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TITANIC BEAR
Titanic Belfast
Who
would let a bear run a ship?! Of course he’d want to stop
at an iceberg! This is our friend the captain bear from the Titanic,
the giant famous ship that was supposed to be unsinkable, but sank anyway
on its first voyage across the Atlantic. They’ve made a bunch of
movies about it, but not a lot of people know the Titanic ship was built
in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. In 2012, they opened a special exhibit
there at the dock where the big ship was built, and the Titanic Captain
Bear is the mascot. He's not a Teddy Bear, (he's Irish), and he mostly
hangs around the gift shop, greeting people who come to visit.
Titanic sailed from Southampton, England on April 10, 1912, and after picking up passengers in Cherbourg, France like the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown and the world’s most richest man, Benjamin Guggenheim , then a last stop for mostly third class immigrants in Cobh on the southern Ireland coast, the Titanic headed off across the North Atlantic towards New York, but on the night of April 14, 1912, hit an iceberg at 11:40 pm and sank to the bottom of the ocean two and a half hours later on the 15th of April 1912.
The Belfast part of the story
is that the Titanic was born over a dinner party. The White Star Line
of passenger ships was bought by Bruce Ismay’s
father with the promise that the ships would be built Harland & Wolff
Shipyards on Queens Island in Belfast. The company was competing with
its main rival the Cunard Line (see Queen
Mary Teddy Bears) that had
the fastest ocean liners at the time and was winning the transatlantic
crossing routes with its ships the Mauretania and the Lusitania. (The
Lusitania would get sunk later in another famous story, but more on that
later.) After dinner, when everybody (or at least all the men) were smoking
cigars, Lord William Pirrie, the head of the Harland & Wolff Shipyard
said he could build the largest and most luxurious ocean cruise liner.
Why compete with Cunard on speed when they could best them with luxury
and size, because everyone knows size counts, especially when you’re
smoking cigars.
The
keel of the Titanic was laid at the shipyard on March 30 of 1909 and
the after two years of construction, she was launched from the slipway
on May 11, 1911. She was still just a hull and superstructure and was
towed to the dry dock, where she would be fitted out with all the rooms
and ballrooms, to attract the super wealthy of the time like John Jacob.
The Titanic was actually built beside a twin sister ship, the Olympic.
After a short sea trail on the Belfast Loch, the Titanic set off for
Southampton and her starring role in tragic movies. Lots of kids on the
Titanic had Teddy Bears (see Teddy
Bear History) with them, but most of then
sank, too.
There
are a bunch of things to see about the Titanic in Belfast. The Titanic
Belfast Experience is like an amusement park inside a building
with virtual recreations of the building yards, and the rooms of the
ship and life on board, and a movie theater that shows the underwater
discovery of the wreck. The Titanic
Drydock is a really, really big concrete
hole in the ground where the ship was fitted out with all the decorations
and equipment, and the pump house that pumped out the water. The SS
Nomadic which was the little sister ship which carried the
rich passengers from Cherbourg harbor out to the big ship. And stop by
to say hello to the
Titanic Bear…just don’t mention the iceberg thing,
he’s kind of sensitive about it.
.
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