A collection of information boards and artefacts relating to the Hamilton Dock, Queens Island Shipyard & SS Nomadic.
"The historic graving docks on Queen’s Island mirror the development of the passenger vessel from its humble origins in the 1860s to the zenith of ocean liner construction before the First World War.
Those pre-war floating palaces are all gone, together with many famous graving docks built to accommodate them across the British Isles, lost beneath a mass of urban renewal that swept the nation in postwar years.
The graving docks of Belfast survive - a unique and remarkable legacy of dock construction - and a lasting link with liners past.
Graving Dock -
What is a graving dock and what is it used for? The word ‘graving’ is an obsolete nautical term for the scraping, cleaning, painting, or tarring of an underwater body. Combined with the word ‘dock’ a graving dock refers to an enclosed basin into which a ship is taken for underwater cleaning or repair.
Older graving docks were fitted with watertight entrance gates when closed permitted the dock to be pumped dry. However these gates, hinged on either side, restricted the size of vessels entering and the gates were also difficult to seal and to repair. Later designs of graving docks incorporated the use of a caisson or pontoon (sometimes called a camel by shipbuilders) that fitted closely into the entrance. The caisson is flooded and sunk in place and the water pumped out of the dock. Reversing the process the dock is flooded, the caisson pumped dry, floated and is warped away from the entrance to permit passage of vessels.
A graving dock is sometimes called a graving dry dock or just dry dock. It is, however, not a dock. A dock is an artificial basin provided with suitable installations for loading and unloading, close to the sea, where vessels can lie afloat. The dock area may communicate freely with the stream or harbour, or the entrance to it may be closed by a lock or gates.
Work on the Hamilton was completed by February 1867 and the water let into the new Abercorn Basin adjoining the dock the following May. The first practical use of the graving dock came on 2 July 1867 when the wrecked hull of the paddle-steamer Earl of Dublin was warped into the dock for emergency repairs after the vessel had been salvaged by Harland & Wolff.³ On 1 August the hull was warped out of the graving dock and drawn up on the Patent Slip which ran alongside the graving dock for further repairs. After this the sailing ship Australian of 1,028-tons was placed in the graving dock.
The graving dock was formally opened on 2 October 1867 by the Marquis of Abercorn, Lord Lieutenant General and General Governor of Ireland. The original plan was to have placed the recently completed Bibby Line cargo steamer Illyrian (Yard No. 49) in the graving dock, fully rigged and dressed overall with signal flags, but her owners were not prepared to delay her departure for Liverpool so long and instead the dock was empty for the opening ceremony.
In its day, the Hamilton was capable of admitting the largest class of vessel under construction at Belfast and was part of a larger improvement scheme for the Port. The existing graving docks, on the County Antrim side of the harbour, were 300 and 250 feet in length respectively, too small to handle the increased tonnage entering the port and the demands of the shipbuilders for greater dock accommodation. The scheme also included the construction of a tidal basin covering 10½ acres of water with quay space of 465 lineal yards with an average depth at low water of 14 feet. The basin, finished at the same time as the new graving dock, was named the Abercorn Basin in honour of the Lord Lieutenant. The graving dock, basin and other various improvements cost £250,000. This huge investment justified at the time by the increased tonnage entering the port, which, in fifteen years doubled to almost 1.4 million tons by 18664; revenues for the Harbour Commissioners’ over the same period also rose from £32,000 to £60,000.
Many famous vessels were repaired or completed in the Hamilton. Without doubt the most famous of these was the pioneer White Star liner Oceanic (Yard No. 73) - the world’s first true ocean liner. Launched in August 1870, her propeller was fitted and hull coated with anti-fouling paint below the waterline in the Hamilton before she left Belfast for Liverpool. Five years later it was the turn of the White Star liner Germanic (Yard No. 85) to be fitted out in the Hamilton and in February 1876 she took the eastbound Atlantic speed record. At 455 feet in length Germanic and her sister Britannic (Yard No. 83) fitted in the Hamilton’s 470 feet length, but the problem was the maximum 60 feet width of the dock. The White Star liners at 45.2 feet in breadth, left a margin of just over seven feet of clear space on each side amidships making cleaning, painting and general repair work difficult to undertake."
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