CONCRETE boats were all the rage when other materials were in short supply in the First World War. Memories 585 told how SS Cretehawser was one of four concrete tugs made in Sunderland in 1919 and it still lies, as a breakwater, in the Wear at South Hylton. We also found the wreck of MV Creteblock lying beneath the Whitby Abbey cliffs. It too was a 1919 concrete tug, only it was made in West Sussex and came to the Tees to work at Smith’s Dock.
READ MORE: MEMORIES 585 ON SS CRETEHAWSER AND MV CRETEBLOCK
Now Ted Lickrish provides information of a third wrecked concrete boat. It lies in a Norwegian fjord and was made on the Tees by a Darlington company.
Blackett & Son was best known as a house-builder, formed on Haughton Road around 1830 by Joseph Blackett. When his grandson, Ralph, died in 1928, it was reckoned the company had built 10,000 homes, 50 railway stations, 50 bridges, 50 schools and 20 banks.
And two concrete barges.
Blacketts builders amalgamated with Snaith's carpenters in the late 1920s. Snaith's dated back to the 1840s and had their sawmill yard at the top of Bondgate. The yard became Blacketts' headquarters for 60 years until the late 1980s when it was converted into a pub called Blacketts. In 2004, it was converted into a doctors' surgery which had been founded in 1919 in Netherlaw, a large house in Stanhope Road. The practice is to this day called Blacketts. Picture courtesy of the Darlington Centre for Local Studies
In 1917, when a steel shortage was forcing many governments, including the British, to look at the potential of concrete boats, Ralph and his brother John formed Blackett’s Concrete Ships Ltd which was based on the Tees at Stockton. They picked up orders for ten vessels, but only made two, the Cretejetty and the Cretejoist, before they went back to house-building.
The barges were about 180ft long and 32ft wide, and could carry up to 1,000 tons. They were designed to be pulled by another ship as part of a sea-train of barges.
Cretejetty was launched first, on March 21, 1920, into the Tees. It went off to Rotterdam and was then sold to Spain around 1929 after which the trail goes cold.
Cretejoist was launched in August 1920, and Ted’s research shows it was sold to Norway in 1924 and found useful employment transporting limestone for the Christiania Portland Cementfabrik.
When the Second World War broke out, Cretejoist was seized by the Germans who put it to work ferrying coal and coke around the fjords.
A still from Robert Andresen's video showing the Tees Valley-made Cretejoist in the fjord near Trondheim
On the night of February 20, 1943, the fully laden barge hit a mine which exploded.
But concrete ships are notoriously hard to blow up – several attempts have been made to destroy the MV Creteblock at Whitby because it was a hazard to shipping so now it just lies in large concrete chunks beneath the abbey.
Cretejoist was just as indestructible. Its towline broke and it simply drifted off on its own merry way until it hit the shore at Fevag, which is at the mouth of the fjord that leads to Trondheim, Norway’s third biggest city.
There it became wedged.
People tried to drag it off, but couldn’t budget it; people tried to blow it up, but couldn’t destroy it.
So now this 102-year-old piece of Tees Valley concrete just hangs out amid the natural majesty of the fjords, looking rather beautiful itself, according to a video posted on YouTube about seven years ago by Robert Andresen.
THE FULL STORY OF SUNDERLAND'S CONCRETE BOATS FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR
The wreck of MV Creteblock at Whitby. Picture: Peter Giroux
The Cretehawser, scuttled at Sunderland
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