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I was 11 when the war started. If I honestly sort out my memories and disregard what I have since, I must admit that nothing in the whole war moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier. This comparatively petty disaster shocked the whole world, and the shock has not quite died away even yet. I remember the terrible detailed accounts read out at the breakfast table. In those days, it was a common habit to read the newspaper aloud. I remember that in all the long list of horrors, the one that most impressed me was the At the last, the Titanic suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than 300 feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly, which I can still all but feel. Nothing in the war ever gave me quite that sensation. So that, Dominic, was top man of the people, George Orwell, in my country, right or Left. He wrote that in 1940, which, of course, was the middle of the Second World War.

But the war there, he's talking about the First World War. He is saying that nothing in the Great War, as it was known, impacted him, quite like the shock of something that had happened two years before the outbreak of the First World War, namely the sinking of the Titanic.

Yeah, isn't that extraordinary? But actually, it's a really interesting sign of how deeply the loss of the Titanic affected people in the 1910s. Now in our collective consciousness, Tom, the sinking of the Titanic is generally treated as a precursor to the First World War, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a metaphor.

Yeah, it's a metaphor. It's the sense in which industrial society was so rich and powerful, and it was heading for an inevitable smash.

A crash. Yeah. You might say that Europe was a great ship steaming towards the iceberg of industrial warfare.

But that's what people have said since the 1910s itself.

Yeah. There's the great line in The Onion announcing the sinking of the Titanic. World's largest metaphor hits iceberg. I think that we should come to all these in due course, and we should also come to the way that the Titanic has been shown in film as well. Because actually Orwell's describing how the stern upends and people cling onto the edge and then it just plummets down. In the 1997 film with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, that is the bit that stuck in my mind. I actually found it so upsetting dramatic that I never watched the film again until yesterday evening I watched it.

Tom, and did you enjoy it?

I really enjoyed it, but I still found it traumatic for reasons that perhaps we'll come to when we talk about that. But I think that for now, in this episode and the next, let's park all that metaphorical stuff. Let's park all the way that the Titanic has been reimagined over the century and more that's followed it. And look at it as an episode within history because it is brilliant, isn't it? It is. As a opening up huge vistas of historical analysis and all kinds of topics.

It is. It's one of those stories that actually, until we sat down to research it, I had rather dismissed. I think because of the film, I'd seen it as a slushy melodrama, Julian Fellows, the Danton Abbey guy. He did his own mini-series about it. I always thought, for that reason, oh, God. Out of slight snobbery, actually, I thought, the Titanic is beneath me. Some of our listeners may be thinking that, by the way. But I completely agree with you. I think it's one of the best topics we've ever done on the rest history because it's a window into so many things, into late Gilded Age New York, into the sectarianism and the political violence of Belfast, the technological advancements of the early 20th century, class, immigration, all of these kinds of things.

Also, I thought, fascinatingly, the ambivalent relationship between Britain and America at the point where not just global and industrial leadership, but maritime leadership is starting to shift from Britain to America. Absolutely. That's the focus, really, of what we want to talk about today, isn't it? Yes.

There's actually a German dimension to this as well, which is why it is quite a nice prelude to the Great War, because there's an Anglo- German rivalry that's very important in the story of Titanic. Yeah. So the background, the origins, I think it's a story of three men in particular. So they're J. P. Morgan, Bruce Ismail, and William Perry, and two cities in particular, New York City and Belfast. I guess we should start right at the very top, as it were, Tom, of the pyramid. That is the man who comes to embody the ruthless empire capitalism of late 19th, early 20th century America, of the Gilded Age, what is now seen as the arrogance and hubris. It's a man whose name has become one of the most recognizable capitalist brands, J. P. Morgan.

Because it's still banked to this day, isn't it? Absolutely.

The US, at the end of the 19th, early 20th century, it's the China of its It's the coming power. It has fought this war in 1898 and gained the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain. There's a sense of enormous self-confidence and swagger about America, about American capitalism. In 1912. The man who embodies this is John Pierre Pont-Morgan. He was educated in Switzerland, wasn't he? He's a very grim, door man. But his uncle, am I right? Have you seen this? His uncle wrote, Jingle Bells.

It's like Kennedy's grandfather being the first person to put the lights on a public Christmas tree. It's one of those bizarre unexpected intersections between high American politics and American popular culture. But you say he's doing it, but he is a cultured man.

Oh, yes, he is.

