TÍTULO II DEL DOMINIO
DE LA POSESIÓN Y SUS DIFERENTES CALIDADES
‘Circular Ironclads’ Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects Vol 17 (1876). ———, ‘The Russian Imperial Yacht Livadia’, Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects Vol 22 (1881). Mitchell, Donald W A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power London, 1974 Reed, Sir E J ‘The Injuries sustained by the Livadia in the Bay of Biscay’ Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects Vol 22 (1881)
Sir Charles Mark Palmer
1822–1907AN INDUS TRIALIS T FROM the north-east of England, Charles Palmer founded the unique industrial complex of
Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company at Jarrow on the Tyne, which encompassed every aspect of ship production, from the smelting of ore to the delivery of capital ships. At its peak it employed just over 10,000 men and in eighty-three years produced over 1,000 ships. Born into a prosperous South Shields family, after leaving school Palmer spent some time in Marseilles learning French before joining a firm of coal merchants. The coal business was expanding in Britain and by 1847 he had become a partner, giving him a taste for commercial operations. In 1851, with his brother George, he made the first of the many thrusting developments that were to characterise his life, in this case the leasing of a former shipbuilding site at Jarrow, on the south bank of the Tyne 3 miles from the Shields and 7 miles from Newcastle. Despite no previous relevant experience, they resolved to set up as shipbuilders and from the outset all vessels were to be of iron (and later steel). The first launch was that of the tug Northumberland, one of the few ships slid into the water without the great ceremony that later was to be associated with this company. Success in a new shipyard is dependent on the quality of supervision, and here Palmer was astute in appointing John McIntyre from Govan as manager and William Cleland, another Clydesider, as foreman. Their second ship was the single-screw steam collier John Bowes, one of the most innovative designs of the mid-nineteenth century, with her engines aft and with water ballast tanks designed by the yard manager. The John Bowes could lift 650 tons of coal and complete a round-trip to London in five days. This compared most favourably with the collier brigs which could carry at most 300 tons and which in good conditions might make the same round-trip in five or six weeks. The iron colliers cost around £10,000 against the £1,000 for a collier brig, so the brothers took a gamble when they set up the General Iron Screw Collier Company in 1852. It paid off handsomely, however, at a time when the railways were targeting the coal traffic from the eastern coalfields to London.
The historic photograph of the pione e r ste am collie r John Bowe s passing he r birthplace , Palme rs Shipyard, fifty-four ye ars afte r he r launch. Be hind are the famous Jarrow shipyard gantrie s. (From Palmer’s Handbook , 1909)
Developments continued with Palmer setting up an engineering works from which the first new product, quite appropriately, was a single-cylinder steam engine for the collier Jarrow. In 1856, the shipyard delivered the floating armoured battery Terror to the Royal Navy, the first naval contract for an iron ship to come to the north-east of England. This was the beginning of a long and profitable builder/owner relationship between the Jarrow Company and the Senior Service, culminating in the order for the magnificent battlecruiser Queen Mary of 1911. This line of business ensured that Palmer’s could venture into iron smelting and steel manufacture, and in the fullness of time develop armour plate rolling mills.
With the building of blast furnaces, the Jarrow site (now of over 100 acres and a ¾-mile river frontage) could claim to complete the cycle of changing iron ore into nothing short of complex steamships, warships, and steam engines. Palmer had ore brought to the site from Spain and North Africa in 3,000-ton deadweight freighters, and by 1900 the plant was producing almost a quarter of million tons of ferrous products per year.
This complete vertical integration included a plate glass company and a metals company. The shipyard, which was to remain in business until 1932, continued to develop with an early entry into the tanker business and the successful building of some high-class intermediate passenger and cargo liners, then in great demand for the mail routes of the British and other overseas empires. Niche markets were developed, one being the supply of riveted pre-fabricated parts to shipyards and construction sites. One of the most unusual aspects of the Jarrow yard was the (then) unique erection system, where two great gantries, one at the head of the berths and another at the river end, held in place a network of wires on which travelling lifting gear could reach any part of the ship. In keeping with all of this Palmers built the largest dry-dock in the north-east of England and developed a successful ship-repair business.
