William Gray & Company
William Gray & Company was a shipbuilding company in West Hartlepool , England and existed from 1874 to 1963. Gray was a pioneer of various shipbuilding innovations and was one of the most productive shipyards in the world at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
history
The founding years
The company's roots go back to 1863, when the cloth merchant William Gray, born in Blyth in 1823, and the shipbuilder John Punshon Denton came together as Denton, Gray and Company . In 1869 the two acquired the Pile shipyard, Spence Dockyard in Jackson Dock in Hartlepool. After the shipyard had built 58 iron steamships by 1874 , Gray and Denton split up after a dispute and Gray continued the shipyard as William Gray and Company.
Shipbuilding under its own name
The first ship launched in August 1874 under William Gray's name only was the Sexta . In 1875, William Gray built twelve steamships, three years later, 18 units, more ships than any other British shipyard. In 1883, the newly founded Central Marine Engineering Works enabled the shipyard to also build marine machinery in its own shipyard. By 1887, Gray expanded its business premises and acquired the neighboring Jackson shipyard. In order to be able to build even larger ships, Gray opened a second shipyard in the Central Dock of Hartlepool Harbor in 1887, where the first new building, the liner Missouri , was completed in the following year . The company continued to have the highest output of any British shipyard in 1888. At the end of the same year, shipyards and marine engineering were merged into one company, which was registered as a private limited company on January 1, 1889 . William Gray became chairman, with his sons Matthew and William and stepson George Henry Baines serving as directors. In the same year Thomas Mudd designed the quadruple expansion steam engine at Gray . In 1890 the new blacksmith's shop opened and William Gray, who was also the first mayor of West Hartlepool, was knighted . In order to supply the shipyard with orders, William Gray granted extensive loans to shipping companies who had ships built by him and held shares in about half of the ships built at his shipyard. This led to shipping companies commissioning ships from him that they could not have built with other types of financing. In 1892, for example, Marcus Samuel , the founder of Shell, commissioned Gray to build his first tanker, the Murex . Samuel initially paid Gray only 6,350 pounds of the total construction cost of 47,000 pounds. Between 1892 and 1895, eight more tankers for Shell followed.
From the turn of the century to the First World War
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Matthew Gray died in 1896, and Sir William Gray and Thomas Mudd died in 1898. The company was continued by the younger son William Cresswell Gray.
In 1898, Gray acquired the Milton Forge and Engineering Company to expand the manufacturing capabilities for marine engineering. In the same year, Gray and Christopher Furness bought the Moor Steel and Iron Works in of Stockton-on-Tees, the Stockton Malleable Iron Works and the West Hartlepool Steel and Iron Company and merged the three steel companies to form the South Durham Steel and Iron Company. Gray's Central Shipyard was expanded by two slipways in 1900 , making a total of eleven slipways available. At the turn of the century, the company employed around 3,000 shipyard workers. In the following years up to the First World War, about 200 ships were built at Gray. In 1913, Gray's extended the lease with Hartlepool until 1950 and leased a plot of land a few kilometers away in the Graythorp district near Greatham Creek on the Tees River to build a new shipyard under the name Graythorp . Delayed by the World War, the new shipyard was only opened in 1925. During the First World War, the company built 30 liner and tramp freighters for civil clients, 13 ships for the British Admiralty and 30 standard WAR ships for the shipping controller . King George V and Queen Mary visited the shipyard to raise morale. In 1917 a hammer-shaped shipyard crane with a capacity of 100 tons was inaugurated, which remained a landmark of the shipyard and the Hartlepool harbor until it was demolished in the 1960s. Towards the end of the war in 1918, the company was converted to a public company .
The EGIS shipyard
In 1917, Gray participated in a shipping consortium to build a shipyard on the River Wear in North East England . The company called EGIS Shipbuilding Company traced its name back to the companies involved. "E" stood for Ellerman Lines , "G" for Gray, "I" for Lord Inchcape (he was chairman of the shipping companies P&O and the British India Steam Navigation Company ) and "S" for the Strick Line . The former site of the Kish, Boolds shipyard was in Pallion across from the Short Brothers shipyard . The shipyard's first ship with four slipways was the Golconda, launched in 1919 . In 1923 Gray took over the shipyard completely and built it under the name William Gray & Company, two years later the shipyard closed due to a lack of orders. From 1927 until the Great Depression , another 19 tramp ships were built, and in 1930 Grays closed the shipyard again after a total of 34 ships had been built. In November 1936, National Shipbuilders Security acquired the shipyard and had it demolished in 1938.
Interwar years
After the end of the war, during the crisis of the 1920s, Gray also lost construction contracts, so only three ships were built in 1922 and seven in 1923. Sir William Cresswell Gray died in 1924, after which the management of the now heavily indebted shipyard was passed to William Gray in 1925. After the shipyard's thousandth ship, the City of Dieppe, was delivered in 1929, the shipyards had to be closed in 1930 due to a lack of orders. In 1932 the shipyard first reopened and closed again after six tramp ships and a pilot boat had been built . In 1934, the shipyard in Jackson Dock was temporarily opened to build two ferries , the following year a tramp ship was built at the shipyard in Central Dock at their own expense, which could only be sold two years later. It was not until 1936 that the shipyard's order book began to fill up again, and by the start of the war in 1939, Gray was manufacturing 30 tramp and liner cargo ships and two destroyers for the Admiralty.
World War II pending dissolution
During the Second World War, the Gray shipyards built 72 ships, and 1750 more were repaired. In the post-war years, Gray built an average of 7.5 ships a year, including some tankers. 1951 to 1956 the shipyard delivered eight 9,500 tdw ore freighters of the Port Talbot class , two to the Chilean shipping company Compañía Sud Americana de Vapores , and six more to the Houlder Brothers . Several tramp ships followed, but in 1959 the order backlog had shrunk to two ore carriers. After the last ship was delivered in 1961 with the bulk carrier Blanchland , the shipbuilding company was dissolved in 1962, the shipyard inventory was auctioned in May 1963 and the company buildings were demolished in 1963. The Graythorp shipyard was still used by Laing Offshore in 1974/75 to build oil drilling platforms.
Todays use
In 1996 the waste disposal company Able UK acquired the former Graythorpe shipyard 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
- Middlemiss, Norman L .: British Shipbuilding Yards . Volume 1: North-East Coast. 1st edition. Shield Publications, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1993, ISBN 1-871128-10-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Able UK ( Memento of August 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (English)