He speaks French and German. He hangs out in Rome. He's got Saboreau tailors, all this thing. Yeah, it's true. He's very interested in European culture.

But in a slightly joyless way, though, Tom, don't you think? Yes.

Well, a cumulative way, because European culture becomes something to invest in and to buy and to take over the Atlantic. This is, of course, one of the aspects of why there are so many American millionaires on the Titanic. He's not alone in doing that.

It was like a character from a Henry James novel. Henry James was actually writing during this period, these novels about very rich Americans going to Europe and collecting things, collecting people, paying paying homage to the cultural achievements of Italy or France.

But also looting it. I mean, not looting it, but buying it up.

He's absolutely one of these people now. He's made his money back in the US by basically investing in modernity. He's made his money by investing in railroads and street cars and all of these kinds of things. But he's also, he is seen as the personification of Wall Street's new importance in the US and world economy. So he had intervened effectively to bail out the United States after the panic of 1893. I mean, to cut a very long story short, he'd effectively sold gold to the US government in return for a massive bond. So he had saved the US Treasury. There was no central bank in the US at this point. So he basically is the United States's central banker. You found this detail, didn't you? That people always call him a titan. The titan, yeah.

So the guy who runs his London office, a man called Sir Clinton Dawkins, and he's writing about him in 1901. And he says of him, Morgan has something Titanic about him when he really gets to work. That adjective Titanic is capitalized. Really? The sense of Morgan being Titanic is part of the common vocabulary that is used to describe him again and again and again.

Because this is the first point, really, where people are talking about these gigantic business tycoons, more powerful than any government. These are not the industrialists of the industrial revolution. They are bigger than that. They are people who are, as you said, collecting art as Morgan is. So the people talk about them as like the Caesars or the Emperors, but they're also collecting companies. Morgan is the king of what are called at the time the Trusts. So these are huge merged conglomerates.

Monopolies.

Monopolies. The most famous one is US Steel. So he had bought out Andrew Carnegie.

Andrew Carnegie, again, is a representative figure, perhaps of an earlier age, because he comes from Scotland in 1848. So he is emigrating out on the age where Atlantic crossings are really, really tough. There's definitely a Logan Roy quality to him. I mean, maybe there's a deliberate allusion to that, a Scott going out and making it big in the United States. Oh, totally. Yeah. He owns this vast steel company, and Morgan buys him out, gives him $240 million, so that in paper terms, Carnegie becomes the richest man in the world. But of course, Morgan, as the man who now controls this, he's the most Titanic figure of all. There's another intriguing figure involved in that, isn't there? In the buyout of Carnegie and the founding of US Steel, who's a man called Peter Widener, who, again, is a archetypal, gilded-age figure. He's from Philadelphia. He begins as a butcher's boy. He very rapidly sets up this huge chain of butcher's shops across the United States. Then he invests in trams. He kicks off with the Philadelphia Traction Company. Then he gets traction companies in cities across the whole of the US.

He's literally picking up traction, Tom.

He's literally picking up traction. Very good. He, like Morgan, ends up obscenely rich, invests in art. He's spotted by Henry Adams, who's very much an old-school Bostonian brahman collecting art in Paris. Adams calls him an odious old American. His son, and indeed, grandson, will follow the tradition of going across the Atlantic to France to collect art and then coming back. And they may feature later in the story, Dominic.

Exactly. And they, of course, come back on the Titanic, Tom. So Morgan has been collecting companies. Us Steel is his most successful, the most famous. So US Steel was 1901. At the same point, 1901 to 2, he decides to extend his dominions to the seas as well as the land. And he puts together a huge combine called International Mercantile Marine. And this includes It was a British company called White Star, a shipping company. The Economist at the time, like a lot of British publications, was very shocked at this. Tom, you were saying, and I think quite rightly, that part of the story of the Titanic is the story of the emergence of American capitalism at the expense of British. The Economist said, To the patriotic Britain, it is not a pleasant thought that the great transatlantic trade is in future to be bossed by a syndicate of American capitalists. And this is what the story of IMM is it's all about.

Although, Dominic, intriguingly in America, because it turns out that ultimately, Morgan has paid too much for White Star, and for reasons that will come to, he is unable to establish a complete monopoly. People in America see this as a triumph for British capitalism.

The British have fooled him.

The other British have fooled him, that they've tricked the great master of the universe. I think that that reflects something about the status of this company, White Star, that it is an absolutely marquee brand, isn't it?

