Hugh Murphy

British financial, managerial and technical assistance in establishing the global shipbuilding giant, Hyundai Heavy Industries:

The aim of this article is to present the early history of Hyundai Heavy Industries, currently the world’s largest shipbuilder. The company was established by the prolific South Korean entrepreneur Chung Ju-Yung in the early 1970s. Due to limited experience in shipbuilding, the establishment relied heavily on foreign assistance. This article sheds new light on the crucial relationship between Chung and two British companies: the Newcastle-upon-Tyne-based consulting firm A&P Appledore International Limited, and the Lower Clyde shipbuilders Scott Lithgow Limited, during the beginnings of large-scale South Korean shipbuilding. The article is based on a combination of British and South Korean archival sources, as well as secondary literature and the oral and written testimony of consultants and workers involved in the project.

Subsidy and Treasury: the Trade Facilities Act and the UK Shipbuilding Industry in the 1920s

This article analyses the impact of government policy towards British unemployment in the post First World War period. It attempts to do this through the prism of the Trades Facilities Act and the impact on British shipbuilding. The treasury, however, were opposed given other priorities and the effect of the scheme remains, at best, contentious.

The rationalization Of warship building in the United Kingdom, 1945-2000

After the Second World War the Admiralty and shipbuilding industry agreed that the largest possible capacity for warship building should be maintained. This proved impossible as the Royal Navy struggled to evoke a strategy in the nuclear era and the price of increasingly complex vessels rose remorselessly. As the shipbuilding industry wilted in the 1960s in the face of international competition a process of natural selection was followed by increasing political intervention in the industry. Nationalisation in the 1970s aimed to preserve capacity and employment, policy aims which were reversed by privatisation in the 1980s and which, ultimately resulted in an oligopoly in the warship building sector.

Old Methods Versus New: A comparison of Very Large Crude Carrier construction at Scott Lithgow and Hyundai Heavy Industries, 1970–1977

This article compares and contrasts Very Large Crude Carrier shipbuilding at Scott Lithgows Glen shipyard, Port Glasgow, Scotland and Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard, Ulsan, South Korea, initially to the same design, and VLCC shipbuilding in the United Kingdom, 1970–77 in general, at the two other United Kingdom shipyards capable of constructing VLCCs, Swan Hunter on Tyneside and Harland & Wolff in Belfast. It also discusses the collapse of the British shipbuilding industrys major customer for VLCCs, Maritime Fruit Carriers.

The Norwegian market for British Shipbuilding, 1945–1967

Abstract The British Shipbuilding industry experienced a process of both competitive and comparative decline during the period 1945 to 1967 — when the world market for ships was at its most vibrant. The present article seeks to analyse this decline through an examination of the loss of the industrys most important export market — Norway. It is argued that issues such as price, failure to meet delivery dates and to offer competitive credit terms, were all factors in British shipbuildings loss of market share in Norway. Ultimately British shipbuilders retained a production oriented strategy in a market which was being revolutionised in both structural and technological terms. The failure to adopt a marketing oriented strategy, therefore, underpinned the failure of the British shipbuilding industry in the Norwegian market and would also account for its failure in the domestic market.

A shipbuilding consultancy is born: The birth, growth and subsequent takeovers of A&P Appledore (International) Limited, and the A&P Group, 1971–2017

There is a distinct lacuna in the historiography of British shipbuilding in that the role of independent consultants within it is largely unknown. This article attempts to rectify this gap by analysing the birth, growth and subsequent denouement of the industry’s most important consulting firm, A&P Appledore (International) Ltd (APA), and setting it in its domestic and international context. Sadly, through its various incarnations, the business records of APA have been lost. However, this article draws upon the recollections and retained correspondence of two senior directors of APA, John Craggs and Roger Vaughan, and other APA consultants. As such, it sheds new light on an under-researched aspect of British and international shipbuilding history.

