12 PORTS: BELFAST – TITANIC HARBOUR

The history of Belfast Port is the story of the ingenuity and dogged determination of the local merchants, engineers and others who turned a mud-locked inlet into a world-class harbour, carving for itself an historic and unique niche in the maritime heritage of the British Isles.

The first-known sea chart of the area dates from 1570 and depicts the inlet as “Carrickfergus Lough”, because of the trading pre-eminence of the town of Carrickfergus, a few miles north of Belfast.

However, by 1613 when Lord Chichester, on behalf of King James I, gave Belfast the status of a corporate borough he permitted the establishment of a small port there, mainly to raise taxes for the Crown. Sadly, very little progress was made until the local merchants established a Ballast Board in 1785. There was little enough money available, but in 1791 William Ritchie arrived from Scotland with six jobbing carpenters to build wooden vessels, and eventually employed 118 workers.

The real break-through began when the Ballast Board members were given legal permission to begin cutting through the bends in the muddy inlet, which became known as Belfast Lough. The Royal assent was granted by the newly-crowned Queen Victoria in 1837, and money was raised to pay for the work.

A prominent Irish railway contractor William Dargan was appointed to make two cuts in the muddy channel, and by 1849 the access to the open sea was completed – just in time for Queen Victoria’s one and only visit to Belfast.

During the long months of arduous work in forming the new channel, Dargan’s workers dumped the mud (which he called ‘the stuff’) into the mouth of the harbour to form “Dargan’s Island.” When the Queen came to Belfast the grand new inlet was named, appropriately, Victoria Channel, and Dargan’s Island became known as “Queen’s Island”. It was here that the impressive new iron ships were built, and given the dynamism of men like Sir Edward Harland and Gustav Wolff, the Harland and Wolff shipyard became one of the finest in the world.

One of the  most significant developments of this period was the establishment in 1847 of the Belfast Harbour Board, most of whose members had served on the old Ballast Board. The new Harbour Board, whose members had the title of Harbour Board Commissioners, was responsible for running all aspects of the Harbour and the estate, and generations of Commissioners have continued in this role up to the present day.

Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, Harland and Wolff built a host of outstanding vessels. These included a range of trans-Atlantic liners which took many of thousands of Irish emigrants to North America during that period of mass migration from Europe to the New World, and in return brought back large quantities of mail as a lucrative cargo. As the success of H&W grew, they added the outstanding entrepreneur William James Pirrie to the top management team.

The achievements of the Belfast shipyard were all the more remarkable because of the lack of local coal and steel in Ireland, both of which had to be imported from outside the island. Significantly, this gap in essential shipbuilding materials was overcome by the dedication of the Belfast workforce and their leaders.

By the end of the 19th century, Belfast was one of the greatest cities in the British Isles, and even more important than Dublin, to the latter’s chagrin. The commercial success of the City was marked by the elegant extension to the Harbour Office in 1896 and also by the magnificent City Hall in 1906, both of which were completed by the local firm H&J Martin. Belfast was “no mean city” and the inhabitants were keen to underline this to the world at large.

Sadly, however, within two decades or so, everything had changed for the worse. The  magnificent Olympic Class liners, the brainchild of William Pirrie and J. Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line, to compete with Cunard, was launched in style in 1910 with the RMS Olympic who sailed on her maiden voyage  in June 1911. Tragically, however, her successor RMS Titanic made the wrong kind of maritime history when she hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York in April 1912 and sank with the loss of over 1500 lives.

The loss of the Titanic has never ceased to fascinate generations of people since then, but for nearly 100 years she was not talked about in Harland and Wolff’s or in Belfast generally. This was partly because people felt, illogically, that her sinking was the fault of the shipyardmen who built her. It was treated like a death in the family.

Curiously it was only with the discovery of Titanic’s wreck, and the worldwide success of James Cameron’s blockbuster movie, that Northern Irish people began to feel they could begin to talk openly about the vessel. There was even a hint of dark Belfast humour in the production of t-shirts for the increasing number of tourists who came to Belfast. The front of each T-shirt had a picture of the Titanic, and on the back was the legend “She was alright when she left us.”

The Belfast shipyard Harland and Wolff and a smaller shipyard Workman, Clark & Co. achieved significant production in the First World War era, but the intervening post-war years up until the Second World War were difficult for shipping and shipbuilding partly due to the worldwide depression. However the Belfast Commissioners continued dredging, and completed a new airport and runway on the Harbour Estate just in time for the outbreak of the Second World War, during which the famous flying boats of Short & Harland Ltd also operated from Belfast. The Harbour played a crucial role in keeping open the maritime lifeline with America, despite the horrendous Luftwaffe attacks on Belfast in 1941.

After the Second World War, Harland and Wolff continued to build world-class vessels but their efforts were inevitably doomed to failure, despite generous Government backing, because of stiff competition from world shipyards elsewhere. The economic realities of building great ships in Belfast was underlined by the launch in 1960 of Canberra, described as the “greatest British ship since the war”, but its builders H&W lost 1.2 millions sterling on the contract. The company somehow has managed to survive and diversify, but at a greatly reduced level.

Meanwhile throughout the decades of war and peace, the Belfast Harbour Commissioners have continued to maintain high levels of commitment and development within the Harbour Estate. This has been helped greatly in recent years by a huge influx of tourists and cruise liners, by the completion of the Titanic Centre on the site where the great ship was built, and by the growth of an impressive film industry where large parts of the iconic Game of Thrones and other major productions were filmed in the Belfast Harbour Estate, bringing its name to a worldwide audience.

The Harbour also remains well-placed technologically to make the best advantage of the entrepreneurial and other opportunities arising in the modern post-Brexit world, and the Harbour Board’s Chief Executive Joe O’Neill announced recently their investment drive to create 10,500 jobs and to help boost Northern Ireland’s economy. Mr O’Neill stated recently in the Belfast Telegraph “There is the emergence of Belfast as an attractive city, and people are always looking at new markets.”

The qualities of hard work, courage and ingenuity which led to the establishment and development of Belfast Harbour from a muddy inlet in the 16th and 17th centuries to the world-class port it is today are summarized by the distinguished Irish historian Dr Jonathan Bardon who noted in his unsurpassed book History of Ulster: “Many other ports in Ireland and Britain had similar problems to those of Belfast, but few had men as tenacious as members of the Harbour Board. Without their determination, Belfast might not have become one of the greatest ports in Western Europe, and certainly the city would not have become the home for a time of the largest shipyard in the world.”