with paintings of cheerfully obedient life throughout Queen Victoria’s Indian dominions as goldleafed elephants gazed down from the front-facing corners of the proscenium arch.[24]
The Opera House had been part of a building mania that swept Belfast in the twenty years preceding the Titanic’s construction. The spires of the seven-year-old Protestant St Anne’s Cathedral were visible as Tommy Andrews’ car turned right from his former school to motor down Wellington Place and pass the new City Hall, a looming quadrangle in Portland stone, with ornamental gardens, stained-glass windows, turrets and a soaring copper dome. Completed two years after St Anne’s, the City Hall had cost more than £350,000, a sum that had not been without controversy, especially for some of the city’s more parsimonious Presbyterians. But there were many more, including Belfast’s Chamber of Commerce, who had applauded the council’s extravagance on the grounds that a powerhouse like Belfast, ‘a great, wide, vigorous, prosperous, growing city’, needed to be represented with appropriate splendour.[25]
As a younger man, Andrews had been there to witness the surge of capitalist confidence in Belfast’s heartlands. The journey from Comber to the city was too long for the early-morning starts required by the shipyards, so after he had secured his apprenticeship aged sixteen Andrews became a boarder in the home of a middle-aged dressmaker and her sister on Wellington Place.[26] From there, he had witnessed the construction of the City Hall in the same years as Belfast inaugurated its new Customs House, a Water Office built to imitate an Italian Renaissance palazzo, and four banking headquarters.
Belfast’s Donegall Square North. Robinson and Cleaver is on the left.
Panoramic view from the corner of Donegall Square West, by Robert John Welch (© National Museums NI)
Directly in front of City Hall, between its imposing entrance and its wrought-iron gates, a statue of Queen Victoria stared unseeing towards the sandstone turrets of Robinson and Cleaver, one of the most expensive and prestigious department stores in the United Kingdom. Inside the ‘Harrods of Ireland’, 3,000 square feet of polished mirrors lined the shop’s interiors, spread over four working floors, all connected by white marble staircases, at the top of which stood statues of Britannia.[27] Belfast’s well-heeled customers flocked to Robinson and Cleaver, as did prosperous members of county Society, who were prepared to pay for goods shipped ‘from every corner of His Majesty’s Empire’. Reflected in Robinson and Cleaver’s mirrors were busts of the store’s most august clients, including the late Lady Lily Beresford and Hariot Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, one of the bluest of the Ascendancy’s blue bloods as Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, who had used her time in India as wife of the British Viceroy to campaign for better medical care for Indian women and introduce Robinson and Cleaver’s produce to the Maharajah of Cooch-Behar, who now also stood beside her in bust form, along with Queen Victoria’s German grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his consort, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, who had temporarily overcome her pathological 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