Ship scrapping in the UK
The ship scrapping in the United Kingdom was one of more than 100 years to the more important industries of the country. The industry dismantled a good 8,000 ships during this period.
history
The beginnings
In the era of wooden ships, these were only roughly scrapped, with metals and well-preserved woods being reused depending on the individual case . In particular, merchant ships were often set on the beach at a suitable location and then set on fire in order to get to the more valuable metal parts and fittings.
The beginnings of organized ship demolition in Great Britain date back to around 1838, when the Castle scrapping yard opened its business on Baltic Wharf in Millbank on the Thames . The painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up by the British painter William Turner shows a decommissioned warship being towed to Castle. Because Castle specialized in the scrapping of warships, the yard moved further downstream as the ships grew. The wood of old warships, especially old hard oak and teak , was of particular value because it is considered to be extremely weatherproof. In 1922, for example, the London department store Liberty's used the wooden mahogany interior of the officers' mess on the wrecked ships HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindostan when building its new store on Carnaby Street . Simpler wood, such as that obtained from the scrapping of wooden merchant ships, could be marketed as firewood in its sawn-up state until before the First World War and thus achieved a revenue of two pounds per ton.
By 1900, besides Castle on the Thames, a number of ship demolition companies had already formed. Denny Brothers in Dumbarton used ship scrap in the construction of new ships as early as 1880. The steel manufacturer George Cohen started demolishing the ship in Briton Ferry in 1890. Another pioneer was Thomas W. Ward. Founded in Sheffield in 1878 , the company began scrapping ships in Preston, Lancashire in 1895. Another well-known company was JJ King in Garston .
With the introduction of the Siemens-Martin furnace it became possible to use scrap on a large scale for steel production. Due to the long durability of the iron ships built up to that point, only relatively few ships were scrapped by the turn of the century. The most famous ship that had been scrapped up to that point was the Great Eastern , which was abandoned in Birkenhead in 1888 .
1900 to the First World War
Other companies that started ship demolition in the first decade of the century were Jackie Fisher, who scrapped a large number of decommissioned warships between 1904 and 1906, West of Scotland Shipbreaking since 1904 in Troon on the Clyde, Forth Shipbreaking (later P&W MacLellan), in Bo'ness since 1905 or Hughes Bolckow since 1909 on the River Tyne. Ward's also opened additional demolition sites in Briton Ferry and Morecambe . John Cashmore, who had previously dealt with steel construction and steel structures, opened a demolition yard in Newport in 1910 . Hughes Bolckow built another demolition yard in Blyth in 1912 , the financing of which was partly supported by the Dorman family, who were active in the steel business.
At that time, the ships to be demolished were dismantled by hand-chiseling off the individual rivets that connected the ship's plates. Large castings were smashed with a steel ball. With these resources, it took 30 to 40 workers just under six months to dismantle a cargo ship or a smaller warship. Up until the First World War, the cutting torch , which was still new at the time, began to gain acceptance for cutting particularly difficult areas. In the years between the turn of the century and the beginning of the First World War, around 60 ships were dismantled annually, around half of which were merchant ships and the other half warships. During this time, ship demolition companies worked 54 hours a six-day week and the hourly wage was 2.5 pence .
Between the wars
If the number of ship demolition companies had increased up to the beginning of the First World War, scrapping ceased practically completely when the fighting began.
From 1919 a high phase of ship demolition began in Great Britain, because the high initial demand for steel coincided with large tonnage overhangs in military shipping. The British Admiralty sold hundreds of surplus vehicles for relatively small sums. So were sloops or minesweepers , which previously for about 60,000 pounds had been built, repelled for 1,000 pounds. This led to an unprecedented increase in the number of demolition sites being established. By 1923, around 60 mostly small businesses had been founded in order to participate in the boom. But large companies also prospered. In May 1921, Thomas W. Ward acquired a total of 113 demolition ships "en bloc" and founded eight new demolition sites, including Milford Haven , Hayle , Grays and the company in Inverkeithing, which still exists today . Its competitor Alloa Shipbreaking , which became Metal Industries in 1929 , created a large demolition yard in Charlestown , west of Rosyth . In 1926 Alloa Shipbreaking leased parts of the Rosyth Dockyard , where the largest of the ships at the time could be dismantled. This was particularly true of the former German warships lifted by the recovery company Cox & Danks in Scapa Flow , which could not be scrapped in conventional demolition operations.
While smaller companies at that time mostly worked without large technical equipment, i.e. largely as they did before the war, larger companies such as Ward or Alloa equipped their demolition yards with their own facilities for the production of oxygen and acetylene and supplied the sites with their own pipeline system, to increase the efficiency of the places. Due to its pioneering role in the transport of liquid oxygen, Metal Industries later acquired a large share in the British Oxygen Company .
