The Addergoole Titanic Society's Committee decided recently to send two people to Belfast to explore that city's Titanic experience. Contact was made beforehand with a member of the Belfast Titanic Society, who also runs her own exclusive tour company. Susie Millar of Titanic Tours Belfast offered to be our guide for Thursday 29th October 2009.
We made the four hour trip from North Mayo on Wednesday 28th October and stayed in Belfast until Saturday morning. What a fascinating city, so much other history along with its ship building and RMS Titanic.
If you're visiting Titanic's birthplace, the easiest way to see everything and get a real feeling for the Belfast story is with Susie, whose great granddaughter was a Titanic engineer. As Susie explained to us Tommy Millar was one of around 25 Belfast men lost in April 1912. Click here to contact Titanic Tours Belfast to arrange your tour.
Her Mercedes people carrier takes a maximum of five. She picks up at your hotel at a time to suit you. She will even collect you from the train station. Susie arrived at 10 am, as agreed. The tour lasts around 3 hours and is told from a very personal point of view. There is short, but riveting in-car DVD on the Tommy Miller story and what he left his family before he boarded Titanic as crew. The tour includes such sites as;
- The Titanic Memorial at Belfast City Hall
- Windsor Avenue, the home of designer, Thomas Andrews, and now the headquarters of the Irish Football Association
- The Titanic Quarter on Queens Island:the drawing offices where RMS Titanic and SS Nomadic, her little sister, were designed and built: SS Nomadic, now in dry dock for a refit as a visitor centre: the Pump-House and dry dock, slipways and two towering yellow Harland and Wolff gantry cranes.
It was some shock to see the fine Titanic Memorial in Belfast City Hall grounds erected in 1920, now entrapped in the Belfast Wheel. This was balanced by the knowledge that the Belfast Titanic Society is petitioning the City Council to move the memorial to a more suitable position in the grounds, if the Wheel is granted planning permission for a further two years. The Memorial was originally unveiled in 1920 in Donegall Square North and was then moved to its current position in 1959, fifty years ago. Read more. As a small part of the petition the Addergoole Titanic Society wrote to the City Council. In response to all those petitioning the Wheel was removed in April 2010.
On the Thursday evening we were invited by the Belfast Titanic Society to the unveiling of a large piece of Titanic artwork at Abercorn Residential Complex in Titanic Quarter in the form of a giant toy modelling kit. Read more and view pictures.
There is a very useful free guide, “Titanic Guide Belfast & Greater Belfast” by Belfast Visitor & Convention Centre: click here. The Belfast Telegraph has an extensive searchable archive of Titanic local news items: click here.
Just click on any picture below to view the slideshow.