by Brad Matsen
Wee Man was again an engineering apprentice. He graduated to the drawing office, married Sylvia, and bought a house outside town with a small down payment and a big mortgage. Among his chores was responding to requests from shipowners for plans, manuals, and other documents, most of which he filled as quickly as possible with the approval of the chief technical manager. There were also letters asking for information about Titanic, many of them poignantly written by relatives of the victims of the disaster. To these, McCluskie replied with a form letter that said, “The company is unable to assist you in obtaining the information you have requested.”
At the end of one day in an endless succession of days at the shipyard, McCluskie asked his boss if he could devote some of his time to researching questions about Titanic and writing answers to all those letters. His boss told him that Harland and Wolff would just as soon forget that Titanic had ever existed, but if McCluskie wanted to spend a few hours a week on the letter it was okay with him.
McCluskie opened storeroom doors that had been shut for decades. He found stacks and boxes of files, ledgers, and correspondence, none of it organized by topic, chronology, or hull number. There were at least a million individual drawings and plans for hundreds of ships, and thousands of photographs. He had always done his work at the shipyard as well as he possibly could, advancing upward through the ranks. But that was a job. Organizing the archive and answering letters about Titanic became a vocation. After Ballard and Michel found the wreck in 1985, the trickle of letters asking for information about Titanic increased to a torrent.
From 1968, when McCluskie returned to the shipyard, until 1986, when he submerged himself in the archive, Harland and Wolff had built only forty ships. The episodic downturns the company had weathered for a century had become a death spiral. Shipyards in Asia were building the same ships for half the price. Harland and Wolff hadn’t turned a profit in decades. It was no longer a privately held company but a heavily subsidized public corporation propped up with massive loans. The British government wanted nothing more than to unload it and, in 1989, finally succeeded, selling it for pennies on the dollar to Norwegian shipping magnate Fred Olsen, who changed the name to Harland and Wolff Holdings.
As Harland and Wolff staggered into the last decade of the twentieth century, maintaining the archive became a low priority. Hoping to justify its existence, McCluskie turned his office into a small business, selling copies of the plans, memorabilia, and photographs. He launched a collaboration with local manufacturers to produce a line of merchandise evoking the golden age of ships and shipbuilding. The Harland and Wolff Maritime Collection featured bone china, crystal glasses, linens, and silverware in the patterns of the White Star Line.
In 1994, McCluskie got a call from Los Angeles.
“We want to rebuild Titanic for a movie,” the speaker said. His name was Peter Lamont, and he was a production designer working for producer-director James Cameron. “We want you to help us.”
By then, McCluskie had gotten used to calls asking for advice and help with fantastic schemes. He was skeptical, but something in Lamont’s voice signaled a higher grade of confidence than the crackpots and wannabes. McCluskie agreed to meet him in Belfast.
“Would tomorrow be convenient?” Lamont asked. “I can be on the first flight this morning.”
The next day, Lamont made a deal with Harland and Wolff to borrow McCluskie as a technical adviser. The moviemakers would pay his salary and expenses; the company would give him a leave of absence. Because of the eight-hour time difference between Belfast and the West Coast of the United States, McCluskie worked at night from home, checking e-mailed scenes and photographs of sets for accuracy. Near the end of his work on the film, Lamont sent him a scene in which two men in the engine room were brewing tea using steam from one of the boilers. Lamont called it a thumbprint. He and Cameron had remembered McCluskie telling them how the engineers made tea, and left the scene in the movie as a private thank-you for his contribution to their work.
McCluskie was celebrated by historical societies, moviemakers, and shipping buffs, but his life inside Harland and Wolff deteriorated into a bitter conflict with its chief executive. For a while, McCluskie’s resurrection of the archive did not rise high enough in the bureaucracy to attract attention from the top. Fred Olsen, the new owner, had installed a seasoned industrial pro, Per Nielsen, to preside over the winding down of the shipyard and the emergence of Harland and Wolff Holdings as a real estate development company. Nielsen was infuriated by McCluskie. Reminding people that Harland and Wolff had built the notorious ship that killed hundreds of innocent men, women, and children was corporate suicide, not a point of pride. McCluskie’s Maritime Collection was a bad idea, too, making a heavy industrial corporation look like an amateur museum.
