The CS Mackay-Bennett Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth

The River Clyde, Scotland's most iconic waterway.

Today, it's a bustling commercial hub,

but 150 years ago

this was the beating heart of an industrial revolution...

..and fuelling it were its shipyards.

I'm David Hayman and I grew up surrounded by those yards

and the magnificent ships that they produced.

But it's where they went and what they did

and the lives they touched that's always fascinated me.

In this series, I'm going to uncover the secrets of the great ships

that laid the foundations of today's Commonwealth of Nations.

It's a journey that's going to take me around the world

to tell incredible stories and unearth extraordinary characters.

If you want to know why Britannia ruled the waves

and where the Commonwealth was born, look no further than here.

In 1884, a Clyde-built ship headed out of Glasgow

and across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada to become

part of something truly ground-breaking.

And this is her - the Mackay-Bennett.

This little Clyde-built steamer was about to find herself at the centre

of one of the most incredible chapters in maritime history.

The creation of a underwater cable network that connected Britain

with her future Commonwealth for the first time

and in doing so sparked a communication revolution that would

change the world forever and shape the way we lead our lives today.

It's a story that tells me why I can send an e-mail

or make a phone call from my home city of Glasgow

and receive it here, nearly 3,000 miles away

on the other side of the Atlantic.

PHONE RINGS

But the Mackay-Bennett's lasting legacy lies not

just in the birth of modern day telecommunications.

It's also about her role in the most tragic incident in maritime history.

The Titanic disaster.

For the men on this Scottish steamer would play a heroic

and, until now, untold part in this tragedy and, in doing so,

would come to be at the centre of a fascinating DNA mystery

that would take over 100 years to solve.

It was late 19th century

and Glasgow was in the midst of a golden age of shipbuilding.

An estimated 300 vessels a year were heading down these slipways

feeding the Industrial Revolution

that had made Britain the powerhouse of the world.

The Empire's burgeoning colonial rule was brilliantly

serviced by her Glasgow ships, but there still remained one thing

that made Britannia feel distinctly disconnected.

She was an island.

And that made communication with the rest of the world

really, really slow.

So everything, from business to politics,

was desperate to find a more effective way to communicate.

The potential for new forms of communication had already

been established in the 1840s

by inventor Samuel Morse.

Morse code was a system by which electrical pulses were transmitted

down a wire and received as a series of dots and dashes

that made up letters and words.

His invention had proven that messages could be

sent and received almost instantly between one country and another.

But sending an electrical current

down a short piece of wire was all well and good,

but what Britain desperately wanted was the means to communicate

not just across rivers and countries,

but across vast wild oceans and between continents.

Something new was needed.

The real prize was the transatlantic telegraph -

a cable link that would connect the British Empire

with North America. And that meant crossing a stretch of water

over 4,000km across and 4km deep.

Simply making a cable long enough to span the vast

expanse of an entire ocean was an engineering problem in itself.

For the greater the distance

along which the electrical signal was sent,

the weaker it would become.

So when, on top of this, you added in the physical feat of actually

laying it in such a hostile environment,

this really was a technological challenge.

By the 1850s, the race was on.

After a number of false starts, in 1858, two converted warships,

HMS Agamemnon and the USS Niagara, ran the first successful

transatlantic cable from Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada.

'It was an engineering triumph.

'I've come to meet cable historian John Packer

'of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum in Cornwall

'to find out more about just what a significant turning point

'these first successful connections were.'

John, when these first transatlantic messages began to be exchanged,

how important a development do you think that was to us all?

It caught the public imagination

in the same way, in the last century,

that the space age and landing a man on the moon,

it was almost that sort of interest

and wonder to the general public.

Here we could send a message to North America in a few seconds and

get a reply back that same afternoon or even half an hour later.

Whereas prior to that, we wrote a letter,

it took weeks to cross the Atlantic

and, by the time you got a reply back,

probably the person you had sent the message to had died!

It was so long winded.

And I guess in the beginning

it must have been a seriously complex issue.

Yes. It was all in code, rather like Morse code, only this was

cable code. There were no dots and dashes, there were lefts and rights.

-Could you demonstrate it for me?

-Certainly.

At the sending end, there's a key.

It's like a Morse key but there are two of them on the same base.

You press one key, you send a current down the cable.

If you press the other key,

you send a current in the reverse direction down the cable.

