How Irish is the Titanic
story? As the 100th
anniversary of the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic approaches—April 15, 2012, this essay will explore the
fated ship’s Irish connections. Clearly not Irish is the actual
sinking of the Titanic, unless we
give credence to the stories of curses placed on the vessel because of the
employment bias in its construction.
Well known is that the Titanic
collided with an iceberg in the mid-Atlantic on the “Night to Be Remembered,”
April 14, 1912, sinking the next morning.
Ownership of the Titanic, the
White Star Line, was American since 1902 and management was British. A J.P. Morgan company was the majority owner of
the vessel; indeed, Morgan had a stateroom especially built for him on the ship
but cancelled his passage on the maiden voyage owing to illness. He escaped the death at sea suffered by other
wealthy people like John Jacob Astor. The ship, according to testimony at a United
States Senate hearing, was travelling far too fast in a sea in which there were
icebergs identified and reported on by other ships in the general area. Trying to avoid an iceberg that had been observed
by the watch on deck, the Titanic
sustained a 300 foot gash amidships, an injury that destined the ship to rest
at the bottom of the Atlantic. No Irish
were involved in the decisions which led to the fatal crash.  Nor was anyone Irish charged with
the decisions which made the Titanic
sinking such an unmitigated disaster. For example, it was a corporate decision
to urge maximum speed from the great ship in its competition with Cunard and
German ocean liners for the trans-Atlantic passenger traffic. It
was British management which decided to put lifeboat seats for 1178 passengers
on a vessel carrying 2223 passengers and crew [Senate investigation number]. The
fact that the lifeboats were not filled even close to capacity [706, 711, 712
are three of the estimates of lifeboat passengers] reflects again on the
leadership aboard ship, none Irish.
A word about the numbers associated with the Titanic disaster: Depending on the source, the total number of
people on the Titanic is reported as high
as 2265 and as low as 2201. The number
who lost their lives also varies among official reports: 1517 [Senate]; 1503 [British Board of Trade];
1490 [British Enquiry]. Since we are citizens of the land
into which we are born, the Titanic
is Irish by birth, not a citizen of an independent Ireland—that would happen in
1922—but, nonetheless, born in an Irish city, Belfast. She was built by Irish laborers and mechanics
at the Harland & Wolff shipyards.
The Irish who built the Titanic
were almost entirely Protestant Irish.
The lot of the Roman Catholic working class in Belfast was not a happy
one in the time of the Titanic and
before and after the Titanic, for
that matter. The tenor of intolerance in
Ulster in that time can be gauged in the sermon of Dr. William McKean on Ulster
Day, September 28, 1912: The Irish question is at bottom a war
against Protestantism; it is an attempt to establish a Roman Catholic
ascendency in Ireland…. Stephanie
Barczewski’s book on the Titanic underscores
that Irish Catholics were blocked from many of the better jobs in Ulster. She writes,
“Almost all… workers were Protestant… defending their privileges… from the
flood of predominantly Catholic emigrants pouring into Belfast.” In 1912, she reports, the Catholic Irish held
9% of the jobs in shipbuilding and engineering but were 24% of the
population. Tracing conflict back to
1864, Barczewski relates an incident in which Harland & Wolff shipwrights demanded
the dismissal of all Catholic navvies who attended the unveiling of a statue of
Daniel O’Connell in Dublin. Harland
rebuffed the demands. Home Rule
agitation, in 1886, led to shipbuilders loyal to the Orange Order roaming the
streets of Belfast armed with scraps of metal pipe in Catholic neighborhoods. The Catholics in the shipyard were so worried
for their safety that, of the 225 Roman Catholics employed in the shipyard at
that time, 199 quit over fear for their lives.
In the decades of the Titanic,
the police found the H&W yards so dangerous that they were reluctant to
enter through the gates. Three months
after the Titanic launching, Unionist
workers evicted all Roman Catholics from the yards in retaliation for an attack
on a Presbyterian Sunday School outing by Roman Catholics. The anti-Catholic atmosphere at Harland &
Wolff assured that few Irish Catholic laborers helped to construct the Titanic. The more recent history of
Harland & Wolff’s employment policies is easier to quantify than it was in
the time of the Titanic owing to
reporting requirements. Jonathan Bardon
in his History of Ulster, says, “… hard
evidence [of discrimination in private employment] is available for the 1970s
onward.” That evidence shows four
hundred Roman Catholics in a workforce of 10,000 at Harland & Wolff in 1970. The Fair Employment Agency’s records in 1978
show only 4.8% of employees in Shipbuilding and Engineering were Catholic. There is no doubt that the Titanic was built by an Irish work
force, an Irish work force more attracted to the Orange than the Green. Owing to Harland & Wolff’s
biased hiring practices which kept Irish Catholics from working on the Titanic, many stories and legends
sprang from the sinking of the unsinkable
Titanic. One is that one of those
few Catholic workers painted “Let God sink this vessel if he can” on the side
of the Titanic. Seems this painter did not have a belief in an
omnipotent god. Another is the “No Pope”
legend. It goes like this: The vessel’s registry number—3909 04—if
written in longhand and looked at in a mirror will read “No Pope.” This legend
embodies the hope of the injured parties that H&W’s discriminatory hiring
policies would be met with retribution. Some
call this legend the Curse of the Titanic.
