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Peanut butter Cups are the greatest, but let me

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you did it! You stumped this

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charming devil. I

1:09

was 11 when the war started. If

1:11

I honestly sought out my memories and disregard

1:14

what I have learned since, I

1:16

must admit that nothing in the whole war

1:18

moved me so deeply as the loss of

1:20

the Titanic had done a few years earlier.

1:24

This comparatively petty disaster shocked the world. And

1:29

the shock has not quite died away even

1:31

yet. I remember the

1:33

terrible detailed accounts read out at the

1:35

breakfast table. In those days, it was a

1:37

common habit to read the newspaper aloud. And

1:40

I remember that in all the long list of horrors,

1:42

the one that most impressed me was

1:44

that at the last, the Titanic

1:47

suddenly upended and sank

1:49

bow foremost. So

1:51

that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than

1:53

300 feet into the air before they planted the stone. The

1:56

ship was plunged into the abyss. It gave me

1:58

a sinking sensation. in the belly, which

2:01

I can still all but feel. Nothing

2:04

in the war ever gave me

2:06

quite that sensation." So

2:09

that dominant was top man of

2:11

the people, George Orwell, in

2:14

my country right or left. And he wrote that in

2:16

1940, which of course was the middle

2:18

of the Second World War. But the war there, he's talking about

2:20

the First World War. And he is

2:22

saying that nothing in the Great

2:24

War, as it was known, impacted him,

2:26

quite like the shock of something that

2:28

had happened two years before the outbreak

2:30

of the First World War, namely the

2:32

sinking of the Titanic. Yeah,

2:35

isn't that extraordinary? But actually, it's

2:37

a really interesting sign of how

2:40

deeply the loss of the

2:42

Titanic affected people in the 1910s.

2:45

And now in our collective consciousness, Tom,

2:47

the sinking of the Titanic is generally treated

2:50

as a kind of precursor to the First

2:52

World War, isn't it? Yeah, it's a kind

2:54

of metaphor. Yeah, it's a metaphor. It's a

2:56

sense in which industrial society was so rich

2:58

and powerful, and it

3:00

was heading for an inevitable smash, crash.

3:04

Yeah. So you might say that Europe

3:07

was a great ship steaming towards

3:09

the iceberg of industrial warfare. But

3:12

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

3:15

So this is a great line in

3:17

The Onion announcing the sinking of the

3:19

Titanic. World's largest metaphor hits iceberg. So

3:22

I think that we should come to all

3:24

these and do cause, and we should

3:26

also come to the way that the

3:28

Titanic has been shown in film as well.

3:30

Yes. Because actually, Orwell's describing how the

3:32

stern upends and people cling on to

3:34

the edge and then it just plummets down.

3:37

In the 1997 film with Kate Winslet

3:40

and Leonardo DiCaprio, that is the bit that

3:42

stuck in my mind. And I actually found

3:44

it so upsetting and traumatic that I never

3:46

watched the film again until yesterday evening. I

3:48

watched it. Tom, and did you enjoy it?

3:50

I really enjoyed it, but I still found

3:52

it traumatic for reasons that perhaps we'll come

3:54

to when we talk about that. But I

3:56

think that for now, in this episode and

3:58

the next. Let's park all

4:00

that kind of metaphorical stuff, let's park all the

4:03

way that the Titanic has been reimagined over

4:05

the century and more that's followed it. And

4:08

look at it as an episode within history

4:10

because it is brilliant, isn't it? It is.

4:13

As a kind of opening up huge vistas

4:15

of historical analysis and all kinds of topics.

4:17

It is. It's one of those

4:19

stories that actually until we sort of sat

4:21

down to research it, I had rather

4:23

dismissed. I think because of the film, I'd seen

4:26

it as a sort of slushy melodrama, sort of

4:28

Julian Fellows, the Downton Abbey guy, he did his

4:30

own mini series about it. And I always thought

4:32

for that reason, oh God, you

4:34

know, out of slight snobbery actually, I thought

4:36

the Titanic is beneath me. And

4:38

some of our listeners may be thinking that by the way.

4:40

But I completely agree with you. I think it is one

4:43

of the best topics we've ever done on the rest of

4:45

history because it's a window into

4:47

so many things, into kind of late

4:49

Gilded Age New York, into

4:51

the sectarianism and the political violence

4:54

of Belfast, the technological advancements of

4:56

the early 20th century,

4:59

class, immigration, all

5:01

of these kinds of things. And

5:03

also I thought fascinatingly, the ambivalent

5:05

relationship between Britain and America at

5:07

the point where kind

5:09

of not just global and industrial leadership,

5:12

but maritime leadership is starting to shift

5:14

from Britain to America. Absolutely. And that's

5:16

the focus really of what we want

5:19

to talk about today. Yes. There's

5:21

actually a German dimension to this as well, which

5:23

is why it is quite a nice prelude to the

5:26

Great War, because there's an Anglo-German rivalry that's very important

5:28

in the story of Titanic. So yes,

5:30

so the background, the origins, I

5:32

think it's a story of three men

5:34

in particular. So they're JP Morgan, Bruce

5:37

Ismay, and William Pirring, and

5:39

two cities in particular, New York

5:41

City and Belfast. And

5:44

I guess we should start right at the very top, as

5:46

it were, Tom of the Pyramid. And that is a

5:49

man who comes to embody the ruthless

5:52

empire-building capitalism of

5:54

late 19th, early 20th century America, of the

5:57

Gilded Age, what is now seen as the

5:59

arrogance and hubris. It's a man whose

6:01

name has become one of

6:03

the most recognizable kind of capitalist brands, J.P.

6:05

Morgan. Yeah, because it's still a bank to

6:07

this day, isn't it? Absolutely.

6:11

So, the US at the end of the 19th,

6:13

early 20th century, it's the China of its day.

6:16

It's the coming power. It has fought this war in 1898

6:19

and gained the Philippines and Puerto Rico from

6:21

Spain. And

6:23

there's a sense of enormous

6:25

self-confidence, the swagger, about

6:28

America, about American in 1912. And

6:32

the man who embodies this is John

6:34

Pierpont Morgan. So he is,

6:36

he was educated in Switzerland, wasn't

6:39

he? And he's a

6:41

very grim kind of

6:43

door man, but his uncle,

6:45

am I right? You've seen this, his uncle

6:47

wrote jingle bells. Yeah.

