Fire and water in Hebburn.


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Three months of snow and broken weather were finally blown away by the equinoctal storms: with the promise of a clear dawn, I scrambled into the burnt husk of a Victorian shipyard early on a Sunday morning. From the top floor of Hawthorn Leslie’s former offices in Hebburn, I looked westwards over serried ranks of houses in which folk slept, wasting a fine morning on their hangovers. To the east lay overgrown slipways, a crumbling jetty – and the clatter of the former shipyard’s dry dock, where A&P Tyne are currently working on a P&O ferry, the Pride of Calais. This 1866 graving dock, built from blocks of sandstone then lined in concrete between the wars, is the only active part remaining of Hebburn Shipyard.


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Graham Greene wrote that “to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and the city no longer exists except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.” The shipyard and the Leslie Houses built in its shadow were a world to themselves, until shipbuilding collapsed. Now the memory is slowly fading, and with it, a Scottish enclave in the heart of Tyneside. Hawthorn Leslie had their roots in north-east Scotland – Andrew Leslie was a Shetlander, who gained engineering experience in Aberdeen before moving south. In 1853, he took eight acres of land at Hebburn Quay and started his own marine engineering and shipbuilding firm. Leslie recruited many of his workers from the north-east of Scotland area and these few streets around Hebburn Shipyard earned the nickname “Little Aberdeen”. The yard even contributed to the construction of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, whose 200 ft. steeple at the top of Ellison Street is still a local landmark.


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After Andrew Leslie retired in 1884, his junior partner Arthur Coote quickly formed a new partnership with locomotive and marine engine builder, R.& W. Hawthorn of Newcastle, creating R.& W. Hawthorn, Leslie & Co. in 1885. Having built and launched over 250 ships at Hebburn under the old firm, the new undertaking employed 4000 at its height, lasted eighty years and built another 500 hulls – during that time, wars and slumps meant that the company changed shape several times, although the yard itself survived remarkably intact after reconstruction around 1930. Many ships built at Hebburn were powered by engines from the firm’s own St. Peter’s Works, and the yard’s busiest periods were during the wars. Over the course of six years of the Hitler War, Hawthorn Leslie built over 50 ships, including the aircraft carrier Triumph, three cruisers, five “Battle” Class and several other destroyers, plus gunboats, minelayers and landing craft.


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Post-war, the order books remained strong and the building berths were busy, as the Merchant Navy's strength was built up once again. Hebburn Shipyard began to specialise, producing nine tankers in the late 40’s and ‘50’s, including the Auris and Auricula for the Anglo-Saxon Shipping Company. In fact, the Auris was revolutionary – built in 1948 and fitted with diesel-electric machinery, she was converted to gas turbine power in 1951, and made the first Atlantic crossing of its kind. Later, as the post-war merchant boom tailed off, the yard turned to the Royal Fleet Auxiluary. Now styled Hawthorn Leslie (Shipbuilders) Ltd., it used its expertise to bid for RFA “oilers”, the mobile filling stations which keep the fleet sailing.


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In the early 1960’s, the yard produced both of the later “Tide” Class – the 27,400t fast fleet tankers Tidepool and Tidespring; then a few years later it was the lead yard for the 36,000t “Olna” Class, which evolved from the Tide ships. These were similarly specialised, designed for the re-fuelling and victualling of naval vessels at sea, and two out of three were built at Hebburn - the Olna and the Olwen. All of these naval auxiluaries were fitted with Parsons steam turbines built by Hawthorn Leslie themselves, and marked the high point of Hawthorns as an integrated shipbuilder, in other words one which built the hull, the machinery and did the fitting out as well. Many of the vessels served during the Falklands War, as did the landing ships Sirs Bedivere, Tristram and Percivale (three out of six of the “Sir Lancelot” Class were built at Hebburn) plus the yard’s final warship, the “Leander” Class frigate Argonaut.


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The yard typically built 4-5 vessels each year, but Hawthorn Leslie (Shipbuilders) Ltd’s final ship, Yard No.766, the Wiltshire, was built in 1968, after which shipbuilding on the Tyne changed fundamentally. Following the Geddes Report, which promoted the restructuring of the industry into regional groups (Mersey, Tay/Forth, Wear, Upper Clyde, Tees, Lower Clyde, Tyne and so on), a consortium of Tyneside shipbuilders was formed, consisting of Hawthorns, Swan Hunter, Vickers’ Walker Naval Yard, Readheads and Clelands. This new arrangement took over in January 1968, and was known as Swan Hunter & Tyne Shipbuilders Ltd. The primacy of Swan Hunter in the name gave a strong hint as to who controlled the group, and this led to the slow run down of the Hebburn Shipyard: yet it had looked like Hawthorns had a promising future. In the early 1970’s, work was carried out to the No.1 berth, and some shop facilities were integrated into the Hebburn Shipbuilding Dock, but a second round of re-organisation in 1977 led to nationalisation, and British Shipbuilders succeeded SH&TS as owners of the Hebburn Shipyard.


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British Shipbuilders didn’t try to stem the yard’s decline, and by 1985 the offices and sheds were being used as a Training, Education and Safety Centre for Tyneside apprentices. The rest of the site was abandoned, and in 1987 South Tyneside Council made plans to create a shipbuilding museum, even gathering together ships’ machinery and artefacts, but ultimately the plans fell through. When the eastern half of the fabrication sheds, plus the dry dock, were sold to Cammell Laird c.1998, things looked up, as they invested in the yard, fabricating a new dry dock gate and repairing its pumps. However, they went bust in 2001, and 800 men lost their jobs, despite Hebburn having a full order book. A&P (Tyne) Ltd. took over, and they continue to work as a ship repair business, albeit employing far fewer men.


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Regeneration began beside the yard in the mid 1990’s, when Bellway Homes built “Hebburn Village” on Ellison Street, on the land once occupied by the workers’ houses built by Andrew Leslie. However, through this time the western half of the yard lay idle, its last tenant being Hawthorn Leslie Fabrications Ltd. – the “HLFL” on the offices gates – who left around 2006. The building berth cranes were demolished in the 1990’s, and the famous Hawthorns clocktower building was flattened in 2007. The current owner, MMC Estates, sits on a planning approval to redevelop the site for housing and while they wait for the yield curve to pick up, vandals have burned out part of the offices.


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The seahorse logo on Hawthorn Leslie’s gates stands as a monument to one yard, just as the swordfish symbolising its rival across the Tyne, Swan Hunter, presides over that shipbuilder’s demise. Today both yards are, to use Graham Greene’s analogy, like amputated limbs.