In 1907 Managing Director of the White Star Line, Joseph Bruce Imsay arrived for dinner at the Belgrave Square home of Lord Pirrie. That night, plans were drawn up for a new class of transatlantic liner, far larger and more luxurious than any vessel in service at the time. Pirrie, as managing director of the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, was able to facilitate a plan that called for a two-liner express service, later increased to three vessels. They were to be a third as large again as the new Cunarder Lusitania and Mauretania, and would exceed eight hundred feet in length. Horsepower would be a moderate 45,000 horsepower produced by a reciprocating/turbine engine configuration providing economical fuel costs and a respectable service speed of 21 knots. The vessels would bear the names Olympic, Titanic and Britannic.

Some five years later, an almost unimaginable fate befell the second liner or the trio, the Titanic; sunk on her maiden voyage with the loss of over fifteen-hundred lives. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster the offices of the White Star Line in Southampton, Liverpool and London were besieged by anxious relative searching for news of their loved ones. The White Star Line's London headquarters stood on Cockspur Street and were also the London Offices of other companies within the International Mercantile Marine, White Star's parent company. Designed by Henry Tanner Jr, and completed in 1903 the offices are near to Trafalgar Square.

Within two days of the sinking the White Star Line had chartered vessels to search for bodies. In six weeks, the steamers Mackay-Bennett, Minia, Montmagny and Algerine recovered three-hundred and twenty-eight bodies and of these one hundred and nineteen were buried at sea. Of the remainder landed at Halifax, fifty-nine were claimed by relatives, and the remaining one-hundred and fifty were interred in either the Baron de Hirsch, Fairview or Mount Olivet cemeteries for Jewish, non-denominational or Catholic victims respectively. For 1,314 souls the sea would prove their final resting place, and of these 1,195 had no proper burial.

First class passenger William T Stead is commemorated in London with a memorial, situated on the Embankment in London near to Fleet Street which is famous as the historic home of journalism in London. He was remembered at the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund in May 1912 as a "journalistic crusader". The inscription on the memorial reads "This memorial to a journalist of wide renown was erected near the spot where he worked for more than thirty years by journalists of many lands in recognition of his brilliant gifts, fervent spirit & untiring devotion to the service of his fellow men".

Return to previous page  Go to top of this page