Sisters Of The Titanic

The workers go home after their turn at the Harland & Wolff shipyard, Belfast, in May 1911, with cloth caps on each head and no helmet is visible. There are a series of trams waiting for those who live further and in the distance, you can distinguish the hull of the powerful Titanic, under the gantry crane specially built for the construction, side by side, of her and her twin ship, Olympic. Already launched, the Olympic is being equipped nearby, ready for its maiden voyage. Titanic will launch in late May.
White Star Line's decision to build three new ships, so that it could maintain its share of transatlantic passenger traffic against competition from the Germans and Mauritania and Lusitania from Cunard, was taken in 1908 with the backing of JP Morgan, who controlled the parent corporation of White Star. Cunard went for speed, while White Star was for size, with Titanic and its sister ships weighing about 46,000 tons. Belfast could cope, since it had the largest shipyards in the world at that time, although all the coal and iron had to be imported, although the giant portico of Sir William Arrol & Co. Arrol had to be installed as well. He lived up to the challenge: using his new hydraulic riveting technique, he had built the Forth Bridge and much of the Tower Bridge. Of the total Harland & Wolff workforce of 15,000, approximately 4,000 worked at Titanic, almost all Protestants and, therefore, the Ulster unionists, determined to fight the Irish local government, even take up arms in a year or Two, when it seemed. It could be forced on them.

It is not necessary to retell the story of Titanic's first and last trip in April 1912, but it is worth remembering that of his Olympic and Britannic sister ships (launched in 1914). British became a hospital ship and was sunk by a mine in the Mediterranean in 1916; Although it was the largest ship sunk in the war, only 30 lives were lost. Olympic became an armed troop and in 1918 a German submarine sank. After the war, he continued to cross the Atlantic back and forth and was finally removed from service in 1935. There is another story largely forgotten, which may help keep the Titanic in some kind of perspective. In May 1914, the 14,000-ton Empress of Ireland, the pride of the Canadian White Empress Fleet, left Quebec for Liverpool. On the St Laurence River he saw that he was approaching a Norwegian collier of 6,000 tons before disappearing into a fog bank. He stopped and kept blowing his foghorn, only to have the collier reappear and drive directly to his side, between his two funnels. The Empress sank in a quarter of an hour with a little more than 1,000 lives lost, not a rival for the more than 1,500 who sank with Titanic, but close enough to speak the same way. As for Harland & Wolff, its main business now is offshore wind power, while Titanic Belfast Visitor Attraction opened at the shipyard site in 2012.

By: Preeti Narula
Content: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/focus/titanics-sisters