The great shipyards of the River Tyne have been all but erased by the passage of time. The ships, cranes, dry docks, and workers have passed into history.
The river is quieter today, no longer the banging, clanking hive of industrial activity that helped power the North East’s economy for well over a century. Hundreds of ships of every kind were built at yards in Scotswood, Elswick, Newcastle, Gateshead, St Peters, High Walker, Low Walker, Hebburn, Jarrow, Willington Quay, Howdon, Coble Dean, North Shields, South Shields, Bill Quay and, perhaps most famously, here at Wallsend.
Our two photographs from the ChronicleLive archive show the launch of the 115,000-ton tanker Nacella 55 years ago in March 1968 at the renowned Swan Hunter yard. Shipbuilding had come to define the river across many decades and was a way of life for people in our region.
READ MORE: Tyneside in 1968: 10 photographs from around our region 55 years ago
Even if cheaper foreign competition in the post-war world was by now impacting on British shipyards, the Tyne was still busy. In our aerial image, not only do we see the giant shape of the newly-launched Nacella spanning virtually the full width of the river, but also a host of nearby vessels under construction namely, from the top, Wave Baron, Sir Tristram, City of Glasgow, and Border Regiment.
But these were mere 'tiddlers' reported the Evening Chronicle at the time, and even the Nacella would come to be dwarfed by what would soon follow. The vacant berth would be occupied by two 244,000-ton tankers built for Esso - the Northumbria and Hibernia - as well as at the time the biggest ship built in Britain, the £7million, £255,000-ton Regent Westminster. It was, the Chronicle noted optimistically, "a foretaste of what might be a brighter future for Tyneside shipyards". Time would tell.
Swan Hunter was one of the most famous shipyards in the world. Founded in 1880, the company united three powerful shipbuilding families – Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson.
Aircraft carriers, passenger liners, cargo liners, ferries, ice breakers, destroyers, frigates and submarines were constructed by Swans’ skilled workforce. Its yards at Wallsend and Walker would build more than 1,600 ships, among them some of the most notable vessels in seafaring history.
The liner, Mauretania, which held the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, was launched there in 1907. The RMS Carpathia, which rescued survivors from the Titanic in 1912, was also a Swan-Hunter-built vessel.
Among the ships built at Swans which fought in World War II were HMS Sheffield and HMS Victorious, both of which took part in the 1941 sinking of the mighty German battleship, Bismarck. The 1960s and 1970s saw the launch of a series of supertankers such as the Esso Northumbria and World Unicorn.
The aircraft carriers, Ark Royal and Illustrious, were also constructed by Swans - the latter finally being decommissioned in 2014. Through the challenging 1980s and ‘90s, towards the new millennium, Swans went through different configurations. The last ship to be built and completed at the yard was the Largs Bay in 2007. Then, in 2010, in a highly symbolic move marking the end of an era, Swan Hunter’s cranes were dismantled and sold off to a yard in India.
As for Nacella, the tanker was registered out of Hamburg and later Liberia and was operational for 25 years before being broken up at Chittagong in Bangladesh in 1993.
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