Character Sketch. 



245 



into competition with the Clyde, the Tyne and the 

 Tees, which had everything needed close to their back 

 door. Orpheus with his lyre made trees and the 

 mountain tops that freeze move hither and thither 

 at his will. Not less marvellous was the magic by 

 which, as by the wand of an enchanter, men and money, 

 coal and iron hastened to the mudbank on Queen's 

 Island, from which access to the sea had to be gained 

 by an artificial channel. They began in 185Q with a 

 staff of 44 men and an acreage of 3I acres. They 

 now cover 80 acres and employ 14,000 men. And all 

 this was accomplished in half a century : — 



O small beginnings, ye are great ami strong ! 

 Based in a faithfvil heart and weariless brain, 



Yc build the future fair, ye conquer wron^', 

 Yc earn the crown and wear it not in vain. 



.\ TRIUMPH OF BRAIN — 



Sir Edward Harland, Mr. Wolff, Lord Pirric, Mr. 

 Alick Carlisle, Mr. Bailey, the Wilsons, and others who 

 might be named, are entitled to a foremost position 

 among the great industrial heroes of our time. It is all 

 very well to exalt Labour and to maintain that Labour 

 alone is the source of wealth. All the labour of all 

 the men who were gathered together and trained to 

 discipline and set to work at the construction of the 



I ocean ferries of our time could not have created the 

 great wage-earning machine which, year in year out, 



( distributes a million pounds sterling to Labour in 

 Belfast. Without the Harlands, the Pirries, and the 

 Carlisles Labour would have found not even a penny 

 piece on the Queen's Island mudbank. Nor would 

 uny Government Department have ventured, greatly 

 daring, to attempt such a venture as the creation of 

 this shipyard. Brain, after all, is the great thau- 

 maturgist. It is genius which transmutes by its 

 alchemy the grosser metals into gold. 



— AND OF RULE OF THUMB. 



The firm seems to have been born under a lucky 

 star. It has had its misfortunes when it has ventured 

 out of the beaten track. But so long as it remained 

 true to the task .set before it by its founder it was 

 uniformly successful. And here, again, we find our- 

 selves confronterl by a strange parado.x. Shipbuilding 

 is of all the crafts the one which demands the most 

 science. But Harland and Wolff knew nothing of 

 science. Neither did Messrs. Pirrie and Carlisle, who 

 succeeded them in the direction and control of the 

 firm. The firm, from the first to the last, has built its 

 hips by the rule of thumb. It began with small 

 ships, it experimented with bigger ships, it tried ex- 

 periments in all directions, and profited by their result. 

 Hut although it has now the record for building the 

 biggest and safest ships in the world, it has done it all 

 not by scientific calculation, l)ut by the sheer genius 

 of the rule of thumb carried to the nth point. 

 None of the great men who built up this marvel of 

 constructive skill and made it capable of turning out 

 the leviathans of the modern world coulil have passed 

 1' an ordinary Civil Service examination. One of the 



greatest of them never learned to .spell. But they 

 built the Olympic, that wonder of the world. 



BELFAST AND ITS WORK.MEN. 



One of the essential elements in the creation of a 

 successful industry is a constant supply of labour, 

 obedient, skilled and docile. Belfast is the last place 

 in the whole world where we should look for the raw 

 supply of the labour required. The Black North has 

 combined in its sons the dour doggedncss of the Scot 

 with the fiery combativeness of the Irishman. Belfast 

 has long been notorious for the readiness with which 

 its sons let their angry passions rise on the slightest 

 provocation. They are the only people in the British 

 Empire who commemorate historical anniversaries by 

 provoking always and occasionally producing bloody 

 riots. When religion and history fail to supply them 

 with an opportunity of showing that they have 

 inherited the family characteristics of their pro- 

 genitor Cain, they take a fierce delight in industrial 

 wars. It was in the midst of this hornet's nest of 

 Kilkenny cats, to perpetrate an expressive Hibernicism, 

 that Harland and Wolff pitched their tent. They 

 tamed the wild aboriginal and taught him to expend 

 his energies not on breaking heads, but in driving 

 rivets. They took the two-handed biped who had 

 previously earned an exiguous li\-ing by digging 

 potatoes, and turned him into a skilled mechanic, 

 who, working in combination with his fellows and 

 under the direction of his masters, turned out Olympics 

 and Majesties as easily as his ancestors wove the 

 wicker-work coracles of the western coast. The task 

 was not achieved without many a tough and well- 

 contested battle. The masters were as tough as their 

 men, and they never shrank from the fray. No system 

 of co-partnership, no tribunal of arbitration, was ever 

 imented to evade the stern issues of industrial war- 

 fare. Men struck and struck again. One strike 

 lasted ten months. As a rule, if a strike lasted a day. 

 It ran its course in four or eight weeks. But whether 

 in war or in peace, the combatants understood each 

 other, and when the battle was over they shook hands 

 without rancour and resumed their fruitful joint 

 labour in good heart. 



THE TRIUMPH OF HONESTY AND SKILL. 



I remember some forty odd years ago reading 

 jeremiads by Mr. Froudc over the alleged decay of 

 honest workmanship in modern Britain. The 

 foundering of the Margara was one of the incidents 

 which in those days supplied the prophets of disaster 

 with materials for their sombre prognostications of 

 coming doom. If we could raise Mr. Froudc from the 

 grave it would be interesting to have his comments 

 upon the superb results of modern shipbuilding. 

 Better workmanship has never been put into floating 

 craft since the world began than that which has been 

 employed by Harland and Wolff. They are not the 

 jerrybuilders of the fea. After breasting the storms of 

 the Atlantic for a quarter of a century, the Whi'.e 



