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 Irish in opposition to that which was British, right the way down to what sports should be played.[46] Some of these groups made an effort to reach out to Irish Protestants, others made an effort to do the exact opposite by helping ‘to embed the myth that Ireland was a religiously and ethnically homogeneous society’.[47] This idea that to be Irish meant being Catholic played into the hands of unionists in the north who claimed that a compromise with Home Rule would be tantamount to collective suicide, particularly since unionists insisted that the moderate proposals for Home Rule would inevitably result in full independence. The nineteenth century’s torturous preoccupation with race birthed apparently ‘scientific’ justification of each side’s respective prejudice; the ‘Two Nations Theory’ insisted that there were insuperable racial, moral, cultural and intellectual differences between Irish Catholics and Protestants. Even academic publications like the Ulster Journal of Archaeology promulgated the idea that Irish Protestants, particularly those in the north, were essentially Anglo-Saxon, while Irish Catholics were predominantly Celtic, giving both a distinct set of characteristics which made political union between them an absurdity. Protestants were hard-working, law abiding and stalwart; Catholics, as Celts, were lazy, dishonest and prone to drunkenness. Nationalists often accepted this racial hogwash, but rejigged it to class Hibernian Catholics as hospitable, artistic and passionate, while Protestants were dour, miserly and cruel.[48]
By the time the Titanic had been completed, the question of Irish independence, whether in part or in full, was the blood seeping beneath a closed door in Belfast. Fear of it preoccupied everybody, including Thomas Andrews. In his own political views, Andrews was described by family friends as ‘an Imperialist, loving peace and consequently in favour of an unchallengeable Navy. He was a firm Unionist, being convinced that Home Rule would spell financial ruin to Ireland.’ However, he was uneasy with the perceptible drift towards Irish politics being governed by ‘passion rather than by means of reasoned argument’.[49] Many Ulster Protestants sincerely believed, and were proved correct in their suspicions, that Irish independence would constitute a major triumph for Catholicism in the island, with an Irish government choosing to grant special status to the Catholic faith.[50] Ironically, the north’s fevered insistence on absenting itself from independence was the behaviour of Laius after the Oracle since Ulster’s secession would mean the removal of the majority of Irish Protestants from a future Irish state, whatever the strength of that state’s ties to Britain, thus enabling many of the events they claimed to fear. As a southern lawyer practising in Belfast tried in vain to warn his unionist friends, if the predominantly Protestant north separated from the predominantly Catholic south, ‘you would have not one, but two, oppressed minorities’.[51]
Protestant fears of being outnumbered and thus overruled by their Catholic compatriots were lent unfortunate credence by Pope Pius X’s issuing of the Ne Temere decree of 1907. The decree ruled that any marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant was invalid unless it was witnessed by a priest, implicit within that stipulation and often explicit in its application being a priest’s refusal to officiate unless an undertaking was given that any children born to that couple were raised Catholic. Ne Temere seemed particularly unhelpful in the Irish context because it negated a papal rescript, issued by Pius VI in 1785, which had allowed for the legality of mixed marriages in Ireland, even if they were not solemnised before a Catholic priest.[52] Viewed as pastoral care by its defenders and lambasted by critics as prejudice by stealth, Ne Temere resulted four years later in the McCann case, when the marriage between a Belfast resident called Alexander McCann, a Catholic, and his Protestant wife Agnes fell apart. A private sorrow became a public circus when McCann’s local priest allegedly encouraged the separation and certainly helped Mr McCann gain sole custody of his children, despite the fact that the McCanns had married before the publication of Ne Temere. Agnes McCann went to her local minister, Reverend William Corkey, who had already regularly waxed apoplectic in his sermons about the ‘foul’ Ne Temere decree and saw in the McCann case the inevitable fruition of Pius X’s edict.[53] As such things often did in Edwardian Belfast, the issue moved from the pulpit to the press to protests, the latter of which spread from Belfast to London, Dublin and Glasgow.[54] At one rally, the McCanns’ marriage certificate was held up before the crowd, as a Presbyterian clergyman roared, ‘I hold in my hand a marriage certificate bearing the seal of the British Empire, and recording the marriage of Alexander McCann and Agnes Jane Barclay. This certificate declares that according to the law of Britain these two are husband and wife. This Papal decree says their marriage is “no marriage at all”. Which law is going to be supreme in Great Britain?’[55] The pursuit of the answer had already fractured lifelong friendships and it looked, in 1912, as if it had the potential to destabilise an empire.
*
As he boarded the Titanic, Andrews received a note from one of his colleagues saying that there was a problem in one of the boiler rooms. Since this was their first full run, that was to be expected. A fire had started raging when some of the coal stored in one of the bunkers had caught fire and there was no chance of putting it out before the ship was due to start her tests. Should they postpone them? No, not if the fire in question could be contained. An extra squadron of stokers and firemen was deployed to monitor the troubled boiler room, the others were fired up and, without fanfare, the Titanic took to the ocean for the first time, beginning six hours of technical manoeuvres and trials.
The sea trial had originally been scheduled for the previous day, but was postponed in the face