Wilton-Fijenoord

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The Dutch shipyard NV Dok en Werf Maatschappij Wilton-Fijenoord existed from 1929 to 1999. The company from Schiedam operated shipbuilding and repair as well as ship engineering . In 1988 the new building department was closed, the ship repair was continued as Damen Shiprepair Rotterdam BV .

history

The roots of Wilton-Fijenoord go back to the ship engineering company Etablissement Fijenoord , founded in 1825 by Gerhard Moritz Roentgen and the shipping company Nederlandsche Stoomboot Maatschappij in the south of Rotterdam . The company on the site of the former Rotterdam Pesthaus manufactured ship steam engines. Since the Dutch shipowners did not trust the skills of their own shipbuilders and only had large ships built in Great Britain, Fijenoord, which had previously only supplied the steam engines, built its own larger ship for its own account. This strategy worked around 1880. The number of orders increased and in 1895 the company was renamed Maatschappij voor Scheeps- en Werktuigbouw Fijenoord in accordance with the expanded tasks . The shipyard made high profits in the First World War and was able to reconstruct its facilities after the war.

Around thirty years after Fijenoord, in 1854, Bartel Wilton founded a forge with the support of Willem Ruys . Wilton's business developed, possibly through the influence of Ruys, more and more from a conventional to a shipbuilding forge, which in 1875 already employed 35 men. In 1876 Wilton finally acquired a site on the West Sea dike of Rotterdam, where he dug a harbor and built a slipway . The company, founded in 1895 with a capital of 300,000 guilders, traded here as NV Machinefabriek B. Wilton . The company was later renamed Wilton's Machinefabriek en Scheepswerf . Wilton also developed in the following decades and in the meantime relocated its growing business to Schiedam.

Wilton's Machinefabriek founded a holding company in 1921 with shares valued at 25 million guilders and in 1927 concluded a cooperation agreement with Maatschappij Fijenoord, before the two companies finally merged in 1929 to become Dok- en Werfmaatschappij Wilton-Fijenoord . In 1938, Wilton-Fijenoord and the neighboring shipyard Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij jointly acquired their competitor Machinefabriek en Scheepswerf van P. Smit Jr. from the Rotterdam businessman DG van Beuningen. This shipyard was not incorporated, but continued as an independent company.

A notorious problem faced by the Dutch shipyards was the lack of ship designers. Mostly they built the drafts of external design offices and only designed the detailed structures or made their organizational and production knowledge available for the construction. So they acted as contractors for changing shipping companies, not as providers of certain types of standard ships. But this is also where their flexibility is based. In 1935, four shipyards, including Wilton-Fijenoord, merged their design offices in accordance with a cartel, which was also due to the pressure of the still unresolved global economic crisis .

During the Second World War, the shipyard finished building submarines of the Dutch Navy for the German Navy . In addition, minesweepers and smaller warships as well as auxiliary warships for the German Reich were built at the shipyard.

After the Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij merged with the shipyard Koninklijke Maatschappij "De Schelde" and the Motorenfabriek Thomassen on March 4, 1966 to form the Rijn-Schelde Machinefabrieken en Scheepswerven (RSMS), Wilton-Fijenoord joined forces on July 3, 1968 under pressure from the government the network. Also under pressure from the government, Verolme Verenigde Scheepswerven (VVSW) from Rotterdam , which had got into financial difficulties, joined the group on January 1, 1971, which then traded as Rijn-Schelde-Verolme Machinefabrieken en Scheepswerven (RSV). On April 6, 1983, the RSV went bankrupt.

After the bankrupt group was unbundled, the Gemeente Schiedam took over the shipyard, the Dutch state made new loans possible and the shipyard emerged as Dok en Werf Maatschappij Wilton-Fijenoord BV with a superordinate holding company. Not least thanks to several newbuildings ordered by the Royal Navy, the shipyard continued to exist. In 1987 Wilton-Fijenoord Holding first acquired the Vlaardingen-Oost Bedrijven (VOB) repair yard and the Verolme Botlek shipyard a month later. But in February 1988 the newbuilding department of the shipyard closed. In 1994 Wilton-Fijenoord Holding also acquired the Verolme Scheepswerf Heusden. After the company got into financial difficulties again in 1998, it was in turn taken over by RDM Technology. One year later, Wilton-Fijenoord merged with the Yssel-Vliet-Combinatie repair yard to form Rotterdam United Shipyards, and in 2003 the Damen Shipyards Group from Gorinchem took over the business, which it still belongs to today.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerbrand Moeyes: Networks in Dutch Shipping and Shipbuilding, 1900-1940. In: Lars U. Scholl, David M. Williams: Crisis and Transition. Maritime Sectors in the North Sea Region 1790-1940. 8th North Sea History Conference, Bremerhaven 2005. Hauschild, Bremen 2008, pp. 196–215, here: 200f.
  2. ↑ Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945, Vol. 2: Torpedo boats, destroyers, speed boats, minesweepers, mine clearance boats , Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1983, ISBN 3-7637-4801-6 , p. 173f., Erich Gröner, Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German Warships 1815-1945, Vol. 5: Auxiliary Ships II: Hospital Ships, Accommodation Ships, Training Ships, Research Vehicles, Port Service Vehicles , Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1988, ISBN 3-7637-4804 -0 , p. 158.