6:51

It's like Kennedy's grandfather being the first person

6:53

to put the lights on a public Christmas

6:55

tree. Yeah. Because there's

6:57

a kind of unexpected intersections between high

6:59

American politics and American popular culture. But

7:02

I mean, you say he's doing, but

7:04

he is a cultured man. Oh, yes,

7:06

he is. Yeah. He

7:08

speaks French and German. He hangs out in Rome.

7:10

He's got several retailers, all this kind of thing.

7:12

Yeah, it's true. He's very interested in European culture.

7:15

But in a slightly joyless way though, Tom,

7:17

don't you think? Yes. Well,

7:19

the kind of accumulative way, because European

7:21

culture becomes something to invest in and to

7:24

buy and to take over the

7:26

Atlantic. And this is, of

7:28

course, one of the aspects of why

7:30

there are so many American millionaires on

7:32

the Titanic. Yeah. He's not

7:35

alone in doing that. It's like a character from

7:37

a Henry James novel. So Henry James was actually

7:39

writing during this period, these novels about very rich

7:41

Americans going to Europe and collecting things, collecting people,

7:44

sort of paying homage to the cultural achievements

7:46

of Italy or France. Also looting it. I

7:48

mean, not looting it, but I mean buying

7:50

it up. He's absolutely one of these people.

7:52

Now he's made his money back in the

7:54

US by basically investing in modernity. So

7:57

he's made his money by investing in railroads

7:59

and streetcars. and all of

8:01

these kinds of things. But he's also seen

8:04

as the personification of Wall Street's new

8:06

importance in the US and

8:08

world economy. So he had intervened effectively

8:10

to bail out the United States. After

8:13

the Panic of 1893, I mean, to

8:15

cut a very long story short, he'd

8:17

effectively sold gold to the

8:19

US government in return for a massive

8:21

bond. So he had saved the

8:24

US Treasury. There was no central bank

8:26

in the US at this point. So

8:28

he basically is the United States central

8:30

banker. You found this detail,

8:33

didn't you? That people always call him a

8:36

Titan, the Titan. Yeah. So

8:38

the guy who runs his London office, a

8:40

man called Sir Clinton Dawkins, he's writing about

8:42

him in 1901. And he

8:45

says of him Morgan has something Titanic

8:47

about him when he really gets to

8:49

work. And that adjective Titanic is

8:52

capitalized. So the sense of

8:54

Morgan being Titanic is

8:56

part of the kind of the common vocabulary

8:59

that is used to describe him again and

9:01

again and again. Because this is the first

9:03

point really where people are talking about these

9:07

gigantic business tycoons more powerful than

9:09

any government. You know, these are

9:11

not the industrialists of the

9:13

kind of industrial revolution. They're bigger than that.

9:15

Yeah, they are people who are, as you

9:17

said, collecting art as Morgan is, so

9:20

people talk about them as like the Caesars

9:22

or the emperors, but they're also collecting companies.

9:25

So Morgan is the king of what are

9:28

called at the time the trusts. So there's

9:30

a huge merge conglomerates. Monopolies.

9:32

The most famous one is

9:34

US Steel. Yeah. So he had bought out

9:37

Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie, again, is a

9:39

kind of representative figure, perhaps of an earlier

9:41

age, because he comes from Scotland in

9:44

1848. So he is emigrating out

9:47

on the age where, you know,

9:49

Atlantic crossings are really, really tough. There's a kind

9:51

of definitely a Logan Roy quality to him. I

9:54

mean, maybe there's a kind of deliberate illusion to

9:56

that Scott going out and making it big in

9:59

the United States. Oh, totally. Yeah.

10:02

And he owns this vast steel company and Morgan

10:04

buys him out, gives him $240 million so that

10:08

in paper terms, Carnegie becomes the richest man in

10:10

the world. But of course, Morgan

10:13

as the man who now controls this.

10:15

Yeah. I mean, he's the

10:18

most titanic figure of all. Yeah. And

10:20

there's another kind of intriguing figure involved in

10:22

that, isn't there, in the buyout of Carnegie

10:25

and the founding of US Steel with a

10:27

man called Peter Widener, who again, he is

10:30

a kind of archetypal gilded age figure. So

10:33

he's from Philadelphia. He begins as a

10:35

butcher's boy. He very rapidly sets up

10:37

this huge chain of butcher's shops across

10:39

the United States. Then he

10:41

invests in trams. So

10:44

he kicks off with the Philadelphia traction

10:46

company. And then he gets

10:48

traction companies in cities across the whole of

10:50

the US. He's literally picking up traction, Tom.

10:52

He's literally picking up traction. Very good. And

10:56

he, like Morgan, ends up obscenely

10:58

rich, invests in art. He's

11:00

spotted by Henry Adams, who's kind of

11:02

very much an old school Bostonian Brahmin,

11:05

collecting art in Paris, as Adams

11:07

called him, an odious old American.

11:10

And his son, and indeed

11:13

grandson, will follow the tradition

11:15

of going across the Atlantic to

11:17

France to collect art and then

11:19

coming back. And they

11:21

may feature later in the story, Dominic.

11:23

Exactly. And the story has come back on

11:26

the Titanic, Tom. So Morgan has

11:28

been collecting companies. US Steel is

11:30

his most successful, the most famous. So

11:32

US Steel was 1901. At the

11:34

same point, 1901 to two, he decides

11:36

to extend his dominions to the seas as well

11:38

as the land. And he puts together a huge

11:40

combine called International Mercantile Marine.

11:43

And this includes a British

11:45

company called White Star, a

11:47

shipping company. And the economist at

11:49

the time, like a lot of British

11:51

publications, is very shocked at this. And

11:54

I think quite rightly that part of

11:56

the story of the Titanic is the

11:58

story of the emergence of American capitalism.

12:00

at the expense of British. So

12:02

the economist said, to the patriotic

12:04

Britain, this is not a pleasant thought,

12:06

that the great transatlantic trade is in

12:09

future to be bossed by a syndicate

12:11

of American capitalists. And this is what

12:13

the story of IMM is all about.