The price of scrap fluctuated in the years up to World War II between £ 5 per ton in the period immediately after the war and a low of £ 1.5 in 1932. The majority of the smaller companies had given up by 1930, with the exception of Ward and Metal Industries remained around a dozen in business.
In the 1930s, marked by the Great Depression, several developments came together. On the one hand, in the wake of the respective steel industries, companies from Germany, Italy and Japan had increasingly started scrapping ships, creating competition for the acquisition of ships to be scrapped. On the other hand, the supply of decommissioned Admiralty ships dried up. British steelmakers had to import large amounts of scrap. This led to the founding of the British Shipbreakers Association in 1935 , which campaigned for higher scrap prices in Great Britain. In 1936, Great Britain imported around one million tons of steel scrap, which was about half the amount of steel required. British ship breakers meanwhile dismantled one to two hundred ships a year and delivered 200,000 to 300,000 tons of steel scrap, about a tenth of the demand. The supply of the British steel industry with scrap was regulated at this time by the British Iron and Steel Federation , whose branch British Iron and Steel Corporation (BISCO) was initially responsible for the salvage and after the outbreak of war for the supply of the steel works with scrap and demolition ships. Hughes Bolckow in Blyth was taken over by Metal Industries in 1938, but continued to operate under the ancestral name.
As at the beginning of the First World War, scrapping practically ceased when the fighting began in the Second World War. The ship demolition operations have mainly focused on the scrapping of small, irreversibly damaged or stranded ships on the British coasts. Another mainstay was the provision of block ships . Individual companies even started shipbuilding activities, for example Hughes Bolckow took over the equipment of six escort ships of the neighboring shipyard Blyth Dry Docks & Shipbuilding Company .
First post-war period
Some demolition companies, such as Metal Industries and Arnott Young, moved in the early post-war period. Metal Industries, for example, left the Blyth Dockyard and took over a former military port in Faslane , while Arnott Young moved from Dalmuir to Cairnryan .
The demolition yards began their work again shortly after the end of the war. The majority of the ships to be demolished were initially decommissioned military ships such as landing craft, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. Almost all of them were bought by BISCO and distributed to suitable demolition yards. Since a large part of the steelworks was located in Scotland, the majority of larger military ships in Scotland, including the HMS Nelson , the HMS Rodney , the HMS Royal Sovereign or the HMS Revenge , which came to an end in Inverkeithing . The need for scrap was so great in the immediate post-war period that BISCO had ships towed from ports as far away as Bombay or Singapore to be demolished in Great Britain.
1950s and 1960s
At the beginning of the 1950s there were around 25 ship demolition companies in the UK employing around 2000 people. Together they dismantled around 200 ships a year, producing between 250,000 and 400,000 tons of steel scrap and 10,000 tons of non-ferrous metals. While little changed in the basic methods of scrapping, improvements in efficiency were achieved through the increased use of cranes and steel shears, especially in the larger companies. Replacing acetylene with propane made it possible to reduce costs. A not inconsiderable portion of the scrapped tonnage of these years consisted of former passenger ships, the use of which had become unprofitable due to the triumphant advance of passenger aircraft. In the years 1951 to 1960 alone 44 passenger ships with measurements over 10,000 GRT were dismantled in British demolition yards. Among them were famous ships like Cunard's RMS Aquitania and RMS Scythia , or the Georgic .
From 1962 onwards the distribution of the tonnage to be scrapped was abandoned by BISCO, after which the abandoners themselves were responsible for purchasing the scrap ships. A number of smaller companies that did not have enough equipment or equity capital, some of which had since been decoupled from the railway network, gave up. These included companies such as Rees in Llanelli , King and Dorkin in Gateshead , Young in Sunderland, Smith & Houston in Port Glasgow, Dover Industries and Demmelweek & Reeding in Plymouth and Brechin in Granton near Leith.
The largest company remained Metal Industries, whose sites in Rosyth and Charlestown closed in 1963 and whose ship demolition company in Faslane was now called Shipbreaking Industries . When Metal Industries was sold to Thorn Electrical Industries in 1967 , it closed its last ship demolition companies, Shipbreaking Industries in Faslane and Hughes Bolckow in Blyth. The second major company was Thomas W. Ward. Ward operated sites in Inverkeithing, Preston, Barrow, Briton Ferry, Grays, and Milford Haven. Other more significant operations were Cashmore in Newport, Arnott Young with the main operation in Dalmuir and the subsidiary West of Scotland Shipbreaking in Troon, MacLellan in Bo'ness and Clayton Davie on the River Tyne. There were also a handful of smaller companies operating in the UK. In 1962, around 400 workers were still employed in British demolition yards.
