Northumberland Shipbuilding Company
The Northumberland Shipbuilding Company Ltd. was a shipyard on the River Tyne in Howdon , (Northumberland). The company, founded in 1883, was particularly known for the construction of standard ships and was dissolved in 1930.
history
The company was founded in 1883 by HS Edwards in Howdon. After Edwards' death in 1898, Rowland Hodge took over the yard for £ 6,000, with shipowners Sir Christopher Furness from West Hartlepool and John Cory from Cardiff holding large shares in the company. Hodge had previously worked at Swan Hunter in Wallsend, he modernized and expanded the operation fundamentally and renamed it the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company . Towards the end of the First World War, the Furness Group put the shipbuilding company up for sale. The London ship broker Robert A. Workman, with family connections to the Belfast Workman-Clark shipyard, acquired Northumberland Shipbuilding with the support of the London banking houses Sperling & Company and Kleinwort Sons & Company in July 1918 for £ 835,000. Under the leadership of Sir Alex Kennedy, the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company built up the largest British shipbuilding group as a corporation . Successively majority stakes in the shipbuilding company William Doxford & Sons from Sunderland, Fairfield Shipbuilders in Govan, Workman, Clark & Company from Belfast, the Blythswood Shipbuilding Company , the Monmouth Shipbuilding Company and the Lancashire Iron and Steel Company were taken over.
In 1923 the Workman-Clark Shipyard made losses of £ 3.12 million, after which the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company could no longer service its guaranteed bonds and got into a series of legal disputes with the shareholders. Due to the lack of orders in shipbuilding, the shipyard conglomerate financed by Sperling collapsed in 1925. The Northumberland Company had also ordered 300,000 tons of shipbuilding steel from Dorman, Long and Company - twice as much as it needed - and had to write off £ 300,000 for unneeded material. In 1926, the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company closed and renamed Northumberland Shipbuilding Co (1927) Ltd. the following year . reopened. In 1930 the shipyard was closed again, transferred to the National Shipbuilders Security and finally demolished.
A total of 418 ships had been built, 75 under Edward's leadership and 343 as the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company.
Web links
- Shipyard description at Gracesguide (English)
- Shipyard description at Tynebuiltships (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chris Swinson; Regulation of the London Stock Exchange: Share Trading, Fraud and Reform 1914–1945 , Routledge, 2017, no page numbers