So, at the receiving end, we have a spot of light on a screen

and it moves either to the left or the right.

So if you watch the spot of light and I send the signals,

the letter F for example is left, left, right, left.

And it was developed specifically for

-this particular kind of operation?

-It was. Yes.

'Because left and right signals were easier to decipher than dots

'and dashes over large distances, the transatlantic pioneers had

'finally cracked a system that worked between continents

'and, for the first time in history, an American president was

'able to speak to a British queen across a vast ocean void.'

"May the Atlantic Telegraph under the blessing of Heaven prove to

"be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between kindred nations."

This rather lovely message

was sent from the American President James Buchanan to

Queen Victoria on 16th August 1858.

And it must have been a momentous moment for Britain,

because suddenly, in terms of communication,

she was no longer an island.

The modern telecommunications age was born

and there would be no turning back.

Within a decade,

the transatlantic telegraph network was beginning to grow

as Britain continued in her quest to connect herself with North America.

She was now starting to rule both under and over the waves.

But as had been the case so often in the past, servicing this

latest ambition of the Industrial Revolution required ships.

And, once again, the Empire looked toward Clydeside

to provide the answer.

A new breed of cable ship was on its way.

But these cable ships had very specific needs.

They certainly presented unique engineering challenges

even for the great shipbuilders of the Clyde.

Clydeside designers were celebrated for building the fastest vessels

in the world, but the cable ship had to be not just aerodynamic

but incredibly stable in order to overcome the challenge of sitting

still in huge seas for long periods whilst laying or repairing cables.

The danger of capsizing was a serious obstacle

that had to be overcome.

But it was one small and fledgling company that actually managed

to crack the problem in the first place.

The Commercial Cable Company had been set up in 1883 in an attempt

to grab a piece of this flourishing but highly competitive new industry.

Industrialist John William Mackay

and New York Herald newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett

were the men behind the bold new venture

and they were about to build a ship that would re-write

the rule book and, in the process, lead the way in cable ship design.

Mackay and Bennett commissioned their ship from John Elder & Sons

and the Fairfield Shipping Company,

in its day probably the most dominant yard on the Clyde.

It's still in existence today, as you can see behind me.

It's run by BAE Systems.

Sadly, it's the only major yard left on the river.

Elder & Sons had built an enviable reputation engineering

state-of-the-art compound steam engine technology that was

both more efficient and faster.

Their work attracted the military

and Elders quickly become the world's best producer of warships.

And that is exactly what made them

of such interest to Mackay and Bennett

and the fast, sleek-hulled ship

they had planned for the North Atlantic.

Fred Walker used to be a steel works manager at this yard.

He knows all about what made this new type of cable ship so special.

The Mackay-Bennett was generally superb.

She was built of steel, an alloy of iron,

which made the ships stronger, lighter

and much, much longer if required.

So she was at the height of technology.

And her particular design, was there anything unique about it?

Yes, the hull shape was fairly streamlined for the time.

And she had bilge keels.

What were they for?

The bilge keels are down at the bottom of the ship.

They would put little plates coming out, probably

about 40cm in length, and these would run along the ship's length.

The purpose was to stop the ship rolling too badly.

They actually give a damping effect on the ship.

Stability must have been very

important to the job they were doing.

Yes. The stability, which includes of course

ensuring that the ship remains upright, is of extreme importance.

But it wasn't just the issue of stability that

the Mackay-Bennett overcame.

Another unique John Elder design quirk allowed this little

steamer to turn and manoeuvre in a new way that was truly cutting edge.

What was very unusual was that she had two

rudders - one at the bow and one at the stern.

And this really was the start of our study of manoeuvring of ships.

So this must have given her extraordinary manoeuvrability

for the laying of cables or the repair of cables

out in the middle of the Atlantic.

It gave you the possibility of finite adjustment.

You are still, of course, at the mercy of the wind,

you are still at the mercy of the seas.

But it was altogether a very, very excellent means

of controlling the ship.

The fitting of two rudders on any ship was a pioneering

if unusual addition but the ability to turn very quickly

that this feature gave her was the very thing that its owners hoped

would give the Mackay-Bennett that competitive advantage.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The ship was completed in late 1884 and named after her wealthy owners.

It was a moment of celebration.

A new ship for a new age.

