Fill her up with Akroyd Stuart

My journey began quite well, as when the VW scandal broke, I discovered that I drive a diesel car which is named after Rudolf Diesel.

The concept of an engine in which the fuel is ignited by high temperature rather than a spark, as in a petrol engine, was the brainchild of an English inventor, Herbert Akroyd Stuart, in 1885, but Diesel refined the idea and took out a patent in 1887.

Perhaps it is fortunate that the Englishman’s name didn’t stick, because you would feel faintly foolish asking a forecourt attendant to “fill her up with Akroyd Stuart”.

Diesel’s life ended in intrigue on September 29, 1913, when he failed to complete his journey from Antwerp to London on a steam mail ship. In his cabin, his bed was unslept in, his watch tidily stowed by the pillow, his pyjamas ready, and his coat neatly folded with his hat on top.

Ten days later, trawlermen discovered a body in the Channel from which they recovered items belonging to Diesel, but they left the body in the sea.

It is most likely that Mr Diesel committed suicide – particularly as he’d left a bag containing 200,000 German marks with his wife in the event of his non-return from his trip.

But conspiracy theorists say that the German engineer was sailing to Britain with details of an efficient engine which he was prepared to sell – a legitimate transaction, but one that would have benefitted the enemy. So he was murdered by his own side.

Having discovered the background to the VW scandal, I changed course and looked at the other big news story of the week: the mothballing of the blast furnace at Redcar.

Mothballing is an interesting term, given that the first mothballs were made of highly flammable naphthalene and so would have an explosive effect if put in a blast furnace.

And mothballing itself doesn’t preserve anything – it is the fumes from the naphthalene in the mothballs that kill the moths and prevent any destruction.

Far more interesting was the superb picture of the steelworks in a thousand shades of grey that the Echo used front and back of Tuesday’s paper.

In the background of the picture were the distinctive, ordered shapes of the industrial plant; in the foreground was the higgledy-piggledy decay of the rotting frame of an old boat. But what was the name of the old boat? What had she carried? How had she sunk? What was her story?

One correspondent told me this was the wreck of a French merchant ship from the First World War; another suggested it was the remains of a 19th Century schooner from Yarmouth and a third that it was all that’s left of a brig from Sunderland.

They may all be right. Bran Sands, at the mouth of the Tees, has several wrecks which are revealed and then covered up by the shifting whims of the tide.

This wreck seems just to have been a coal barge – perhaps no one ever named it, or perhaps no one bothered to remember its name. At the end of its working life, it was simply abandoned to the wind and the waves, and left to rot on the foreshore – the remains of an old industrial era.

It’d be tragic if the steelmaking shapes behind it were to share its fate.