THE TITANIC TIMES
Lagan Legacy’s unique maritime newspaper THE TITANIC TIMES rolls off the presses.
The Titanic Times is published as a "pullout" in one of the world's oldest daily morning newspapers - the Newsletter. This is Lagan Legacy's second free eight page commemorative newspaper supplement. The editorial policy, like all of the organisation's substantial media work, is to raise the profile of Belfast's unique maritime and cultural heritage.
The editorial on page three clearly illustrates this objective.:
The Titanic was a ‘weapon of mass distraction'. Her celebrity status and famous passengers; her sudden, premature and tragic demise; her subsequent and international intrigue; all of these distractions converted the world's biggest manmade moving object into a star eclipsing everything that followed in her long wake from the Lagan; a wake in every sense that still continues.
Titanic was a nautical enigma. She was everything that was great and glorious. While the world focussed on her fate, only a few Lagan stalwarts trumpeted the greatness to come and the greatness that had gone before; it was "business as usual" rather than "business most extraordinarily spectacular"!
The White Star Liner had become a four funnelled icon that hogged and robbed the headlines for nearly a century. For that, and other reasons, the city has "grown accustomed to her voice!" The Newsletter is the oldest daily newspaper in the entire English speaking world; it perceived of the editorial technique, and printed, the first ever ‘exclusive story'. The Titanic Times continues that tradition as a unique mini-newspaper supplement dedicated to the River Lagan's maritime heritage. Its exclusive content in this second issue is "The Greatest Story Never Told"!
There are some excellent books and publications about Belfast's inimitable nautical past, by local writers and authors from further afield. There are authoritative documentaries, dramas, radio, film and television too, but the greatest story is the River Lagan, once awash with every available superlative, yet it doesn't seem to have sunk in - except for Titanic!
Concurrent with Harland and Wolff being the biggest shipbuilder in the world, the city's other yard Workman Clarke was also one of the biggest, and down the centuries there were another dozen Lagan yards. Give or take a few minor qualifications Belfast also boasted some of world's greatest linen mills, soap factories, rope works and thread works. Her potteries, glassworks, gasworks, tea factories, tobacco producers and brickworks were national if not international leaders. All nurtured by Belfast folk and their river. The city's vast vaulted underground sewage system was revolutionary, her huge industrial and maritime ventilation systems were second to none, similarly her aircraft, trains, bridges, oil rigs and much more; all curiously underplayed because of a magnificent but sad single ship - underneath the Atlantic.
"The Greatest Story Never Told" is the collective heritage of our thousands of other ships; many tens of millions of tons of innovative Lagan Legacy laid beside, launched upon, and travelling from Belfast to make history around the world. Most of all - it's the story of the men and women, some of them still with us, who helped make this improbable dream come true.
Today's Belfast is a city striding proudly into an exciting new era after suffering thirty vacuous years of sadness and tragedy. Humble heroes, many of whom may never be acknowledged, have worked relentlessly to reconstruct life in our unique and very special place; very special because of its characters and characteristics - its people, places, past and present; its Lagan Legacy.
The following pages of The Titanic Times are reminders of all of that. Each word is also a deep thank you to everyone who was, is, and will be, involved. Much deeper than the Titanic!
Citizen Crane - Billy Childs.
In 1950 a young Belfast lad embarked on his first employment and walked tall from the very start. The job was that of a harbour messenger boy, but he was aiming for much higher things! Fourteen year old Billy Childs from Newtownards Road loved cranes. He soon started driving them, and rose through the ranks to become the harbour's Superintendent crane driver, and after that as a senior instructor he taught crane driving here and further afield.