She slide down her Govan slipway

and soon she'd be steaming across the Atlantic to Halifax,

where she was to become part of the telecommunications revolution.

And this exciting new era that she was to be part of had

already expanded beyond belief even in the year

since the Mackay-Bennett had been built.

The cable network was now no longer just a transatlantic endeavour,

but a worldwide operation.

Through the late 1800s, this Victorian internet had

rapidly spread to become a vast underwater highway

spanning every ocean and joining up every continent.

And the Brits dominated most of it.

By the 1880s, Britain owned two thirds of the world's undersea

cable networks, all spreading out across the globe

from unassuming little huts like this one in Porthcurno in Cornwall.

These odd little buildings were the exchange points

out of which Britain ran her entire telegraphic empire.

They were hubs that became very busy places.

In just two decades, Britain had literally connected herself

with the world. From Europe and the Americas to Asia

and beyond, just about every country that would become part of her

Commonwealth was now connected to Britain by the telegraph.

But why had this network grown so rapidly?

John, what motivated the expansion of the cable network?

Well, it was simply demand for business.

Not private people sending telegrams wishing happy birthday,

but business deals. If you could conclude a good business deal by

telegram in a matter of days, well, then another company in a similar

business would have to use telegraph to conclude their business because

otherwise they would be left behind in the race towards the future.

So did this mean that with the advent of this

technology there was an explosion in trade between countries?

There was and, as far as Britain is concerned,

at that time, we had the world's largest empire, with business

interests all around the world and therefore there were business

needs as well as government needs for communications worldwide.

Communication was certainly big business

and although the telegraph now covered the globe, as far

as Britain was concerned, the North Atlantic network still

remained the biggest and most profitable gateway of them all.

By the time the Mackay-Bennett docked in Halifax to join

the revolution, this unassuming Canadian port had become

the central hub for the entire North American cable network

and it's where the Mackay-Bennett's story has brought me.

Locals dubbed the underwater highway that ran out of this city

the octopus

and it was the little Scottish steamer's job to

help maintain all 500,000km of it.

It's a task that is all the more remarkable when you

understand the sheer complexity of what was involved in doing this.

A transatlantic cable was about as thick as my arm

and it was laid three miles down at the bottom of a deep,

dark ocean that was approximately 32 million square miles in size.

Awesome!

That's like me throwing this pebble into that water

and trying to find it.

How on earth did the Mackay-Bennett do it?

This extraordinarily complex process began with

the challenge of finding the damaged cable in the first place.

When a signal became lost or distorted,

the Mackay-Bennett would first be dispatched to the approximate

points of latitude and longitude given by the cable's last signal.

Once at the rough location of the problem, the ship would

lower its huge grapnel hook to the sea bed and repeatedly pass up

and down the area until the cable was hooked and raised.

After conducting another electrical test to more accurately

verify the exact point of the fault, a marker buoy was attached

and the cable lowered back into the water.

The Mackay-Bennett would then steam along the route of the cable

and beyond where the fault was thought to be.

Using the same process, the grapnel was again

dragged along the sea bed until the other end of the cable was found.

This time it was brought on board, cut and a new section spliced on.

The Mackay-Bennett then turned around and retraced her steps,

feeding the new cable all the way back to the marker buoy.

The new section was then connected and a test signal sent

down the entire line to confirm that communication was fully restored.

Job done.

With such a logistically complex procedure, maintaining

the entire telegraph network was a tricky and arduous job.

So when the weather systems of the North Atlantic were

factored in, cable repair was not a job for the faint-hearted.

The ships attracted only the hardiest of men

and the Mackay-Bennett was no exception.

A former British soldier, Captain Frederick Larnder,

put together a crew of 75 sea-hardened deckhands and engineers

to form a crew that was to become known

as the hardest crew in the North Atlantic.

And they had to be.

With a daily routine of sub-zero North Atlantic temperatures,

pounding ocean swells and unpredictable machinery,

simply doing their job was an almost impossible challenge

for the Mackay-Bennett's Canadian crew and her British captain.

"I have never known a more challenging job than this.

"On one occasion last year, we repaired a cable in five days.

"This year, having to effect a repair to the same cable,

"it took five months."

And little has changed in the 100 years

since the Mackay-Bennett was patrolling these waters.

Today's cable ships setting out from Halifax

might be a little bigger,

but the job they do is still essentially the same.

