READY to mix it with the worst of them, the British Government towards the end of World War I ordered 154 concrete hulled ships - tugs and barges - to overcome a shortage of steel.

Two of the barges were built on the Tees at Thornaby. Far from a lead balloon, one's still proving stubbornly unsinkable.

The 744 ton Cretejoist was built by Darlington-based Blacketts & Co, sold subsequently to Norway and wrecked near Trondheim, when the occupying German forces tried to send it to the bottom. The concrete overcoat simply wouldn't wear.

Years later, the Trondheim harbour authorities also tried to blow up the Cretejoist, and with no greater success. She not only resisted but still sits there defiantly, an improbable monument to marine construction on the Tees.

Evidence of all this - hard facts, as might be supposed of a concrete ship - comes from Alan Betteney, who for ten years, has been researching the history of shipbuilding in Stockton and Thornaby.

The resultant book is launched, as a book on shipbuilding should be, today.

Once there were more yards than a country mile, men on both banks at it hammer and tongs. Now no trace remains.

"I think people find it quite hard to believe that shipbuilding was so big here because there's virtually no living memory of it," says Alan, a former ICI research scientist who took early retirement.

There were barques and barges, tramps and tankers, sloops, schooners and paddle steamers like the Talpore, a "peculiarly constructed" vessel which worked the River Indus. A pub on the south bank still bears the name.

Alan, who'd previously written a book on the Castle Eden railway, even lists the hundreds of ships - almost 2,000, from Beryl to King of the Belgians - which set sail from that part of the river.

"I chose shipbuilding as a subject because I thought it would be quite easy. I couldn't have been more wrong," he says.

From November 29, an exhibition at Stockton's Green Dragon Museum and a photographic display in the central library will mark the 150th anniversary of the launch of the first iron ship, from Thornaby.

Craft for the Holy Land, 12th century Bishops of Durham are thought to have been the first to have boats built in Stockton. In 1776, about two per cent of all British shipbuilding was in Stockton - though Whitby had seven times as much.

Alan Bettenby also includes a fascinating chapter on the Confederate ships built on the north bank during the American Civil War, and the Union spying missions launched to find out what on earth was going on.

There were companies like Castle Moat, Craig Taylor and Richardson Duck - Swans it wasn't - but the biggest of all was Ropner's, in Stockton, close bounded by Paradise Row and in 1891, Britain's fourth biggest shipbuilder.

In both 1912 and 1913, more than 100,000 tons of shipping was completed on the river, but by 1931, the industry had dried up completely.

Many of the concrete ships were never built, either because the war was over or because - despite what the Government thought - they cost £27,000 apiece, almost twice the cost of an equivalent steel vessel.

Blacketts decided they'd sailed close enough to the wind. The company went into brick making instead.

* Shipbuilding in Stockton and Thornaby, written and abundantly illustrated by Alan Betteney is published by the Tees Valley Heritage Group and is available at £6.95 plus £1 postage from Darlington and Teesside bookshops or from the author at 35 Fairwell Road, Stockton-on-Tees TS19 7HT.

IT is the season for book publishing, of course, and yet another stocking filler has arrived from Dulcie Lewis in Redmire, Wensleydale.

Dulcie's the lass who, however unladylike, has made her name - if not necessarily her fortune - by writing about netties and closely related matters.

The latest is called A Flush in the Pan. Her puns may be close to exhaustion but the market shows no signs of bottoming out. This one's clearly designed for a Christmas present, said to be a "classic" collection of lavatorial jokes and one-liners passed on by the audiences at her talks. Dulcie laments that there aren't more.

"Where are the stories of old ladies backing into the outdoor privy in the dark and finding themselves sitting on a tramp's lap?" she asks. "The sense of adventure of a trip down the garden path is missing from our lives."

Inevitably, there are a couple of pages on Thomas Crapper, the man who perfected the flushing WC, almost as inexorably, some jokes about night soil and midnight men: What has four wheels and flies?

A night soil cart.

It's all fat scatological. One further example may suffice:

There was a young fellow called Hyde

Who fell down a privy and died,

His unfortunate brother

Then fell down another

And now they're interred side by side.

* A Flush in the Pan by Dulcie Lewis (Countryside Books, £4.05)

MORE surprisingly, a thin volume called Forest Wisdom arrives from Richard Franklin - former member of both Liberal and Conservative associations in Wensleydale, former parliamentary candidate for the Referendum Party and the UK Independence Party, and perhaps best remembered as an actor in Dr Who. Richard, once in Middleham, now seems to be forming a new political movement - maybe more of that next week.