RMS Olympic

Olympic was built beside Titanic in a specially enlarged gantry at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, the two vast hulls rising side by side. She was launched on 20 October 1910 and entered service on 14 June 1911 with a maiden voyage from Southampton, calling at Cherbourg and Queenstown before crossing to New York, under the command of Captain Edward Smith — the same master who would later go down with Titanic.

As the first of her class, Olympic introduced the world to the scale and luxury that would soon make Titanic a household name: the glass-domed Grand Staircase, the panelled first-class public rooms, and a size that made her, briefly, the largest ocean liner afloat.

Barely three months into service, Olympic was caught up in a collision whose consequences would reach her younger sister. On 20 September 1911, as she manoeuvred in the Solent off the Isle of Wight, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke — built with a reinforced ram bow — struck her starboard side near the stern, tearing two large holes and flooding two compartments. Olympic made it back to Southampton under her own power.

The repairs at Belfast pulled workers and slipway time away from Titanic, delaying the younger ship's completion by several weeks — one small link in the chain of events that would place Titanic among the ice on a particular April night.

Titanic's loss in April 1912 fell hardest of all on her surviving sister. Olympic's crew briefly refused to sail without proper lifeboats, and the ship was withdrawn for a major safety refit over the winter of 1912–13.

Her lifeboat capacity was raised dramatically, from twenty boats to enough for everyone aboard. Shipwrights built an inner watertight skin along the boiler and engine rooms, in effect giving her a double hull, and raised five of her watertight bulkheads so that flooding could no longer spill from one compartment to the next as it had on Titanic. Rebuilt, Olympic could stay afloat with her first six compartments open to the sea.

When the First World War came, Olympic was requisitioned as a troopship. Painted in bold dazzle camouflage, she carried tens of thousands of soldiers across the Atlantic, her speed her best defence against submarines. Her dependability under pressure earned her the nickname “Old Reliable.”

On 12 May 1918 she made history of a rarer sort. Meeting the surfaced German submarine U-103 in the English Channel, Olympic turned and rammed her, the great liner's port propeller slicing into the U-boat's hull and sending her under. Olympic remains the only merchant ship of the war credited with sinking an enemy warship.

Between the wars Olympic returned to the luxury trade and stayed a popular ship, but the Great Depression gutted transatlantic travel, and the forced merger of White Star with Cunard sealed the fate of the older liners. Her final years were shadowed by tragedy.

On 15 May 1934, running through thick fog off the American coast, Olympic struck the Nantucket lightship — a small vessel anchored to warn ships away from the shoals — cutting it in two and killing seven of its eleven crew. The accident deepened the sense that the grand old liner's day had passed.

Olympic was withdrawn from service on 12 April 1935 and sold for scrap. Her upper works were dismantled at Jarrow and her hull finally broken up at Inverkeithing, ending twenty-four years and some 500 Atlantic crossings.

Yet pieces of her live on. Much of her exquisite panelling and fittings were sold off and preserved — most famously the carved à la carte restaurant interiors, reinstalled as a suite of rooms in the White Swan Hotel at Alnwick, where guests still dine beneath Olympic's woodwork. It is the nearest thing that survives to standing inside Titanic herself.