Once Nielsen figured out what McCluskie was doing, Wee Man knew it was only a matter of time before Harland and Wolff would pitch him out the door. He began negotiating with the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland to find a permanent home for the archive’s treasures.
In the spring of 1997, McCluskie was promoting a gala to celebrate the Belfast screening of Cameron’s Titanic. He wanted to set up tents and hold the afterparty on the site of the slipway where the ship had been built, and invite people to come in period costumes to mingle with movie stars. Nielsen killed the party. “It wouldn’t make us any money,” he told a newspaper reporter. “It was a side issue to the main job of building ships and keeping the company going.”
Later that year, McCluskie and Nielsen got into a screaming fight. McCluskie had retrieved the Canberra’s builder’s plate from the breakers’ yard, a priceless artifact that McCluskie wanted to install in the shipyard as a monument. Nielsen ordered him to put it in storage.
Two days later, Wee Man’s war with Nielsen ended. After working late, McCluskie left his office, drove home, stretched out on the sofa with a bad headache, and had a stroke that left him paralyzed and blind in one eye. It took him three years to relearn how to speak, move his arms, and walk. For six months, Harland and Wolff paid him half his salary. After that, he got nothing. In 2000, at the age of fifty, he asked for his job back. Not a chance, Nielsen told him. Take your pension. You’re done.
When McCluskie emerged from the international arrivals hall at Boston’s Logan Airport, Roger Long’s heart sank. The jockey-sized old man carrying a satchel was balding, with a comb-over and thick, arched, dark eyebrows, and he walked with the hesitant gait of exhaustion. His skin tone was only a shade away from the white of his sport coat. Long was afraid that the man he was hoping would fill the hole in his theory was going to keel over before he ever had a chance to talk to him.
A half hour later, after checking into their hotel near the airport, Long took McCluskie to dinner. The Italian restaurant was dark, aromatic, and packed with families and couples on dates. Long ordered a beer and chicken cacciatore. McCluskie ordered water and spaghetti.
McCluskie would do an interview the next day in front of a camera, but Long couldn’t wait.
Tom, I want to hear what you have come to tell me, he said. You know what we think happened to the ship from our e-mails and the stuff I sent you. What we can’t figure out is how it could have been so weak.
Long’s blunt question transformed McCluskie. The exhausted, timid man from the airport was replaced by a pedant who confidently explained himself.
It’s the stroke, he said. When I’m tired, people tell me I look like I’m drunk or very sick. But I get little bursts of energy.
To begin with, McCluskie said in answer to Long’s question, Thomas Andrews saw Olympic’s hull panting during sea trials.
Long knew exactly what that meant. The hull of a steel ship is in constant motion, flexing, bending, and even doing what Andrews had called panting, with the sides of the hull moving in and out. The motion is rarely visible to the unaided eye. It was a question of degree.
How do you know? Long asked.
McCluskie had read everything. He talked about Andrews’s adding steel to Titanic’s superstructure, the cracks in the hulls of both ships, the dismal condition of the bow plates and rivets after Hawke collided with Olympic. Pirrie, Andrews, Ismay, Wilding, and everybody else at Harland and Wolff had had no idea whether Olympic and Titanic were strong enough to hold together at sea.
They were cultural egomaniacs, McCluskie said, as if he were personally offended by all of them. They thought they could do anything they wanted to do, build anything as big as they wanted it to be.
As McCluskie had gotten to know Titanic, its builders, and its owners, he’d found himself unable to ignore the monumental hubris of the age. Inventors and builders had entered the nineteenth century using only their own and animal power, with a little help from wind and water—the same things they had used for millennia. They had entered the twentieth century with capacities for transportation, production, and manufacturing multiplied a thousandfold by the power of machines. It was regrettable, but completely understandable, if shipbuilders thought they could make ships as big as they wanted them to be.