Billy had high genes, and not unexpectedly. "Both my grandfather and uncle were crane drivers," he recounted, sitting on a comfortable if paradoxically low sofa at ground level in a Dundonald bungalow of surprisingly normal vertical dimensions! "Grandfather began in the harbour in the 1890s and was there until 1932. My uncle started in 1918." Other relatives worked in the shipyard, so Lagan land always beckoned Billy; it really was a home from home. "Some of the older men told me they remembered my grandfather and my uncle. In fact the morning I started work the foreman asked me how Lizzie was. And I said: ‘I don't know Lizzie'. He said: ‘you do know Lizzie - how is she?' I said: ‘I don't know who you're talking about'. He said: ‘your Mother - how is she? I knew her well!'" Youngsters were polite in those days and Billy wasn't fluent with parents' Christian names.
"I was taken down the Sydenham Road into an antiquated office on the old Channel Road," he said of his industrial initiation "I carried the messages from the boss up to the crane-men working the Queen's Quay where the Odyssey is today, and along the Abercorn Basin." Whilst he pre-dated a now ubiquitous invention, young Billy had no intention of continuing life as an animated mobile! "The few phones they had were operated by cranking handles," he smiled. "I was quicker and took written orders to the drivers.
Up there it was difficult to hear anything and apart from me there were only hand signals." Some of his communications were technical, some strategic, and some were more domesticated. "I had to climb up and maybe say there's someone coming to do a tea-break. If the crane man didn't get a relief driver he'd have to stop the crane, which wasn't allowed." High tea was mandatory! "They would usually have an empty tin of pears or something and would always keep that tin with a piece of wire round it and put it on a coal fire up in the crane, there was no electric, it was all coal-fired. They'd fill the tin, carry it up in the morning, put it on the fire, and by lunch-time it would be boiling.
On the big cranes it would have taken half an hour to get down to the ground and back up again!" In every sense Billy preferred going up rather than down! "It was more interesting climbing up because there were more stops to look around and see what was going on; otherwise you'd no breath by the time you got to the top." A necessity that doubled as an important ploy, "because we were really the foreman's eyes and ears; we'd carry information back to the boss! We could even tell him if a ship was being loaded or unloaded on schedule." Tins affected the drivers' working day in various guises. "In the fifties we sometimes didn't know much about what we were working with; for instance - pineapples! We'd lifted tons of tins and we'd seen photographs of what was inside but there was a cargo of fresh pineapples came in. And at lunchtime one of the crane men came in and said: ‘I had some pineapples for you Billy but they weren't ripe.' And being ignorant of these matters I said: ‘how did you know they weren't ripe?' ‘Well' he said ‘I cut the top off them and they weren't in those little square chunks so I just threw them into the Pollock dock!'"
Billy's ups and downs continued successfully "until I was about sixteen because I didn't want to serve my time as a fitter or an electrician or something like that. I wanted to be a crane driver like my uncle and grandfather. And so they got me to do all sorts of different jobs; red lead the cranes and chip them and stuff like that."
His next step was a slippery one, but he mastered it. "I went to the big crane at the Alexander wharf, a hundred and twenty ton crane that had been built in nineteen-twelve and my uncle had driven it. It was huge; you were about a hundred and fifty feet up in the air. I became a greaser. There was a stanchion with wires to the jib so to save me time and energy climbing away up and climbing down and then climbing up again to the top of the jib - I used to go across the wires." Proving again how he disliked the downs! "One of my uncles caught me doing this and I got a lecture and he said if I fell they wouldn't know whether to scrape me up or paint over me!"
The older men often had kind hearts and looked after their young prodigies, if a little clumsily. "There was that comradeship," he recalled, though not so on one occasion. "My job as a greaser sometimes was to go round to the big floating crane and find out how long it took the thing to be discharged. And I remember one time out in the Musgrave Channel I was taken out by a boat. And I couldn't get the crane for four hours because the boat didn't come back. Everybody was wondering where I was." Except himself - and he knew where he was going too!
