Internationally, Harland & Wolff is perhaps best known as the birthplace of the RMS Titanic, however, in Northern Ireland the iconic shipyard carries far deeper significance.
Its iconic yellow gantry cranes, named after the Biblical figures Samson and Goliath, stand as a symbol of an era when it was at the forefront of a global industry.
But news that the company is once again facing administration has cast doubt over its future.
History
Over its 163 history, it has survived two world wars, the partition of Ireland, the Troubles, and in 2019 it was rescued from the brink of collapse.
From its inception in 1861 it grew from around 500 employees to become one of Northern Ireland’s biggest employers.
By the early 20th century, Harland & Wolff dominated global shipbuilding and had become the most prolific builder of ocean liners in the world.
It was during this period that it produced one of its most famous ocean liners, the Titanic, which sank during its maiden voyage in 1912.
Dr Graham Brownlow is a senior lecturer in economics at Queen’s University Belfast and he says that at its peak in 1919 the shipyard employed around 30,000 people but, by the middle of the decade, the business was in serious decline, having been hit by a drop in demand during the interwar period.
Since then it has been plagued by financial difficulties and increasing global competition.
Rescued from the brink
In 1975 the company was nationalised, at which point it employed around 10,000 people.
Harland and Wolff returned back to private ownership in 1989, after a management-employee buyout, backed by Norwegian industrialist Fred Olsen.
Eventually Olsen withdrew support and the business fell into insolvency in 2019. At this point it hadn’t built a ship in around two decades.
But Dr Brownlow says the issues which have beset H&W are not “unique” to the east Belfast business.
Globalisation has seen the building of merchant ships migrate to Asia, while the capital intensive nature of the business and highly cyclical nature of supply and demand in the industry have all challenged the business.
Fearing for their jobs, the workforce occupied the shipyard for nine weeks to prevent its closure in 2019.
Dr Pete Hodson, a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, said the shipyard is “quite central to Belfast civic pride”.
“The shipyard occupation in 2019 was quite unusual, because the shipyard leveraged a lot of cultural power from its status and in ways that I don’t think is available to any other UK industrial employer.
“The shipyard is quite central to Belfast civic pride, in a way, regardless of how much it’s contracted the last 20 years.
“It employs about 300 people now in the Belfast site, but culturally it packs a punch and leverages a lot of the heritage into keeping it alive.”
It was later rescued by London based company Infrastrata, which rebranded under the Harland & Wolff name, and turned its focus to rebuilding the shipyard.
Nationalisation and government support
Dr Brownlow says that over its recent history, the company has been able to weather challenging economic conditions, largely due to the support it has received from governments. In the 1980s it received the equivalent of almost £700m.
“Economic historians writing in 100 years time might actually regard it as quite strange that Harland & Wolff went on as long as it did,” explains Dr Brownlow. “If you look objectively at the economics of the industry, so many things have conspired against it over time.”
“It was given financial assistance in the 70s and 80s that was more generous than it would otherwise have got because of the symbolism, but that symbolism can only take it so far.”
Dr Hodson added that successive governments have “essentially placed the shipyard on economic life support” from the 1970s onwards.
“At that time the shipyard had re-equipped, hence the building of the two big cranes to construct large oil tankers,” he said. “But the oil price hikes of early 1973 kind of destroyed that industry.”
He explained that in many ways supporting the business was a means of securing jobs. With the outbreak of the Troubles, there were fears that unemployment could lead to people becoming involved in paramilitarism.
“So the government was pumping money into the shipyard as a means of peacekeeping effectively. Subsidising these jobs was a way of keeping a lid on the Troubles.”
By the end of the 20th century that support was beginning to dwindle.
Dr Hodson explains: “In the 80s it was death by 1,000 cuts, there was a very slow process of layoffs, maybe 100 every couple of months, almost beneath the radar so as not to provoke widespread concern or anger or violence.
“And it was a fairly successful policy. Employment shrank by 2,500 by the time it was privatised in 1989 with negligible political repercussions.
“By right it should have gone bust in 1970s but it was kept on life support.”
Troubled past
Harland and Wolff has also been badly scarred by sectarianism.
The firm’s workforce was overwhelmingly Protestant and some Catholic staff made complaints of sectarianism and intimidation during the company’s long history.
Dr Hodson said: “It’s a cultural icon, but it’s also a contested one too. In the Troubles period those cranes were seen as symbols of Protestant supremacy for the Catholic population in Belfast and Northern Ireland.
“But you can’t judge it on those terms alone, the shipyard was seen as a sectarian workplace with a Protestant unionist majority workforce for most of its lifespan, but that is going back 30 years or so.
“It’s a very different beast today, certainly it’s done a lot to get young people into industry.”
What next?
Today it is estimated to employ around 300 people in Belfast, a far cry from the days where it was one of Northern Ireland’s biggest employers.
With over 20 companies expressing an interest in the business there is hope that Harland and Wolff may be be pulled from the brink once more. Dr Brownlow believes that its future may rest with its defence contracts.
“I think the merchant fleet, that business, has gone to Asia, but you don’t have to be an expert in geopolitics to realise that there is no way that Western governments are going to want military shipbuilding fully in the orbit of Asia.
“And that’s a big transformation for H&W, because it was overwhelmingly a shipyard that was concerned with building ocean liners. The vast bulk of output before 1914 was for private shipping lines, not the Royal Navy.”