It is, because this is the point at which steamships are seen as light cars or telephones, electricity. Steamships are part of that world. They are embodiments of the exciting modernity of the day. So all of the men who sail on the Titanic, the crewmen, are called sailors. And some of them, the older ones, would probably remember the age of sail, wouldn't they? Because the age of sail, in the 1870s or something, if you taken a ship to New York, it could have been a sailing ship and it could have taken you 40 days. Now it's taking you less than a fortnight, and you're doing it by steamship. Steamships have conquered the waves. They are much faster. They are also much safer. So there's an extraordinary statistic in Richard Davenport-Heinz's book, Titanic Lives, an absolutely brilliant book, I have to say, that one in 184 passengers on sailing ships will die making the Atlantic Crossing. But on steamships, it's one in 2000. So in other words, steamships are much, much safer. But steamships are also- Well, they're much faster, aren't they?

Also the stat in Richard Davenport-Heinz's book, in 1872, the average crossing from Liverpool to New York by sailing vessel took 44 days by steamship under a fortnight. And of course, the notion of the blue ribbon, the first, the ship across the Atlantic becomes something that people on both sides of the Atlantic become obsessed by.

Yeah. So steamships, to us, they seem old fashioned. At the time, they seem absolutely thrilling. The Futurist Manifesto by Marinette. When's that? 1909, something like that, 1908. In the Futurist Manifesto, the world's splendor has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. We will sing of the fervid night time vibrations of armaments factories and ship yards blazing with violent electric moons, bold steamers sniffing the horizon, the sleek flight of aircraft, whose propellers turn like banners in the wind. So in other words, steamships are part of that world of aircraft. They're incredibly exciting. And speed itself, it's not just convenient, but speed itself is seen as something unbelievably ecstatic, something to be celebrated above all else by the futurists.

Do you think that now the the marker of an absolutely cutting-edge economy is to have a massive tech company? Today, famously, America has all the tech companies, and Europe doesn't have any. But it's the white star line. It's a British equivalent of Apple or something. It's a marker of a really, really successful company at the cutting edge of technology. And so that's why the question of who owns it is so potent.

Yeah. These steamship companies are seen as emblems of a nation's virility to some extent, aren't they? We'll come to the Anglo-German competition.

Which is why The ships have to be bigger and bigger and bigger.

Biger and bigger and faster and faster. Absolutely. Then there's a general obsession with speed. Davenport-heinz in his book points out that one of the most famous passengers in the Titanic, John Jacob Astor, was one of the first Americans to buy a motor car. He had 18 cars. Some of these American passengers with two surnames rather than a first name and a surname. It's a guy called Washington Rubbling II, who designed a racing car. He's one of the millionaires in the Titanic. Another millionaire in the Titanic, a man called Dickinson Bishop. He has a car waiting for him in New York, the most expensive car in the world, a Lozia. He's paid $7,750 for. And there's actually a car on the Titanic, isn't it? There's a Renault. One of the American millionaires takes a car with him. So this worship of technology, machinery, and speed, it's connected to that thing that you're talking about, which is the idea of nation's sense of success and virtue and virility being bound up with the ownership of the companies that embody those virtues.

Yeah. And so that's why White Star matters. And it's been founded by a man from the Lake district, Dominic.

Yeah, Cumbrian.

Thomas Isme, who, he's not highly educated. He hasn't been to an expensive public or any of that stuff, but he's an absolute, dare I say, titan.

Yeah, he's a really interesting figure because that earlier generation of the rough-hewn entrepreneurs who've built themselves up from nothing. He bought this shipping firm called White Star, and what they were specializing in was shipping people to the goldfields in Australia. Which is a long way away. Yeah. And he, apparently, he was playing billions with a bloke. And the bloke said, Why'd you bother doing that? Why don't you ship people to America? It's much closer. And he started to ship people to the United States. And the thing is, he's doing that in 1867, '68, '69, at just the point when the American Civil War has ended. So there's a big demand now.

Starting to boom.

Yeah, it's booming again. People want to go to the United States. Now, to do this, he signs a deal with a particular shipyard called Harland & Wolf in Belfast. They lent him the money to expand his building program to do this. On the condition position that they will all be built in Belfast, and we will come back to Belfast and to Harland & Wolf.