Billy undoubtedly had a special head for heights, an aptitude not shared by everyone. "I remember one fellow who came to do a bit of repair work on the old hundred and fifty ton crane at the deep water wharf. He went up with a joiner and we had to put four ropes round him to get him down. He was petrified!" On another occasion "when I'd become manager, a lady from a television company wanted to do a programme from York Dock's big container crane. She arrived and announced ‘we'll go up the crane now!' I had difficulty saying ‘no you'll not go up now!' She was a bit annoyed until I pointed out she was wearing a skirt and..." he diplomatically understated, "it wouldn't be very appropriate"; his genuinely wise attitude, with aptitude, brought altitude. But he had to start low! "When I became a crane driver I think I was one of the youngest. I was just nineteen and a half." he admitted under some duress. "In those days the harbour had small mobile cranes working in all the old sheds along the Donegal Quay; the Heysham Quay, the Liverpool Quay, the Glasgow Quay and then Pollock Dock."
Each quay he recalled unlocked warm memories, reflected in his eyes, invading his voice "And ah I had a little thirty hundred weight crane and oh I was delighted. It was really only a little dinky toy, really it was....." He smiled nostalgically, interrupting himself with reminiscence, "but my, a big lot of the time I was driving that little crane.... I used to load tobacco for Gallagher's in Connswater..... a lot of tobacco came from America in the Headline boats. It was in cases of four hundred and forty pounds each case. And in this little crane.... she used to lift two at a time and you put ten on a lorry and then the lorry went off. And that's where I learned to drive really - up and down the Pollock Dock." Billy was a lorry driver too, prematurely experienced! "When I was about fifteen I actually could drive one unofficially - because the crane drivers used to let me drive it. It was very simple." At that I age, I thought, I was driving dinky toys too - on Mum's kitchen floor!
Billy thrived on driving, and not just machinery. "I remember later on in life arguing with the harbour management who wanted to reduce the retiring age from seventy to sixty-five. And it's interesting now that the government wants to go from sixty-five back to seventy!" he added pertinently. Not surprisingly, Billy continued upwards through the ranks. "The bigger stuff was the five ton cranes on the Queen's Quay and the Albert Quay. We were discharging mostly coal or grain or loading scrap. I finished my days at the Queen's Bridge. You know everybody used to moan about that big scrap-heap lying there. Never getting any smaller! Well I used to load all that into boats and I can assure you an awful lot of it went away. Then I progressed from that to the big cranes. For a while I just did tea relief or when somebody was on holidays. And then I was heavily involved in the union and stuff like that." He temporarily resigned, and became dock secretary for the Transport and General Worker's Union from January until July 1975. His Northern Ireland patch included Carrickfergus, Bangor, Larne and Belfast. Billy returned to the harbour as the crane superintendent and did a course in Liverpool qualifying him to teach the art of crane driving. I took liberties with his further and higher education and suggested he teach me a few things about cranes. "The bigger the crane," the master began, "the easier they are to drive because they're so much slower. I mean the two hundred ton crane. If you were doing a two hundred ton lift, it would take about twelve or fourteen minutes to go from the top of the crane to the ground. You could nearly read a paper in between times!"
I wondered what makes a good crane driver. "If you came to me for a job," he wildly speculated, "first of all I would ask if you could you climb; that's the first important question. I remember once interviewing a young fellow for a job and I asked him that. He said yes he could climb up the ladder and clean his Mother's windows. And I pointed out of the window of my office and said: ‘could you climb to the top of that crane?' He said: ‘You must be joking!' and walked out and we never saw him again!"
Billy ended his intriguing reminisces on a powerful note that was an overture to the special character of the men who worked on the Lagan. "I think there was a comradeship between all of us in those days. If you were sick back then there was no such thing as sick pay but if you weren't feeling too well somebody would say: ‘look, I'll drive for you - you go and sit down and stay out of the road and I'll do that.' It's not the same now, I feel - everybody's after themselves now. It was an individual thing - a team spirit type of thing. We were team and you looked after your friend and your chum." The true height of humanity, I thought.
"The wages of sin are death. The wages of Harland and Wolff are terrible."
Regularly appeared handwritten on notices around the yard!