Pirrie, Andrews, and Wilding had simply scaled up the hull of Oceanic and much smaller ships, doing their strength calculations with pencils. Long knew that engineering a hull was never a matter of merely putting more steel into it; the trick was to use just enough. It was easy to be wrong. In fact, it was a miracle if one was right. Titanic was nowhere near as strong a ship as it would have had to be for the high-angle-break theory to be true.
Why are you talking to me about this now, Tom? Long asked.
I’m tired of carrying it around in me, McCluskie said. After the stroke, every day might be my last.
The next morning, Roger Long and a video crew were set up in Bill Lange’s conference room at Woods Hole. McCluskie looked rested and relaxed. John Chatterton was due sometime that morning; Richie Kohler was at home with his children.
“Okay, Tom,” Long began. “Let’s start with what you said Thomas Andrews observed during Olympic’s sea trials. What you told me at dinner last night.”
“You don’t design two sister ships, you design one,” McCluskie said. “Then you use the same set of plans to build both of them. On the Titanic drawings, over which I have spent many hours, you can see lots of changes made by Thomas Andrews after he discovered design flaws during Olympic’s sea trials, things that could have been done better or been done differently.”
McCluskie went into far more detail than he had over dinner the night before. After Andrews noticed that the hull was panting during Olympic’s sea trials, he worried that the hull wasn’t stiff enough. White Star had scheduled Olympic to sail on its first crossing immediately, so Andrews couldn’t change anything right then. But he could, and did, add steel bracing to Titanic, particularly in the bow and the superstructure of the front of the ship. The most dramatic change he made to Titanic was enclosing the promenade deck with steel. White Star said it was to turn the promenade into a small restaurant, but that wasn’t true. It was to stiffen the ship. There was a tremendous amount of vibration in that part of Olympic, so Andrews tried to stop it on Titanic. He also added reinforcing steel to Titanic at the bottom where the double bottom met the main hull.
Roger Long managed to stay in his chair, but he felt like doing cartwheels around the room. If Olympic had been panting and cracking in calm seas, it must have been right on the edge of coming apart.
“What about the possibility that the ship broke up on the surface, and that it would have stayed afloat a lot longer if it had not?” Long asked.
“At the inquiry, Harland and Wolff did not offer any opinion about the ship breaking up on the surface,” McCluskie said, his voice stronger and more assertive than ever. “They avoided the question. However, from private documentation within the company which I saw many times, they determined that it was very likely that the ship had broken in half. It was never made public.”
After Harland and Wolff’s confidential investigation determined that Titanic had probably broken up on the surface, McCluskie said, they had come to a horrible conclusion. Using estimates of the amount of water flooding into the ship through its damaged bow, they calculated that if Titanic had not broken, it would have remained afloat for three to three and a half hours. Plenty of time for half-empty lifeboats to return, or for Carpathia to arrive.
John Chatterton, who had come in a few minutes earlier, tapped Long on the shoulder and whispered, “Am I hearing what I think I’m hearing?”
McCluskie glanced at Chatterton, paused, and went on.
“No one at the inquiry asked the right questions,” he said. “Edward Wilding, who testified on behalf of Harland and Wolff, had been instructed to volunteer nothing.”
One of the first disturbing pieces of evidence McCluskie had found in his exploration of the Harland and Wolff archive was in the design notes. Andrews had specified 1¼-inch plate for the Olympic-class hulls, but Ismay had told Andrews that the ship had to be built lighter than his original design. He had calculated that the hull needed to be 1¼-inch steel to have an acceptable degree of strength. White Star had insisted that all they really needed under the Board of Trade rules was 1-inch steel. Harland and Wolff managers would have known that the lesser thickness of steel would have weakened the hull, but they did what the customer wanted them to do. If Andrews had built the ship he’d wanted to build, things probably would have turned out a lot differently.
