401, that's what we called her, we knew she'd be the largest passenger ship in the world but we didn't call her Titanic then
I was there from the beginning, I watched the shipwrights lay the keel blocks, they slipped big wooden blocks on the slip way to start with
Then the keel on top of it, like a backbone and the frames that touched that like a skeleton
Workshops everywhere, it took weeks to find your way around
They'd workshops for every trade you ever heard of, painters, steel makers, coppersmiths, boilermakers, cabinet makers
I even learned a bit about French polishing off them
Harland and Wolff was a fine place to work but dangerous
Every ship cost a life and there'd be lots of injuries besides
I was in the engine works for a while, very well equipped it was
That's where we built the triple expansion engines, two of them each as high as a three-storey house
I worked on the frame bending shelf, you had to heat steel beams in the furnace
Then hooked them onto slabs of cast iron and hammer them curved, it's skilled work
You had to bend down more than you needed because the frame straightened out a little when it cooled
The shell plates that made up the hull weighed up to four and a half tons, they were taller than me da
The plates were overlapped on the edges, some were raised, one after another we called it clencher
One of the foremen taught me years ago that's how you built steal ships
I worked as a heater boy, you had to heat the rivets on a wee plate, you pumped the bellows to my rivet was white hot
Then you get a hold of it with your tongs and throw it up to the catcher and he put it in the hole in the plate for to hold it up
If the 2 of us on the other side of the plate were to hold it up, we'd have to hammer the rivets to fill the hole before it turned all red
The double bottom
That's a wee space we called the tanks made up of steel plates, the rest of the rivet squad all had to fit into that gap
One of the four men would check each rivet with a special hammer
If it made a ringing sound, we'd have to go back and tease it out afterward
I get scared working down in that double bottom
You only had candles for light and the constant hammering against the gel plates, you could hear it all over Belfast
Some of those boys ended up stone deaf, so they did
We were paid 31 bob a week, the heater boys catcher got 16 bob but we all work the same 54 hours
The other deck was steel too and part of the strength of the ship
There's no straight lines in the ship and when you looked down when you were on deck you could see the sheer of the hull
The stern frame had to be strong enough to take the rudder turning in heavy seas
You'd have all these timbers and guy wires to steady the frame and men scurrying around like ants underneath
When we came to launch day, I was torn between pride and fear
The sliding ways were coated in tallow, train oil tree and soft soap so the ship would slide when they shifted her weight off the blocks
That was the most dangerous part, when the shipwrights were knocking away the last props
They were under compression you see, and the sliding ways would be released by the hydraulic trigger
100,000 people watched the launch
Some paid a bob to sit in the reserved seating
There were extra trams laid on, then we all went off to the pub to wish her well
You were proud to be an eyelet man that day and Titanic was the pride of Belfast