"He had an all-smelling nose and an all-seeing eye."
Said of the 23 year old Edward Harland when as manager of Hickson's yard he uncovered a hiding worker, smoking a pipe in a saw pit.
"She was all right when she left here."
Chief MV Joyce Boatman Derek Booker about the Titanic.
"What happened to Titanic was a disaster.....she was not"
Una Reilly. Co Founder, Belfast Titanic Society.
"Anyone smoking near combustible material will be fired."
Harland and Wolff Rules (number 14) introduced in 1888.
"Give me my house,
"Though it may be a garret,
"In the pleasant surroundings
"Of Ballymacarrett."
Gustav Wolff. (Evidently feeling poetic)
"No, thank you. We are dressed in our best and are prepared to go down as gentlemen. But we would like a brandy!"
Benjamin Guggenheim in Cameron's film Titanic, on being offered a lifebelt.
"Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said ‘No, thank you,' to dessert that night; and for what!?"
Erma Bombeck, an American humourist.
"A thimbleful of diesel oil can carry a ton of cargo a distance of one mile".
Often said of Harland and Wolff's engines.
"Trust no memory,
"However bright.
"Get it down in
"Black and white."
From the wall of a security office in Harland and Wolff.
"Keep clean, act green, and don't forget your board number on a Friday."
George McAllister, former senior rigger foreman, on his first day in the yard aged 16. The board was an early pay chip with your number on it.
Since her inception as the biggest idea in the world, RMS Titanic has been surrounded with intrigue. A month of Sundays collectively could never have invented such an addictively popular if poignant story, nor splashed it with so many headlines, coincidences and human emotions. Journalists refer to a long lasting story as a "story with legs"; Titanic certainly had that, and a mind of its own as well! The only missing link is comedy, though I'm sure it's in there somewhere!
Even Titanic's immense larder was a culinary enigma with its seventy five thousand lbs. of fresh meat, twenty five thousand lbs. of poultry, thirty five thousand eggs, thirty thousand bottles of ales, stout and wines, five tons of sugar and forty tons of potatoes. The sheer scale overloads the imagination and whets the palate. So that readers can savour these simultaneous senses, The Titanic Times invited Stephen Friel, Head Chef from the Spaniard Bar/Restaurant in Belfast's Skipper Street, to translate her "last dinner" into a more accessible menu that you can cook simply at home. Alternatively, the fateful feast is available in the Spaniard for the duration of the Titanic "Made in Belfast" Festival.
"It's based on French classical," Stephen Friel explained in his small but efficient kitchen, "and funnily enough, I was very surprised when I saw what was on offer. It included chicken curry and rice, which I wouldn't have thought they'd have had in 1912!" Describing the original concept as "complex and slower to cook than would be domestically popular today" Stephen devised his version to be "as simple as possible with ingredients you could buy in most supermarkets," though his Festival dishes will be somewhat less adapted than his DIY version.
Stephen allowed me to be an observer on his maiden "Made in Belfast" Titanic menu. "I've chosen an easy rendition of three courses from the 1st Class fare," Kent born Stephen said as he rendered a plump duck breast in a small hot pan. "Male Barbary duck," he explained, "the fatty side criss-crossed scored with a sharp knife, with milled sea salt in the cuts. Just to get some of fat off, nice and crispy brown, before going into a preheated oven, at 180C. Ten minutes for pink, fifteen for medium, and twenty for well done," the latter being his proposed overall total cooking time. The diced apple, celeriac and potatoes were boiling in water as he popped the duck and little tomatoes into the oven, and his assistant finished off a few dishes for diners down in the restaurant.