12:16

Although Dominic, intriguingly in America, because

12:18

it turns out that ultimately Morgan

12:20

has paid too much for White

12:22

Star, and the reasons that

12:24

we'll come to, he is unable to

12:26

establish a complete monopoly. People in America

12:28

see this as a triumph for British

12:30

capitalism. The British have fooled him. The

12:32

other British have fooled him, that they've

12:34

tricked the great master of the universe.

12:37

And I think that that reflects something about the

12:39

status of this company, White Star,

12:41

that it is an absolutely marquee

12:44

brand, isn't it? It is, because this is

12:46

the point at which steamships

12:49

are seen as like cars

12:51

or like telephones, electricity.

12:53

Steamships are part of that world.

12:56

They are embodiments of the sort

12:58

of exciting modernity of the day.

13:01

So all of the men who sail on

13:03

the Titanic, the crewmen, are called

13:05

sailors. And some of

13:08

them, the older ones, would probably remember the

13:10

age of sail, wouldn't they? Because the age

13:12

of sail in the 1870s or something, if

13:14

you had taken a ship to New York, it could

13:16

have been a sailing ship and it could have taken

13:19

you 40 days. Now it's taking

13:21

you less than a fortnight and you're doing it by

13:23

steamship. Steamships have conquered the

13:25

waves. They are much faster. They

13:27

are also much safer. So

13:29

there's an extraordinary statistic in Richard Devon

13:32

behind his book Titanic Lives, an absolutely

13:34

brilliant book, I have to

13:36

say, that 184 passengers on sailing

13:38

ships would die making the Atlantic

13:40

crossing. But on steamships, it's

13:42

one in 2000. So in other

13:45

words, steamships are much, much safer. But steamships

13:47

are also... Well, they're much faster, aren't

13:49

they? Yeah. Also the stat in Richard

13:51

Devonport behind his book. In 1872, the

13:53

average crossing from Liverpool to New York by

13:55

sailing vessel took 44 days by steamship

13:57

under a fortnight. And of

13:59

course, the notion of the blue ribbon, the

14:01

first ship across the Atlantic, becomes something that people

14:04

on both sides of the Atlantic

14:06

become obsessed by. Yeah. So steamships

14:08

to us, they seem old-fashioned. At

14:10

the time, they seem absolutely thrilling.

14:12

The Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti, when's

14:14

that? 1909, something like

14:16

that. 1908. In

14:19

the Futurist Manifesto, the world's splendor has

14:21

been enriched by a new beauty, the

14:23

beauty of speed. We will sing of

14:26

the fervid nighttime vibrations of armaments, factories,

14:28

and shipyards blazing with violent electric

14:30

moons, bold steamers

14:32

sniffing the horizon, the

14:35

sleek flight of aircraft whose propellers turn like

14:37

banners in the wind. So in other words,

14:39

steamships are part of that world of aircraft.

14:41

They're incredibly exciting. And speed itself, it's not

14:44

just convenient, right? But speed itself is seen

14:46

as something unbelievably

14:49

ecstatic, something to be celebrated above all else

14:51

by the Futurists. And so do you think

14:53

that, I mean, now, the kind

14:56

of the marker of an absolutely cutting-edge

14:58

economy is to have a massive tech

15:00

company? And today, famously, America has

15:02

all the tech companies in Europe, doesn't have

15:04

any. But it's the white

15:06

star line. It's a British equivalent of

15:09

Apple or something. It's a marker of

15:12

a really, really successful company at the

15:14

cutting edge of technology. And so that's

15:17

why the question of who owns it

15:19

is so potent. Yeah, these steamship companies

15:21

are seen as emblems of a nation's

15:24

virility to some extent, aren't they? Yeah,

15:26

we've come to the Anglo-German competition. Yeah,

15:28

right. The ships have to be bigger

15:31

and bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger

15:33

and faster and faster. Absolutely. Absolutely. Then

15:35

this general obsession with speed, Davenport

15:38

Hines in his book points out that, you know, one

15:40

of the most famous passengers in the Titanic,

15:42

John Jacob Astor, was one of

15:44

the first Americans to buy a motor car. He had 18 cars.

15:48

Some of these American passengers with two

15:50

surnames rather than first name and surname.

15:52

So, the guy called Washington Rubling II,

15:55

who designed a racing car. He's one of the

15:57

millionaires in the Titanic. Another millionaire.

16:00

a Titanic a man called Dickinson Bishop. He

16:02

has a car waiting for him in New

16:04

York. The most expensive car in the world,

16:06

a LOSIER, he's paid $7,750 for. And there's

16:08

actually a

16:12

car on the Titanic, isn't there? There's a

16:14

Renault, one of the American millionaires takes a

16:16

car with him. So this worship of technology,

16:18

machinery, and speed, I mean, it's

16:20

connected to that thing that you're talking about,

16:22

which is the idea of nations' sense of

16:24

success and virtue and virility being bound up

16:27

with the ownership of the companies that embody

16:29

those virtues. Yeah. And so that's

16:32

why White Star matters. And it's

16:34

been founded by a man from the Lake

16:36

District, Tom Nighy. Yeah, Cumbrian. Yeah.

16:39

Thomas Ismay, who, I mean, he's not

16:41

highly educated. He hasn't been to an

16:43

expensive public school or any of that

16:46

stuff, but he's an absolute, dare one

16:48

say, titan. Yeah, he's a really

16:50

interesting figure because, you know, the earlier

16:52

generation of kind of the rough-hewn entrepreneurs

16:55

who built themselves up from nothing, he

16:57

bought this shipping firm called White Star.

17:00

And what they were specialising in was

17:02

shipping people to the gold

17:04

fields in Australia. Which is a long

17:06

way away. Yeah. And he apparently, he

17:08

was playing billions with a bloke. And

17:11

the bloke said, why do

17:13

you bother doing that? Why don't you ship people to

17:15

America? It's much closer. And he started

17:17

to ship people to the United States. And the thing

17:19

is, he's doing that in 1867, 68, 69,

17:23

at just the point when the American Civil War

17:25

has ended. So there's a big

17:28

demand now starting to boom. Yeah, it's booming

17:30

again. People want to go to the United

17:32

States. Now to do this,

17:34

he signs a deal with a particular

17:36

shipyard called Harland and Wolf in

17:39

Belfast. They lend him the money to

17:41

expand his building program to do this

17:44

on the condition that they will all be built

17:46

in Belfast. And we will come back to Belfast

17:49

and to Harland and Wolf. But his

17:51

particular wheeze, as well as kind of

17:54

moving to the transatlantic crossing, is to

17:56

offer people luxury travel. Yeah. So

17:58

if you think back, we talked in a previous. episode

18:01

about Dickens crossing the Atlantic to go to America. So

18:03

he goes on a steamer that has been built

18:05

by a rival British company called

18:07

Cunard and they are saying, oh

18:09

we've got amazing cabins and Dickens is very very

18:12

sniffy about this. So he complains that his luggage

18:14

could no more be got in at the door

18:16

of his cabin than a giraffe could be persuaded

18:18

or forced into a flower pot. So

18:20

even in the 1840s

18:22

luxury is still very very grueling

18:25

but what Ismay does is

18:28

really to go in hard and to

18:30

basically kind of start looking to luxury

18:32

hotels as a source of inspiration. And

18:35

so to go on a white star liner

18:38

it's not an ordeal, it's a positive pleasure.