The infrastructure of the town of Jarrow changed beyond recognition in fifty years; the quiet rural area became a small industrial town, bringing with it all the drawbacks of heavy industry in close proximity to a population of 40,000. With the help of Palmer, the town had a Mechanics Institute and an excellent hospital, named after his first wife. However, the most remarkable feature was the founding in 1860 of a building society which enabled many of the workforce to buy their own homes. By the end of the century Jarrow could claim that it had a higher owner-occupancy rate than any similar-sized town in the UK.
Charles Mark Palmer was a man of his time. In the words of David Dougan ‘… one cannot win economic battles, any more than one can win military ones with an altruistic spirit …’. In 1893, the company faced bankruptcy. Despite having been one of the earliest limited companies, a series of complicated moves were required to remain trading, including the Palmer’s resignation. He continued to
sit as a Member of Parliament until his death in 1907.
Palmers continued operation until 1934 when the yard was purchased and ‘sterilised’ by National Shipbuilders Security Limited. The ship repair and dry-docking business, however, carried on until the 1970s under the name of Palmers Hebburn Ltd. SOURCES: Bowen, Frank C ‘Shipbuilders of other Days – Palmers of Jarrow’ Shipbuilding and Shipping Record (24 January 1952) Dougan, David The History of North East Shipbuilding London, 1968 Some Account of the Works of Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company Limited Fourth Edition (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1909)
William Pile
1823–1873 S UNDERLAND HAS A long and distinguished shipbuilding history. A shipbuilding site on the banks of the Wear was authorised in 1346, beginning one of the longest runs of continuous industry in Britain, which ended with the closure of the Pallion Shipyard in the late 1980s, following the decision of the Conservative government to transfer support to Japanese car manufacturers in the northeast of England.Of all the many great shipbuilders of Sunderland, a name that stands head and shoulders above rest is that of William Pile Jr. Being a man of unbounded enthusiasm for ships and coming from a family with long-standing shipbuilding connections, Pile’s quick and successful rise in the industry will come as no surprise. In his teens, he had served an apprenticeship (under his father William Pile Senior who had a small shipyard on the Wear), then moved to Lightfoot’s yard in Monkwearmouth before returning to his father’s new yard in South-wick as foreman. At the age of twenty, he set up his own yard in the North Sands and in the 1840s one of the legends of the north-east was born. Pile’s yard would have been little different from the many small, undercapitalised yards in Sunderland, and is unlikely to have had more than a score of men and boys on the register. However, in one respect it was different: its clientele came from many parts of Britain, from as far north as Fraserburgh and as ‘deep south’ as the London River, indicating Pile’s willingness to be adventurous, to travel and to nurture a new breed of client. This may seem of little importance in today’s world, but in the 1840s travel was uncertain and credit arrangements were even more difficult to obtain. The 1850s were to witness some fine craft coming from Pile’s slipways, and all the time these ships were becoming bigger and the hulls becoming ‘finer’, emulating the fine shape and hollow bow of the fast sailing vessels from Aberdeen. Ships were built for the Baltic trade, for the Indian trade, the Australian trade and ultimately the very high-class South Australian emigrant trade. In 1852 the new yard had the good fortune to receive an order from John Hay of Sunderland for the King Richard, believed to be a ship (that is a full-rigged ship) and whose hull shape was based on that of the Sunderland coble. In a short time the ship had been sold to Richard Green, the shipbuilder at Blackwall on the Thames, and had been renamed Roxburgh Castle. This ship had the effect of introducing William Pile and Richard Hay (one of John’s family) who became partners in 1860 and of persuading Green to order further vessels from Pile – a fantastic achievement, as Green had his own shipyard at Blackwall! Many ships were built for the Greens, and almost all with names associated with the South East of England, like The Lord Warden, Walmer Castle and Dover Castle.