Manageress Veronica Kane's amplified voice called for a few more over the intercom as I asked him if celeriac would have been popular back then. "I didn't see it on the menu," he replied, "but because it said duck with apple sauce I thought, well apples and celery and potatoes were mainstay. They would definitely have had apple sauce, there was definitely celery - it was on another of the courses that night so I just married them in together." Was apple regularly used with duck, I tendered, suggesting oranges might be more culinary correct. "That's the first time I've seen it on that menu," he offered, "but anything that's a little bit tart or sharp to cut through the fattiness. I just thought - put all three together - apple, celery and potato - all in one pot, easier and ready in one go!"
Stephen was concurrently draping smoked salmon onto wheaten bread, and poking the poaching peaches with a knife. "They're in any sort of wine you like so that you can finish off the rest of the bottle, a little bit of water, some sugar, a cinnamon stick, and you can put in a little bit of orange peel, just a little flavouring in it, simmer all together, gently for ten or fifteen minutes. Test them, and when they're nice and soft leave them to cool a little and then a couple of scoops of ice cream, peaches on top - reduce what's left in the pan to a little bit of syrup - let that cool - you can do all that earlier in the day - and spoon/drizzle the syrup over the ice cream and peaches." He'd begun presenting the thinly sliced salmon on a white dish. I noted it was carefully shaped and placed - two pieces angled together in a "v" shape with a little garnish of salad - mixed leaves and some dressing. "This has some French vinaigrette," he explained. "The Titanic had a mousseline sauce," he added, "but that would be quite complicated if you want a simple dinner." I asked the obvious question. "Mousseline is egg white beaten up, mixed with pureed salmon, made into a very light mousse, and put on top of the smoked salmon. Lemon has an affinity with salmon, which is a bit fatty, and the juices cut through it." The red fish looked like little ruffled blankets on a well made doll's house bed! At home all this would be simple enough for six or eight. On a rough sea I don't know how they did that," he smiled.
When it was all ready and beautifully plated I asked Stephen what could go wrong. "You could overcook the peaches by having the wine too hot," he grimaced, "they'd go mushy and maybe break up - so just a gentle simmer, and keep testing them. The duck - you should just keep an eye on it, every now and again, to make sure it's not burning. Apart from that - it's fool proof really. Make sure the salmon and wheaten are really fresh," and he added, "Don't forget to rest the duck. When you cook any meat all the juices bubble up to the surface so when you take it off the heat, cover it in tin foil on a warm plate, the juices don't spill onto the plate, but back into the meat."
And regarding the wine: "I would say it would be better to have a sweet wine, it doesn't have to be expensive. It's the acidity that's needed." The final presentation was in motion. He applied his attentive dexterity with a culinary commentary. "A large spoon of mash on the middle of the plate - you can keep the duck whole or cut it (more intercom messages and phones ringing) using a sharp knife cutting the duck at an angle, slicing, making it easier to eat. ‘That's just a chef thing, really!' On top of the celeriac, to the side, tomatoes carefully placed - balsamic vinaigrette, two-thirds balsamic vinegar, one-third olive oil - shaken together, drizzled around the plate, some on the duck, and a sprig of herbs on the top."
It looked brilliant, and it was absolutely delicious, if perilously poignant. The whole process took Stephen nineteen minutes and twenty-one seconds. I gave it a test run at home the next night and managed it in slightly over an hour; a tiny slice of dwarf duck for one, and no starter or dessert. Everything was smaller, including the taste; but my kitchen isn't part of the biggest man made moving object in the world. But nor was Stephen's. Perhaps it was because there was, or wasn't, a Spaniard in my works. Or vice versa; or both!
THE SPANIARD HOME COOKING RECIPE at a glance.
By Stephen Friel.
• Starter:
Irish smoked Salmon on wheaten bread with lemon cucumber and cracked black pepper.
Ingredients:
200g sliced smoked salmon, buttered wheaten slices, half lemon, thinly sliced cucumber, black pepper.
Method:
Place buttered wheaten bread on plate, drape over salmon slices, top with cucumber. Squeeze over lemon juice and a good grind of black pepper.
• Main Course:
Roast duck with an apple, celeriac and potato puree, oven baked cherry tomatoes and balsamic vinaigrette.
