Andrews · 1912
Thomas Andrews on the Titanic
At twenty minutes to midnight on the night of Sunday the fourteenth of April 1912, on the four-hundred-mile mid-Atlantic crossing between the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Nantucket Lightship, the White Star Line's new flagship RMS Titanic, three days out of Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg on her starboard bow at a position approximately three hundred and seventy nautical miles south-south-east of Cape Race, Newfoundland. Aboard the ship was Thomas Andrews, thirty-nine years old, the Belfast-born managing director and chief designer at Harland & Wolff who had been the lead naval architect on the Titanic's design through the four years of her construction at the Queen's Island shipyard on the Lagan; he had sailed with the Guarantee Group of eight Harland & Wolff engineers to observe the maiden voyage and to note any final modifications required by the ship's operational performance. Andrews went forward to the bridge with Captain Edward Smith at five minutes after midnight on the fifteenth of April, inspected the forward damage with the Captain over the next ten minutes, calculated that the iceberg had ripped a three-hundred-foot gash along the starboard hull below the waterline that had penetrated the forward five watertight compartments, and informed the Captain at twenty-five past midnight that the ship would sink in approximately ninety minutes (his actual sinking-time estimate, recorded in the Mersey Inquiry transcript of June 1912, was an hour and a half from the moment of impact). The Titanic actually sank at two-twenty in the morning of the fifteenth of April, two hours and forty minutes after the impact, and slightly longer than Andrews's estimate on the strength of the slower-than-predicted flooding through the bulkheads. Andrews spent the next two hours moving through the ship organising the launch of the lifeboats and personally escorting passengers to the boats. He was last seen alive at approximately two-ten in the morning, ten minutes before the ship went down, standing alone in the first-class smoking room on A-deck, his Harland & Wolff naval-architect's lifejacket beside him on a chair, staring at the painting Approach to the New World over the smoking-room mantelpiece. His body was never recovered.
A ship is rarely lost in the way the Titanic was lost. Most maritime disasters of the late steam-shipping age happened in storm or in collision with other vessels or in the confined waters of an estuary. The Titanic struck a single iceberg in flat-calm mid-Atlantic water on a clear moonless night with the highest standard of contemporary navigational practice in operation, was the most-modern passenger liner in service, and was held by the popular press to be effectively unsinkable. The man who had designed her stood with the Captain on the bridge at five past midnight, calculated that she would be on the bottom by two-thirty, and went down with her.
THE COMBER FARM-BOY
Thomas Andrews was born at Ardara House at Comber in County Down on the seventh of February 1873, second son of the Right Honourable Thomas Andrews of Ardara, a substantial Comber linen-manufacturer and Liberal Unionist Privy Counsellor for Ireland, and Eliza Pirrie. The Pirrie connection was the central single fact of his career: his mother's brother Sir William Pirrie was the chairman of the Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff and was, by the time of Thomas's adolescence, the dominant single figure of the Belfast shipbuilding industry. Thomas was schooled at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution from twelve, was apprenticed to Harland & Wolff in May 1889 at sixteen as a Premium Apprentice (the standard family-connection apprentice grade for the sons of Harland & Wolff senior staff), and worked his way through the standard five-year shipyard rotation across the joinery shop, the cabinet shop, the iron-working shop, the engine-fitting shop and the naval-architecture drawing-office.
He completed the apprenticeship in 1894 in his twenty-first year and was retained as a junior draughtsman in the naval-architecture drawing-office under the chief designer Alexander Carlisle. He rose through the drawing-office across the next decade on the strength of his sustained engineering-and-administrative competence, was appointed Assistant Chief Designer in 1903 in his thirtieth year, and on Carlisle's retirement in 1907 was appointed Chief Designer and Managing Director of Harland & Wolff at thirty-four, the youngest Managing Director in the firm's history.
THE OLYMPIC-CLASS LINERS
He took up the Chief Designer position in the same year (1907) that his uncle Pirrie agreed in principle with the White Star Line chairman J. Bruce Ismay at the famous London dinner at Downshire House (the standard contemporary account in the Pirrie-Ismay correspondence) on the construction of three new transatlantic passenger liners of unprecedented scale, to be named Olympic, Titanic and Britannic, the Olympic-class of three sister-ships that would carry the White Star Line back to commercial competitiveness with the Cunard Line's new Lusitania and Mauretania of 1906 and 1907.
Andrews led the naval-architectural design of the Olympic-class across the four years 1907 to 1911. He produced the standard Olympic-class general arrangement (a four-funnel triple-screw passenger liner of approximately forty-six thousand tons displacement, eight hundred and eighty-two feet length overall, ninety-two feet beam, and a maximum passenger-and-crew capacity of three thousand five hundred), the watertight subdivision plan (sixteen watertight compartments separated by fifteen transverse bulkheads, of which any two adjacent compartments could be flooded without the ship losing buoyancy, the design parameter that produced the contemporary popular-press characterisation of the Olympic-class as effectively unsinkable), the propulsion plant (the triple-screw arrangement with two reciprocating-steam engines driving the wing-screws and a low-pressure turbine driving the central screw, on the standard Harland & Wolff Olympic-class steam-and-turbine combined-cycle plant), and the deck-and-cabin arrangement (the famous Olympic-class promenade-deck system with the Veranda Cafés, the Café Parisien, the Reading and Writing Room and the central First-class Dining Saloon on D-deck).
