“Ah, well,” was the quiet comment, “Mr. Andrews would do all that and more three times maybe every day.”
All in the day’s work, you see. And when it was done, then home in a tramcar, to have his dinner, a talk with his mother over the telephone, and so to work again until eleven.
In 1901 Andrews became a Member of the Institution of Naval Architects, and in the year following a Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. He was also a Member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (New York), and an Honorary Member of the Belfast Association of Engineers.
In 1908 he made a home for himself at Dunallan, Windsor Avenue, Belfast, marrying, on June 24th, Helen Reilly, younger daughter of the late John Doherty Barbour, of Conway, Dunmurry, County Antrim, D.L.—worthiest and most loyal of helpmates.
Concerning his married life, so woefully restricted in point of years as it was rich in bounty of happiness, it is perhaps sufficient to say here that, just before he sailed from Southampton, in April last, on that final tragic voyage, he made occasion, one evening whilst talking with a friend, to contrast his own lot with the lot of some husbands he knew; saying, amongst other things, that in the whole time since his marriage, no matter how often he had been away or how late he had stayed at the Yard, never had Mrs. Andrews made a complaint.
She would not. With Jane Eyre she could say, “I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine.”
In 1910 a child was born to them and named Elizabeth Law Barbour.
IV.
All this is important, vital a great deal of it; but after all what concerns us chiefly, in this brief record, is the kind of man Thomas Andrews was—that and the fine end he made. Everything, one supposes, in this workaday world, must eventually be expressed in terms of character. Though a man build the Atlantic fleet, himself with superhuman vigour of hand and brain, and have not character, what profiteth it him, and how much the less profiteth it the fleets maybe, at last?
Perhaps of all the manual professions that of shipbuilding is the one demanding from those engaged in it, masters and men, the sternest rectitude. Good enough in the shipyard is never enough. Think what scamped work, a flawed shaft, a badly laid plate, an error in calculation, may mean some wild night out in the Atlantic; and when next you are in Belfast go to Queen’s Island and see there, in the shops, on the slips, how everyone is striving, or being made to strive, on your behalf and that of all who voyage, for the absolute best—everything to a hair’s breadth, all as strong and sound as hands can achieve, each rivet of all the millions in a liner (perhaps the most impressive thing one saw) tested separately and certified with its own chalk mark.