As I hail from Northern Ireland,
the RMS Titanic is part of my cultural history and one of early moments of
history I remember learning about in school.
The Titanic was built in Harland & Wolff Shipyard which is in
Belfast and the two cranes David and Goliath are part of the Belfast skyline.
Harland & Wolff are well
known for building great ships.
Unfortunately though the Titanic sank.
2012 marked 100 years since the ship sank and there many commemorations
for this event and some TV shows were made about it. One of these shows was “Titanic: Blood and
Steel” which I recently watched.
Titanic: Blood and Steel is a
series of 12 episodes and it was a slow burner to start off with but then it
got interesting. It is a show not just about the building of the Titanic –
there are plenty of other themes in it:
- Religion) especially the difference between Protestant and Catholic (only in Northern Ireland!!)
- Upper class v lower class
- Home Rule
- Trade Unions
- Politics
- Irish Republican Army
- Poverty
- Romance / Love
- Death
The show had some big names in
it:
- Derek Jacobi as Lord Pirrie – a leading Irish shipbuilder and businessman. He was Chairman of Harland & Wolff between 1895 and 1924. He was also Lord Mayor of Belfast between 1896 and 1898).
- Neve Campbell as Joanna Yeagar – a New York Journalist
- Chris Noth as J.P Morgan - an American financier and founder of the J.P Morgan bank. Another one of his ventures was International Mercantile Marine (IMM). One of the subsidiaries of IMM was White Star Line who were the owners of RMS Titanic. Morgan died in 1913, a year after the RMS Titanic sank.
The series follows the lives of
the shipbuilders, the financiers, the aristocratic families of Belfast and
those who worked in office posts at Harland & Wolff. Most of the characters are portrayals of real
people like Thomas Andrews, J. Bruce Ismay and Lord Pirrie etc. However, the central character Dr Mark Muir
is a fictional character (portrayed by Keven Zegers – a Zac Efron lookalike).
Dr Muir is an engineer and metallurgist (a person who specialises in
metal). He convinces J.P Morgan to hire
him to work on the Titanic and succeeds.
Dr Muir claims to be a Londoner
and speaks all posh. However, he is actually a native of Belfast and was born
Marcus Malone but changed his name to Mark Muir in order to hide his identity
and progress in his world of academia.
He tries to hide his heritage from his current employers Harland & Wolff
because he is a Catholic and his employers are Protestant elite that rule Belfast
and dislike Catholics.
When they find out that the real
identity of Dr Muir they sack him as he is Catholic and no Catholics should
ever be in management as apparently they are untrustworthy. However after the sister ship The Olympic
gets bashed in a crash, J.P Morgan insists Muir is brought back on the payroll
as he is the best at his job. The board
do not like this but as Morgan is financing the Titanic then what he says goes
and Dr Muir is rehired.
Dr Muir’s background isn’t the
only thing to annoy the Board. He also insinuates that the steel used by the
shipbuilding company were using was cheap steel, which apparently was a concern
for the real shipbuilders building the RMS Titanic. However, it has been documented that the
steel plates used were of good quality of that period of time. The reason why the Hull broke on impact with
the iceberg was not because of structural weakness but because the strains
imposed upon it were simply greater than any ocean liner was designed to
bear. And the hull only broke during the
last few minutes of the ship sinking.
Tensions rise between the lower
class workers and the rich elite which was due to sectarian discrimination as
Harland and Wolff hired predominantly Protestant workers and only a few
Catholics. Though in the programme it
shows that there were mostly equal numbers but in reality that is not
true. The Protestants did not want to
work alongside Catholics so the Catholics rioted against this.
In the series the riots are
apparently because of safety and wage issues, but Harland & Wolff’s wages
were considered fair. It is the sectarian tensions which were the driving force
of the rioting. These riots were a
setback for the construction of the Titanic, as were the workers wish to form a
Trade Union., the woman suffragettes movement in the UK and the battle between
pro Home Rule (a belief that all Ireland should remain an independent republic
and pro Unionist (the political union between Ireland & Great Britain).
When RMS Titanic was built Ireland
was all one country and only separated into Northern Ireland Southern Ireland
10 years after the Titanic sunk in 1922.
There are a many other historical
errors in the show mainly regarding the Olympic (the sister ship) which was
launched in October 1910 while the RMS Titanic was launched on May 2011.
There was a love story in the
series as well which was between Dr Muir and Sofia Silvestri (an Italian immigrant
and illustrator for Harland & Wolff).
Their relationship was up and down and in the end she had decided to go
to New York to make a career in design and he wanted to stay in Belfast.
The series ended with the maiden voyage
of the RMS Titanic which in reality was from Southampton to New York but in the
show it sailed from Belfast.
Many of the shows main character
board the RMS Titanic all ready for a new life in America. As they all boarded I wondered which ones
would have survived and which ones would perish. I felt like shouting at the TV, no don’t get
on the ship, it sinks!!
It was an interesting series,
quite addictive and one day I ended up watching five episodes in one day!
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