dedicated. The story thus pieced together would be chiefly concerned with his work, for his work was his life.

To Thomas Andrews the hero, then, we did not propose to raise a monument. To his memory a fine memorial hall is to be built and endowed in his native Comber by the inhabitants of the town and district and his friends, while he will be associated in memorials elsewhere with those who died nobly in the wreck.[1] These tributes will serve to remind us how he died, but will not tell us how he lived. It is the purpose of this short memoir to give a fairly complete record of his life—his parentage, his home, his education, his pleasures, his tastes and his thoughts, so far as they are known, upon things which count in the lives of peoples. The family, and all from whom information was sought, responded most cordially to our wishes. There remained the difficulty of finding a writer who could tell the story of Thomas Andrews the man, as we wished it to be told.

For such a task it was decided that, if he could be induced to undertake it, the right man was Shan Bullock. He is an Ulsterman, a writer of tales of Ulster life, distinguished among other Irish books by their sincerity and unequalled understanding of the Ulster character. While other Irish writers of imagination and genius have used Irish life to express their own temperament, Shan Bullock has devoted his great literary ability almost entirely to the patient, living and sincere study of what Ulster really is in itself as a community of men and women. It is true that his stories are of rural and agricultural communities, while the scene is now laid chiefly in a great centre of manufacturing industry. But in Mr. Bullock’s studies it is always the human factor that predominates. One feels while reading one of his tales that he loves to look upon a man, especially an Ulster man. Here was the ideal historian of the life of Thomas Andrews.

It fell to me to approach Mr. Bullock. I induced him to go and see the family, having arranged with them to bring him into touch with the authorities at the Island Works, who were to show him round and introduce him to many who knew our friend. He promised me that he would look over all the material out of which the story could be pieced together, and that if he found that it “gripped” him and became a labour of love he would undertake it. The story did, as the reader will see, grip him, and grip him hard, and in telling it Mr. Bullock has rendered the greatest of all his services to lovers of truth told about Ireland by Irish writers.

It will now, I think, be clear why Thomas Andrews has, notwithstanding his noble end, been represented as the plain, hard-working Ulster boy, growing into the exemplary and finally the heroic Ulster man that we knew. We see him ever doing what his hand found to do, and doing it with his might. Our author, rightly as I think, makes no attempt to present him as a public man; for this captain of industry in the making was wholly absorbed in his duties to the great Firm he served. None the less I am convinced that the public side of the man would not long have remained undeveloped—who knows but that this very year would have called him forth?—because he had to my personal knowledge the right public spirit. Concentration upon the work in hand prevented his active participation in public affairs, but his mastery over complicated mechanical problems—his power to use materials—and to organise bodies of men in their use, would not, I believe, have failed him if he had come to deal with the mechanics of the nation.

These may be fruitless speculations now, and Mr. Bullock wisely leaves us to draw our own conclusions as to the eminence to which Thomas Andrews might have attained had his life been spared. Abundant proof of the immense influence he might have exercised is furnished in the eloquently sincere grief which pervades the letters of condolence that poured into the home of the parents at Comber when it was known that they had lost their distinguished son. They came—over seven hundred of them—from all sorts and conditions of men, ranging from a duke to a pauper in a workhouse. In one of these letters, too intimate to publish, a near relative pays to the dead shipbuilder a pathetically simple tribute with which I may well leave to the reader Mr Bullock’s tale of a noble life and heroic death. “There is not,” ran this fine epitaph, “a better boy in heaven.”

HORACE PLUNKETT.

THOMAS ANDREWS
SHIPBUILDER

I.

For six generations the Andrews family has been prominent in the life of Comber: that historic and prospering village, near Strangford Lough, on the road from Belfast to Downpatrick: and in almost every generation some one or other of the family has attained distinction. During the eventful times of 1779-82, John Andrews raised and commanded a company of Volunteers, in which his youngest son, James, served as Lieutenant. Later, another John Andrews was High Sheriff of Down in 1857; and he also it was who founded the firm of John Andrews & Co., which to-day gives employment to some six hundred of the villagers. The present head of the family, William Drennan Andrews, LL.D., was a Judge of the High Court, Ireland, from 1882, and has been a Privy Councillor since 1897. His brother, Thomas Andrews, is a man whose outstanding merits and sterling character have won him an honoured place among Ulstermen. One of the famous Recess Committee of 1895, he is President of the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association, Chairman of the Belfast and County Down Railway Company, a Privy Councillor, a Deputy Lieutenant of Down, High Sheriff of the same county, and Chairman of its County Council. Two more brothers, James and John, were Justices of the Peace. In 1870 Thomas Andrews married Eliza Pirrie, a descendant of the Scotch Hamiltons, Lord Pirrie’s sister, and herself a woman of the noblest type.

To these, and of such excellent stock, was born, on February 7th, 1873, a son, named after his father, and described in the family record as Thomas Andrews of Dunallan. His eldest brother, John Miller, born in 1871, and his youngest brother, William, born in 1886, are now Managing Directors of John Andrews & Co., Ltd., under the Chairmanship of their father. A third brother, James, born in 1877, adopted the profession of his distinguished uncle, and is now a barrister-at-law. His only sister, Eliza Montgomery, married in 1906, Lawrence Arthur, the third son of Jesse Hind, Esq., J.P., of Edwalton, Notts, and a solicitor of the Supreme Court.

ARDARA, COMBER

Tom was, we are told, “a healthy, energetic, bonny child, and grew into a handsome, plucky and lovable boy.” His home training was of the wisest, and of a kind, one thinks, not commonly given to Ulster boys in those more austere times of his youth. “No one,” writes his brother John, “knew better than Tom how much he owed to that healthy home life in which we were brought up. We were never otherwise treated than with more than kindness and devotion, and we learned the difference between right and wrong rather by example than