It's what modern cable repair ship manager Dan Lundrigan does

for a living and he can tell me more about just how tough the job is.

It's very dangerous on that deck, because you have a lot a strain

on the equipment, on the rope, on the shackles, on the grapnels,

so you try and avoid trenches, you try and avoid obstacles as best

you can. If the weather turned nasty then you'd have high seas coming

over the bow of the ship, washing men around and people just go.

It's a dangerous job in some of the worst conditions.

What kind of men are attracted to this life?

The men had to be very tough.

On the older cable ships,

the majority of the work was all done on the open deck.

If you're up north and you have stormy weather,

you do not go back in until the repair is completed.

So if your vessel is icing up,

all hands are on deck to break ice and lessen the load on the ship.

It does not sound like a job for wimps like me!

Ah, you'd do it. You'd do it.

No, sir, I wouldn't last five minutes.

So working along the transatlantic cable network was certainly

not a job for the faint hearted.

But just how tough the Mackay-Bennett men had to be

is evident through the account of one of her most infamous voyages.

It was the dead of winter and the year was 1901.

The steamer was sent 400 miles out there into the North Atlantic

and its job was to repair a cable that had instantly cut

the whole of the transatlantic network.

They reached the point of the fault and set to work fixing the cable.

But before the job was completed

the harsh Arctic weather suddenly took hold.

Within an hour, the temperature had plummeted

and the ocean began to freeze around them.

"The northern edge of the ice was down on us

"in what seemed like minutes.

"It enveloped the ship."

The men of the Mackay-Bennett found themselves trapped in a sea of ice.

"We rushed operations,

"worked all night and managed to complete the repair.

"Then we had to hammer our way 350 miles through the ice back to port."

Work on the cable ships of the North Atlantic was clearly

a daunting physical challenge but it was also extremely lucrative work,

which made competition fierce

as many other ships joined the Mackay-Bennett,

all vying for the same highly paid cable contracts.

But with her unique design features, the Mackay-Bennett quickly

showed her star qualities in the face of this fierce rivalry.

Between 1884 and the end of the 19th century, the Mackay-Bennett

and the Commercial Cable Company that owned her dominated

the North Atlantic network.

She would pick up much of the cable repair work to be had

and was, in effect,

chiefly responsible for keeping Britain connected to North America.

But this job wasn't simply about keeping telegraph lines connected.

The Mackay-Bennett didn't know it, but her work was helping transform

the face of global economics forever.

As the world entered the 20th century,

the British Empire's vast underwater network of cables

had made her richer than ever before.

She had managed to become a true economic powerhouse.

And this new form of communication enabled and allowed her to

forge new and exciting trade links and political allegiances,

particularly across the Atlantic

where our so-called special relationship began to form.

More Brits than ever before were heading

stateside as the telegraph stimulated both transatlantic

migration and the beginnings of the Empire's new Commonwealth.

So this obviously meant more ships to carry more people

and very soon we were introduced to the largest of them all.

On 10th April 1912, one of the world's biggest passenger ships

left Southampton en route to New York.

Named the Titanic, this grand liner had been funded by JP Morgan,

one of the many Anglo-American industrial giants that had

grown out of this new telegraphic age.

She was the ultimate in opulence and luxury, a fitting tribute

to the shared economic success of Britain and North America.

On board this famous ship were 2,209 people

and they all ranged from the very poorest -

families who were escaping poverty for a new life in the New World -

to the world's richest man - John Jacob Astor IV.

So as this unsinkable ocean liner sailed across the very telegraph

cables that helped finance her, the Mackay-Bennett and her crew, berthed

in Halifax, were about to play a very important part in her story.

At 11.40pm on 14th April,

the Titanic struck an iceberg near an area of the North Atlantic

known as the Grand Banks.

Within 40 minutes, she was listing heavily.

Within three hours, she had broken in two

and was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Only around 712 people, mainly women and children,

managed to get abroad the few lifeboats that were provided.

Most fell victim to the Atlantic's freezing waters.

On the night of the tragedy,

the water temperature would have been about two degrees.

A fit, healthy adult would last no more than 15 minutes.

On that cold, clear night, the nearest rescue ship,

the Carpathia, was one and a half hours away.

They didn't stand a chance.

