The White Star Line had originally been a company serving Australia with traditional sailing vessels during the great Australian gold rush. The company went bankrupt as this gold rush faded, and on the 18th January, 1868, Thomas Henry Ismay bought the company for £1,000. From this point forward, the White Star Line would commission ships …
Wallace Henry Hartley was born on 2nd June 1878, in Colne, East Lancashire. His parents Albion and Elizabeth Hartley were both employed in the local textile trade, which at the time produced cotton for export around the world. Wallace was the younger brother to Mary Ellen, who had been born the previous year. When Wallace …
It would seem that you can´t have a good story without a conspiracy theory raising its ugly head these days, and the story of the Titanic is no exception. Robin Gardiner, a plasterer from Oxford, England, has written a book, ´Titanic – The Ship That Never Sank´, in which he goes to great lengths to persuade the …
The White Star Line had been using the port of Southampton, on the south coast of England, as a major, and mainly transatlantic, port since 1907. However, the existing dock areas would not be large enough to accommodate the new Olympic-classliners, so a new, and much larger dock covering 16 acres and dredged to almost forty feet was …
The Olympic-class liners were designed to rival the Cunard Line’s greyhound steamers Mauretania and Lusitania, however, there was one vital area where the Olympic-class liners lagged far behind the state-of-the-art Cunard sisters – speed. Cunard had borrowed money at very favourable rates from the U.K. Government to enable them to design and build the two …