RMS Olympic

Olympic began as a conversation in mid-1907 between White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay and the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, whose International Mercantile Marine controlled the line. Cunard had just launched Lusitania and Mauretania, the fastest passenger ships in service, and the German lines were pressing hard. Ismay chose to compete on size and comfort rather than speed, proposing a class of liners bigger than anything that had gone before. A cost of £3 million was agreed for the first two ships, plus extras and Harland & Wolff's usual five per cent fee.

The ships were built at Queen's Island, Belfast, by Harland & Wolff, whose relationship with White Star dated back to 1867. Lord Pirrie, a director of both companies, oversaw the design, with naval architect Thomas Andrews as managing director of the design department, Edward Wilding calculating stability and trim, and chief draughtsman Alexander Carlisle handling general arrangements. When Ismay signed the letters of agreement on 31 July 1908, the lead ship had no name — she was simply Number 400, Harland & Wolff's four hundredth hull. Titanic, built to a revised version of the same design, was 401.

The yard combined three slipways into two larger ones so Olympic and Titanic could rise side by side. Olympic's keel was laid on 16 December 1908 and she was launched on 20 October 1910, her hull painted light grey so its lines would read clearly in black-and-white photographs. Three propellers drove her: two wing screws powered by triple-expansion engines and a central four-bladed screw turned by a turbine running on their exhaust steam — a combination tested on SS Laurentic and found more economical than either engines or turbines alone. She burned 650 tons of coal a day against 1,000 for Lusitania or Mauretania.

Olympic's maiden voyage left Southampton on 14 June 1911 under Captain Edward Smith, calling at Cherbourg and Queenstown and reaching New York on 21 June with 1,313 passengers. As the first of a new class of superliners she drew worldwide attention: over 8,000 visitors toured her in New York, and more than 10,000 spectators watched her depart. Thomas Andrews crossed with her, alongside Harland & Wolff's Guarantee Group watching for problems. Both Smith and Andrews would be aboard Titanic's maiden voyage the following year, and both went down with her.

Her first major mishap came on 20 September 1911, when the cruiser HMS Hawke struck her starboard side near the stern in the Solent, tearing two large holes and twisting a propeller shaft. Olympic flooded two watertight compartments yet returned to Southampton under her own power with no one seriously hurt. The Royal Navy blamed her, alleging her displacement had sucked Hawke into her side, and White Star bore heavy legal and repair costs. Yet surviving so serious a collision seemed to vindicate the class's design — and reinforced its 'unsinkable' reputation. Repairs at Belfast borrowed a propeller shaft from Titanic, delaying the younger sister's completion.

On the night of 14 April 1912, Olympic — now under Captain Herbert James Haddock — picked up Titanic's distress call some 505 miles away. Haddock set a new course and ordered full power, but about 100 nautical miles out came a message from Captain Rostron of the Carpathia: all boats accounted for, about 675 souls saved, Titanic foundered at 2:20 am. When Olympic offered to take on survivors, Rostron declined under orders from Ismay, who feared that boarding a virtual mirror-image of the lost ship would distress them. Olympic reached Southampton on 21 April with flags at half-mast, and her identical lifeboats, bulkheads and watertight doors were inspected for both the American and British inquiries.

That same month her firemen struck. Hurriedly fitted second-hand collapsible lifeboats — 40 of them, transferred from troopships — proved in many cases rotten, and 284 firemen refused to sail. Fifty-four sailors later left the ship rather than work with non-union replacements and were charged with mutiny; Portsmouth magistrates found the charges proven but discharged them without punishment, and White Star, fearing public opinion sided with the strikers, let them return.

In October 1912 White Star withdrew Olympic for a refit that built the Titanic disaster's lessons into her hull. Lifeboats rose from twenty to sixty-eight, an inner watertight skin doubled the hull along the boiler and engine rooms, five bulkheads were raised to B deck, and a seventeenth watertight compartment was added. She could now float with her first six compartments breached — the wound that had sunk her sister.

War overtook her in August 1914. On her last commercial crossing that October she answered distress signals from the battleship HMS Audacious, mined off Tory Island, taking off 250 of her crew and twice attempting a tow before the battleship blew up and sank. Admiral Jellicoe, anxious to suppress the news, held Olympic at Lough Swilly with her passengers aboard until 2 November. Requisitioned as a troopship in May 1915, armed with 12-pounders and 4.7-inch guns, she carried 6,000 soldiers at a time to Moudros for the Gallipoli campaign, and from 1916 trooped Canadians from Halifax — where she became a favourite symbol of the city — and later thousands of Americans.

In the early hours of 12 May 1918, carrying US troops through the English Channel under Captain Bertram Fox Hayes, Olympic sighted a surfaced U-boat 550 yards ahead. Her gunners opened fire and she turned to ram, her bow slicing through U-103's pressure hull just aft of the conning tower. The submarine's crew scuttled her; USS Davis picked up 31 survivors. It later emerged that U-103 had been preparing to torpedo Olympic but could not flood her stern tubes. Hayes received the DSO, and Olympic remains the only passenger liner to have rammed and sunk a U-boat in the First World War.

Across the war she is reported to have carried up to 201,000 troops and personnel, burned 347,000 tons of coal and steamed about 160,000 nautical miles — service that earned her the nickname 'Old Reliable' and her captain a knighthood in 1919 for valuable services in connection with the transport of troops. When she was drydocked at Belfast that August for her return to civilian trade, workmen found a dent with a crack at its centre below the waterline, later concluded to be the mark of a torpedo that had struck her and failed to detonate.

Restored and converted to oil firing in 1919 — cutting refuelling from days to hours and her engine-room complement from 350 to 60 — Olympic carried a record 38,000 passengers in 1921, the peak of her career. Through the 1920s she carried Marie Curie, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and the Prince of Wales; many passengers chose her precisely because she was nearly identical to Titanic. The Depression then halved Atlantic traffic, and newer rivals — Bremen, Europa, Rex, Île de France — took what remained. In 1933, her worst year, she carried just over 9,000 passengers.

On 15 May 1934, inbound to New York in heavy fog and homing on the radio beacon of the Nantucket Lightship LV-117, Olympic failed to turn in time and sliced through the smaller vessel, which sank with the loss of seven of her eleven crew. That same year White Star merged with Cunard, and the old express liners became redundant. Olympic left New York for the last time on 5 April 1935, having completed 257 Atlantic round trips and carried 430,000 commercial passengers.

She was sold for £97,500 to Sir John Jarvis MP, to be partially demolished at Jarrow expressly to provide work for the depressed Tyneside town. Her fittings were auctioned over ten days in November 1935; the remaining hulk went to Inverkeithing in 1937 for final demolition. Her chief engineer protested that 'the engines are as sound as they ever were'. Pieces of her survive — the first-class lounge fittings in the White Swan Hotel at Alnwick, panelling in Sheffield's Cutlers' Hall, her grand staircase clock at Southampton's SeaCity Museum, her bridge bell with the Titanic Historical Society in Massachusetts.