HE GASPS

Ironically, given that they were in a new age of speedy communication,

news of the sinking was incredibly slow to reach the mainland

and what word did eventually filter through was confused.

Initial telegraph messages reported that all passengers

and crew were safe and well and being transported to Halifax.

Titanic owners White Star quickly chartered a train to take

everyone from the Canadian port and on to New York.

But it wasn't to be and, a few hours later,

the world would learn the awful truth.

White Star officials must have been completely stunned

and shell-shocked by the enormity of what had happened.

They had an empty train standing by here in Halifax.

So they put out a call for any ship in this port

that was capable of assisting in the grim task of recovering,

unfortunately not the living, but the dead.

The Mackay-Bennett was one of three idle ships in port

but, crucially, the only boat with a hold big enough to carry

the estimated numbers of dead and a crew tough enough and

experienced enough to stomach the terrible task of recovering them.

Just before noon on 17th April, Captain Larnder

assembled his crew, but he'd enlisted two extra men.

One of them was John Snow, a local undertaker.

The other was Canon Kenneth Hinds,

a priest's assistant from Halifax's All Saints Church.

The Mackay-Bennett also loaded up a large supply of grim

provisions to help with the task ahead.

'To learn more about how the ship and her men

'prepared for this disaster,

'I'm meeting with historian and Titanic expert Dan Conlin.'

Mackay-Bennett had to get ready in a big hurry.

They'd just repaired a cable that was crushed by an iceberg

and were only in Halifax for a day or two then they get this call

that you've been chartered by the White Star line

to seek Titanic bodies so they just had a day to get the ship ready

for this very difficult but unpredictable task.

What were the supplies?

What did they need to take, knowing what was ahead of them?

You can just imagine the scene at Mackay-Bennett's wharf

as not only the coal and the food for the crew arrive,

but then these wagon load after wagon load of coffins. 125 coffins.

The White Star Line had hired a funeral company, bought every

coffin in Nova Scotia and shipped it down to Mackay-Bennett's wharf.

And then there were the embalming supplies.

Jar after jar of embalming fluid, enough to embalm 70 bodies.

And then came the ice, the ice wagons.

Everybody remembers the ice There was 100 tonnes of ice.

These big slabs cut from lakes around Halifax and Dartmouth.

100 tonnes of ice alone!

100 tonnes of big slabs of ice which they stored in the

big round cable tanks aboard the ship that are usually

used to hold the miles and miles of underwater telegraph cables.

So there was all the supplies and you have to

remember that these guys had no idea what they were going to find.

They didn't know if they'd find a dozen bodies or 1,000.

Newspapers were full of university professors saying,

"They won't find any bodies,

"the giant ship will have sucked them all down."

Nobody knew just exactly what to expect, but everybody was worried.

White Star officials had decided to play it safe by over-supplying

the Mackay-Bennett with tools for the job.

What they didn't realise was that their provisions would, in fact,

be woefully inadequate.

Poor weather and heavy fog meant that it took the ship almost

four days to sail the 800 miles out to the disaster site.

As she steamed towards the Grand Banks, one seaman,

luckily for us, began to commit his thoughts and his feelings to

paper and this remarkable document is still with us today.

I'm meeting with this Mackay-Bennett diarist's granddaughter to

take a rare and privileged look at the crewman's unique testimony.

"Thursday. Steaming towards the wreck.

"Passed by several icebergs.

"Arrived at spot where ship went down at 7.15

"and laid to all night till daylight."

Will you tell me something about the seaman

who is responsible for this extraordinary but

rather insignificant looking little document?

Well, he was my grandfather, Clifford Crease, and when he

wrote this book he was 24 years old. He was an assistant engineer.

How did you come to know about the existence of this little book?

One night when my father and my grandfather were watching

television, my grandfather looked over at my dad and said,

"I have some stories I need to tell you before I go."

HE GASPS Yeah.

-Oh, goose bumps time.

-Yeah, goose bumps.

So he told my dad all that had happened for him out there.

"A large iceberg about four miles from the ship.

"Supposed to be the one Titanic struck.

"Lots of wreckage floating about.

"Four bodies passed by through the night."

That must have been eerie.

It's always so touching to touch this piece of...

It must, knowing it belonged to your grandfather

-and those are his experiences and his feelings.

-Yeah.