In fact, the Titanic had never had
the No Pope number assigned to it. Its
registry was 131,428 and its yard number was 401. So much for the Curse. There is also a
message in a bottle story related to the Titanic. Jeremiah Burke of Cork, who did not survive
the tragedy, is said to have put a note in a holy water bottle: “From
Titanic. Good Bye all.” The bottle, the
story goes, washed up on shore a year later near his home in Cork. These stories have a wonderful Irish feel
about them. The last landfall seen by
passengers on the Titanic was
Ireland. After embarking passengers at Southampton
and Cherbourg, the Titanic took on
passengers at Cobh (called Queenstown then).
The list of the Queenstown passengers reads like a list of the members
of the Irish Cultural Society—three Kellys; three Murphys; six Rices; a
McCormack and an O’Connell, and so on.
These 113 Irish passengers were a part of the total steerage list of
approximately 712 passengers. Only
thirty-four of the 113 Irish were rescued, one being Ellen Shine, grandmother
of Christine Quinn, President of the New York City Council. Was there discrimination against the Irish as
the vessel was being evacuated? Probably
not. But class distinction, steerage
vis-à-vis first class, most likely affected the rescue effort. 62% of first class passengers were rescued
while only 25% of steerage survived. The
rescue effort’s chief goal was women and children first regardless of
ethnicity. Unlike the bias in the
building of the Titanic, there was no
anti-Irish bias in the tragic mismanagement of the rescue effort.  How Irish do movies make the Titanic story? In the film “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,”
about the only Irish touch is Margaret’s father’s brogue and her Huck Finnish
Tom-boy portrayal by Debbie Reynolds.
About the only Irish in the 1953 “Titanic” is a defrocked, alcoholic
priest, played by Richard Basehart, returning to America. He finds his inner priest in the last hours
of the sinking. In “A Night to Remember”
(1958), there is a realistic Irish village scene of a priest and the community
seeing parishioners off on their voyage to America, and in steerage scenes, the
audience sees many Irish faces, the performance of a jig, and hears Irish music
and lyrics. The blockbuster James
Cameron “Titanic” is the most Irish of the Titanic
films. Irish music plays as Leonardo
DiCaprio runs to catch the about-to-depart Titanic. Molly Brown, played by Kathy Bates, is an
important figure in the film. There is a
lengthy scene of a céilí in steerage with a lively jig, tin whistles, a bodhrán,
pipes and a squeeze box adding to the Irish flavor of the scene complimented by
pints of Guinness. This film, owing to
its popularity, has probably done more to write an Irish chapter into the Titanic story than any other influence. In this Narrowback’s family, the Titanic story was not a part of our oral
history. We heard plenty about the Black
and Tans, the great sport of hurling, Eamon deValera, the Shannon Scheme, holy
wells, how to read tea leaves, turf, but no Titanic. Surely, in April 1912 the newspapers in
County Galway and County Clare published the tragic news of the sinking of a
great ship bound for America, but the readers might have been more interested
in the mysterious death of a cow or the results of the football matches. Only many years later did this writer learn
that the Titanic was built in
Ireland, something to be proud of. Even
later, as a researcher for an article in an Irish-American newsletter, did the
writer learn of the job discrimination against Irish Catholics in the Harland
& Wolff shipyards. No one in our
Irish ghetto in Brooklyn spoke about the Titanic;
apparently, no one’s descendents earned any sweat equity by working on the Titanic.
Surely, some of us who are descendents of Irish Catholic immigrants heard
something about the Titanic from
their parents.... But for me, the story of
the Titanic is a great tragedy; a
historic event which merits attention on the 100th anniversary of
another reminder of human fallibility…. But not an Irish tragedy.
(Written by John Walsh) |