Austin & Pickersgill

Austin & Pickersgill is a shipbuilding company.

Company composition

This Sunderland shipbuilder was formed in 1954 by the merger of S P Austin & Son Ltd (founded in 1826) and W Pickersgill & Sons Ltd (founded in about 1838). After the merger Austin's Wear Dock yard was used for repair while shipbuilding was concentrated at Pickersgill's Southwick yard. The latter was modernised with the introduction of large assembly shops and prefabrication processes. This reduced costs and increased the maximum size of vessel that the yard could build from 10,000 to 40,000 tons deadweight.

In 1957 a consortium of three companies led by London and Overseas Freighters (LOF) took over Austin & Pickersgill (A&P). In October 1968 A&P took over Bartram & Sons Ltd, whose South Dock yard was also in Sunderland. In 1970 LOF bought out the other members of the consortium to take 100% ownership of A&P.

In 1977 A&P was nationalised as a member company of British Shipbuilders. In 1986 A&P was merged with Sunderland Shipbuilders Ltd to form North East Shipbuilders Ltd (NESL), but the new company closed in 1988.

Today, the remaining part of the Sunderland yard is operated by the A&P Group, a shiprepair/construction company that takes its initials from Austin & Pickersgill and owns several shipyards in the UK.

hips

A&P maximised the competitiveness of its prefabrication process by producing ships to standard designs rather than individual specifications. From 1962 onwards the company offered standard bulk carriers in a range of sizes designated according to tonnage: "e.g." the B26 was a standard design of 26,000 tons deadweight.

A&P's most numerous product was another of its standard designs, the SD14 shelter deck cargo ship. During the Second World War, shipyards in the USA had delivered more than 2,700 shelter deck cargo ships of a type called the Liberty ship. By the 1960s many Liberty ships were reaching the end of their service lives, so in 1965 A&P started to develop a low-cost shelter-deck cargo vessel to replace them.

A&P invited other UK shipbuilders to tender for licences to produce SD14's, but by 1966 only Bartram's could meet A&P's requirement to build each ship to a selling price of £915,000. Both Bartram's and A&P built their first SD14's in 1967 and handed them to their new owners in February 1968. A&P's takeover of Bartram's followed in October.

In 1967 A&P licenced Hellenic Shipyards Co. of Skaramangas in Greece to build twenty SD14's. In 1971 A&P licenced Companhia Comércio e Navegação to build SD14's at Mauá in Brazil.

In 1973 Robb Caledon Shipbuilding of Dundee in Scotland contracted to build three SD14's. Astilleros y Fábricas Navales del Estado also obtained permission to build six SD14's in its yard at Ensenada in Argentina.

By 1976 176 SD14's had been built: 98 at A&P's Southwick and South Dock yards and 78 by licencees in Greece, Brazil, Scotland and Argentina. The largest volume of sales was to Greek shipowners who by 1976 had bought 59 SD14's between them. The SD14 and B-series standard ship designs, and the prefabrication methods by which they were built enabled A&P to maintain a full order book right up until nationalisation in 1977, in contrast to many other UK shipbuilders at the time.

References

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*For details of the company archives see Tyne & Wear Archives Service [http://www.tyneandweararchives.org.uk/pdf/userguide05.pdf]