Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave.
Thursday the 1st of February 1911 was a big day for East London. A large crowd had gathered at the Thames Ironworks in Canning Town. Looming like an iron mountain on a slipway of London’s last major shipbuilder was the 9,000ton hull of HMS Thunderer, about to be the first ‘dreadnought’ battleship launched into the Thames. In addition to ship-workers and other local residents, the launching was attended by numerous VIPs. These included prominent members of the then Liberal government: First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna; Sidney Buxton, President of the Board of Trade; and Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt. Arnold Hills, the owner of the shipyard and its managing director was present, despite being confined to an invalid chair, so too his chief naval architect Clement Mackrow, whose father had designed ships for the yard as far back as the 1860s, and Sir William White, the Admiralty’s former Director of Naval Construction. Charged with cutting the launch ribbon was Mrs Randall Davidson, whose husband would as Archbishop of Canterbury perform the anointment of King George V later the same year. Numerous members of the press were present including a reporter from the Daily Mail, who regaled readers with a stirring depiction of the launch in keeping with his paper’s long-standing advocacy of British sea power.
Many tons of grease had been spread on the slips to ease the progress of the huge hull. All dog-shores and other supporting timbers except those necessary for preventing a precipitate slide into the river had been earlier removed. At 17 minutes past three, Mrs Davidson cut the launch ribbon with a long gilt knife signalling the release of an eight hundredweight block, whose falling would impel the vessel down the slips. The Mail correspondent reflected the anxieties of many at that precise moment:
‘The ship looked so enormous that it had been hard to realise that she could move at all. When she did, how could she be controlled? Would she not break away and play havoc with staging? derrick poles? everything?’
None need have worried. To the cheers of onlookers, the 600ft ship began to move with ‘dignified deliberation’. ‘One watched, fascinated’, reported the Mail, ‘one felt almost as if some great convulsion of nature were taking place. With marvellous precision she glided on, scarcely quickening her pace at all’. Meanwhile, the attendant band struck up Rule Britannia and a large red and white balloon at the ship’s bow burst in a shower of confetti and white doves; a ceremonial legacy from the shipyard’s former prominence as a constructor for the Japanese navy. It was a launch, concluded the Mail, ‘without a jerk, without a quiver, without a hitch’.
The yard’s owner, virtually paralysed since 1906, had moved his own mountain in order to secure the contract for the 22,000ton battleship. By 1911, London had long ceased to be a major centre for shipbuilding owing to increased competition from overseas yards and those in other parts of the country such as the River Clyde. Hills and his political allies in East London, which included J.E. Le Manguais, the mayor of the neighbouring district Poplar, and John Bethell, MP for Romford, had had to lobby hard for the £1,800,000 contract, overcoming both parliamentary and Admiralty scepticism that a Thames yard could safely accommodate such a large ship or even complete the project in an area with a recent history of industrial strife. In 1911, the Anglo-German naval race was at its height. Thunderer and her three sisters were the second instalment of dreadnoughts resulting from the conservative political and press campaign of ‘We want eight, we won’t wait!’ and reliability of construction and delivery of ships was a significant public concern.
Of more concern to Hills and other philanthropic-minded gentlemen in East London were the livelihoods of 3,000 shipyard workers and their families, most from ‘the poor and dismal district of Canning Town’, whose futures depended directly on securing this mammoth project. Fortunately, the award of this prestige warship contract had fallen in a double election year. With Conservative and Liberal parties more or less tied after the election of January 1910, and with the increasing electoral appeal of the recently-formed Labour Party, whose new leader George Barnes had himself started out in a shipyard, it seems Herbert Asquith’s sitting Liberal government, which included Winston Churchill, was keen to throw a bone to the impoverished East End.[1] This was acknowledged by cynics at the time; Thunderer receiving the sobriquet ‘HMS Polling Day’. At a post-launch luncheon, Hills described her as a ‘treasure ship’ to the local community, one ‘richer than any Spanish galleon that was ever brought to British port.’ The work had indeed contributed £7,000 pounds in wages to the local economy every week of its construction.
Even once the contract had been won and the keel laid the Thunderer project had not run entirely smoothly. Awkward questions had been asked in parliament about the company’s rumoured purchase of a large floating crane from a German manufacturer; the fear being expressed that imported German construction overseers would be able to spy on one of Britain’s most advanced warships. Shipbuilding had always been dangerous work, and although the two worker fatalities that occurred during the Thunderer’s construction fell far short of the eight killed working on the contemporaneous liner Titanic at Belfast’s Harland & Wolf, it was still a regretful loss; both cases being found on inquiry to have been avoidable accidents caused by poor yard practices. Moreover, the truth was that Bow Creek, where the slipways of Thames Ironworks were sited, was becoming too shallow even at high tide to launch increasingly larger ships, and had required extensive dredging before the launch.
‘It has all gone off admirably, I am thankful to say’, remarked Hills when interviewed after the ship had safely entered the Creek. The old man had reason to be thankful; for another highly-anticipated launch at Thames Ironworks a dozen years earlier had resulted in a heavy and tragic loss of life.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 