Korea Read Free Page B

fallen under the subtle spell of what they call the Geordie country, one of the great streams of the world. It is neither a very long nor in truth a very great river, yet somehow in its brief passage from source to sea it manages to capture all the alluring mixtures and contrasts that make England what she is—grace and power, rustic charm and ironbound sinew, breeze-ruffled heather and hot industrial oil, lonely moorlands and bustling factory gates. These contrasts exist in many river passages, perhaps, but in the case of the Tyne seem to represent so accurately all that for which the country once stood and all that had been for so long part of the leitmotiv of Empire.
    The Tyne rises high in the broom-covered hills near the border between England and Scotland. It chuckles merrily through narrow gorges and across small waterfalls. It matures and lazes through meadows and prosperous suburban villages. It washes grandly between the great old cathedral cities of Newcastle and Gateshead, cities of grey sandstone and marble monuments, vaulted railway stations and imposing city halls; and finally it passes by the low-lying, swampy slakes of Jarrow and Wallsend—the latter named for the eastern end of the mighty wall Hadrian had built to protect Rome’s English dominion—on its way to the cold and grey heavings of the North Sea. And in those last ten miles of its brief course, by which time it has widened and deepened and slowed to a kind of majesty, the River Tyne became over the centuries the home for an industry that perhaps more than any other has made the northeast of England famousthroughout the world: on the lower reaches of the River Tyne they build ships .
    Vessels of war and passenger liners, gritty little tramp steamers and sleek container ships, ugly grain haulers and bulk carriers, motor vessels of every imaginable type that now ply between faraway ports, Baltimore and Capetown, Pago Pago and Papeete, Shanghai and Port Moresby, Colombo and Mombasa and (with a cruel irony that will shortly be apparent) the Korean ports like Inchon and Pusan, and a thousand places besides. Anything that was made of iron, and that floated, and that was made in England seemed to have some inevitable association with the River Tyne. So many of these ships in their uncountable armadas have, on some ’tween-deck bulkhead, an oval brass plate with the engraved name of the shipyard and a final phrase of simple geography that still stands out proudly like a mariners’ seal of approval—made, the plaques say, in Newcastle upon Tyne.
    When I arrived there as a reporter in 1967, they had just started work on the last family of truly great ships ever to be built on the river. The first, the flagship, was called the Esso Northumbria , and she weighed in at something like a quarter of a million tons—a supertanker, everyone called her. The people of Wallsend, where she was built, were glad indeed after many months of short orders and short time—for the Tyne was suffering from a near-terminal case of slump—to have won the order to build her. I was fascinated by her construction. (I had been brought up in Dorset, and the biggest boat I had ever seen was a six-man whaler built of teak.) Each weekend I, along with scores of other local people, would drive down to Wallsend to watch her progress. I would walk down to the tiny lanes of terraced houses where the shipyard workers lived, and I would watch her mighty hull rise behind them.
    Week after week a wall of steel, fireworked by rivet throwers and welders, resonant with hammering and flecked with red lead and rustproof paint, would rise higher and higher, blocking out the view, the light, and the wind. Wallsend housewives who were normally muffled to the eyes would walk to the shops insummer dresses. The icy gales that so often roared across the river had been stopped in their tracks by the Northumbria ’s ever-growing hull, which, within its cobweb of cranes and scaffolding, climbed higher