18:40

Yeah so what they do, it's an unusual

18:42

example actually of a company

18:44

being incredibly successful by going very very

18:46

high end. Reassuringly expensive. Yeah it's antithesis

18:48

of the sort of the Lord Sugar

18:51

for our British listeners or the sort of

18:53

cut costs drive down your overheads.

18:55

Ismay doesn't do that at all. What Ismay does

18:57

is you say he has electric bells, he has

18:59

hot running water in the baths, it's

19:02

a floating hotel. And he has a

19:04

series of ships. Oceanic is the first one, then

19:07

Adriatic, Britannic, you'll see how

19:09

we're going to get to Titanic. Well they

19:11

all end in ick don't they? Coptic, Ionic,

19:13

Doric. Seasick. Well no, well no not seasick

19:15

you see. No because you don't have seasick.

19:18

Yeah as you say it's a holiday, it's

19:20

a treat to go on a white star

19:22

crossing. And so Ismay as you say, I

19:24

mean he's kind of pulled himself up by

19:26

his bootstraps and he's very tough, very hard

19:29

and in the 1870s you know there's a

19:31

particular crisis that could have derailed the entire

19:33

company. When in 1873

19:36

one of his steamships, the Atlantic, runs out of

19:38

coal on the way to New York. They divert

19:41

courses to go to Halifax to pick up coal

19:43

and they end up hitting a rock. And

19:45

the lifeboats have swept away, 250 lives, about a third of

19:47

the people on board the ship

19:50

are lost and you know it

19:52

creates an enormous scandal. It could have completely

19:54

derailed the company. It doesn't because Ismay is

19:57

the kind of man who's not going to

19:59

be diverted. by a crisis

20:01

like that. Right. But

20:03

Tom, that's a reminder, isn't it? It

20:05

is a floating hotel. These are holidays

20:07

for some people, not for most people,

20:09

arrogance. But still a hint

20:11

of danger in the Atlantic crossing,

20:13

isn't it? It's not entirely certain

20:16

that your voyage will be trouble free. No.

20:19

But the great thing that White Star are able to do

20:22

is to convince people basically that you can

20:24

go on it. It will be like a

20:26

hotel and all risk of danger has effectively

20:28

gone. And this

20:30

is obviously a massive boom area of

20:33

development because essentially you can build bigger

20:35

and bigger ships and you can make

20:37

them more and more luxurious. And

20:39

this is why it's a really good business to be in.

20:42

And so Ismay looking ahead to the

20:44

future, he wants to establish a dynasty.

20:46

He has three sons. Of

20:48

these three sons, only one develops

20:50

an interest in the sea. And

20:53

this is his middle son, Bruce. And

20:56

Bruce on one level is a classic example

20:58

of what happens when British industrialists become very

21:00

rich. They send their children to private schools

21:02

where basically the sons are taught to be

21:05

ashamed of their parents for having the wrong

21:07

accent. Yes. Which is what

21:09

happens. But at the same time, you know,

21:11

Daddy is not interested really in the

21:13

airs and graces that his young son has been

21:15

taught. I mean, it's purely a marker of status

21:17

that he can send him off to private school.

21:20

What he really wants is a guy who is going to be

21:23

effective at running the company. And so that is

21:25

what Bruce does. The other two sons go off

21:27

and become members of the landed gentry. Bruce

21:30

Ismay does stay true to the source

21:32

of his family's wealth. So it's brilliantly

21:34

summed up by Francis Wilson, who wrote

21:37

a wonderful book called How to Survive

21:39

the Tannic or The Sinking of J.

21:41

Bruce Ismay. She said,

21:44

Thomas, so Thomas Ismay, the father

21:46

was a Victorian, Bruce, an Edwardian.

21:48

The father stood for entrepreneurial strength

21:50

and imperial greatness, the son

21:52

for decline. And maybe

21:54

with the kind of symbolic resonance that

21:57

shadows the whole of the story.

22:00

Thomas Ismay dies one year before

22:02

the death of Queen Victoria.

22:05

It's not just a British event of

22:07

note. It has international resonance. The Kaiser

22:10

sends a telegram of condolence to Ismay's

22:12

widow. All the flags in Liverpool are

22:14

hung at half mast. And

22:17

Bruce Ismay takes over. And the first

22:19

thing he does, Dominic, is to sell

22:22

the company to J. Pierpoint

22:24

Morgan. So there's a real succession element to

22:26

this, isn't there? You mentioned the Logan Roy

22:28

comparison. So for people who haven't seen the

22:30

succession, it's a great, great TV series, model

22:32

of the Murdoch family. And in

22:35

that series, there's this sort of

22:37

ferocious Scottish self-made man

22:39

played by Brian Cox, and

22:41

then his sort of feckless sons and daughter

22:43

who are competing to replace him, who are

22:46

never going to be as good, never going

22:48

to be as hungry because they've been reared

22:50

amidst wealth. That's the story of

22:52

Bruce Ismay, because he'd gone to Harrow, hadn't

22:54

he? He is going to travel on the

22:56

Titanic. He is a

22:59

very tall man. He's very polished. He's

23:01

a droopy moustache. He's polite. He's the

23:03

quintessence of a gentleman. I

23:05

mean, that's what Thomas Ismay wanted. Also, he

23:07

is going to survive the Titanic. And this

23:09

will make him notorious.