But his particular wheeze, as well as moving to the transatlantic crossing, is to offer people luxury travel. If you think back, we talked in a previous episode about Dickens crossing the Atlantic to go to America. He goes on a steamer that has been built by a rival British company called Cunard, and they are saying, We've got amazing cabins. And Dickens is very, very sniffy about this. So he complains that his luggage could no more be got in at the door of his cabin than a giraffe could be dissuaded or forced into a flower pot. So even in the 1840s, luxury is still very, very grueling. But what Isme does is really to go in hard and to base Basically, start looking to luxury hotels as a source of inspiration. And so to go on a white star liner, it's not an ordeal, it's a positive pleasure. Yeah.

So what they do, it's an unusual example, actually, of a company being incredibly successful by going very, very high-end.

Reassuringly expensive. Yeah.

It's an antithesis of the the Lord Sugar for our British listeners, or the cut costs drive down your overheads. Ismail doesn't do that at all. What Ismail does is you say he has electric bells, he has hot running water in the Baths. It's a floating hotel. And he has a series of ships. Oceanic is the first one, then Adriatic, Britannic. You'll see how we're going to get to Titanic.

Well, they all end in it, don't they?

Coptic, Ionic, Dorec.

Seasick.

Well, no, not Seasick, you see.

No, because you don't have seasick.

Yeah, as you say, it's a holiday. It's a treat to go on a white star crossing.

And so Ismael, as you say, he's pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he's very tough, very hard. And in the 1870s, there's a particular crisis that could have derailed the entire company when in 1873, one of his steamships, the Atlantic, runs out of coal on the way to New York. They divert calls to go to Halifax to pick up coal, and they end up hitting a rock. The lifeboats are swept away, 250 lives, about a third of the people on board the ship are lost, and it creates an enormous scandal. It could have completely derailed the company. It doesn't because Isme is the man who's not going to be diverted by a crisis like that.

Tom, that's a reminder, isn't it? That it is a floating hotel. These are holidays for some people, not for lots. Most people are arrogance, but still a hint of danger in the Atlantic Crossing, isn't there? It's not entirely certain that your voyage will be trouble-free.

No. But the great thing that White Star are able to do is to convince people, basically, that you can go on it. It will be like a hotel, and all risk of danger has effectively gone. This is obviously a massive boom area of development because essentially, you can build bigger and bigger ships, and you can make them more and more luxurious. This is why it's a really good business to be in. Isme, looking ahead to the future, he wants to establish a dynasty. He has three sons. Of these three sons, only one develops an interest in the sea. This is his middle son, Bruce. Bruce, on one level, is a classic example of what happens when British industrialists become very rich. They send their children to private schools where basically the sons are taught to be ashamed of their parents for having the wrong accent, which is what happens. But at the same time, Daddy is not interested really in the heirs and graces that his young son has been taught. I mean, it's purely a marker of status that he can send him off to private school. What he really wants is a guy who is going to be effective at running the company.

And so that is what Bruce does. The other two sons go off and become members of the Landed Gentry. Bruce Ismey does stay true to the source of his family's wealth. So it's brilliantly summed up by Francis Wilson, who wrote a wonderful book called How to Survive the Tannic or the Sinking of Jay Bruce Isme. She said, Thomas. So Thomas Isme, the father was a Victorian, Bruce an Edwardian. The father stood for entrepreneurial strength and imperial greatness, the son for decline. And maybe the symbolic resonance that shadows the whole of this story. Thomas Ismey dies one year before the death of Queen Victoria. It's not just a British event of note. It has international resonance. The Kaiser sends a telegram of condolence to Ismey's widow. All the flags in Liverpool are at half mast. And Bruce Ismey takes over. And the first thing he does, Dominic, is to sell the company to J. Peerpoint Morgan.

So there's a real succession element to this, isn't there? You mentioned the Logan Royg embarrassed. So for people who haven't seen the succession is the great, great TV series, Model on the Murdoch Family. And in that series, there's this ferocious Scottish self-made man, played by Brian Cox, and then his feckless sons and daughters competing to to replace him, who are never going to be as good, never going to be as hungry because they've been reared amidst wealth. That's the story of Bruce Ismey, because he'd gone to Harrow, hadn't he? He is going to travel on the Titanic. He is a very tall man. He's very polished.

He's a droopy mustache. He's polite.

He's the quintessence of a gentleman. I mean, that's what Thomas Ismey wanted.

Also, he is going to survive the Titanic, and this will make him notorious. But just for now, Dominic, why does he want to sell the company? Well, basically because Morgan has deeper pockets than anyone in the world and is offering him an obscene amount of money for it. Yes.