At daybreak on that freezing morning of 21st April,

the crew lowered their recovery boats into the water

to begin the gruesome task

and something terrible quickly became clear.

"Picked up the first bodies at 6am

"and continued all day until 5.30pm.

"Recovered 51 bodies - 46 men, four women and one baby.

"Never seen so many dead."

The crew were soon overwhelmed.

The sea was covered in hundreds of dead bodies, all floating face

upwards in their life jackets, looking not dead but simply asleep.

The Mackay-Bennett men soon realised that there would not be

enough room on the ship to carry all the bodies.

Captain Larnder then had to make what must have been

the hardest decision of his life.

It was decided that some bodies would be saved

whilst others would not.

The system was brutal and went like this -

first class passengers were carefully embalmed

and put in coffins.

Second class passengers were wrapped in simple canvas.

Third class passengers were slipped back into the sea.

This horrific production line of corpses was a difficult thing

to stomach and, even for the toughened cable

men of the Mackay-Bennett, the task began to take its toll.

"April 23rd. Tuesday. Weather fine.

"Picked up 128 bodies -

"127 men and one woman."

Can you describe the psychological and emotional effect

that must have had on these men.

You're talking about hard-bitten seamen who do

one of the toughest jobs in some of the wildest seas in the world.

So to come across this must have been quite, quite profound.

They could never have been prepared for what they found out there.

That's over 300 bodies they found.

It must have affected them for the rest of their lives.

As the days passed, the task only became grimmer.

More and more bodies were being dragged out of the water.

From the world's richest man, John Jacob Astor IV,

identified only by the million-pound diamond and platinum ring

on his finger, to the Titanic's band leader Wallace Hartley, pulled

from the Atlantic with his music case still strapped to his body.

By April 26th, the Mackay-Bennett men had spent almost a week

fishing corpses from the site.

Her hold was crammed with almost 200 bodies.

A further 116 had been returned to the sea.

Neither she nor the crew could take any more.

But amongst those pulled from the water

lay one in particular that had touched

the hearts of the Mackay-Bennett crew more than any other.

And because it was third class, it wasn't

even supposed to have been recovered.

"Sex - male. Estimated age - two. Hair - fair.

"Clothing - grey coat with fur on collar and cuffs.

"Probably third class. Unable to identify from clothing."

That is the cold, detached coroner's report on the tiny infant

body that had been floating for six days in the North Atlantic

before the Mackay-Bennett reached him.

And that image must have seared itself into the hearts

and the psychology of those tough, tough men.

They couldn't save him. They couldn't save anyone.

But they decided there and then that that unknown child was going

to have a proper burial on land.

This small child would be

the only third class body kept by the Mackay-Bennett

as she headed back to Halifax with her gruesome cargo.

With the Halifax city church bells tolling,

she docked back at port on the morning of the 30th of April.

30 teams of undertakers from all over Nova Scotia

gathered at Halifax's Mayflower ice rink,

which became a makeshift morgue for the process of preparing

almost 200 corpses that the Mackay-Bennett had picked up.

As the bodies of the victims were brought to the ice rink,

they laid the coffins and the canvas sacks down one side.

On the other side were the grieving relatives,

aided by some medical staff,

and the coroner's office, who must have been working overtime

just to deal with the sheer volume.

Gradually, they were identified, claimed and removed one by one.

John Astor was of course the first to go, followed by another 129

until eventually just a few remained unclaimed.

One of them stood out simply because of its size.

It was the tiny body of that baby boy that the crew of

the Mackay Bennett had decided was not going to have a burial at sea.

After four days, that same little body still remained.

And it was at this point that these hard-nosed Atlantic seamen

did something quite out of character.

They decided to claim the child as their own.

Pooling together their wages,

they paid for the cost of the burial and a headstone.

And, on the morning of the fourth of May 1912,

the Mackay-Bennett cable men carried the tiny coffin

through this cemetery and to his final resting place.

There was only one burial

that May morning

and it was attended not only by the entire crew

of the Mackay-Bennett,

but also by many thousands of the townspeople of Halifax,

who lined the streets in tribute to this tiny, emotive symbol

of that terrible tragedy, that had obviously touched their hearts.

Inside the coffin,

the Mackay-Bennett crewmen placed a small metal plaque

and it read simply: "Our babe."

The service ended.