RMS Olympic was completed in May 1911 and entered transatlantic service the following month under Captain Edward Smith of the White Star Line (who had been the master of the Adriatic and was the most-senior captain in the White Star fleet). RMS Titanic was completed at the Queen's Island shipyard at Belfast on the second of April 1912, ran her sea-trials in Belfast Lough on the second of April, sailed from Belfast to Southampton on the third of April under Captain Smith, and embarked passengers at Southampton on Wednesday the tenth of April 1912 for the maiden voyage to New York via Cherbourg and Queenstown.
THE GUARANTEE GROUP
Andrews sailed with the Harland & Wolff Guarantee Group of eight engineers (the standard Harland & Wolff arrangement on the maiden voyage of any of the firm's major builds, by which the chief designer and a small team of senior engineers travelled on the maiden voyage to observe the ship's operational performance, take notes on any necessary modifications, and respond to any first-voyage technical issues). The Guarantee Group on the Titanic comprised Andrews himself and seven other Harland & Wolff engineers: Robert Chisholm (chief draughtsman), Anthony Frost (foreman fitter), William Henry Marsh Parr (chief draughtsman), Roderick Chisholm (assistant draughtsman), William Campbell (joiner), Alfred Cunningham (apprentice fitter), and Frank Parkes (apprentice plumber).
Andrews occupied cabin A-36 on the starboard side of A-deck, kept a working office of sorts at the Harland & Wolff plan-and-modification room on B-deck, and across the first four days of the voyage made detailed inspection rounds of every compartment of the ship from the boiler-room platforms in Boiler Room 6 forward to the navigation bridge. His daily walk through the ship (preserved in the surviving Guarantee Group inspection-log of the eleventh-to-fourteenth of April 1912) ran to approximately twelve miles per day. He noted recommended modifications including the addition of additional electric reading-lights in the first-class smoking room, the modification of the writing-room desk arrangement, and the installation of two further cigar-cabinets in the first-class lounge. He sent his last cable home to his wife Helen Reilly at Comber from the Titanic's Marconi station at six o'clock on the evening of the fourteenth of April.
THE NIGHT OF THE FOURTEENTH
He was in his cabin reviewing the ship-plans at twenty minutes to midnight on Sunday the fourteenth of April when the Titanic struck the iceberg. He felt the shudder of the impact from his cabin and the brief grinding contact along the starboard hull, dressed quickly, and went up to the bridge at five past midnight. Captain Smith met him at the bridge entrance. They went forward together with the standing-watch officer First Officer William Murdoch, took the report from the boatswain's mate of the forward damage, and went below to the forward compartments to inspect.
Andrews calculated the flooding rate from the visible damage at five-fifteen in the morning: the iceberg had ripped a three-hundred-foot gash along the starboard hull below the waterline that had penetrated the forward five watertight compartments. The Titanic's watertight subdivision design (his own design) could keep the ship afloat with any two adjacent compartments flooded, or with the forward four flooded, but not with the forward five. The mathematical implication was unambiguous: the ship would sink. He reported the conclusion to Captain Smith on the bridge at twenty-five past midnight: an hour and a half from impact, by my reckoning (the standard contemporary report by Second Officer Charles Lightoller at the Mersey Inquiry of June 1912).
He spent the next two hours moving through the ship organising the launch of the lifeboats. He personally walked the first-class cabin decks and the second-class cabin decks, knocking on cabin doors, telling passengers to put on lifejackets and go up to the boat deck. He personally escorted the passenger Sarah Daniels and her daughter, the maid Maria Penasco and the actress Dorothy Gibson to the lifeboat-stations. He worked with the chief steward to organise the orderly evacuation of the third-class steerage compartments below D-deck. By two o'clock in the morning the last of the twenty lifeboats had been launched.
THE FIRST-CLASS SMOKING ROOM
Andrews was last seen alive at approximately two-ten in the morning of the fifteenth of April 1912 by the first-class steward John Stewart. He was standing alone in the first-class smoking room on A-deck. The smoking room was empty (the male first-class passengers who would normally have been there had been organised onto the lifeboats by Andrews's own walk-through forty minutes earlier). His Harland & Wolff naval-architect's lifejacket was lying beside him on a chair. He was staring at the large oil painting Approach to the New World by the marine painter Norman Wilkinson over the smoking-room mantelpiece; the painting (a depiction of the steam-and-sailing ships of the late-nineteenth-century North Atlantic on the approach to the New York harbour-mouth) had been one of his own choices for the smoking-room decoration during the design phase of the Titanic at Belfast in 1910 to 1911. Stewart called to him by name from the doorway. Andrews did not turn. Stewart went out onto the boat-deck and was taken into lifeboat 15.
The Titanic went down by the head at two-twenty in the morning of the fifteenth of April 1912. The hull broke in two between the second and third funnels at approximately two-eighteen on the strength of the forward-trim load on the unsupported aft hull section; the bow section sank vertically into the North Atlantic at two-twenty; the stern section followed at two-twenty-two. Approximately one thousand five hundred passengers and crew (out of two thousand two hundred and twenty-four embarked) went down with her, the highest single death-toll in any peacetime maritime disaster in the history of the North Atlantic shipping trade. Thomas Andrews's body was never recovered. The Titanic Memorial at Comber (the small octagonal stone monument in the central square of his native town, unveiled by his widow Helen Andrews in 1914) carries the inscription IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY OF THOMAS ANDREWS, JUNIOR, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF HARLAND AND WOLFF, LIMITED, WHO LOST HIS LIFE IN THE WRECK OF S.S. TITANIC. The Andrews name in modern shipbuilding-and-maritime history carries the weight of the night of the fourteenth of April 1912.