and higher into the sky.
And then one day in early May 1969, Princess Anne came by, a young girl in a big yellow hat and a warm yellow coat, and ended it all. She cracked a bottle of champagne over the bows of the mighty new ship. With a roar of drag chains and a muted roar of pride from her Geordie builders, the Esso Northumbria was let go. She gathered speed down the slipway, slid effortlessly into the dark waters of the Tyne, performed the traditional curtsy of buoyancy to the thousands waiting on the riverbanks, and proceeded downriver to be fitted out and to undergo her sea trials. Then, probably (for I lost track and now cannot find her in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping ), she took off for the distant destinations for the petroleum trade, like Kharg Island and Kuwait, Philadelphia and Kagoshima, and all the oil ports of the world. Newcastle upon Tyne would never see her again. (She was broken up in Taiwan thirteen years later.)
The housewives in Wallsend complained that night that their protective wall had suddenly vanished and that cold gales blew grittily up their terraced streets once again.
What the women of Wallsend may then also have vaguely suspected, and what the months and years ahead would confirm, was that Newcastle upon Tyne, and indeed the River Tyne itself, would never see so great a vessel again. It was not simply that the Esso Northumbria and her sisters were the last of the massive supertankers to be built there; they were also the last really big ships to be built in the English northeast. The Northumbria ’s launching and the empty slipway she left behind were powerful in their symbolism. They represented in a mournful way the formal close to a lengthy and glorious industrial era—the end of a historical chapter for the Tyne, for Britain, for Europe, and, one might say, for the once-ascendant countries grouped around the Atlantic Ocean. As each tanker vanished downriver and out to the ocean, so it became the turn of the nations grouped aroundthe Pacific to take up the duties of the Old World and begin to accept the benefits and the responsibilities of being the world’s new industrial powerhouses, for the remainder of the century and beyond.
Sixteen years after the Northumbria had gone I travelled on assignment for a newspaper out to that Pacific Ocean, and I spent a couple of weeks in the Republic of South Korea. On the Wednesday of my second week I flew down to a small seaside town in the deep south of the country, an unlovely place with the unlovely name of Ulsan. And in Ulsan I came to realize in an instant just why the River Tyne, so very far away and to these people so very unknown, was in the throes of dying.
For here, on a huge plain below a heather-covered bluff jutting into the Sea of Japan, was the headquarters of the shipbuilding division of a new Korean ‘miracle’ company called Hyundai. I was shown around, as I remember, by a young man named Lee Seong Cheol (though some of his cards gave his name in the more Westernized style: Mr S. C. Lee). He was an assistant in the company’s protocol division. What he showed me would make any Tynesiders—any Europeans, indeed, and many Americans too—shiver in their shoes.
Any one of the yards on the Tyne, in the river’s heyday, could possibly manufacture four or five ships at once—in wartime, perhaps, or during a period of grave emergency or extraordinary prosperity. The Hyundai Heavy Industries Company’s shipyard at Ulsan, however, could make forty-six ships at once. And it could do so without any of the romantic Victorian nonsense of tallow and drag chains and bottles of champagne and princesses in flowery hats. Out here it was all much more businesslike—the yard had seven immense dry docks, and when a hull was finished the dock was simply flooded and the monster was floated away. In one of their docks—the biggest—they could build a million-ton tanker; two more of them could hold a 700,000-tonner apiece, two more still