I have read with some interest the claims that the Oceanic III was not planned to have been built at 1000+ feet long. Long a student of this ship, I this evening pulled out my source notes and research material and gave it a read through. (I’ve not conducted any active research on this ship for a good decade.)
The inescapable conclusion that I continually arrived at is that the Oceanic III was intended to be or to surpass 1000 feet in length. Every source agrees with this conclusion.
For starters, two respected Harland & Wolff employees are to be consulted. Cuthbert Coulson Pounder, Director and Chief Technical Engineer of H&W after WWII, released details of the Oceanic that must be accepted as fact due to his position and the fact that H&W nor its employees would have had any reason to lie about a ship that was 20 years distant and never built.
Pounder said that the ship “would have had 47 six-cylinder, exhaust turbo-charged, four-stroke single-acting diesel engines producing a total of 275,000 i.h.p. and coupled in pairs to electric generators. The total weight of the installation would have been some 17,000 tons, equal to the displacement tonnage of a smaller liner of the day!” Additionally the ship “was to measure 60,000 gross tons with an overall length of 1,010 feet, a beam of 120 feet and a draught of 38 feet.” (Damned by Destiny, David Williams and Richard P. De Kerbrech, 1982)
Dr. Denis Rebbeck, a director at Harland & Wolff, delivered a paper read before Section G of the British Association on Friday, September 5, 1952. This paper gave great detail the history of the shipyard, and contained additional facts about the Oceanic III that cannot be ignored. He wrote that “The Musgrave Shipyard will also be long remembered by the people of Belfast as the yard where the keel of a 1000-ft. Diesel-electric passenger liner was laid down for the White Star Line in the late 1920’s …” and “the total power of the ship was designed to be 200,000 shaft horse-power on four screws, and there were to be 47 six-cylinder super-charged four-stroke Diesel engines, coupled in pairs.”
This same paper shows the profile and engine arrangement of the Oceanic III in a plan which must be accepted as Gospel. Indeed, this outline profile is still used today as the basis for all renditions of the ship, as well it should be. It was produced during the design phase for the ship, and was reproduced in print a mere 24 years after the laying of the keel. I hold in great suspicion any plans purporting to show the ship at a shorter length than 1000 feet.
To explore this facet of the ship further, Roy Anderson did much important early research regarding the Oceanic III, and he and I shared correspondence in the years before he died about the ship and its plans. Most of this revolved around the actual existence of the liner (including a letter from a man who made a special trip to H&W to see the keel plates of the ship). What Anderson did caution me at the time is that “there are several dangerous assertions which you would do well to avoid” — thoughts that the steel from the Oceanic III was incorporated into the Britannic III or that the Oceanic III became the Georgic II, among others.
But again, Anderson — a man who spent much time talking to people who actually worked on this project or knew first-hand of it — never made the claim nor thought that the ship would be anything other than a 1,000 foot liner. Again, Captain J.H. Isherwood’s famous profile of the ship is his usual scale of 1 inch=100 feet and works out to 1,006 feet overall.
C.J. Slater, a former employee of H&W, was just beginning his career in 1928 as an architect and civil engineer in the office of his father who was H&W’s Consulting Civil Engineer, wrote that he was the “innocent junior” who wound up with the job of “compassing” every single concrete pile used in the extension of Slipway 14. This extension alone involved over 1000 15 inch square, 40 to 60 feet long piles! His recollections are more based on the fact that the ship was started, abandoned and an attempt to restart it (the keel had in the meantime been coated with oil), but he also states “that the outline of the ship on the slipway drawings was always 1001 feet. This was to make quite sure that no rival could argue that she was a half an inch short of 1000 feet.”
Other H&W employees who worked in the yard at the time also have written of a 1000 foot ship — not one has asserted that the ship was to be built one inch shorter than the magical figure of 1000 feet.
Nations Business in July 1929 mentions the ship at 60,000 gross tons, designed to make 27 knots. John Malcolm Brinnin, N.R.P. Bonsor and John Maxtone-Graham all refer to the ship as 1000 feet. Several articles in the Titanic Commutator of the THS do the same as does Steamboat Bill of the SSHSA. Again, the New York Times and The Times of London, both contemporary publications, also reference the ship at that length.
The problem with any objective look at the Oceanic III is that the builders model is lost (although one of my correspondents had actually seen it) as are the vast majority of plans for the ship. Perhaps more may be uncovered as the mass of plans and photographs from H&W are properly catalogued and organized, but I do not think that any new information about the ship will show that it was anything other than the first 1000 foot liner actually started by any shipbuilding concern.
I’d be glad to respond to questions about my research, but with the caveat that I’m incredibly busy at the print shop and may not be able to respond for some days.
