Arrol Gantry

A central 15 ton travelling gantry crane was also provided, for lifting machinery along the centreline of the hull.

The access within the gantry was also improved, with long sloping walkways and electric lifts, rather than the previous slow and hazardous use of ladders.

[1][2] The Belfast gantry was commissioned by the White Star Line[3] and Harland and Wolff and built by Sir William Arrol & Co. in 1908.

Along the centre line ran a light Titan crane, with a reach of 135 feet and able to carry a 3-ton load at full radius, and 5 tons closer in.

To provide better photographs against the steelwork of the gantry, Olympic's hull was painted white during building, then repainted after launch.

[12] At the outbreak of World War I, Harland and Wolff were still engaged in building passenger liners and the Belgian Red Star Line's[vi] 27,000 ton SS Belgenland was almost completed on the adjacent No 1 way.

The monitors were fairly small, of around 6,000 tons and quite short, but they also had protective anti-torpedo bulges which gave them an extremely broad beam of 90 feet (27 m).

The limited lifting capacity of the gantry's cranes required the 4-inch armour plate to be installed in particularly small pieces, compared to in a warship building yard.

[18] A class of small 6 inch gun-armed monitors was also designed, to use the secondary armament removed from the Queen Elizabeth battleships.

Slipway 5, at the southern end of Queen's Island, was used instead to build three of them, working around the keel of the postponed SS Narkunda, and the other two at the Workman, Clark yard across the water.

Both were built by Harland and Wolff, Erebus at the Govan yard and Terror on the third slip at Queen's Island.

Ney's turret was removed at Elswick and the mount converted for greater elevation, then shipped to Belfast for installation by Harland and Wolff's floating crane.

[23] The Gantry dominated the skyline of Belfast and became an important local landmark, as Samson and Goliath would do again fifty years later.

The poet Louis MacNeice's autobiographical poem Carrickfergus describes his birthplace: "I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:" This is somewhat anachronistic, as MacNeice was born just before the construction of the Gantry and his family had moved to nearby Carrickfergus before Olympic's launch.