City pays tribute to Titanic’s designer

The City of Belfast will later this week pay formal tribute to one of the men responsible for creating the ship best known to Belfast, Titanic.

On Friday January 25 the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Councillor Jim Rodgers, will unveil a plaque commemorating County Down born Thomas Andrews, the naval architect who designed the Titanic.

The plaque, commissioned by the Ulster History Circle, will be unveiled at the house in Windsor Avenue, off the Lisburn Road, where Andrews lived for less than four short years before his death on board the ship he was so instrumental in creating.

When Titanic struck an iceberg late on Sunday April 14, Andrews was among the first below decks to survey the damage. As the ship’s designer, he would have realized that the 300-foot long gash in her side was fatal, and it was he who gave the order to Captain Smith to abandon ship.

Contemporary eyewitness accounts describe Andrews playing an active role in ship's evacuation, right up until the last recorded sighting, still on the boat deck of Titanic, throwing deckchairs to people in the icy waters below, before both he and his creation slipped below the waves of the north Atlantic to their final resting place.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the fateful maiden voyage of Titanic, and Belfast City Council, in conjunction with the Ulster Titanic Society, has organized a series of special events to commemorate her departure from Belfast on April 2 1912.

The Titanic: Made In Belfast festival runs from March 30 until April 7, and features lectures, exhibition, tours of both the City and the shipyard, showings of the films ‘A Night To Remember’ and ‘Titanic’, and re-enactments of both Titanic’s launch and the public enquiry into her untimely demise. (AMcE)