We talked about the foundation of IMM. Morgan basically pays him 10 times the value of White Star's earnings, plus a premium of $7 million in cash. So he ends up buying it for $35 million. Now, there's a bit of a fudge, isn't there? Because the ships will still have a British flag. They'll still have British crews. And Isme as part of the deal will carry on running White Star within the IMM combine.

So that's why he does it. But it's very like anxieties in Britain at the moment about tech companies listing themselves on the New York Stock Exchange rather than in London. There's that feeling that prestige companies, cutting-edge companies, are being taken over by the might of American capitalism. An additional anxiety is that ships are needed to transport troops. So Thomas Ismail had loaned his ships to the British government during the Burr War to transport troops. And there's a real feeling of anxiety about what this might be. So the British government then lean in and they give Cunard a massive bang. So Cunard is the rival British company. Effectively, to compete with this would be monopoly that Morgan is setting up. And because Morgan cannot buy Cunard, it means that he doesn't actually establish a monopoly. And so therefore, he is imbroiled in exactly the competition that he didn't want to have.

Yes, because the Paul Point, with all of these American capitalists at the beginning of the 1900s, is, as you say, to establish complete market dominance and then to basically fix the prices to suit themselves. He can't do this, partly because the British government is sponsoring Cunard as a competitor, but also because, Tom, some other people have entered the story. The Germans. The Germans. So the Germans have turned up, and they have two big companies. One is called Hamburg America, and the other is Norddeutscher Lloyd. And of course, the story of the 1890s, 1900s is one of tremendous German growth in all kinds of areas, science, engineering, and so on. Shipbuilding is one of these things. So that at this point, 1903, which is the first full year of the existence of IMM and the existence of White Star under Pierre Pont Morgan's banner, the four fastest ships in the world are all German. And they all have these very Germanic patriotic names.

Emperator, Waterland, Bismarck.

Yes. So Whited Star had always been the company that set the standard for luxury. But Hamburg America, in 1903, have a ship called America that has been designed by the people who designed the Ritz Carlton hotels in London, and they have Ritz Carlton standards. And this is beyond anything that Whited Star have ever done. And now the British companies have to fight back. So first of all, Cune Bernard, build three very famous ships, the Mauritania, the Aquitania, and the Lusitania. Of course, there's your great war connection, two of which make their made in voyages in 1907. That, of course, then puts great a pressure on Morgan and his combine.

Yeah. So Clinton Dawkins, who we mentioned, the guy who describes him as Titanic, he says, What threatens to swamp us is this monstrous indebtedness for shipbuilding. And I don't feel satisfied that we're not putting more big ships into the Atlantic than it can bear. There is massive overcapacity in the shipping, but they have no choice but to compete with Cunard and with the German firms. Of course, the white star reputation is for absolute luxury. That basically is where the idea for the Titanic and its two sister ships comes from.

Exactly. So Ismey gets together with a guy who we'll come to in a little bit called Lord Perry. Lord Perry is the head of the ship yards, Holland Wolf in Belfast. And Ismey says, Listen, what we could do is we could just go bigger. And better. I mean, just go bigger than Cunard, bigger than the Germans. And again, let's think about three ships, and they're going to call them the Olympic, the Britannic, and the Titanic. These three ships will allow us to recapture the momentum and the reputation which we need to justify our existence as part of the J. B. Morgan business empire. That has been created. And that effectively, Tom, I mean, these are the origins of the Titanic, the financial world of the 1900s, the Anglo-German competition, the new Anglo-American business relationship with all of its anxieties, the excitement of the age of steam and speed and technology. And also, of course, something we will come to later on, which is the boom in emigration to the United States, because that's, of course, what's driving so much of this, that so many people want to start lives in the new world.

But Dominic, this is the transatlantic context context. But these ships in the Titanic, the Olympic, and the Britannic, have to be built somewhere. It's a very specific place. It's Belfast in the north of Ireland. I think we should take a break now. When we come back, Let's look at the specific Belfast context for the making of this extraordinary ship.

Brilliant. We'll be talking about Belfast after the break. Hello.

Welcome back to the Rest is History. We are looking at the story of the Titanic. In the first half, we were exploring the background to the building of this colossal ship in Anglo-American relations, the transatlantic world of the early 20th century. But Dominic, now we want to zoom in on a particular place, don't we? Which is Belfast. Yes. Because Belfast is where the Titanic will be built.

