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Lumley Castle Hotel
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Lumley Castle Hotel
Chester-le-Street, www.lumleycastle.com
 
 
Thursday, 9th September 2010

 
LAUNCHED ON WEARSIDE

Launched....From Doxford yards

THE proud slogan from the 1920s – "Sunderland-built ships sail every sea" – hangs proudly once again in the Launched on Wearside gallery which celebrates our proud history of 600 years of shipbuilding.
It looks not only at the technical side of the industry, but also at the lives of the shipyard owners and workers at the time when Sunderland was the biggest shipbuilding town in the world.
The displays concentrate on the period from the 1880s to the 1950s, and show how a ship was built, what went into it, and even where it went, with a globe showing how Sunderland ships went round the world on many of their voyages.
The hollow ring of metal on metal reverberates all around the gallery, just as it used to reverberate around the river, as the sights and sounds of shipbuilding on the Wear are recreated.
The full-size reconstruction of the bow of a ship, stretching up to the ceiling, gives an indication of the scale of the great ships built here – ships which supported hundreds of other industries and upon which generations of Wearsiders depended, directly or indirectly, for their livelihood.
A section of the side of a ship, showing the round rivets used in the early days, forms an enclosing wall and life-size figures of riveters are shown at work inside a partly-completed hull.
In this area, too, is a continuous video using actors to show the lifestyles of workers and their families in the days when a launch was not entirely a cause for celebration – because it meant workers were laid off until their labour was needed again.
A variation of a snakes and ladders game demonstrates to visitors the relative chanciness of life in the yards. The prize at the end is ownership of the shipyard and the candidates include a director's son (with the dice rather loaded in his favour) and a river-heater (with the least chance of all, but with just enough opportunities for advancement.

Life size riveters inside a partly completed hull


There is a fascinating catalogue of the jobs people used to do in the shipyards – bumpers up, holders down, rivet catchers, and so on. There is also ample evidence of just how much a family affair shipbuilding was, for workers and bosses.
In the age of steamships, Sunderland's yards were owned by local families – Bartrams, Doxfords, Pickersgills, Shorts and Thompsons among them.
In the early 1900s, every one of the Doxford family, sons of the second and third generations, were directors or managers of their shipyards or engineworks.
But sons also followed fathers into the manual trades in the shipyards. In the boom year of 1906, the yards employed 12,672 men, a third of the town's adult population. The Revell family was typical, with eight or nine of them in one yard and two losing their lives in shipyard accidents. Information like this gives a fascinating insight into the world of shipbuilding.
Other features include displays showing the companies which depended on the yards for survival – everything from the great marine engineering works to the makers of ropes, winches, anchors, compasses, even the crockery needed, and all of them based in Sunderland.
The gallery opened in 1993, but it has been refurbished and includes some new features, such as a model of the famous SD14. The museum's collection of models of Sunderland ships and of photographs of the ships and the yards which built them are worth revisiting again and again.

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