23:12

But just for now, Dominic, why does he

23:14

want to sell the company? Well, basically, because

23:17

Morgan has deeper pockets than anyone in the

23:19

world, and is offering him an

23:21

obscene amount of money for it. Yes. So

23:24

we talked about the foundation of IMM. Morgan

23:26

basically pays him 10 times the

23:28

value of White Star's earnings, plus

23:32

a premium of $7 million in cash. So

23:35

he ends up buying it for $35 million. Now,

23:38

there's a bit of a fudge, isn't there? Because the ships

23:40

will still have a British flag. They'll

23:43

still have British crews. And Ismay,

23:45

as part of the deal, will

23:47

carry on running White Star within

23:49

the IMM combine. So that's why

23:51

he does it. And it's

23:53

very like anxieties in Britain at the

23:55

moment about tech companies listing themselves

23:57

on the New York Stock Exchange rather than in London.

24:00

There's that kind of feeling that prestige

24:02

companies, cutting edge companies are

24:05

being taken over by the

24:08

minds of American capitalism. And

24:10

an additional anxiety is that ships are needed

24:13

to transport troops. So Thomas

24:15

Ismay had loaned his ships to

24:17

the British government during the Bergh

24:19

War to transport troops. And

24:21

there's a real feeling of anxiety about

24:24

what this might be. So the British

24:26

government then lean in and they give

24:28

Cunard a massive bung. So Cunard is

24:30

the rival British company. Effectively to compete

24:32

with this would be a monopoly that

24:34

Morgan is setting up. And

24:36

because Morgan cannot buy

24:38

Cunard, it means that he

24:40

doesn't actually establish a monopoly.

24:43

And so therefore he is embroiled in exactly

24:45

the kind of competition that he didn't want

24:48

to have. Yes, because the pull point with

24:50

all of these American capitalists at the beginning

24:52

of the 1900s is,

24:54

as you say, to establish complete market dominance and

24:56

then to basically fix the prices to suit themselves.

24:59

He can't do this, partly because the British government

25:01

is sponsoring Cunard as

25:03

a competitor. But

25:05

also because, Tom, some

25:08

other people have entered the story,

25:10

the Germans, the Germans. So

25:13

the Germans have turned up and they

25:15

have two big companies. One is called

25:17

Hamburg America. And the other is Norddeutsche

25:19

Lloyd. And of course, the story of

25:21

the 1890s, 1900s is one of tremendous

25:23

German growth in all kinds of areas,

25:25

science, engineering, and so on. Shipbuilding is

25:27

one of these things. So

25:29

that at this point, 1903, which is

25:32

the first full year of the existence

25:34

of IMM and the existence of White

25:36

Star under Pierpont Morgan's banner, the

25:39

four fastest ships in the

25:41

world are all German.

25:43

And they all have these

25:46

very Germanic patriotic names. Imperator,

25:48

Vaterland, Bismarck. Yes. So

25:50

White Star had always been the company that set the

25:52

standard for luxury. But Hamburg

25:55

America in 1903 have a ship

25:57

called America that has been designed

26:00

by the people who designed the

26:02

Ritz Carlton hotels in

26:04

London, and they have Ritz Carlton standards.

26:07

And this is beyond anything that White

26:09

Star have ever done. And

26:11

now the British companies have to

26:13

fight back. So first of all, Cunard build

26:16

three very famous ships, the

26:18

Mauritania, the Aquitania, and

26:20

the Lusitania. Of course, there's the

26:23

Great War connection, two

26:25

of which make their maiden voyages in 1907. That,

26:28

of course, then puts greater pressure on

26:30

Morgan and his combine. Yeah. So Clinton

26:32

Dawkins, who we mentioned, the guy who

26:34

described him as Titanic, I mean,

26:37

he says, what threatens to swamp us is

26:39

this monstrous indebtedness for shipbuilding. And I don't

26:41

feel satisfied that we're not putting more big

26:43

ships into the Atlantic than it can bear.

26:46

So there is massive overcapacity in the shipping.

26:48

But they have no choice but

26:50

to compete with Cunard and with the

26:52

German firms. And of course,

26:55

you know, the White Star reputation

26:57

is for absolute luxury. And so

26:59

that basically is where the idea

27:02

for the Titanic and its two

27:04

sister ships comes from. Exactly. So

27:07

Ismay gets together with a guy who

27:09

we'll come to a little bit called

27:11

Lord Pirrie. Lord Pirrie is the head

27:13

of the shipyards, Harland and Wolf in

27:16

Belfast. And Ismay says,

27:18

listen, what we could do is we could

27:20

just go bigger and better. I mean, just

27:23

go bigger than Cunard, bigger than the Germans.

27:26

And again, let's think about three ships, and

27:28

they're going to call them the Olympic, the

27:31

Britannic, and the Titanic.

27:33

And these three ships will allow

27:35

us to recapture the momentum

27:38

and the reputation which we need to

27:40

justify our existence as part of the

27:42

J.B. Morgan business empire that

27:44

has been created. And that effectively, Tom, I

27:47

mean, these are the origins of the Titanic,

27:49

the financial world of the 1900s, the

27:52

Anglo-German competition, the new

27:54

Anglo-American kind of business relationship with all

27:56

of its anxieties, the excitement of the

27:59

age of Cunard. steam and speed and

28:01

technology. And also, of course, something we'll

28:03

come to later on, which is the

28:05

boom in emigration to the United States,

28:07

because that's, of course, what's driving so

28:09

much of this, that so many people

28:11

want to start lives in the New

28:13

World. But Dominic, this is the transatlantic

28:16

context. But these ships in the Titanic,

28:18

the Olympic and the Britannic, have to

28:20

be built somewhere. And it's

28:22

a very specific place. It's Belfast

28:25

in the north of Ireland. And

28:28

I think we should take a break now. And

28:30

when we come back, let's look at the specific

28:32

Belfast context for the making of

28:34

this extraordinary ship. Brilliant. So we'll be

28:36

talking about Belfast after the break. Reese's

28:42

Peanut Butter Cups are the greatest. But let

28:44

me play devil's advocate here. Let's see. So

28:46

no, that's a good thing. Definitely

28:50

not a problem. Reese's,

28:52

you did it. You stumped this

28:54

charming devil. Hello,

29:32

welcome back to the Rest of History. We are looking

29:34

at the story of the Titanic. And

29:37

in the first half, we were exploring

29:39

the background to the building of this

29:41

colossal ship in Anglo-American

29:43

relations, the transatlantic world of

29:45

the early 20th century. But

29:47

Dominic, now we want to

29:49

zoom in on a particular

29:51

place, don't we? Which is

29:54

Belfast. Because Belfast is where the

29:56

Titanic will be built. So let's

29:58

do it, Tom. As we did

30:00

the first half, let's do it through a particular

30:03

character, one of the three individuals that are really

30:05

responsible for the ship. And this is this guy

30:07

called William Pirrie, the first Viscount Pirrie. So he

30:09

was the person that Bruce Ismay was

30:11

talking to at the end of the first half

30:14

about how they were going to compete with the

30:16

Germans and with Cunard. Let's build bigger and better.

