which for the moment gave one the impression that she was conscious of her own strength and beauty’.[44]
‘Down to the river with a grace and dignity’: the launch of the Titanic.
Launch of the RMS Titanic at Belfast, 31 May 1911 (By kind permission of Daniel Klistorner from his personal collection)
Cheers erupted from the onlookers, hats and handkerchiefs were waved in the air; small river craft sounded their sirens, as chains created enough drag to stop the Titanic slamming into the other side of the river.[45] With no funnels or masts and empty interiors, she came to a gentle stop in the water and attention turned to the completed Olympic, which the Titanic would one day so closely resemble. A journalist from the Shipbuilder, the industry’s most respected trade journal, waxed lyrical about White Star’s new flagship, half as heavy again as the previous record holder, the Cunard Line’s Mauretania:
The Olympic is the most beautiful boat ever built on Queen’s Island. The grace and harmony of her lines were admired by the thousands of enthusiasts who saw her on the day of her launch, but since then the work on her has been advanced, and her four massive funnels seem to add immeasurably to her splendour and dignity. Her majestic proportions and her unparalleled dimensions tend to enhance her picturesqueness and power, and one can well understand the interest with which the builders and owners are anticipating her maiden voyage … In her equipment she possesses features that are not to be found on any other boat.[46]
Among the new features celebrated in the press, the Olympic offered the first lift for second-class passengers and the
