PRACTICAL BRITAIN

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 7 December 1927, Page 5

PRACTICAL BRITAIN

BUSY SCRAPPING SHIPS DOCK-YARDS NOW WRECKINGYARDS. FATE OF CRUISER SOUTHAMPTON. [British Official Wireless.) (Received 7, 11.80 a.m.) Rugby, Dec, 6. .Lieut Colonel Headlam, Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, stated in Parliament that orders have bean given during the present year for 39 vessels of the navy to be scrapped. These include one cruiser, nine destroyers, four submarines, one minelayer, and a number of other auxiliary vessels. CRUISER THAT CHASED GOEBEN BOUGHT BY GERMAN SMELTING WORKS. The gallant light cruiser Southampton. which chased the German raider Goeben into the Dardanelles, is going to Germany, says the Sunday Express. She is now being broken up in a slipway at Pembroke Dock frpm which great battleships used to bo launched, in the now deserted and decaying dockyard there. It is a sad sight. It is all the more sad because, as the shell-scarred plates of the cruiser are torn apart, they are hoisted to the German vessel Harland, taken to 'a German smelting works, made into rails, and then brought back to South Wales. The rails are sold at a rate cheaper than works only a few miles away can compete with. Yet Southampton, in her dying throes, is the most alive thing within miles.

DEAD TOWN. Tile vast harbour, that has housed «o manv of Britain’s bulwarks, is unoccupied save for two small rusting tugs and an occasional row boat, pulling disconsolately across the empty sea-floor to the once-flourish-ing town of Ney land, from which even the Trinity House services have now been withdrawn. Beside the Harland lies a British gunboat waiting the same fate as the Southampton- Near by, covered with weeds and barnacles, is the giant slipway from which many fighting shins first slid into the water. Enormous beams of timber over which great ships were erected, are now being cut up for firewood for the unemployed population of the district who cannot buv coal. Acres and acres of arass-growf land, building after building filled with unused machinery, tons on tons of metal, wood, and ships' parts lying about the man-deserted doekyardthesp are all that are left to tel] of earlier and possible future activity in the famous naval centre. The town of Pembioke Dock itself is like a mausoleum. 'JBh WORKLESS. Since the closing of the yard the only local employment has been given by the building of a number of oil tanks, great ugly things like gasometers, for the supply of fuel Io the Navy. As each one is completed, so many more men are thrown of work, and next week will w yet another couple of hundred men seeking employment. Hundreds of the quaint little houses that form the street, which look as if they were made from upturned boxes of bricks, ore now vacant. A wages bill which was once £250,000 is now reduced to less than £6.000. The population is reduced to fewer than half what it was a few years ago, whetj the yard was in full swing. Meanwhile a German ship Is filling its hold with bits and pieces of one of the most gallant fighters that ever flew the British nag.