30:19

Pirrie is the head of the

30:21

Harland and Wolf shipyard in Belfast,

30:23

Belfast's most famous employer. Pirrie,

30:25

again, is a transatlantic character. He was born

30:28

in Quebec City in 1847. His father died

30:30

in New York two years later, and his

30:32

mother brings him back. They're a family from

30:35

the north of Ireland, Northern Ireland as we

30:37

would call it now, though of course, then

30:40

the status of Northern Ireland didn't exist

30:42

as a separate state. His

30:45

mum brings him back to County Down. He

30:47

goes to this very well-known private grammar

30:50

school in Belfast, the Royal Belfast

30:52

Academic Institution, William Pirrie, and he

30:54

joins Harland and Wolf, the shipyards,

30:56

as an apprentice when he

30:59

is 15 years old. Now,

31:01

Harland and Wolf, the foundation is

31:03

1859 when it's bought by a

31:05

guy called Edward Harland. And he goes into

31:08

partnership with a man called Gustav Wolf. Astonishing,

31:11

who'd have guessed it? And their

31:13

business model is that they drum

31:15

up custom from often foreign ship-owning

31:17

companies, and they do deals with

31:19

them and they will build the

31:22

ships right there in

31:25

Belfast. Lord Pirrie, who works his

31:27

way up, is a

31:29

brilliant kind of salesman. He will tour

31:31

the land, you know,

31:33

making small talk with millionaires and persuading

31:35

them, come to Belfast, we

31:38

will build your ship for you. Richard

31:40

Davenport-Hines describes him as, he says, a

31:43

small masterful man with intrepid nerves and

31:45

unshakable self-confidence. He thought nothing

31:47

of removing grit from one of his

31:49

shipyard workers' eyes with the blade of

31:51

a knife. Wow. Which of all the

31:53

details of the Tyres Hanextro is the

31:55

one I find most terrifying. Yeah, quite

31:57

honestly. So he is a

31:59

workaholic. He speaks of

32:01

the very strong Belfast accent, which at the

32:03

time people regard as reassuring. You know,

32:06

it's not too smooth. Like Scottish

32:08

bank managers. Yeah, absolutely. He said

32:10

that he has a magic and

32:12

he will charm orders out of

32:14

customers. And thanks to

32:17

Piri's salesmanship, Harland and Wolf becomes

32:19

by far the biggest shipbuilder in

32:21

the world by the

32:23

end of 1910 when it is building

32:25

the Titanic and the Titanic class ships.

32:28

It employs more than 11,000 people

32:31

and it absolutely dominates the landscape of

32:34

Belfast, but also I think the world's

32:36

imagination because the world is obsessed with steamships

32:38

and with chips and with speed and Harland

32:40

and Wolf is the company. There's a brilliant

32:43

comment on him by WT Stead, a big

32:45

newspaper man. I think we've mentioned before, he's

32:47

the guy who basically whips up the campaign

32:49

to get General Gordon sent to the Sudan

32:52

and all kinds of things. And

32:54

he will feature again later in the story.

32:57

And he said of Piri that he is

32:59

the greatest shipbuilder the world has ever seen. He

33:01

has built more ships and bigger ships than any

33:03

man since the days of Noah. Not

33:06

only did he build them, he owns them,

33:08

directs them, controls them on all the seas

33:10

of the world. So there's a

33:12

sense in which Piri is kind of being

33:15

promoted as a kind of Irish equivalent of

33:17

the great capitalists of Gilded Age America, do

33:19

you think? Yeah, I totally think that. In

33:22

fact, while you were reading that, I was

33:24

just thinking, this is an

33:26

age, isn't it? The worship's great, man. Yeah,

33:28

absolutely. In a way that would not be

33:30

the case today. It doesn't look to diminish

33:33

greatness as we do. Our instinct is to

33:35

undercut and to say of the tech billionaires,

33:38

they're very annoying, they have ridiculous opinions, you

33:40

know, all of this sort of stuff. That's

33:42

our instinct. Theirs is to

33:44

magnify. Well, not everybody. I mean, as

33:46

we will see, there's quite a lot

33:48

of subterranean hostility to them, but yes.

33:51

But WT Stead, as you said, he is by

33:53

far the most influential newspaper man of the day.

33:56

I mean, he is somebody who sets the tone

33:58

of kind of populist. conversation.

34:01

And he likes to inflate. The Edwardians do

34:04

like to inflate. There is a sort of

34:06

grandiosity about Edwardian culture, I think. Right. There's

34:08

an obsession with the Titanic. Yeah, exactly that.

34:10

Which is why the name is so resonant,

34:12

isn't it? Exactly. So Piri, he

34:16

becomes Lord Merrifellfast. He's Lord Merrifellfast in the

34:18

Jubilee year of 1897. He

34:20

buys a succession of great kind of

34:22

mansions in Belfast, in Belgravia in London.

34:24

He has a country house in Surrey,

34:26

I think it is. He

34:29

wants to go into politics. So he

34:31

really wants to become the Unionist MP

34:34

for South Belfast. But interestingly,

34:37

he is rejected by the party hierarchy because

34:40

Tom is a supporter of

34:42

Home Rule for Ireland. Right. So this

34:45

plunges us back into a topic that

34:47

we did last year, isn't it? Yeah.