Ingredients:
2 duck breasts, 1 small celeriac, 2-3 medium potatoes, 6-8 cherry tomatoes, 1 apple, butter or cream, salt and pepper, mix 2/3 balsamic vinegar with 1/3 olive oil shaken.
Method:
Pan fry breasts fat side down for 2 to 3 minutes, place in oven (180C) for 20 minutes with the tomatoes. Meanwhile peel and dice celeriac and potato, peel and core apple, cover with hot water and cook until soft. Drain, then mash with butter or cream, season with salt and pepper. Place cooked duck on top of mash, dot round with cherry tomatoes and drizzle with balsamic mix.
• Dessert:
Poached peaches, sweet wine syrup with vanilla ice cream.
Ingredients:
2 ripe peaches, skinned and seed removed, then halved. 2 mint sprigs, half bottle sweet white wine, 1 cinnamon stick, 4oz. granulated sugar, good quality vanilla ice cream.
Method:
Simmer peaches in: wine, sugar and cinnamon for 8-10 minutes. Remove, leave to cool. Reduce wine to syrup and set aside to cool. Add peaches to a scoop of vanilla ice cream, drizzle with syrup and garnish with mint sprigs.
THE AUTHENTIC RECIPE FROM THE TITANIC:
RMS Titanic First Class Dinner Menu
April 14, 1912
Hors D'oeuvre Varies
Oysters
Consomme Olga
Cream of Barley
Salmon, Mousseline Sauce, Cucumber
Filet Mignons Lili
Saute of Chicken, Lyonnaise
Vegetable Marrow Farcie
Lamb, Mint Sauce
Roast Duckling, Apple Sauce
Sirloin of Beef, Chateau Potatoes
Green Peas
Creamed Carrots
Boiled Rice
Parmentier & Boiled New Potatoes
Punch Romaine
Roast Squab & Cress
Cold Asparagus Vinaigrette
Pate De Foie Gras
Celery
Waldorf Pudding
Peaches in Chartreube Jelly
Chocolate & Vanilla Eclairs
French Ice Cream
"It was love. Love at first sight!" Derek Booker admits his initial feelings for the Confiance, Lagan Legacy's 600 ton Dutch barge. With colleague Gerry Murphy in Holland, early in 2006, Booker was visiting a small inlet harbour town called Nijmegen, which doubled as a ‘barge supermarket'. "The Confiance was in such good condition, beautifully painted with an enormous hold, perfect for our plans. It was obvious she was the one for us."
Booker's prize, soon to be received, had been his dream for several years; a floating arts and heritage centre for the charitable Lagan Legacy organisation and its burgeoning cargo of culture. "We needed a ship of very shallow draft to moor permanently on the Lagan beside the Waterfront Hall, for exhibitions, community events, and the many multi cultural projects we're involved with." One problem of many was getting a vessel of the required size underneath Belfast's bridges to an easily publicly accessible location. Having met their perfect match, the mathematics began. "Particularly with the Queen's Bridge and the Lagan Weir, we needed a low ‘air draft' (height) and a shallow draft for the water so we had to measure everything on the barge and back at the Lagan, using poles to get the exact depth." An additional headache was the sloping headroom underneath the arches; Queens Bridge is lower at the sides and higher mid-bridge.
