The Arrol Gantry was a large steel structure built by Sir William Arrol & Co. at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was built to act as overhead cranes for the building of the three Olympic-class liners.
The Arrol Gantry was a large steel structure built by Sir William Arrol & Co. at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was built to act as overhead cranes for the building of the three Olympic-class liners.
From 1900 to 1906, Arrol had constructed a shipyard for William Beardmore and Company at Dalmuir on the Clyde. This included a large gantry structure over the building berth. In 1906 it was used for the construction of the pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Agamemnon, then the largest battleship launched on the Clyde. [1]
The Beardmore gantry was 750 ft (230 m) long, 135 ft (41 m) wide and 150 ft (46 m) high, spanning a single building berth. The structure was of two long steel truss girders, supported on ten pairs of steel truss towers, braced by cross trusses above. Nine electric cranes were provided, with four jib cranes along each side girder, each having a 5-ton capacity and 30 foot jib. These were travelling cranes and could be moved along the girder, or grouped together to share a heavier lift. They were intended to place the main hull plates into position, with a dedicated gang for each crane, forming the plates and riveting them into place. A central 15 ton travelling gantry crane was also provided, for lifting machinery along the centreline of the hull. [1]
The Belfast gantry would be very similar to this first gantry, although larger at 840 ft (260 m) long and spanning two building berths. The central girder between the berths allowed the addition of a larger cantilever crane. [2]
The Beardmore gantry had used tapered towers, with size and strength proportional to the load upon them. The base of each was spread into a triangular arch, giving a more stable base and also allowing a railway line to be laid through the towers, bringing construction materials. For the Belfast gantry, the towers were more parallel, with straight inner faces. This allowed temporary working platforms to be attached and relocated upwards as a hull was constructed, giving an additional working space and easy access to the outside of the hull, even with heavy equipment. The access within the gantry was also improved, with long sloping walkways and electric lifts, rather than the previous slow and hazardous use of ladders. [1] [2]
The Belfast gantry was commissioned by the White Star Line [3] and Harland and Wolff and built by Sir William Arrol & Co. in 1908. [4] It was 840 feet (260 m) feet long, 270 feet (82 m) feet wide and 228 feet (69 m) feet high. [4] [5] It was an essential part of the infrastructure needed for the construction of the RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic and remained in use until it was demolished in the 1960s to create space for storage and car parking. [6]
Before the Gantry, the northern end of the Queen's Island shipyard had four building slipways, each with gantry cranes above them. The cranes formed three crosswise gantries over each slip, with jib cranes working from each upright. To make space for the two new slipways, three of the old slipways were given up. No 1 slipway remained and continued in use, with its original gantries, and was used for building liners such as the SS Belgenland. The two new slipways were numbered 2 & 3. There were nine slipways at Queen's Island before this, eight afterwards but the other remained numbered as 5...9 and there was no longer a No 4 slipway. [7]
The Gantry was built on three rows, 120 feet (37 m) apart, of eleven steel truss towers with three large truss girders between them, and lighter crosswise Warren trusses above this. The large girders provided runways for a pair of 10-ton overhead cranes above each way and lighter 5-ton jib cranes from the sides. Along the centre line ran a light Titan crane, with a reach of 135 feet and able to carry a 3-ton load at full radius, and 5 tons closer in. The cranes were electrically-powered and built by Stothert & Pitt of Bath. [5] Access to the high girders was provided by three long ramps and also electric lifts for the shipyard workers. [8] As Harland and Wolff were primarily a commercial yard, [9] [lower-roman 2] there was no need for the huge Titan cranes being built at this time for the naval shipyards of the Clyde, where heavy lifts of armour plate, or even entire turrets, were needed. [lower-roman 3]