Although the 1960s were characterized for the British abandoners by a growing number of competitors, for example from Spain, Italy or Yugoslavia, who often offered higher prices for ships to be abandoned due to lower wages, they remained thanks to their higher competence in the extraction of non-ferrous metals and a better one Second use of the aggregates obtained from higher quality tonnage is still competitive. In addition, the scrapping of British warships, locally occurring or small tonnage, ensured basic utilization. The price of scrap ranged between £ 10 and £ 15 per ton in the 1960s.
1970s and 1980s
In the course of the 1970s, the composition of the competitors initially changed. If these came mainly from Europe before, ship scrapping shifted increasingly to Asia. Whereas in Asia the majority of ships were previously scrapped in Japan, Hong Kong, China, Pakistan , India and, above all, Taiwan have now taken its place. Low labor costs, little or no safety and environmental regulations made the labor-intensive dismantling there more competitive. In addition, higher steel purchase prices could be achieved in Asia, as the cut up steel scrap was processed directly in the construction industry and used marine equipment in developing countries achieved considerably better prices than in the United Kingdom. In the 1970s, ships to be abandoned in Asia achieved a good twice as high revenues as in Europe, which meant that almost every ship that could still reach Asia on its own was abandoned there.
After the British shipbreakers had concentrated more and more on processing smaller vehicles and land-bound scrap during this period, the aftermath of the first oil crisis came to light next . They reduced the demand for steel and thus the price of scrap and old Siemens-Martin furnaces were taken out of service. Although only around 100,000 tonnes of steel was extracted there from ship scrap at the end of the 1970s, Great Britain turned into a net scrap exporter for the first time. Thomas W. Ward reduced its operations to Briton Ferry, Grays and Inverkeithing, with the latter being the last in Great Britain to have large tonnage scrapped. Arnott Young was taken over by Tarmac and completed the demolition of the ship at Troon and Dalmuir, but kept the latter operating with scrap. Cashmore and Clayton & Davie also closed their operations, while MacLellan gave his place in Bo'ness in 1977 to the land scrap dealer Dalton of Edinburgh . The demolition site in Cairnryan was initially taken over by Shipbreaking Queensborough and leased to Steel Supply Western , which scrapped the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle there . After that, H. Kitson Vickers leased the space to demolish the Eagle's sister ship , the HMS Ark Royal .
While the ongoing strikes of the 1980s hit Britain's entire heavy industry, the prolonged strikes at the British Steel Corporation , in particular, caused scrap demand to fall further, eventually leading to the closure of most of the UK's remaining demolition yards. In 1981, only about 200 workers were employed in British demolition yards in Great Britain, who scrapped about 20 merchant ships. None of the ships was larger than 3000 tons, which resulted in a total of around 15,000 tons, most of which was exported.
1990s until today
In the course of the 1990s there was hardly any ship demolition of any appreciable extent in Great Britain. Only a few companies, such as Thomas W. Ward in Inverkeithing, which was taken over by the Rio Tinto Group in the early 1980s, and a number of smaller companies continued to exist. These companies usually also processed and traded large quantities of land-bound scrap. While the dangers of ship demolition in Great Britain were investigated and criticized as early as the early 1960s, the desolate working and environmental protection conditions of Asian demolition companies led to increased public pressure since the 1990s to safely and environmentally friendly scrapping of certain ships. In 1996 the waste disposal company Able UK acquired the former Graythorpe shipyard in Hartlepool from Laing Offshore and expanded it into a modern demolition yard. The most famous ship that has so far been scrapped at Able is the former French aircraft carrier Clemenceau .
literature
- Buxton, Ian L .: A Century of British Shipbreaking: The Growth and Decline of an Industry . In: Ambrose, AJ (Ed.): Jane's Merchant Shipping Review . Jane's Publishing Company Limited, London 1982, ISBN 0-7106-0261-8 , pp. 151-159 .
- Bowen, Frank C .: The Shipbreaking Industry . In: Winchester, Clarence (Ed.): Shipping Wonders of the World . The Fleetway House, London 1932.
- Ville, Simon (Ed.): Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century . A regional approach. International Maritime Economic History Association, St. John's 1993, ISBN 0-9695885-3-4 (Research in Maritime History No. 4).
Individual evidence
- ↑ JB Thomson: Shipbreaking at Troon in Marine News Vol. XXIII, No. 7, July 196, World Ship Society, Kendal, pp. 203-205
- ↑ Page on the development and use of welding gases ( Memento from September 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.0 MB)
- ↑ a b Study by the Nuffield Department of Industrial Health (English)
- ↑ Able UK website ( Memento of August 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
Web links
- Ship recycling strategy in the UK (PDF; 86 kB)