So let's do it, Tom, as If we did the first half, let's do it through a particular character, one of the three individuals that are really responsible for the ship. And this is this guy called William Pirry, the first Viscount Pirry. So he was the person that Bruce Ismail was talking to at the end of the first half about how they were going to compete with the Germans and with Cunard. Let's build bigger and better. Pirry is the head of the Harland & Wolf shipyard in Belfast, Belfast's most famous employer. Pirry, again, is a transatlantic character. He was born in Quebec City in 1847. His father died in New York two years later, and his mother brings him back. They're a family from the north of Ireland, Northern Ireland, as we would call it now, though, of course, then the state as a way of Northern Ireland didn't exist as a separate state. His mom brings him back to County Down. He goes to this very well-known private grammar school in Belfast, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, William Perry, and he joins Harland & Wolf, the Ship yards, as an apprentice when he is 15 years old.

Now, Harland & Wolf, the foundation is 1859, when it's bought by a guy called Edward Holland, and he goes into partnership with a man called Gustave Wolf.

Astonishing. Who'd have guessed it?

And their business model is that they rum up custom from often foreign ship owning companies, and they do deals with them, and they will build the ships right there in Belfast. Lord Perry, who works his way up, is a brilliant salesman. He will tour the land, making small talk with millionaires and persuading them, Come to Belfast, we will build your ship for you. Richard Davenport-Heinz describes him as, he says, A small masterful man with intrepid nerves and unshakable self-confidence. He thought nothing of removing grit from one of his shipyard workers' eyes with the blade of a knife. Which, of all the details of the Titanic story, is the one I find most terrifying, quite honestly. So he is a workaholic, Perry. He speaks with a very strong Belfast accent, which at the time people regard as reassuring. It's not too smooth.

Kind of like Scottish bank managers. Yeah, absolutely.

He said that he has a magic and he would charm orders out of customers. And thanks to Pirry's salesmanship, Harland & Wolf becomes by far the biggest shipbuilder in the world. By the end of 1910, when it is building the Titanic and the Titanic class ships, Harland & Wolf employs more than 11,000 people, and it absolutely dominates the landscape of Belfast, but also, I think, the world's imagination, because the world is obsessed with steamships and with chips and with speed. And Harland & Wolf is the company.

There's a brilliant comment on him by WT Stead, a big newspaper man who I think we've mentioned before. He's the guy who basically whips up the campaign to get General Gordon sent to the Sudan and all kinds of things. And he will feature again later in this story. And he said of Perry that he is the greatest ship builder the world has ever seen. He has built more ships and bigger ships than any man since the days of Noah. Not only does he build them, he owns them, directs them, controls them on all the seas of the world. So there's a sense in which Perry is being promoted as a Irish equivalent of the great capitalists of Guided Age America, do you think?

Yeah, I totally think that. In fact, while you were reading that, I was just thinking, this is an age, isn't it, that worships great men. Yeah, absolutely. In a way that would not be the case today. It doesn't look to diminish greatness as we do. Our instinct is to undercut and to say of the tech billionaires, they're very annoying, they have ridiculous opinions, all of this stuff. That's our instinct. Theirs is to magnify.

Well, not everybody. I mean, as we will see, there's quite a lot of subterráne hostility to them, but yes.

But WT Stead, as you said, he is by far the most influential newspaper man of the day. I mean, he is somebody who sets the tone of populist conversation, and he likes to inflate. The Edwardians do like to inflate. There is a grandiosity about Edwardian culture, I think. Right.

There's an obsession with the Titanic.

Yeah, exactly that.

Which is why the name is so resonant, isn't it? Exactly.

So Piri, he becomes Lord Mayor of Belfast. He's Lord Mayor of Belfast in the Jubilee year of 1897. He buys a succession of great mansions in Belfast, in Belgravia, in London. He has a country house in Surrey, I think it is. He wants to go into politics, so he really wanted to become the Unionist MP for South Belfast. But interestingly, he is rejected by the party hierarchy because Tom is a supporter of home rule for Ireland.

Right. So this plunges us back into a topic that we did last year, isn't it? Which is the tortured politics of Ireland and its relations to Great Britain in this period.