The Mackay-Bennett men returned to the Atlantic

and the curtain came down

on history's greatest maritime disaster.

Until that is,

a man walked into a museum 100 years later,

holding a pair of old shoes.

And this is them...

a tiny pair of size two leather sandals,

just 14cm long.

Dan, what on earth has this little pair of shoes

got to do with the world's worst maritime disaster?

The shoes came to us via the grandson of a policeman in Halifax in 1912,

Sergeant Clarence Northover,

one of the policeman assigned to guard

the personal effects of the Titanic victims

and he was there when the janitor was, literally, sweeping up

the clothing with a broom and he saw these shoes that had just been taken

from the two-year-old boy, who was even then known as

"the unknown child". He put them in a drawer

and kept them there until he retired as deputy police chief

and he gave the shoes to his son, who then would tell this story

to his son. Earle Northover inherited the shoes

and then he approached our museum in 2002, saying,

"These are the shoes from the Titanic."

That was very honourable of him, wasn't it?

Surely there must be some value attached to these shoes?

As a museum, we are always having people coming to us and saying,

"I have a belt buckle from the Titanic",

"I have a steamer trunk from Titanic" and it's usually very clear,

very quickly, that there's no family history and no documentary evidence.

The shoes were very different, though, because they had

a very detailed family history about them and that made us

take this case very seriously. The first thing I did was pull the file

for the unknown child and, right on the inventory,

it lists a pair of brown shoes, so that built this very detailed

documentary case that told us the shoes WERE from Titanic,

WERE from this little boy.

It had to have been from that body and the evidence supported that.

The Mackay-Bennett's unknown child and these little shoes

were about to become two parts in a fascinating DNA riddle

that would for ever

connect the Clyde cable ship with the world's most famous sinking.

Back in 1912, nobody knew for sure the identity of the unknown child,

but, because his body had been found floating next two adults

named Paulson, the coroner's best guess had been that it was

their son, Gosta Leonard Paulson,

a Swedish boy counted as missing on the passenger roll.

But it was just that - a guess - and, for many years,

it remained an intriguing mystery, just begging to be solved.

'And there was one man desperate

'to try and do just that.

'Alan Ruffman had been fascinated by the story

'of who the unknown child was all his life.

'He knew that the only way to finally get to the bottom

'of this mystery was through modern science, by gaining DNA.

'And the only way to do that was to go through the complex

'and sensitive process of exhuming the grave.'

And so, in 2001, after careful negotiation

and with the help of forensic scientist

Professor Ryan Parr, he did just that.

And he would do it with a little help

from the Mackay-Bennett cablemen.

As we went down with the shovel and got the first bit of wood

that was when we could see the shape of the coffin

and realised that we had at least a chance of finding some bone material.

And what did you find inside the coffin?

We found pieces of glass,

stems of flowers and the two corroded pieces of metal,

that, ultimately, we realised were a coffin medallion.

So, the piece of metal that you found was the same little plaque

placed in that grave by the crew of the Mackay-Bennett?

The men of the Mackay-Bennett bought this as their tribute to

the small child. It read "Our babe" and this would have been a very

common tribute to place on the grave of a child. We found, in fact,

an exact drawing of the same medallion

in catalogues of undertakers.

And that plaque, somehow, aided the DNA process?

We think that the plaque was right above the folded arms

of the child, ie this bone of the arm,

and it slowed the dissolution of the bone, to the extent that there was

still 6cm of bone for us to work with and that's what we were able to,

ultimately, extract the mitochondrial DNA from.

So, the medallion assisted that preservation of the signal

that we needed to find.

This DNA signal, or clue, left behind by the Mackay-Bennett men

proved to be the key that unlocked the riddle.

Initial results were inconclusive,

but thanks to advances in the accuracy of DNA analysis,

by 2011, Ruffman was finally able to narrow his findings

down to two possible matches - a Finnish child called Eino Panula

and a young British boy, who provided an even closer DNA match.

And this is him...

Sidney Leslie Goodwin,

a 19-month-old boy

and the person Parr and Ruffman, along with their DNA results,

concluded, with 98% certainty, was the unknown child.

But to be 100% certain, they had one more question to ask -

would the shoes fit?

And to answer that, Ruffman enlisted the help

of historian Dan Conlin, whom the Titanic shoes had been donated to.