Olympic and Titanic were built together, with Olympic in the No 2 slipway. [11] [lower-roman 4] [lower-roman 5] Olympic was launched first, in October 1910, with Titanic seven months later. To provide better photographs against the steelwork of the gantry, Olympic's hull was painted white during building, then repainted after launch. Titanic was painted in White Star's black hull livery from the outset. Britannic was then constructed on the Olympic ways. [12]
At the outbreak of World War I, Harland and Wolff were still engaged in building passenger liners and the Belgian Red Star Line's [lower-roman 6] 27,000 ton SS Belgenland was almost completed on the adjacent No 1 way. SS Statendam had been launched from the No 2 way in July, a fortnight before the outbreak of war. A further liner, yard number 470, had been laid down there, but work had hardly started. [13] [lower-roman 7]
When the Royal Navy wished to build the 14 inch monitors as coastal bombardment ships, these building ways were the most immediately available. The monitors were fairly small, of around 6,000 tons and quite short, but they also had protective anti-torpedo bulges which gave them an extremely broad beam of 90 feet (27 m). This would require equally wide building slips, which the Olympic slips could provide. The monitors were so short that the first two of them, Admiral Farragut and General Grant, could be built simultaneously on the same slipway. [lower-roman 8] Farragut was launched on 15 April 1915, with Grant following on 29 April. The limited lifting capacity of the gantry's cranes required the 4-inch armour plate to be installed in particularly small pieces, compared to in a warship building yard. To install their US-supplied turrets, the hulls were taken to the COW yard on the Clyde. [13]
A second group of monitors was also built. These were the 12 inch monitors and used guns taken from Majestic-class pre-dreadnought battleships. [15] Although their 12-inch guns were now quite old, they had been sufficiently advanced over other guns at the time that they were still worth re-using. They had been the first British battleship main guns to use wire-wound construction and also the first to fire cordite propelling charges. As originally mounted, their elevation of 13½° only permitted a range of 13,700 yd (12,500 m), which would leave the monitors within range of German coastal defences; with this increased to 30°, a range of 21,000 yd (19,000 m) was expected. [16] Eight of these monitors were built, five by Harland and Wolff and four of them on slips 1 and 3 of the Queen's Island yard. [17] Like the 14 inch monitors, these monitors had prominent anti-torpedo bulges to their hulls and required a wide building slip, but were short enough that two could be built simultaneously on the large liner slips.
Glorious was laid down as a 'large, light cruiser' on 1 May 1915 and launched almost a year later on 20 April 1916. [18]
A class of small 6 inch gun-armed monitors was also designed, to use the secondary armament removed from the Queen Elizabeth battleships. [lower-roman 9] As the 14-inch monitors were now almost complete, it was hoped to build this whole class of five on a single large slipway. However the number 2 slipway was needed immediately for Glorious. Slipway 5, at the southern end of Queen's Island, was used instead to build three of them, working around the keel of the postponed SS Narkunda, and the other two at the Workman, Clark yard across the water. [19]
A second batch of 15 inch-armed monitors were built, with a more developed design than the earlier Marshals. Both were built by Harland and Wolff, Erebus at the Govan yard and Terror on the third slip at Queen's Island. [20] The Marshal monitors had been so unsuccessful, largely owing to their slow speed and their unreliable diesel engines, particularly for Marshal Ney, that it was decided to remove their turrets for re-use on the new high-speed monitors. Ney's turret was removed at Elswick and the mount converted for greater elevation, then shipped to Belfast for installation by Harland and Wolff's floating crane.
Both of these monitors had a successful WWI career and served into WWII.
