Tyneside shipyard in Hebburn Set to be Demolished
A decaying relic of Tyneside’s mighty industrial past which has stood empty for years is now finally being consigned to history. What’s left of the former Hawthorn Leslie shipyard in Hebburn, South Tyneside, is currently being dismantled brick by brick and the land flattened in advance of the construction of a 21st-century state-of-the-art housing complex.
Kelly’s Wharf, named after the most famous ship built at the yard – the World War II destroyer HMS Kelly – is billed as “a fantastic new riverside community of high quality modern living and public spaces”. The development will comprise houses, apartments, a convenience shop, a day nursery, a cafe, a cycle store and a waterfront restaurant.
The Newcastle Chronicle is reporting that the demolition of the once-proud shipyard finally brings 170 years of history to an end. It’s a far cry from the glory days of Hawthorn Leslie when it built hundreds of ships and provided work for generations of local people.
The driving force behind the shipyard and the subsequent thriving community which grew quickly around the yard was a visionary industrialist from Aberdeen called Andrew Leslie. Opening the shipyard on the River Tyne in 1853, Leslie recruited workers from his native North East Scotland.
Many of them settled in Hebburn Quay, earning the area the nickname ‘Little Aberdeen’. The nearby and still-popular Caledonian pub is a legacy from those times.
On the steep Hebburn riverbanks, 400 houses were built by Leslie to accommodate the families of the workers who built the ships. Many of the sloping terraced streets were demolished in the 1960s and ’70s, and later replaced by modern housing.
In that God-fearing Victorian age, people also needed a place in which to worship. Leslie was responsible for St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, which was built in 1872. With its magnificent 190-foot steeple, it remains a riverside landmark that can be seen from miles around to this day – but in a much-changed world, the former church building is now home to a thriving Buddhist centre.
Leslie’s original company built an impressive 255 ships at Hebburn before it merged with locomotive builder R & W Hawthorn of Newcastle in 1885. A measure of Andrew Leslie’s popularity is that when he died in 1894, hundreds of his former workers and foremen walked the four-mile route behind the funeral cortege as it made its way from Gosforth to Newcastle Central Station. Leslie is buried in the family plot in Leith Cemetery, Edinburgh.
Hawthorn Leslie’s yard list from the boom years of the early 20th century recalls the wide variety of vessels that were built there – from passenger ships to early oil tankers, and British and foreign naval vessels to great lake steamers. The most famous ship constructed at the yard was the ill-fated HMS Kelly, launched in 1938 and commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten. The vessel was torpedoed by German E-boats in the North Sea in 1940.
Twenty-seven men were killed in action and the stricken ship was towed back to Hebburn for repair. A year later, during the Battle of Crete, HMS Kelly was sunk by the Luftwaffe, with half of the ship’s crew perishing. The graves of seamen killed in the North Sea attack and a memorial to those lost in the Crete tragedy can be found at the ‘Kelly grave’ in Hebburn Cemetery.
The boom in post-war shipbuilding began to drop off in the mid 1950s, and securing orders became ever more difficult. By 1967, Hawthorn Leslie was receptive to a proposal to join a consortium of Tyneside shipbuilders. A year later, the company’s shipbuilding interests were merged with those of Swan Hunter and the Vickers Naval Yard to create Swan Hunter & Tyne Shipbuilders.
In 1977, UK shipyards were nationalised, but the decline continued. The Hawthorn Leslie yard at Hebburn closed in 1982, before later being acquired by other concerns. The former site, having stood derelict for many years, is now being cleared while, directly across the River Tyne, is the site of another former iconic shipbuilder, Wallsend’s Swan Hunter.
Hawthorn Leslie may be gone, but the Kelly’s Wharf development means its name will live on in Hebburn for a while longer.