L Thompson. The new company was to exist for a mere six years, but during that period it built about sixty ships, introduced iron construction and commenced the construction of steam reciprocating engines. The growth was so remarkable that by 1865 the total labour force numbered 3,000 men. One of their most distinguished vessels was the composite-built fully-rigged South Australian emigrant ship City of
Adelaide built for Devitt and Moore and (in the year 2009) still intact, but awaiting probable breaking-up.
This ship, after a very full career, became HM S Carrick, a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR)
accommodation ship on the Clyde and later, the ship of the RNVR (Scotland) Club. Currently it is in the hands of the Scottish Maritime Museum, Irvine. The first steamship built by them was the iron screw brig
Stettin of 480 tons. In 1866, following the retirement of Richard Hay, the name of the firm reverted to
William Pile and Company and work was to continue until Pile’s death seven years later. 1868 saw a further expansion with the purchase of the Bridge Graving Dock, making the Pile organisation a real force to be reckoned with in Sunderland.
Launche d into the Rive r We ar by William Pile in 1864, the ve ry fast composite -built clippe r ship Coral Nymph had a short but distinguishe d care e r in the China te a trade . In 1867, she arrive d back in Britain with an appre ntice Ge orge Arthur, a young She tlande r, in command following various accide nts during the voyage . The ship was lost the following ye ar off the China coast.
(Chinese School ship portrait in private collection)
The first composite vessel was the barque Sarah launched in 1863. Altogether another eighteen such hulls were completed including the fast tea clipper Coral Nymph which is referred to elsewhere in this book. Pile seems to have had a fairly straightforward relationship with Lloyd’s surveyors; he was known
to defend his views in a robust manner, but equally was intent on building the highest quality of ship. An example of this occurred in 1850 when Lloyd’s Register increased the topside plank thickness of wooden ships by a significant amount. Pile informed the Lloyd’s visiting committee courteously that this would cost his business several hundred pounds a year (then a considerable sum) but he acknowledged that he would accept their ruling without further complaint. Several of his composite hulls were built under cover in order that they might qualify for the Lloyd’s class 17A1, an endorsement that the hull with normal care should be serviceable for seventeen years. Few shipyards anywhere could claim to have such a level of experience in this unique form of construction. In 1873 and at the early age of (around) fifty, William Pile died in London. He left a large and complex organisation, and it has been reported that difficulties arose in the settlement of both business and estate matters as close to twenty ships were under construction. One of Pile’s employees, and also a former apprentice, George Hunter, formed a new company named Austin and Hunter. He took over two hulls, had them dismantled and moved to his new yard for completion. His success can be gauged by the fact that he became Sir George Hunter and his surname became enshrined in the title of Tyneside’s great Swan Hunter shipyard. J L Thompson’s shipyard acquired much of the work and plant of Pile and Co. SOURCES: Bowen, F C ‘Pile of Sunderland’ Shipbuilding and Shipping Record (January 1945) Clarke, J F Building Ships on the North East Coast 2 vols (Whitley Bay, 1997)
Bernard Waymouth
1824–1890FOLLOWING S TAFF reductions at Devonport Dockyard at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Bernard Waymouth’s
father accepted an appointment at Pembroke Dock, and moved with his wife Eliza and eleven children to Milford Haven. Their third child, Bernard, who had been born in 1824, served a shipwright apprenticeship at the Dockyard. Around 1846 (for family reasons) Bernard moved to London and joined the staff of Money, Wigram and Sons which a few years earlier had taken over the western part of the former Black-wall Shipyard on the Thames, and was one of the companies in Britain then experimenting with iron ship construction. He remained there until he was twenty-nine years old and then made two changes, first by marrying the daughter of a naval officer and secondly, by joining the staff of Lloyd’s Register as an assistant surveyor in London. With shipping and shipbuilding going through a technical near-revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, Waymouth had positioned himself to carry out the work that would bring him renown.