| Building Berth | 1909 | 1910 | 1911 | 1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nomadic (422) | Belgenland (391) | Earl of Peterborough (480) | Arundel Castle (455) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sir Thomas Picton (481) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2 | Olympic (400) | Britannic (403) | Admiral Farragut / Abercrombie (472) | Glorious (482) | Vindictive (500) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| General Grant / Havelock (473) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 3 | Titanic (401) | Statendam (436) | Laurentic [lower-roman 7] (470) | Lord Clive (478) | Terror (493) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| General Craufurd (479) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Gantry was in use into the 1960s, but the shipyard was then reorganised to provide a larger building space. Work on large ships then took place in a large dry dock at the end of the Musgrave channel on the south-eastern side of Queen's Island, served by a pair of Goliath cranes, Samson and Goliath. [22]
A gallery at Titanic Belfast is dominated by a steel scaffold which stands 20 metres (66 ft) high and alludes to the Arrol Gantry: however, the original gantry was nearly four times the height of the gallery's representation. [23]
The Gantry dominated the skyline of Belfast and became an important local landmark, as Samson and Goliath would do again fifty years later. The poet Louis MacNeice's autobiographical poem Carrickfergus describes his birthplace:
"I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:"
This is somewhat anachronistic, as MacNeice was born just before the construction of the Gantry and his family had moved to nearby Carrickfergus before Olympic's launch. [24]
RMS Olympic was a British ocean liner and the lead ship of the White Star Line's trio of Olympic-class liners. Olympic had a career spanning 24 years from 1911 to 1935, in contrast to her short-lived sister ships, Titanic and Britannic. This included service as a troopship during the First World War, which gained her the nickname "Old Reliable", and during which she rammed and sank the U-boat U-103. She returned to civilian service after the war, and served successfully as an ocean liner throughout the 1920s and into the first half of the 1930s, although increased competition, and the slump in trade during the Great Depression after 1930, made her operation increasingly unprofitable. Olympic was withdrawn from service and sold for scrapping on 12 April 1935 which was completed in 1937.
HMHSBritannic was the third and final vessel of the White Star Line's Olympic class of steamships and the second White Star ship to bear the name Britannic. She was the youngest sister of the RMS Olympic and the RMS Titanic and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. She was operated as a hospital ship from 1915 until her sinking near the Greek island of Kea, in the Aegean Sea, in November 1916. At the time she was the largest hospital ship in the world.
Harland & Wolff is a British shipbuilding and fabrication company headquartered in London with sites in Belfast, Arnish, Appledore and Methil. It specialises in ship repair, shipbuilding and offshore construction. Harland & Wolff is famous for having built the majority of the ocean liners for the White Star Line, including Olympic-class trio – RMS Olympic, RMS Titanic and HMHS Britannic. Outside of White Star Line, other ships that have been built include the Royal Navy's HMS Belfast; Royal Mail Line's Andes; Shaw, Savill & Albion's Southern Cross; Union-Castle's RMS Pendennis Castle; P&O's Canberra; and Hamburg-America's SS Amerika of 1905. Harland and Wolff's official history, Shipbuilders to the World, was published in 1986.
HMS Erebus was a First World War monitor launched on 19 June 1916 and which served in both world wars. She and her sister ship Terror are known as the Erebus class. They were named after the two bomb vessels sent to investigate the Northwest Passage as part of Franklin's lost expedition (1845–1848), in which all 129 members eventually perished.
SS Nomadic is a former tender of the White Star Line, launched on 25 April 1911 at Belfast, that is now on display in Belfast's Titanic Quarter. She was built to transfer passengers and mail to and from the ocean liners RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic. She is the only surviving vessel designed by Thomas Andrews, who also helped design those two ocean liners, and the last White Star Line vessel in existence today.
William Beardmore and Company was a British engineering and shipbuilding conglomerate based in Glasgow and the surrounding Clydeside area. It was active from 1886 to the mid-1930s and at its peak employed about 40,000 people. It was founded and owned by William Beardmore, later Lord Invernairn, after whom the Beardmore Glacier was named.
Samson and Goliath are the twin shipbuilding gantry cranes situated at Queen's Island, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The cranes, which were named after the Biblical figures Samson and Goliath, dominate the Belfast skyline and are landmark structures of the city. Comparative newcomers to the city, the cranes rapidly came to symbolise Belfast in a way that no building or monument had hitherto done.
A gantry crane is a crane built atop a gantry, which is a structure used to straddle an object or workspace. They can range from enormous "full" gantry cranes, capable of lifting some of the heaviest loads in the world, to small shop cranes, used for tasks such as lifting automobile engines out of vehicles. They are also called portal cranes, the "portal" being the empty space straddled by the gantry.