Yeah, of course. And this is a really, really fascinating, a richly fascinating thread that runs through the story of the Titanic. Lord Perry actually ends up, because he wants to get ahead in politics, he can't do it with the Unionist Party, he ends up doing it with the Liberals. The Liberals, the party of Gladstone, the party of Asquith, very much a friend of the rest of his Wait, Tom. This is the party that becomes the party of Home Rule for Ireland, because Ireland is obviously part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But by the late 19th century, there is tremendous pressure from within Ireland, Catholic Ireland for Home Rule. Great opposition and antipathy to it among protestants in Ireland.

Who are very much centered in Northern Ireland and specifically in Belfast. Exactly.

The Titanic is against that background. Just on Belfast, Belfast in 1912 is by far the biggest and richest and most industrially important city in Ireland. You said it plunges us back into the world of the Irish episodes we did last year. Our guest in some of those episodes, Paul Rouse from University College, Dublin. He wrote a thing about Belfast in 1912, I think it was the Irish National Archives or something like that, a big thing about the world of Ireland in the beginning of the 20th century. There's a line in that. It says, Belfast was a place unlike any other in Ireland. Wealth in Dublin and in other Irish cities was usually rooted in trade, in land, or in lineage. Wealth in Belfast was the product of industry. Belfast, it's a city that makes things. It makes cigarettes, it makes cars, it makes linen, especially more linen than anywhere else on Earth.

Dominic, do you know what is brilliant on this? It's the Titanic Museum in Belfast in what was the Harland & Wolf ship yards. It's a wonderful museum. They have a brilliant section on this. All the the clamor and the noise, they evoke it very, very powerfully. Just a few details that I garnished from that. They boasted Belfast Rope Works, which was the largest rope maker in the world, and they had Cirocco Works, which was the world's leading fan and ventilation manufacturer. Both of these, of course, supplied lots of material to the Titanic.Curocco Works supplied 75 fans to the Titanic. I'm guessing that's another reason why it's such a center of ship building is that basically all the raw materials that you need to build a huge ship, they're not just in the ship yards, but scattered around in the companies that dominate the industry of Belfast.

Yeah. So Belfast is more akin in many ways to a northern or Midlands, British industrial city than it is with Irish cities, Cork, Dublin, Limerick, and so on, further south. Actually, there's a wonderful quotation in Richard Davenport-Heinds' book from an Edwardian visitor who comes from the south of Ireland. And he goes to Belfast, and he's really struck by how different it is. He says, I saw churches of all denominations, free Mason and Orange Lodges, wide streets, towering smoke stacks, huge factories, crowded traffic. And out of the water beyond the custom house, dimly seen through smoke and mist, rose some huge, Shapeless thing, which I found to be a shipbuilding yard, wherein 10,000 men were hammering iron and steel into great ocean liners. The noise of wheels and hoofs and cranks and spindles and steam hammers filled my ears and made my head ache. So that's the way that mid-victorians talked about Birmingham or Manchester or something. This is the way that people in Ireland talk about Belfast. It's this terrifying temple to industrial modernity.

I guess one thing that Belfast has that most industrial cities, although not all, I mean, he thinks Glasgow and Liverpool, but most industrial cities in Britain don't, is a very, very sharp sectarian divide.

It does, yeah. Paul Rouse gives in his thing, Belfast has a pub for every 300 people. But of course, what pub you go to is determined by your religion in Belfast. Belfast has been founded, largely Scottish and English Presbyterians in the 1600s, 1603, I think it is. But over time, as has happened with so many industrial cities all over Europe, not just in Britain, but in the United States, what has happened is it has absorbed migrants from the countryside who tend to be Catholic. In other words, Irish Catholic. By 1911, the breakdown, based on Confessionalism is 34% of the people of Belfast are Presbyterians, 30% of them are Church of Ireland, 7% of them are Methodists, so those are the protestants. Then you have the Catholics, which is 24%, and there is absolutely no love lost between them.

Well, Dominic, you did mention the pubs. The most beautiful Belfast pub, The Crown, which is opposite the Europa Hotel, which in the Troubles was always being bombed and has beautiful compartments that the ladies would sit You can still sit in them now. This, reputedly, was owned by a Protestant and a Catholic. The Protestant husband said that we would call it the Crown. The Catholic wife said, All right, but we're going to put the image of the Crown on the doorway so that everyone will trample it as they walk in. That's what I was told when I was there. I don't know whether that's true, but it's a nice example of how maybe that's the way that you get both Protestant and Catholic into a pub.

There's another visitor, 1907, Belfast hummes with industry and causes her progressive. Yet underlying all this commercialism, all this thrift, all this cult of the main chance, there is a cast iron bigotry, a cruel, corroding unfathomable, ferocious sectarian rancor.

