Shipyard’s treasures preserved for local posterity

The East Riding Archives and Local Studies Service has been given extensive records of the now defunct company Richard Dunston (Hessle) Limited, based at Hessle Haven, which could trace its shipbuilding roots back to the mid-19th century.

Although some of the company’s records are held in the national Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the collection is believed the East Riding’s biggest publicly available shipbuilding archive of its kind, and had previously been stored in Hull’s Maritime Museum.

It includes its staff register from 1937 to 1950, the apprenticeship indentures of 1949 to 1960, records of all vessels built between 1897 and 1987, the specifications and drawings of ships between 1946 and 1989, ship’s plans of 1927 to 1989, and even the 1961 to 1993 records of its sports and social club.

Also included are selected photographs of ships built at the yard and pictures of members of staff.

The company had come a long way since Richard Dunston began building wooden barges on the bank of the Stainforth and Keadby Canal in Thorne, South Yorkshire, in 1858.

The variety of vessels the yard turned its hand to was staggering, from liquid petroleum gas carriers to the elegant, three-masted schooner Sir Winston Churchill, built for the Sail Training Association in 1966.

Ships produced at the yard are still in use all over the world.

But perhaps the yard’s most significant contribution was the steady supply of TID Tugs it churned out under a Ministry of Defence contract in the Second World War.

The arrival of the prefabricated tugs, which were assembled at the yard, heralded a sea change in British shipbuilding when the old skills of riveting were replaced by modern methods of welding.

This period also saw the first women welders appear on the yard, although at the conflict’s end they just as quickly disappeared, which some blamed on pressure from trade unions.

In 1943 the MoD had called for “one tug a week” as it began planning for the greatest seaborne invasion in history - the Normandy landings - in which the tugs played a vital role.

They towed the floating roadways linking the Mulberry Harbours – parts of which were built in Goole – to the beaches and were kept busy servicing ships anchored in deep water. Some tugs were also allocated to the US Army.

Others went into a navy pool in Portsmouth Harbour, or were sent to the Far East to support the British Pacific Fleet and help re-establish bases in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Retired maritime curator Arthur Credland said: “Tugs have always been the workhorses of shipping and they were even more so during the War.

“They were of major importance at D-Day and absolutely vital to the whole landing process.

“One or two are still afloat. I think the last one I heard of was in Finland; they were sturdy little things.

“The ones that survived were converted for commercial use after the war.”

In total 1,358 vessels were built by the company at Thorne and 636 at Hessle.

Mr Credland said Dunstan’s was one of the three most important shipbuilding companies in the area.

“They were a major shipbuilding concern right to the end,” he said.

Although ships are still being built on the Humber, albeit intermittently, at Hepworth’s yard at Paull, most other yards have disappeared, a demise which Mr Credland blamed on foreign competition and European Union regulations.

He said: “They suffered from competition from overseas and so many other shipyards so it was forever a throat-cutting operation to try to keep up and keep competitive.

“And EU rules didn’t make it easier. Governments were not supposed to prop up industries ad lib.

“We would always stick to the rules while other countries undercut us.

“Whoever is brave enough to break the rules wins out, as Italy did for a number of years.”

The records can be viewed in the Treasure House, in Champney Road, Beverley.

Collections officer Sam Bartle said: “The records help to build a picture of the business as a whole and how it operated and the photographs give us an idea of the type of ships that were coming out of the Hessle yard between the 1920s and 1970s.”