The Yards
Cross reference from the yards back to the ships plus links to external sources
Continuing to work on it.
What an evocative image of the John Readhead yard in South Shields.
The steamers are coming!!
This yard built Boltons first 9 ships, Ruysdael (III) having being built as Blackwell and only acquired in 1921.
These were to be the most ordered from any yard by the company.
What happened then, why the change to William Gray after 9 builds at Thompson's never to be commissioned again?
Thompson's yard was, however, extremely prolific and successful, a definitive account of which can be found in the links above.
The 'Empire' tramp ships were the British built equivalents of the American 'Liberty' ships some of which were built by J.L. Thompson. I did have a link (which no longer exists) which included a fascinating comparison between British and American yards.
It states that the steelwork time for an Empire ship at J.L. Thompson's was 336,000 man-hours
Whereas a Liberty ship built by Bethlehem, Baltimore was 510,000 man-hours
Therefore Bethlehem took 52% more time to build virtually the same ship than Thompson's, whose workforce also had to contend with air raids, blackouts, rationing and smaller yards