Dominic, that ferocious sectarian rancor, that is very evident in the Holland and Wolf shipyards, isn't it? Because they are overwhelmingly protestant, the people who work there.

They are. After the Titanic had sailed, there was a story told in the House of Commons. An MP said he'd heard a story about a Catholic workman being stripped and wasted over a furnace by protestant workers in the shipyard until other Catholic with sledge hammers piled in to rescue him, threatening to smash these guys' skulls to pieces. This story was contested, so some people said, Oh, this is totally not true. This is invented. But the very fact that such stories were told tells you about the rancor, as it were. So there are riots in Belfast in 1909. There are more riots in 1911 and in 1912, as the two communities turn on each other. The protestants, obviously, the overwhelming majority, they hold the levers of power. But the talk of home rule is simmering the whole time. They are terrified that they will be absorbed into a Catholic dominated home rule island, which is the absolute last thing they want. And so all the time, without going back to some of our favorite Restus history metaphors, the temperature is rising on.

Yes. The lava is bubbling.

It is indeed.

Waiting to erupt. I mean, the shipyards do seem to have been places where casual violence was expected. Because another intriguing detail that I learned from visiting the museum was that the foremen would wear bowler hats, partly as a symbol of status, but also they would be lead-lined.

Like our jobs hat.

Yeah, in case a riveter would drop something on their heads. So there were clearly class tensions as well as sectarian tensions. Yeah, of course. But I guess the bowler hat also, it's the symbol of the Orange Order, isn't it? It's a visual signifier of that. So again, the class and religion, it seems to have been a very potent factor in the ship yards that are building the Titanic. Yeah.

The Orange Order, which commemorates the victory of William of Orange over James II in 1690, the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism. That is very strong in the Holland Wolf shipyard. So as you say, those are these four men with their bow and hats will be prominent figures in the Orange Order. Now, Lord Perry, interestingly, it's so interesting that he has set himself apart from that by backing home rule. And of course, as the temperature does rise, his support for home rule becomes ever more controversial. And he's shunned by Belfast's Protestant establishment. They see him as a quizling, as somebody who has jumped into bed with the illegitimate liberals over in London who are trying to, as they see it, give their country away to the Pope.

Right. Okay. Dominic, that's the background to the building of this ship, the Titanic. We've looked at the transatlantic context. We've looked at the specific context of the city and the shipyard in which it is built. I think in our next episode, let's look at the Titanic itself. Let's look at why it gets the name it does, how it's built, the fittings, the crew, and we'll get it out onto the ocean ready for its maiden and what will prove its final voyage.

Jolly Good. We will see you next time. Now, we love a voyage on the rest is history, Tom, don't we? I see us very much as the Captain Smith and the Charles Lytola. We are.

We are. We like to see ourselves as the owner of the great ship that transports people. We offer births, don't we, on this ship?

We do. We love our crew. Now, if you are a member of the Rest is History crew, that club, you can sign up at therestishistory. Com, you can listen to all our Titanic episodes instantly. No need to wait. No need for to make the Atlantic Crossing. So don't delay. Head to that website, therestishistory. Com. Lift yourselves out of steerage, and we will see you next time for the building of the Titanic. Then we'll get into the crews, the passengers, and then minute by minute, we will tell the story of its voyage and the unfolding disaster.

It's rendezvous with an iceberg.

So on that note, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Hi, Restless History fans. If you want more Tom Holland in your life, and frankly, why wouldn't you?

I have some good news for you. I'm Emily Dean, and I'm thrilled to say that this week Tom is a guest on my podcast Walking the Dog, where you get to hear well-known faces at their most relaxed because I talk to them over a leisurely outdoor stroll with my dog, Raymond. And you can join us this for a very special two-part in-depth chat with Tom Holland. And yes, I'm afraid I did ask him this question. Tom, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? I think about it a huge amount. In fact, there are days where I barely stop thinking about it. My brain is occupied by the Romans. It's like Gaul.

If you want to hear more of my chat with Tom, give Walking the Dog a Listen this week.

And while you're there, you can take your pick from episodes starring the likes of Ricky Gervais, Jack Whitehall, and Jimmy Carr. What's that, Raymond?

Yes, The Rest is History did do an episode all about the greatest dogs in history. No, you weren't in it.

Most spoiled dog in history, maybe.