How can the Titanic be celebrated?

2011-06-02 00:08:48

31 May 2011 Last updated at 11:53 Share this page Delicious Digg Facebook reddit StumbleUpon Twitter Email Print Titanic: How can a disastrous ship be celebrated?   Continue reading the main story In today's Magazine Does the Queen do fashion? 10 of your Vidal Sassoon cuts How hard do you work? The cult of lawn

More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic sank. So why is the centenary of its launch being proudly celebrated in Northern Ireland, asks Tom de Castella.

No other ship comes close to rivalling the gigantic shadow cast by the Titanic. A hundred years after its completion, it's still the most iconic vessel to have set sail.

Its tragic maiden voyage has become shorthand for catastrophic hubris - the "unsinkable" ship that hit an iceberg and sank, causing the deaths of 1,503 passengers and crew. And yet in one corner of the UK, the Titanic is a byword not for disaster but a source of pride and nostalgia.

When its hull was launched at Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard on 31 May 1911, it was the largest ship in the world, measuring 886ft (270m) long.

And in Northern Ireland that's where the story ends, says Mick Fealty, editor of the news site Slugger O'Toole.

Continue reading the main story What went wrong Iceberg caused a series of irregular openings in hull along the rivet line Ship designed to withstand four compartments being flooded Iceberg caused five compartments to flood, a sixth took water onboard but the pumps managed to control it But bulkheads did not extend to the deck above, meaning that they weren't watertight Titanic's sister ship Olympic later recalled to Belfast and given a double-skinned hull and raised bulkheads Source: Maritime historian and Titanic expert Michael McCaughan

Rather than a maritime disaster, the Titanic is an engineering triumph. There's a common Belfast joke, says the Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, that taps into this feeling: "It was fine when it left us."

Behind the joking there's a serious point, Fealty says. The shipyards in those days employed tens of thousands of workers while Belfast also had the world's largest rope works and the huge textile machinery firm Mackies.

"The pride is about looking back to the golden days. The Titanic was the pinnacle of Belfast's industrial glory," he says. This was in the days before partition when the majority Protestant city wore industrialisation as a badge of pride, differentiating itself from the agrarian, Catholic and rural south.

"Its industrialism was a real exception on the island of Ireland. Dublin was Edinburgh to Belfast's Glasgow," says Fealty.

Not only that, its industrial might made Belfast a crucial partner in the British empire, says Jonathan Tonge, professor of politics at Liverpool University. "Many northern Irish Protestants say the empire was built on the Northern Irish ship building industry."

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