34:49

Which is the tortured politics of

34:52

Ireland and its relations to Great

34:54

Britain in this period. Yeah, of

34:56

course. And this is a really,

34:58

really fascinating, a richly fascinating thread

35:00

that runs through the story of the Titanic. I

35:03

mean, Lord Piri actually ends up, because he wants to get

35:05

ahead of politics, he can't do it with the Unionist Party,

35:07

he ends up doing it with the Liberals. And

35:10

the Liberals, the party of Gladstone, the party

35:12

of Asquith, very much a friend of the

35:14

rest of his history, Tom. This

35:16

is the party that becomes the party of Home Rule

35:18

for Ireland because Ireland is obviously part of the

35:21

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But

35:23

by the late 19th century, there is

35:26

tremendous pressure from within Ireland, Catholic Ireland,

35:29

for Home Rule. Great opposition

35:31

and antipathy to it among

35:33

Protestants in Ireland who are

35:36

very much centered in Northern Ireland and specifically

35:38

in Belfast. Exactly. The Titanic

35:40

is against that background. So

35:42

just on Belfast, Belfast in 1912 is

35:44

by far the biggest

35:48

and richest and

35:50

most industrially important city

35:52

in Ireland. You said it plunges

35:54

us back into the world of the Irish episodes we

35:56

did last year. So our guest

35:58

in some of those episodes, Paul

36:00

Rouse from University College Dublin.

36:04

He wrote a thing about Belfast in 1912

36:06

for the, I think with the Irish National

36:08

Archives or something like that, a big thing about

36:11

the world of Ireland and the beginning of the

36:13

20th century. There's a line in that, it says

36:15

Belfast was a place unlike any other in Ireland.

36:18

Wealth in Dublin and in other Irish cities

36:20

was usually rooted in trade, in land or

36:22

in lineage. Wealth in

36:24

Belfast was the product of

36:26

industry. So it makes, Belfast,

36:29

it's a city that makes things, it makes

36:31

cigarettes, it makes cars, it

36:33

makes linen, especially more linen than

36:35

anywhere else on earth. And

36:38

Dominic, do you know what is brilliant on

36:40

this is the Titanic Museum in

36:42

Belfast in what was the Harlan and

36:44

Wolf Shipyards. It's a wonderful museum. They

36:46

have a brilliant section on this, all

36:48

the kind of the clamour and the

36:51

noise, they evoke it very, very powerfully.

36:53

So just a few details that

36:55

I garnished from that. They both did

36:57

Belfast rope works, which was the largest

37:00

rope maker in the world. And they

37:02

had Sirocco works, which was the world's

37:04

leading fan and ventilation manufacturer. And both

37:06

of these of course supplied lots of

37:08

material to the Titanic. So Sirocco works,

37:11

applied 75 fans to the Titanic. So

37:13

I'm guessing that's another reason why it's

37:15

such a centre of shipbuilding is that

37:17

basically all the kind of raw materials

37:20

that you need to build a huge ship

37:23

are, you know, they're not just in

37:25

the shipyards, but scattered around in the

37:27

companies that dominate the industry of Belfast.

37:29

Yeah. So Belfast is more akin in

37:32

many ways to a sort

37:34

of Northern or Midlands, British

37:36

industrial city than it is with

37:38

Irish cities, you know, Cork, Dublin,

37:41

Limerick and so on further

37:43

south. So actually, there's a wonderful quotation

37:46

Richard Davenport-Heinz's book from an Edwardian visitor

37:48

who comes from the south of Ireland.

37:51

And he goes to Belfast and he's really struck

37:54

by how different he says,

37:56

I saw churches of all dominations, Freemason,

37:58

Orange Lodges, wide stream. streets, towering

38:00

smokestacks, huge factories, crowded traffic, and

38:02

out of the water beyond the

38:04

custom house, dimly seen through smoke

38:06

and mist, rose some

38:08

huge, shapeless thing, which I

38:10

found to be a shipbuilding

38:13

yard wherein ten thousand men

38:15

were hammering iron and steel

38:17

into great ocean liners. The

38:20

noise of wheels and hoofs and

38:22

cranks and spindles and steamhammers filled

38:24

my ears and made my head

38:26

ache. So that's the

38:28

way that mid-Victorians talked about Birmingham

38:31

or Manchester or something. And this is

38:33

the way that people in Ireland talk

38:35

about Belfast. It's this

38:38

terrifying temple to industrial

38:40

modernity. I guess one thing that Belfast

38:42

has that most industrial cities,

38:44

although not all, I mean I think

38:46

Glasgow and Liverpool, but most industrial cities

38:48

in Britain don't, is a very, very

38:50

sharp sectarian divide. It does, yeah. So Paul

38:52

Rouse gives in his thing, Belfast has

38:54

a pub for every 300 people. But

38:58

of course what pub you go to is

39:00

determined by your religion in

39:03

Belfast. So Belfast has been founded

39:06

largely Scottish and English

39:08

Presbyterians in the 1600s, 1603 I think it is.

39:12

But over time, as has happened with

39:14

so many industrial cities all over Europe, not

39:16

just in Britain, but in the United States,

39:18

what has happened is it has absorbed migrants

39:21

from the countryside who tend

39:23

to be Catholic. So in other words, Irish

39:25

Catholics. So by 1911, the

39:28

sort of breakdown based on confessionalism is

39:30

34% of the people of Belfast are

39:34

Presbyterians, 30% of

39:36

them are Church of Ireland, 7% of

39:38

them are Methodists. So those are the Protestants. And then

39:40

you have the Catholics, which is 24%. And there is

39:44

absolutely no love lost between them.

39:47

Well, Dominic, you did mention the

39:49

pubs. The most beautiful

39:51

Belfast pub, the Crown, which is opposite

39:53

the Europa Hotel, which in the Troubles

39:55

was always being bombed and has kind

39:57

of beautiful compartments that the ladies would

40:00

sit in. You can still sit in them now. And

40:02

this reputedly was owned by a Protestant

40:05

and a Catholic. And the Protestant husband

40:07

said that we would call it the

40:09

crown. And the Catholic wife said, all

40:11

right, but we're going to put the image of the crown

40:14

on the doorway so that everyone will trample it as they

40:16

walk in. I mean, that's what I was told when I

40:18

was there. I don't know whether that's true, but it's a

40:20

kind of nice example of how

40:24

maybe that's the way that you get both Protestants

40:26

and Catholics into a pub. Right. I mean, there's

40:29

another visitor in 1907. Belfast hums

40:31

with industry and causes self-progressive. Yet

40:33

underlying all this commercialism, all this

40:35

thrift, all this cult of the

40:37

main chance, there is a cast

40:39

iron bigotry, a cruel, corroding, unfathomable,

40:42

ferocious sectarian rancour. And Dominic, that

40:44

ferocious sectarian rancour, I mean, that

40:46

is very evident in the Harland

40:48

and Wilf shipyards, isn't it? Because

40:50

they are overwhelmingly Protestant, the people

40:52

who work there. After

40:54

the Titanic had sailed, there

40:56

was a story told in the House of Commons,

40:59

an MP said he'd heard a story about a

41:01

Catholic workman being stripped and

41:03

roasted over a furnace by Protestant

41:05

workers in the shipyard until

41:07

other Catholics with sledgehammers piled

41:10

in to rescue him, threatening

41:12

to kind of smash these guys' skulls to

41:14

pieces. And this story was contested. So some

41:16

people said, oh, this is totally not true.