After work in various outports for Lloyd’s, Way-mouth was appointed London Senior Surveyor in 1858 and was charged with the task of preparing the Rules for Construction of Composite Ships, that is, vessels with iron keels, keelsons, frames, stringers and beams, but with timber hulls and decks. Around the late 1850s and the 1860s, composite ships were being built in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Greenock, London and Sunderland where their inherent strength was recognised. Possibly of greater importance was that this form of construction enabled vessels to be built longer than had been possible before. For this work, Waymouth had neither practical precedents nor theoretical research to guide him, and had to prepare the rules using pragmatism and empiricism. The final rulebook, beautifully illustrated by another outstanding naval architect Jack Cornish (1839–1928, and a vice president of the INA) was published in 1867.
Composite shipbuilding lasted no more than twenty years, but the success of these specialist vessels (including the extant clipper ships City of Adelaide and Cutty Sark) is witness to the first of his triumphs.*
In 1825, George Thompson, an Aberdeen merchant, set up a shipping business known later as the Aberdeen White Star Line, and which in a period of 125 years was to have sixty sailing ships and close on twenty steamers, mostly serving on the London to Australia trade. Many of the ships were built at Walter Hood’s Aberdeen shipyard, and one in particular, the composite full-rigged ship Thermopylæ was to become the fastest tea clipper of all time. For reasons that are obscure, Bernard Waymouth was allowed by Lloyd’s Register to design Thermopylæ, and working together with these superb builders, produced a ship that could ‘ghost along’ at six knots in a near-calm but, more remarkably, that was to set the all-time record for a sailing ship of sixty days from London to Melbourne. The design of tea clippers was part art and part science, but the outcome had to be a sailing vessel capable of sustained high speed with bale capacity sufficient to carry enough high-value cargo in a single voyage (tea in this case) to pay all charges for one year. As tea is light, these ships rarely sailed on maximum drafts, and the loading in Shanghai or other Chinese port had to be closely supervised to ensure cargo was crammed into every conceivable space and then rammed down with mallets. With 1,000 tons of tea and 250 tons of ballast
Thermopylæ would be brought to her marks for returning to Britain from China. It is accepted that the only
competitor to the green-painted Aberdeen clipper was the Dumbarton-built Cutty Sark designed by
Hercules Linton of Kincardineshire (1836–1900).
One might be forgiven for assuming that with the successful introduction of Lloyd’s Composite Shipbuilding Rules and the design of what is arguably the greatest British sailing vessel of all time, Waymouth would be happy to rest on his laurels. Nothing could be further from the truth, as in the years that followed he was to make a singular contribution to both Lloyd’s Register and shipping in general. The first was a complete revision of the Rules for Iron Ships which were formulated after proper scientific analysis, and were to be the model for many later publications. In 1870 he was appointed Principal Surveyor, a post he held for two years before becoming Secretary of the Classification Society until his death in 1890. Immediately after becoming Principal Surveyor, he made a tour of the Continent, resulting in the setting up of ‘Non-exclusive Lloyd’s Surveyorships’ in major cities like Copenhagen, Genoa and Marseilles, appointments that became key to the long-term development of ‘LR’ in twentieth century Europe. In a similar manner, he acted for Lloyd’s Register in 1885 when they fused with the Liverpool Registry, the first of many mergers. This in turn led, at Waymouth’s suggestion, to the setting-up of Lloyd’s Printing House, which produced the 1891 Register Book shortly after his death. It is interesting to note that even after being appointed Secretary of Lloyd’s Register, he found time (and persuaded his employers there was no conflict of interest) to design a sailing ship, this being the highly successful fully-rigged iron passenger and cargo ship Melbourne. She was built on the Thames in 1875 by R & H Green, the company which had taken over the eastern half of the Black-wall Shipyard. Twelve years after her launching she was purchased by the crack passenger shipping line of Devitt and Moore, renamed Macquarrie and put on the London to Sydney run. SOURCES: Annals of Lloyd’s Register London, 1934 Coates, Jane, and Coates, John Bernard Waymouth and the change from Wood to Steel Ships Newcomen Society, 1999–2000 Lubbock, Basil The China Clippers Glasgow, 1919
*HM S Gannet, a composite naval sloop built in 1876, can be viewed at the Chatham Historic Dockyard.