William Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie

Memorial to William Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie, in front of Belfast City Hall

William James Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie KP (born May 31, 1847 in Québec , † June 7, 1924 off Cuba ) was an Irish shipbuilder and politician .

biography

William James Pirrie was born on May 31, 1847 during a stay of his Irish parents James Alexander Pirrie and Eliza Swan Montgomery in Québec in the province of Canada . He spent his childhood in Conlig, County Down, Ireland, and attended the Royal Academical Institute in Belfast .

At the age of 15, he began his training at the shipyard Harland & Wolff in Belfast, where he later became a partner in 1895 and CEO ( chairman ) was. From 1896 to 1897 he was Lord Mayor of Belfast and in 1897 he was inducted into the Privy Council for Ireland. In 1898 he was High Sheriff of County Antrim and in 1899 High Sheriff of County Down. In 1900 he became President of the UK Chamber of Shipping . On July 17, 1906, he was ennobled by King Edward VII as Baron Pirrie , of the City of Belfast, and thereby a member of the British House of Lords . On July 9, 1921, King George V made him Viscount Pirrie , of the City of Belfast. In 1908 he was accepted as a Knight Companion in the Order of Saint Patrick . From 1907 to 1913 he held the office of Comptroller of the Household of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and from 1911 to 1924 he was Lord Lieutenant of Belfast. During the First World War he was a member of the Supply Board of the War Office from 1916 and in 1918 he was accepted into the British Privy Council. After the First World War, he was, among other things, the main auditor for merchant shipbuilding. In 1921 he was elected to the Senate of Northern Ireland .

In 1899 he was the honorary doctorate (Doctor of Law) of the Royal University of Ireland and 1903 with an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Science) of the Trinity College of Dublin University honored.

Pirrie died on June 7, 1924 during a voyage at sea off Cuba at a pneumonia . Since his marriage to Margaret Montgomery Carlisle († 1935), which he entered into in 1879, remained childless, his title of nobility expired upon his death.

His sister Eliza Pirrie was the mother of Thomas Andrews (1873-1912), the architect of the RMS Titanic , and of John Miller Andrews , the second Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

In 2006 a memorial was erected to him in front of Belfast City Hall .

Political activity

Pirrie joined the Belfast Corporation , but his position as a Unionist was later so weakened that he was refused nomination as a candidate for Parliament in the Unionist Party in 1902. As Lord Mayor of Belfast, he pushed ahead with the isolation of the city by building a new town hall and the later Royal Victoria Hospital . With his support of the Home Rule Bill of 1912, he made the Belfast population an enemy and was whistled on the street after attending a meeting of the Ulster Liberal Association initiated by Winston Churchill .

Pirrie's role in shipbuilding

After Pirrie became a partner of the two company founders Sir EJ Harland and Gustav Wolff at Harland & Wolff in 1874 , he embodied a driving force in the shipyard, of which he was chairman for several years. He was one of the foremost champions in the further development of seafaring technology and marine architecture, including the construction of ocean liners such as the Titanic and its sister ships in cooperation with the British shipping company White Star Line . Pirrie's "floating hotels" assumed a dominant position on the "North Atlantic route" between Canada and Great Britain.

Web links

• William James Pirrie, 1st and last Viscount Pirrie on thepeerage.com
• Mr William Pirrie in the Hansard (English)