“Roger, I have to ask you now, on the record with the cameras rolling,” McCluskie said, sounding like an interrogator instead of an interview subject. “Have you seen the internal memos and design notes which describe how Harland and Wolff thought Titanic broke up?”
“Absolutely not,” Long answered, obviously taken aback by the question out of the blue.
“Well, when I saw your analysis, I was sure that you had seen these memos. I was charged for years with keeping them secret, and that would have meant that I had failed. As far as I know, they have never been seen outside of Harland and Wolff. The scenario you reverse engineered was very, very, very close to what Harland and Wolff already knew in 1912.”
After Harland and Wolff’s internal investigation, Pirrie and Ismay had decided on their own to retrofit Olympic with a double hull, build Britannic with a double hull, and redesign the expansion joints and other weak points in the ships. There was no law that required them to do that. Titanic had perfectly conformed to the regulations of the British Board of Trade.
“What about the Board of Trade inquiry?” Long asked.
“It was a whitewash to reassure the world that British ships were safe,” McCluskie said. “Harland and Wolff didn’t want people to think their ships were substandard, which they certainly weren’t, according to the law. But it would be easy for people to think that they were if Harland and Wolff had revealed everything they knew.”
After McCluskie’s confirmation of Long’s theory about the sinking, and his allegation that Harland and Wolff had covered up the probability that Titanic was a weak ship, Chatterton and Kohler could think about little else but returning to the wreck. A week after the Woods Hole revelations, their hopes were dashed when the Russian government recalled Keldysh and the Mirs, canceling all Titanic charters for the foreseeable future.
Chatterton and Kohler had lost their return to Titanic, but they could still get to Britannic, which lay off the coast of Greece in 400 feet of water and was reachable by scuba. If Pirrie and Ismay had pushed the envelope of strength too far when they’d built Olympic and Titanic, the changes they’d made to Britannic would reveal what they thought was wrong with the first two sisters.
Sixteen
BRITANNIC
The night Titanic sank, the first of Britannic’s frames was rising from its keel on the slipway at Harland and Wolff. After two months of mourning and indecision, Pirrie and Ismay agreed to complete the hull but to wai
t to outfit the ship until there was a chance that passengers would have forgotten enough about Titanic to buy tickets on its sister. Britannic went into the river Lagan with no fanfare in February 1914, after which it lay derelict at the dock for more than a year. When the war began, Pirrie finished it with money from the Admiralty. His Majesty’s Hospital Ship Britannic left Belfast painted bright white with three giant red crosses on each side.
At dawn on November 21, 1916, Britannic was steaming south of Athens on its way to pick up British wounded in Turkey when it struck a mine that had been laid across its path by a German submarine. The explosion blew a hole in the starboard side a hundred feet from the bow. Britannic’s captain steered at full speed toward the island of Kéa, six miles away, reckoning that his best chance was beaching the ship. The decision to beach a crippled ship is instinctive to a seasoned mariner in sight of land, but it was a mistake. Britannic flooded much more quickly as it plowed ahead than it would have had it stopped dead immediately. Thirty minutes after the mine exploded, the foredeck was underwater. Kéa was still two and a half miles away.
The captain ordered the lifeboats launched to evacuate the 1,067 crew members and medical staff. Where Britannic stopped, the channel was only 400 feet deep, so the bow of the 882-foot liner hit the bottom while more than half of the ship was above the surface. Britannic’s three gigantic propellers were still revolving, creating a vortex that sucked in the fleeing lifeboats as soon as they were lowered to the sea. The deadly situation was immediately obvious to the experienced sailors in command of the boats, who ordered the doctors, nurses, and orderlies to jump for their lives. Most obeyed and were able to paddle away from the crackling, thundering mass of the sinking ship. Thirty men and women died under the propellers when their boats were smashed to matchsticks. The Aegean in November is warm. Greek fishermen and passing warships rescued 1,037 men and women who had survived the ordeal of abandoning ship into the lifeboats, and then abandoning their lifeboats for the open sea.