One thing that perplexed us a bit as the DNA results started to come out

was they were suggesting a 13-month-old possible identity,

a little Finnish boy.

We looked at the shoes and growth charts from the early 20th century

and these are big for a 13-month-old child.

So we were scratching our head as this DNA project was going on

and all the growth charts suggested they were a better fit

-for a two-year-old.

-Which is where the Goodwin child came in.

The Goodwin child was 19 months old,

much closer to two years old, and those shoes were able to cling

to his feet for the six and a half days that he was in the water

before he was brought ashore or brought to the ship.

All in all, it's quite a wonderful and exciting piece of detection.

-It's a detective story, isn't it?

-It is, in the classic museum sense

of gathering and weighing evidence, to solve a mystery

and that's very much what we did with these shoes, and it's left us

with these very compelling little icons of the tragedy

and you can see how that little boy moved the crew of the Mackay-Bennett.

Just the tenderness of these little shoes,

through this one little boy lost helplessly in the sinking.

Modern science, together with a little help from the cablemen

of the Mackay-Bennett had finally solved

this 100-year-old Titanic mystery.

And it's a conclusion that brings me full circle,

back to where the Mackay-Bennett was built, here in Glasgow.

I've come home to find out exactly why this story lives on.

-Gilly. Hello.

-Hello.

-Lovely to...

'This is Gilly Johnston, the living descendent of Sidney Leslie Goodwin,

'and person who provided the DNA that allowed Ruffman

'to finally identify the Mackay-Bennett's unknown child.'

Gilly, you are the woman that the world's been hunting for

in this great Titanic mystery.

How does it feel to be the missing link in this 100-year-old story?

It's unique, isn't it, to find out that you have a cousin

that is the unknown child. It was a little bit upsetting, as well,

to think that a young baby was there. But it was lovely to know that

they found out who he was.

-It's lovely to, at last, be able to put a name on the gravestone.

-Yes.

It's extraordinary to think that these hard-bitten, weather-beaten

men... I mean, something about the floating body

of a 19-month-old baby boy touched them so deeply.

I can't think of words to thank them for what they did,

otherwise, we'd never have known who he was.

The discovery of young Sidney is a very beautiful end

to an extraordinary tale that really started with a simple

and moving act of kindness by some burly seamen of the Mackay-Bennett.

And I wonder what they would have thought, if they knew that,

100 years later, the mystery would be solved.

But I guess he meant so much to them and moved them so much

that they would have approved wholeheartedly.

But those seamen had no time to dwell on it.

For the steamer returned to service the ever-expanding

North Atlantic cable gateway.

She would do so for another decade, but the steamship was quickly

becoming something of a relic in the telecommunications revolution.

In the 30 years since she had begun life as a cable ship,

the world had come to rely on its telegraphic connections

and now demanded bigger, faster and more versatile vessels

to service the network.

And for the Mackay-Bennett, that meant the end of the road.

She was eventually to return to Britain, to be rather

unceremoniously used as a storage hulk in Plymouth,

where she was to remain for the rest of her days.

By that time, she had surpassed her lifespan by over half a century.

The Mackay-Bennett was gone, but the telegraphic network

that she helped create and the legacy she left behind,

would never be forgotten.

It's one that affects almost everything we do today.

From communication to commerce,

our underwater gateway lets us do it all.

Today, 95% of all communication in the world comes through

undersea cables and not, as most people suspect, from satellites.

Now, to highlight this,

I have a report here from 2009,

which tells us of a breakage in the Atlantic cable

from the continent of Europe to the west coast of Africa.

Banking systems failed, markets collapsed

and mobile phone connections were non-existent.

In effect, the west coast of the continent of Africa

was disconnected from the rest of the world.

And that story demonstrates to us how much we owe

the plucky exploits of that tiny little Clyde-built steamer,

the Mackay-Bennett, and those that came after her.

It's a legacy that has, literally, changed the way

we live our lives...

..for ever.

Next time, I investigate the story of the Robert E Lee,

a blockade-running paddle steamer that supplied the Confederate south

during the American Civil War.

These ships are going to run guns.

I visit Bermuda,

to see the watery grave of a Clyde-built blockade runner.

-Ever imagine you'd be in Bermuda holding a piece of Glasgow?

-No!

And I reveal the secret history of Glasgow's industrial past.

If we hadn't been as good at building ships,

hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.