Daybreak

LAUNCH AT WEST HARTLEPOOL

Northern Daily Mail, Oct 24/11

Yesterday, Messrs. William Gray and Company, Limited, launched the handsome steel screw steamer Daybreak, which they have built to the order of Messrs. John Wood and Company, of London and West Hartlepool.

She is designed on very fine lines to maintain a good average speed, and will take the highest class in Lloyd’s Register. The vessel is of the following dimensions, viz.: Length over all, 351ft.6in.; breadth, 48ft. 6in.; and depth, 25ft., with long bridge, poop, and top-gallant forecastle.

The saloon, staterooms, captain’s, officers, and engineers’ rooms, etc., will be fitted up with houses on the bridge deck, and the crew’s berths in the forecastle.

The hull is built with deep frames, cellular double bottom, and large after and fore peak ballast tanks, eight steam winches, steam steering gear amidships, hand screw gear aft, patent direct steam windlass, all with bronze rods, boats on deck overhead, ten derricks, four outstretchers, large horizontal multitubular donkey boiler, shifting boards throughout, stockless anchors, telescopic masts, with fore and aft rig, and all requirements for a first class cargo steamer.

Triple-expansion engines are being supplied by the Central Marine Engineering Works of the builders, having cylinders 25in., 40 ½ in., and 67in. diameter, with a piston stroke of 45in., and two
large steel boilers for a working pressure of 180lbs. per square inch.

The ceremony of naming the steamer Tilemachos was gracefully performed by Miss Harriet Wood, of West Hartlepool.

The vessel has been built to special specifications prepared by Mr. C. P. Sanderson, who has
superintended the building of hull and machinery.



Masters: 1911-14 E Morris: 1915-17 ST Pope.

The defensively armed British merchant ship survived a U-boat attack in the Arctic Ocean on 1 November 1916 but on a voyage from Huelva for Glasgow with a cargo of maize, when she was near Strangford Lough shore, off the Ards Peninsula a mile east of South Rock lightship, County Down on 24 December 1917, she was torpedoed without warning & sunk by German submarine U-87 (Rudolf Freiherr von Speth-Schulzburg) 21 lives were lost including the master.

Lives lost December 1917: Barrett, James, ordinary seaman, 18, Kinsale, County Cork; Bianchi, Paolo, fireman, 37, Casal Zebbug, Malta; Collins, W, able seaman, 35, b. St Johns, Newfoundland ; Dobson, John Edward Tomlin, 2nd mate, 30, Polruan, Cornwall;

Fredericksen, T, able seaman, 19, Denmark; Gomez, Jacine, able seaman, 35, Portugal; Greenway, Thomas, boatswain, 47, Kinsale, County Cork; Gomez, Jacine, able seaman, 35, b. Portugal; Gulwell, Ernest, mess room steward, 17, Tewkesbury; Harrop, Griffiths, Joseph, 2nd engineer, 23, Pontardulais; Holland, James Allcock, ship’s cook, 45, Birkenhead; Kennedy, Joseph, fireman (served as Bonner) aged 33, Thomas St. Londonderry; Muscat, Michael, fireman, 39, Bona, Malta ; O’Conner, William, seaman, 39, Brownsmills, Kinsale; Owen, William, 1st mate, 39, North Llanllechid; Pepper, Thomas, seaman, 18, Nottingham; Pope, SF, master; Postlethwaite, Tom Bennett Steward, 62, Keswick, Cumberland; Sumner, Frank, signalman, 18, Leamington Spa; Verney, Samuel, seaman, 19, London; Wilkins, W, fireman, 27, Southampton.

This section will, in time, contain the stories of more than 450 merchant ships built or owned in the Hartlepools, and which were lost during the First World War. As an illustration of the truly global nature of shipbuilding, these ships were owned by companies from 22 different countries, including more than 30 sailing under the German flag at the outbreak of war.