Unit 6: Shipping in Britain

Britain has a very important history of ships and the sea. The British Navy was the biggest navy in the world at one time. In Liverpool there is a great museum of maritime history. It's got several ships in he docks outside.
Between 1830 and 1930 more than nine million people from all over Europe left from the cort of Liverpool to start a new life in America or Australia.The most famous ship was probably the Titanic. It sank in 1912 and 1,500 people drowned. It was the worst disaster in maritime history.

Other famous ship was the Queen Mary 2, which crosses the Atlantic from Southampton to New York. These containers, are packed with clothes, television sets, computers furniture and toys. Here at theat the Southampton Container Terminal (S.C.T) they unload more than one and a half million containers each year. So the sea still plays a very important part in life in Britain.

Titanic was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, in the UK, and designed to compete with the rival Cunard Line's Lusitania and Mauretania. Were intended to be the largest, most luxurious ships ever to operate. The designers were Lord Pirrie, a director of both Harland and Wolff and White Star, naval architect Thomas Andrews, Harland and Wolff's construction manager and head of their design departmen. Carlisle's responsibilities included the decorations, the equipment and all general arrangements, including the implementation of an efficient lifeboat davit design. Carlisle would leave the project in 1910, before the ships were launched, when he became a shareholder in Welin Davit & Engineering Company Ltd, the firm making the davits.