An Anatomy of Speculative Failure: Wm Doxford & Sons Ltd, Sunderland, and the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company of Howdon on Tyne, 1919–1945

This article investigates the impact and consequences of speculative capital-gaining ownership of several UK shipbuilding firms after 1918, with emphasis on the Sperling Combine’s Northumberland Shipbuilding Company of Howdon on Tyne and its acquisition in 1919 of the Wear shipbuilders and marine engine builders, Wm Doxford and Sons Ltd. The Sperling Combine’s modus operandi was to gain control of companies and utilize their assets to expand. Their approach to shipbuilding was predatory but they failed to take account of shipbuilding’s propensity to booms and slumps, and over-capacity due to war. When the demand for ships plummeted in 1920 Sperling’s financial manipulations were left exposed. Doxford had advanced several loans to Northumberland Shipbuilding totalling £4 million but these were never repaid. The Sperling partnership was dissolved and Northumberland Shipbuilding went into voluntary receivership in 1926. Doxford closed for several years, but the Doxford family bought back into the firm via the Shipbuilding Investment Company and it reopened in 1927. Doxford managed to survive through the 1930s by combining shipbuilding and engine building, and pushing up the percentage of in-house manufacture, which allowed larger profits in times of high demand and more leeway to survive in less prosperous periods.

Appendix 1: The effects of the oil price shocks on shipbuilding in the 1970s

of world trade is transported by ships. Since World War II, shipbuilding has gone through major changes. While the global construction volume increased enormously, British initial dominance was first undermined by Japanese competition from the 1950s, but then Japan was in turn overtaken by South Korea in the 1990s, only to be outcompeted by the People’s Republic of China since the 2008 crisis. Labour processes and employment relations have changed dramatically during these shifts. In twenty-four case studies, covering all continents, Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Workers around the World: Case Studies 1950-2010 reconstructs the development of the world’s shipbuilding and ship repair industries, and the workers’ responses to these historical transformations.This small chapter attempts to give the reader an appreciation of the effects of the two oil price shocks on the market for ships. We address changes both on the demand side (shipping) and the supply side (shipbuilding) in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is not, however, an exhaustive explanation but an indicative one. In the 1950s and 1960s the search for economies of scale led to increased demand by shipowners for larger and larger tankers. From 1967, with the closure of the Suez Canal consequent on the Arab-Israeli war and its continuing non-use to 1975, this trend accelerated, as vessels now had to take the far lengthier route around the Cape of Good Hope.1 A dearth of shipbuilding capacity led to an increase in newbuilding prices, motivating speculative demand. Some VLCCs were sold immediately after they had been completed at a considerable premium to the price originally contracted for, while other contracts were even sold at a prof it before the building of the ship was f inished. The quest for economies of scale had important implications for the shipbuilding industry. The average size of the vessels on order more than trebled in the decade after 1962. Shipyards had to adjust to this, only to see the development stagnate, then reverse, after the 1973-1974 oil price increase. This is undoubtedly one of the roots of the crises in shipping and shipbuilding. Figure A.1.1 shows the growth in the average size of tankers ordered in the 1960s and f irst half of the 1970s, and the drastic reduction in average size after the freight market broke down. The hump-like properties of the orderbook and deliveries in Figure A.1.1 are echoed in – and partly explained by – the development of the demand for oil transport. Again, strong growth in the 1960s was followed by stagnation, then by an absolute decline from the last part of the 1970s onwards.

Measuring Britain's Merchant Shipbuilding Output in the Twentieth Century

This article reports on work done to arrive at a reliable estimate of British shipbuilding output in the twentieth century. Three datasets are considered: the annual figures of the Shipbuilding Conference, those of Lloyds Register and those of the British Shipbuilding Database (BSD). Differences between the figures are explored and reconciliation attempted by examining the sources used by compilers of the datasets in order to arrive at what is believed to be the most accurate estimate yet attempted of British shipbuilding output in the twentieth century. The article is notable in that for the first time a table of completions has been compiled for the entire century.

Shipbuilding and the International Journal of Maritime History

To the maritime business or economic historian, shipbuilding is a supply-side branch of heavy industry the firms of which engage in the construction of ships. By definition, this excludes boat and yacht building.1 Methods of building ships changed comparatively little until the early to mid-nineteenth century, when iron and, later, steel came to be used in place of wood for the hulls of ships, and steam engines of various types and capabilities, in tandem with incremental improvements in boiler configurations, largely replaced sails. These changes in construction and propulsion required the creation of calculation methods for testing strength, speed and other characteristics of the ships being constructed, and required the development of new production processes. From the midtwentieth century onwards, significant changes in the construction of steel ships were brought about by the introduction of electric arc welding to replace riveting of hull structures. In the second half of the century, increases in the sizes of ships, and the appearance of new types of specialised vessels, such as super, very large and ultra-large crude oil carriers, gas and chemical carriers, roll-on-roll-off ferries, increasingly large container vessels and large-scale offshore structures, became apparent. Shipbuilding is at the heart of an assembly industry and a modern ship consists of a large number of components and is constructed from an assortment of materials. Design