Stephen McGann
Appearances
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
He could have been in an engine room, he could have been having a kip. But very quickly there was an alarm and they said, look, there's been an incident. We need everyone downstairs. There was water ingress starting to happen from near the front and then pouring into the other compartments as you went down.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
It was not a trivial thing. An engine had to be carefully fired up, and more particularly where the Titanic is concerned, carefully tamped down at the end. What we would find hard to understand nowadays is once you start a many hundred degrees centigrade, hey, you know, that thing can explode if it gets cold water on it. It's dangerous. It can blow up.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
It's hard to believe now just how important Belfast was at the turn of the last century. It really was a huge industrial hub. My great-grandfather was a guy called Thomas Miller, and he grew up just outside of Belfast, a little town with the lovely name of Bonny before. It's more of a collection of houses, really, than anything else.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
And that's about 15 miles north of Belfast on the shores of Belfast Loch. So, you know, his childhood, he would have been watching big ships come and go up and down the loch in front of his house. So, you know, maybe that was part of the reason why he wanted to get involved in shipbuilding. Harland & Wolfe employed, at its height, over 40,000 people.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
And it was like an army of men going into work for 6.30 in the morning. You didn't need an alarm clock in this city because the tramp of boots on the cobbles would have woken you up. as those men streamed into Queen's Island to start their long day down in the shipyard. And, you know, it was fairly well paid, especially once you got yourself established.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
So for my great-grandfather, for example, he was able to provide his children and his wife with a good standard of living. So, yeah, a very important place back in the day. And Harland and Wolfe, which is still on the go today, the biggest shipyard in the world.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
My great-grandfather used to come home after his long shift in Harland and Wolfe and talk to his two sons about what he was working on.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
He obviously had a great deal of pride in that and he instilled that in his two sons, telling them that this was something special that was going on a couple of miles away and that they should be very proud of their father for being part of the team that was building these massive ships.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
Overseeing all of this was Thomas Andrews, who's very famous in the Titanic story. He's always portrayed as the hero in the movies about Titanic. And he was the head of the design department and very much a hands-on manager. So he spent long days and nights down at the shipyard overseeing what was going on.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
There's a story about him taking his wife down there one time and saying, there go my boys, Nelly, and showing her again with this wonderful sense of pride how Titanic was coming along. So, you know, he's an integral part of the ship from start to finish, and that's why he was so important when things started to go wrong.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
It gets launched and it's just empty at that point. So it goes down to what's called the fitting out wharf where all the special stuff happens. You know, all the craftsmen get on board and it turns into a luxury liner. And that's where the engines and the boilers are put in and the funnels put on top.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
And then the final stage is just a brief spell in a dry dock just to finish off the hull of the ship, to paint it, final bits of electrics and plumbing and that sort of thing.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
My great-grandmother Jeannie died in January of 1912, and she'd had TB, so she died pretty suddenly. And it seems that everything happened pretty quickly, because within three months, there was Tommy signed up as the assistant deck engineer on Titanic. Really, his motivation was to give a change of scene to the family. He wanted a fresh start. And here was the opportunity.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
He was qualified to do the job. And he probably saw himself working for White Star for many years to come, but just based on the other side of the Atlantic.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
There was no way that he could have brought his two sons with him on that voyage because he would have been working the whole time. He was going to go first, get himself organized and settled, and then come back and get his two sons. So it's just as well that they weren't on board with him because otherwise I probably wouldn't be here today. I don't know. Thank you very much.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
Here you have the biggest ship in the world carrying the richest people in the world and also the poorest. And this supposedly unsinkable ship sinks on her maiden voyage. It's such an unbelievable story.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
It was a filthy job. They would do four hours on, I think, real back-breaking work. Then they would take four hours off, then they might be on standby. It was a very strict rota, so you'd go back to bed exhausted, you wouldn't know where you were, what time of day it was, you'd wake up again, they'd call you beforehand and you'd go down.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
They had a bell, which a bit like that great scene in Ben-Hur with the Roman galley, with the galley man banging the drum. They literally used to run by a metronome, so they would then be forced, if it was full steam ahead, as it was, they would have to work to an ever more rapid noise.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
They did such a troglodyte job. You know, life for a black anger down in the engine room. Many of them went stark naked in the room because it was so hot. There'd be dangly bits everywhere because it was, you know, nobody cared. They would absolutely not meet and frighten the ordinary paying passenger. But also, When they're working, they're really working, there's no food breaks for hours on end.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
What used to happen was the scraps of food from the first and second class tables would be put into a sort of big dump, a mix of food, and they would eat it to keep their calories up, so they'd send it down to the black gang. But no, they weren't allowed to see them. No one was supposed to see these beasts.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
They used to defecate on their shovels and shove it into the furnace. That's what they used to do. You know, it's not delicate. When you're doing family history, this isn't Brideshead Revisit. The McGann story isn't pedigree stuff, you know. But I love this kind of detail.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
The ocean that night was so absolute still. There were no clouds, no nothing, no waves breaking against the iceberg summit. You could hardly see where the ocean ended and the sky started. It was as if the nature had prepared this big drama with an enormous ocean liner, as if it was floating over glass and then meeting its enemy.