The story of SS Nomadic
Nomadic was designed by Thomas Andrews, the same naval architect behind Olympic and Titanic, and built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast as yard number 422. Her keel was laid in 1910, she was launched on 25 April 1911 and delivered to the White Star Line on 27 May. At 220 feet long and 1,273 tons she was small by liner standards, built for one job: the great Olympic-class ships were too big for Cherbourg harbour, so Nomadic and her sister Traffic carried passengers, mail and supplies out to them where they lay at anchor.
Her place in history was sealed on 10 April 1912, when she tendered 274 first and second-class passengers out to RMS Titanic at Cherbourg for the maiden voyage. Among them were the New York millionaire John Jacob Astor IV and his wife Madeleine, the couturière Lucy Lady Duff-Gordon and her husband Sir Cosmo, Denver's Margaret Brown and the mining magnate Benjamin Guggenheim. Days later Titanic was gone, and Nomadic became the last working link to her.
A long second life followed. Requisitioned by France in the First World War as an auxiliary minesweeper and troop ferry, she returned to tendering between the wars, served again in 1940 during the evacuation of Cherbourg, and carried passengers to liners like Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth until she retired in 1968. Renamed and moved to Paris in the 1970s, she was converted into a floating restaurant on the Seine before the business failed and she was seized by harbour authorities.
In January 2006 the Northern Ireland government bought her at auction for just over 250,000 euros and brought her home, piggy-backed on a barge into Belfast that July. From 2010 a major restoration, including a £2 million Harland & Wolff steelwork contract that rebuilt her missing bridge and flying-bridge decks and repainted her in White Star livery, returned her to her 1911 appearance. She is the last White Star Line ship in the world, and one of her original lifeboats survives aboard.