41:18

This is invented. But the very fact that

41:20

such stories were told, tells

41:22

you about the rancour, as it were. So

41:25

there are riots in Belfast

41:28

in 1909. There are more riots in 1911 and in

41:30

1912, as the sort

41:34

of two communities turn on each other. The Protestants,

41:36

obviously, the overwhelming majority, they

41:38

hold the levers of power. But the talk

41:40

of home rule is simmering the whole time.

41:43

And they are terrified that they will

41:45

be absorbed into a Catholic-dominated,

41:49

home rule Ireland, which is the absolute

41:51

last thing they want. And so all

41:54

the time, without going back

41:56

to some of our favourite Restless History

41:58

metaphors, the temperature is rising. The lava

42:00

is bubbling. It is indeed. Waiting to

42:02

erupt. I

42:05

mean the

42:07

shipyards do seem to have been places

42:09

where casual violence was kind of expected.

42:11

Because another intriguing detail that I learned

42:14

from visiting the museum was that the

42:16

foreman would wear bowler hats, partly as

42:18

a symbol of status, but also they

42:20

would be kind of lead lined. Like

42:22

old jobs hats. Yeah, in case a

42:25

riveter would drop something on their heads.

42:27

So there were clearly class tensions as

42:29

well as sectarian tensions. Yeah, of course.

42:31

But I guess the bowler hat also, I

42:33

mean it's the symbol of the Orange Order,

42:35

isn't it? It's a kind of visual signifier

42:38

of that. So again, the kind of class

42:40

and religion is, I mean it seems to

42:42

have been a very potent factor in the

42:44

shipyards that are building the Titanic. Yeah, the

42:47

Orange Order, which commemorates the

42:49

victory of William of Orange over

42:51

James II in 1690,

42:53

the triumph of Protestantism over

42:55

Catholicism. That is very strong

42:58

in the Holland and Wolf shipyards. So as

43:00

you say, those are these foremen with their

43:02

bowler hats will be

43:04

prominent figures in the Orange Order.

43:07

Now Lord Pirrie, interestingly, it's so

43:09

interesting that he has set himself apart from

43:11

that by backing home rule.

43:13

And of course, as the temperature does

43:16

rise, his support for home

43:18

rule becomes ever more controversial and

43:20

he's shunned by Belfast's Protestant

43:22

establishment. They see him as a quisling, as

43:24

somebody who's jumped into bed with the illegitimate

43:26

liberals over in London, who are trying to,

43:29

as they say, give their country away to

43:31

the Pope. Right. Okay, so

43:33

Dominic, that's the background to the building of this ship,

43:37

the Titanic. We've looked at

43:39

the transatlantic context. We've

43:41

looked at the specific context of the

43:43

city and the shipyard in which it

43:45

is built. And I think in our

43:47

next episode, let's look at the Titanic

43:49

itself. Let's look at why it gets

43:52

the name it does, how it's built, the

43:54

fittings, the crew, and we'll

43:56

get it out onto the ocean.

43:59

Okay. Yes. It's maiden and

44:01

what will prove its final voyage. Very

44:04

good. We will see you next time now. We

44:07

love a voyage on the Restless History Tom, don't

44:09

we? I see us very much

44:11

as the Captain Smith and the Charles

44:13

Lightholler. We are. We are.

44:15

We like to see ourselves as the as

44:17

the owner of the great ship that transports

44:19

people and we offer birth,

44:21

don't we, on this ship? We do.

44:24

We do. We love our crew. Now,

44:27

if you are a member of the Restless

44:29

History crew, that club, you can sign up

44:31

at the Restless History Tom. You can listen

44:33

to all our Titanic episodes instantly. No

44:35

need to wait. No need to make the Atlantic crossing.

44:38

So don't delay. Head to that website,

44:40

the Restless History Tom. Lift yourselves out

44:42

of steerage and we will see you next time

44:44

for the building of the Titanic. Then we'll get

44:46

into the cruise, the passengers and then minutes

44:49

by minutes, we will tell the story

44:52

of its voyage and the

44:54

unfolding disaster. It's rendezvous with

44:57

an iceberg. So on that note,

44:59

bye bye. Bye bye. Hi,

45:09

Restless History fans. If you want more Tom

45:11

Holland in your life and frankly, why wouldn't

45:13

you? I have some good

45:15

news for you. I'm Emily Dean and I'm

45:18

thrilled to say that this week, Tom is

45:20

a guest on my podcast, Walking the Dog,

45:22

where you get to hear well-known faces and

45:24

they're most relaxed because I talk to them

45:26

over a leisurely outdoor stroll with my dog,

45:28

Raymond. And you can join us this week

45:30

for a very special two part in-depth chat

45:33

with Tom Holland. And yes, I'm afraid I

45:35

did ask him this question. Tom, how

45:38

often do you think about the Roman Empire? I

45:40

think about it a huge amount. In fact, there

45:43

are days where I barely stop

45:45

thinking about it. My brain is

45:47

occupied by the Romans. It's like gall. If

45:50

you want to hear more of my chat with

45:52

Tom, give Walking the Dog a listen this week.

45:54

And while you're there, you can take your pick

45:56

from episodes starring the likes of Ricky Gervais, Jack

45:58

Whitehall and Jimmy Carr. What's that Raymond?

46:00

Yes, the rest is history. Did do an

46:02

episode all about the greatest dogs in history.

46:05

No you weren't in it. Most

46:07

spoiled dog in history maybe.