The cargo steamer Brook of the Hamburg shipping company HM Gehrckens was the first German cargo ship to be built after the Second World War.
details
In the first years after the end of the war, no shipbuilding was allowed in defeated Germany . From 1949 onwards, the occupying powers allowed the first new buildings that had to meet certain requirements, the so-called Potsdam ships . The Hamburg shipping company HM Gehrckens received the first confirmation number "MSB / Ship 1" from the Military Security Board on May 31, 1949 . The ship that was then built was the Brook , which was launched on November 26, 1949 at the Lübecker Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft (LMG) in Lübeck and was delivered to the client in January 1950.
The steamer was designed as a conventional general cargo ship in a three-island design with a deckhouse amidships. It had a measurement of 1489 GRT, two cargo holds with a grain volume of 5347 m 3 and a load capacity of over 3000 tons. The boiler system of the four-cylinder composite steam engine was initially heated with coal, as prescribed by the requirements of the occupation authorities. In 1950 the LMG delivered two sister ships to the Brook , the Irene Oldendorff of the Lübeck shipping company Egon Oldendorff , which sank in the Ems estuary at the end of 1951, and the Wandrahm , which went back to the Gehrckens shipping company.
The Brook went to the commissioning first under the flag of Charlie (German transitional merchant flag) in Scandinavia service, the traditional trading area of HMG After the abolition of the restrictions in April 1951 one built the ship to oil firing order and in 1951 the ship moved to the West Africa service. In 1965 the ship was sold to the Italian Lighea di Navigazione in Palermo, which continued to operate it under the name Giada . In the following year Salvatore Giannone in Naples took over the ship without renaming and in 1968 the shipping company Alba Società di Armamento in Naples acquired the ship again without renaming. After a collision on November 23, 1977, the damaged ship was scrapped in Vado Ligure on August 28, 1978.
literature
1500 GRT freighter “Brook” in “Hansa” No. 23/24 of June 10, 1950, pp. 773-778.
Verg, Erik: Under the blue flag . 150 years of HMGehrckens. Ed .: HMGehrckens. Self-published, Hamburg 1980.