For the next few months Booker and his team were tied to a rising tide of bureaucracy and paperwork. "We put Confiance in dry dock in Holland, got everything checked and made her safe for the open sea because she was designed as a river barge." They left at half past five one morning from Nijmegen, on the first stage of the trip to Amsterdam with the owner on board to show them the ropes. "We dropped him off and went round to the coal yards where we loaded three hundred tons of ballast and stayed the night. At six next morning we embarked on the two day trip to Flushing, a Dutch port on the Belgian border with Holland." Accompanying Derek was a Medway based professional crew working four hour watches, two on each watch, with skipper Alan Pratt, Mick the cook and 2nd Officer Jude rotating. "She sailed like a dream through the heart of Holland, passing beautiful trees, little towns and villages. But the real journey lay ahead when we hit the sea! We got to the Holland/Belgium edge of the English Channel but the seas were far too high and we stayed put for five days." This gave them the opportunity to process more paperwork, in constant coordination with Lagan Legacy's other stalwart back at base in Belfast, Errol Walsh. "When the weather dropped at seven o'clock one night we immediately headed across the Channel, for thirty six hours, non stop, past London and the Isle of Wight - and then we hit a force six storm off Portland Bill. We were only supposed to be out in a force four, but we just had to keep on going. The bow of the barge was completely disappearing under every wave; a lot of creaking and furniture flying around!" Derek's previous watch had ended at midnight in an electrical storm with "flashes of lightning dazzling the sea," but it was relatively calm when he dozed off. "I woke at four in the morning with a chair and table smashing across the cabin. I secured everything and went straight to the bridge." They stayed there till dawn when they arrived in Falmouth. "There's always apprehension," Booker recollected, "on a barge that's not built for the open sea and carrying three hundred tons of ballast, but she handled brilliantly. The stresses were the problem. When 175 feet of narrow length crashes down on the waves it could buckle or bend or break." I asked the naïve landlubber's question. "There were no leaks," Derek smiled, "the covers were all strapped shut, any ventilation ducts were filled with foam, and all the hatches at the barge's bow were rubber sealed and bolted down, with windows well welded with steel plates. The only danger was major structural failure. She could have snapped in half on a big wave and the skipper's car, which was secured on the stern deck, partially broke loose and one side was completely flattened by the waves!"
"We were on the edge of really serious weather with winter looming so we had to get us to Belfast soon, or we'd have to wait till the spring."
They stayed in Falmouth, took on several thousand pounds worth of fuel, and next morning set sail for Land's End where they hit an even worse storm. The bow was often going under fifteen foot waves and her decks were awash with water.
Derek described it vividly "We were bobbing like a cork and ploughing through the rollers when the skipper went silent for about fifteen minutes. Turning around would be a slow and dangerous business with such a big barge, and sideways on to a sea like that is no fun." Alan Pratt made his decision. Back in Falmouth their ballast of coal ran foul of a bureaucratic blunder and was temporarily designated as an ‘illegal import' resulting in the distinct possibility of Confiance being impounded. Between legislation and winter, they seemed to be gazing into the jaws of defeat! But half a century at sea had set the skipper's jaw and Alan debated his way out of the debacle. Did Derek ever have any doubts? "Oh yes, but all we could do was keep on trying. There was no turning back! Our sponsors had paid good money, and the people of Belfast were waiting. A beautiful Sunday dawned and we left at half past eight in the morning with the sun shining. We weathered several more storms before reaching the Irish coast including a huge one when we reached Carlingford Lough. But that's life at sea! Earlier we'd fought through the same waters that grounded the container ship Napoli when she lost her cargo." As Booker looked on the lights of Donaghadee he breathed a sincere "Thank God," and ran in front of another gale to Belfast. Constantly at the back of his mind was the Queen's Bridge. "We had the cutting equipment on hand to remove the barge's superstructure at a moment's notice, but we scraped underneath with literally an inch to play with," he reminisced of their victorious entry to the Lagan and Belfast's cultural heritage. So when city folk waken up to Derek's dream on the first dawn of the 2007's ‘Titanic Made in Belfast Festival' what awaits them? "I want Confiance to be the home of Lagan Legacy, a memory bank of maritime heritage, culture and arts, past present and future, used by Belfast, for years to come." And she'll keep her name, meaning ‘confidence'. "There's a confidence in Belfast, and the Lagan, the yard and the shipyard workers played a big part in that, though sadly much is lost." Booker has lost something too! "I grew my beard through the whole process of bringing over the barge. I'd made a pact that I wouldn't cut it off till we got her here." He didn't. And he did!