Posts by venue: Maritime History

The Training Ship “Wellesley” at North Shields 1868-1914

School Ship on the Tyne – The Training Ship Wellesley at North Shields 1868 – 1914. The driving force behind having a training ship on the Tyne was James Hall, a local shipowner. Hall was worried about declining numbers of… Read more

The Berengaria visits the River Tyne

Over the past couple of months, work has been progressing steadily on the ‘Workshop of the World’ project. I’ve been working through the large quantity of unlisted material in the Vickers Armstrong collection and there have been lots of interesting… Read more

Exploring the ‘Workshop of The World’

This month I’ve started work on a major project to catalogue our collection of the historic records of Vickers Armstrong and its predecessor companies. This will make all the documents fully available to the public for the very first time.… Read more

Remembering the shipyard workers

An earlier blog contained several images of the ship ‘Northern Star’ including an unusual one of workers preparing the slipway for the launch.  It reminded me of how rare and precious such images are. The Archives cares for tens of thousands… Read more

The icebreaker Ermack, a great Tyne-built ship

The icebreaker Ermack was the strongest ship in the world in its day. It was built in 1898 at the shipyard of Armstrong Whitworth & Co. at Low Walker on the Tyne for the Russian government. The Ermack (also known… Read more