A concrete ship? That's madness - but there are TWO still to be found on our shoreline

Yet the remains of not one but two First World War-era concrete boats lie beside our waterways in the North East.

As last week’s Object of the Week told, the remains of SS Cretehawser can still be found on the banks of the River Wear at South Hylton in Sunderland. It was launched in March 1919 and has lain on the riverbank as a breakwater since 1935 (below).

But, said Peter Giroux in Darlington, did you know there was a second concrete boat lying on a beach beneath Whitby’s famous abbey (below)?

As surprising as it sounds, the first concrete boat was built in France in 1848 by Joseph-Louis Lambot, the inventor of “ferro-cement” – cement strengthened by the addition of bits of iron which we know as reinforced concrete. Having come up with the concept, a dinghy was one of the first things Lambot made of his reinforced concrete, although when it sank, he turned to land-based items like water troughs.

Although heavy and therefore expensive to motorise, concrete boats had potential in times of war when timber or steel were in short supply.

During the First World War, many countries tried them out: the US completed 12, whereas the Wear Concrete Building Company completed four concrete tugs in 1919. SS Creterock crashed into a trawler, SS Cretecable ran aground and SS Creterope was dismantled, but SS Cretehawser operated successfully until it was scuttled as a breakwater.

The shipyard at Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex, near Brighton, also experimented in concrete constructions, and in 1919 launched MV Creteblock which was bought by Smith’s Dock of South Bank, where it was used on the Tees as a harbour tug.

By the mid-1930s, it was no longer wanted, so it was sailed down to Whitby where it was stripped of all its fixtures and fittings and allowed to rot.

After the Second World War – in which a new generation of concrete barges had played an important role in the D-Day landings – it was decided to tow it out to sea and scuttle it with the fishes in the deep water.

The wreck of MV Creteblock at Whitby. Picture: Peter Giroux

However, in 1947, when it was moved, it got as far as Whitby Scar, a notorious stretch of shallow water beneath the abbey, where it became grounded. To prevent it from being a hazard for shipping, it was blown up so that now, at low tide, several pieces of sea-shaped concrete can be seen on the shoreline.

NEAR the concrete remains lies another wreck: the Rohilla (above), a hospital ship that smashed into the Scar on October 30, 1914, in a fierce storm and broke up.

It had 229 people on board and was heading from Queensferry, on the Forth in Scotland, to Belgium to collect soldiers who had been injured in the first weeks of the First World War.

Normally shipping was warned of the Scar and the Saltwick Nab outcrop by a bell buoy, but because there was a war on, the bell had been silenced and the light on top of it turned off.

Lifeboats in 1914 were still mainly powered by oars, and so extraordinary efforts were made to rescue the people who were stranded only 600 yards out. For example, one of Whitby’s lifeboats, the William Riley, could not make it out of the harbour because of the towering seas, so it was lifted over an 8ft sea wall, carried over rocks and then lowered down the cliffs.

“But,” said The Northern Echo the next day, “it was found that the difficulties were insurmountable and the attempt to proceed to the scene of the disaster was abandoned.

“When our correspondent telegraphed at a late hour last night, from 80 to 100 people were still clinging to the bridge, the only part of the vessel that remained, and it is feared these will be lost.”

The stricken Rohilla off the Whitby coast..

It must have been a distressing scene – the Echo calls it “exciting” – because spectators on the shore could see people drowning, and the sea filling with bodies, but were unable to help.

However, help was at hand in the form of the Henry Vernon, a motorised lifeboat stationed at Tynemouth (above). It drove the 44 miles through the mountainous seas to Whitby, which took it nearly nine hours. It found the last survivors clinging to the bridge in only their nightclothes and numbed by the spray. Some had empty tins tied around their necks to act as buoyancy aids should they be swept off the wreckage.

“Some of them lowered themselves by ropes into the lifeboat,” said the Echo. “Others watched for their opportunity to jump aboard.

“The whole of the remaining 50 people and the cat were rescued in one trip lasting two hours. When they had been landed at Whitby, the motor boat set out on the return journey to the Tyne which was uneventful.”

The Whitby lifeboat the John Fielden with survivors from the Rohilla disaster

Eighty-five people survived the wreck of the Rohilla, including all of the nurses on board, the captain, and a stewardess called Mary Roberts. In 1909, she had been aboard the Titanic after its collision with an iceberg. She said that because of the gale howling all around while she waited for rescue, the episode on the Rohilla was by far the most traumatic of her two sinkings.

The success of the Tynemouth lifeboat made many people abandon their suspicions about motor boats.

The remains of the Rohilla lie close to those of the MV Creteblock and, once again, we are grateful to Peter Giroux for sending us his pictures of them.

The wreck of the Rohilla on the shoreline beneath Whitby Abbey. Pictures: Peter Giroux