Titanic Celebrations are in sight.
Belfast’s first Titanic Nomadic Convention and its fifth Titanic:Made in Belfast Festival are on their way and Lagan Legacy will be there in force!
In Celebration of The Seeds of Shipbuilding Sown down the Centuries.Belfast Newsletter. 22 Feb. 2007.
There's an immense amount of work going on at the moment in preparation for Belfast's
first "Titanic Nomadic Convention" and fifth "Titanic Made in Belfast Festival". The two packed programmes of events kick off on the 6th and 7th April 2007 respectively. The city is also getting into gear for the centenary of the great White Star liner herself in 2012. This promises to be an event of enormous proportions which will doubtlessly be a historic occasion of major international interest.
I'm not sure we're properly aware of the significance and stature of this hastily approaching and awesome anniversary. The plans and blueprints for the occasion are mind-bogglingly massive. This is no face lift - it's a body transplant; a breathtaking change for a city that until recently was known worldwide only for its terrorism, tragedy and destruction.
Lagan Legacy's barge arriving from Amsterdam to be prepared for the Festival and Convention in April.
The transformation from bleak backwater to cultural capital has been orchestrated by a host of humble residents who never lost hope, and kept things going, against all the odds; many of them remain anonymous. Retailers who kept their doors open for business, churches that probed for peaceful solutions and nurtured faith and truth, and the whole social and economic infrastructure that often heroically provided for travel, health, security and communications. The unsung services that afforded the country a will to live and a hold on hope were bestowed by "ordinary folk" who respected life, and loved the place where they lived; which thankfully included the Lagan.
The Lagan Today, still busy after all these years.
We're here today with a bright tomorrow due to decades of seed sowing by people devoted to harvesting progress. Seeds generally grow in the dark, and so it is with our great maritime heritage. Whilst Belfast today prepares for its two imminent maritime events, and its major maritime festival in 2007, the city is cashing in on the wise investments made years ago and often unknowingly. Similarly, when the four funnelled focus of all these festivities floated into history in 1911, a chain of events had previously evolved which few noticed, and even fewer remember today.
It isn't too difficult to verify shipbuilding on the Lagan as far back as the mid 1600s, and a small port on a narrow river where navigation was difficult if not dangerous. The seeds of sea going vessels sprouted and grew, if tenuously, tended by Belfast's Ballast Board in the latter 1700s and nautical entrepreneurs like William Ritchie, Alexander McLaine, George Langtry, Charles Connell, Coates and Young and Kirwan and McCune; just some of the early trail blazers and hull raisers that unwittingly predetermined the Lagan's high place in history. The first root in the Titanic's family tree took hold nearly two centuries ago when a seagoing Captain William Pirrie came here from Scotland, around 1820. By 1841 Captain Pirrie, the Ballast Board, and engineer William Dargan dredged part of the river and formed the 17 acre Dargan's Island, now Queen's Island. Meanwhile the Thames, Tyne, Wear and Clyde were undergoing enormous shipyard growth. Comparatively, the Lagan was a small fish but other players chipped in, and out! Engineer Robert Pace and ironmonger Thomas Gladstone came and went, and in 1854 Liverpool engineer Robert Hickson launched his first vessel on the Lagan; a 1,289 ton wooden sailing ship, the Silistria. Hickson also had the keel of a steamship, the Khersonese, ready and waiting to be completed for two Belfast merchants Edward Geoghegan and Frederick Lewis.
A Scarborough man came to Belfast to manage Hickson's yard, and to oversee the completion of the Khersonese; his name was Edward James Harland. Due to his father's friendship with steam Tsar George Stephenson, Edward had been apprenticed into the locomotive industry where he'd become friendly with the merchant and shipping investment Schwabe family. In 1857 Edward Harland formally employed Gustav Schwabe's nephew, engineering draughtsman Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, to help him build ships in Belfast.
Coincidentally in 1857, Thomas Ismay and William Imrie initiated a ship broking partnership which later controlled the White Star line. In the same year The North Down Cricket Club was founded; one of its most famous members was to be Thomas Andrews, Titanic's designer and nephew of Captain Pirrie's grandson. What a variety pack of Titanic seeds, 150 years ago, well in advance of the 2012 festivities!