Sir William Arrol was a Scottish civil engineer, bridge builder, and Liberal Unionist Party politician.
HMS Abercrombie was a First World War Royal Navy Abercrombie-class monitor.
The Olympic-class ocean liners were a trio of British ocean liners built by the Harland & Wolff shipyard for the White Star Line during the early 20th century. They were Olympic (1911), Titanic (1912) and Britannic (1914). All three were designed to be the largest and most luxurious passenger ships at that time, designed to give White Star an advantage in the transatlantic passenger trade.
SS Traffic was a tender of the White Star Line, and the fleetmate to the Nomadic. She was built for the White Star Line by Harland and Wolff, at Belfast, to serve the Olympic-class ocean liners. In Cherbourg, her role was to transport Third Class passengers and mails between the port and the liners anchored in the harbour, while the Nomadic was tasked with transporting First Class and Second Class passengers.
HMS General Craufurd was the one of eight Lord Clive-class monitors built for the Royal Navy during World War I. Their primary armament was taken from obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships. The ship spent the war in the English Channel bombarding German positions along the Belgian coast as part of the Dover Patrol. She participated in the failed First and Second Ostend Raids in 1918, bombarding the defending coastal artillery as the British attempted to block the Bruges–Ostend Canal. Later that year General Craufurd supported the coastal battles during the Hundred Days Offensive until the Germans evacuated coastal Belgium in mid-October. The ship was decommissioned almost immediately after the war ended the following month, but she was reactivated in 1920 to serve as a gunnery training ship for a year. General Craufurd was sold for scrap in 1921.
HMS General Wolfe, also known as Wolfe, was a Lord Clive-class monitor which was built in 1915 for shore-bombardment duties in the First World War. Her class of eight ships was armed by four obsolete Majestic-class pre-dreadnoughts which had their 12-inch guns and mounts removed, modified and installed in the newly built monitors. Wolfe spent her entire war service with the Dover Patrol, bombarding the German-occupied Belgian coastline, which had been heavily fortified. In the spring of 1918 she was fitted with an 18-inch (457 mm) gun, with which she made the longest-range firing in the history of the Royal Navy - 36,000-yard (20 mi) - on a target at Snaeskerke, Belgium. After the war, she was laid up before being stripped and put up for sale in 1920. She was finally scrapped in 1923.
Sir William Arrol & Co. was a Scottish civil engineering and construction business founded by William Arrol and based in Glasgow. It built some of the most famous bridges in the United Kingdom including the second Tay Bridge, the Forth Bridge and Tower Bridge in London.
RMS Titanic was a British passenger and mail carrying ocean liner, operated by the White Star Line, that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 as a result of striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, United States. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, about 1,500 died, making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship up to that time. The disaster drew public attention, spurred major changes in maritime safety regulations, and inspired many artistic works.
TitanicBelfast is a visitor attraction opened in 2012, a monument to Belfast's maritime heritage on the site of the former Harland & Wolff shipyard in the city's Titanic Quarter where the RMS Titanic was built. It tells the stories of the Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sank during her maiden voyage in 1912, and her sister ships RMS Olympic and HMHS Britannic. The building contains more than 12,000 square metres (130,000 sq ft) of floor space, most of which is occupied by a series of galleries, private function rooms and community facilities.
SS Pontic was a tender and baggage vessel of the White Star Line that was built in 1894 by Harland & Wolff, Belfast, United Kingdom. She was sold in 1919 and continued in that role. In 1925, she was sold and used as a collier. She was scrapped in 1930.
Titanic: Blood and Steel is a 12-part television costume drama series about the construction of the RMS Titanic. Produced by History Asia, it is one of two large budget television dramas aired in April 2012, the centenary of the disaster; the other is Titanic.
A block-setting crane is a form of crane. They were used for installing the large stone blocks used to build breakwaters, moles and stone piers.
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