When British industry mattered
Marine engine technology from the early 1960s – a Doxford P-type on the test bed
The lead item in 'The Motor Ship', January 1961, was a message from UK Minister for Science Viscount Hailsham.
“The New Year is not an occasion for melancholy,” he said. But 50 years on, we cannot help be sad. Then, the British shipbuilding industry was one that government ministers felt was worth such messages. Now, not just shipbuilding, but manufacturing in general is deemed unimportant and irrelevant.
In fact, the ‘melancholy’ to which Hailsham was referring was the current difficulty caused by a dip in world trade, but the situation was expected to improve. Familiar words?
Most of the issue was happier in tone, even though it contained mostly review-type articles looking back over 1960. The majority of these articles featured various aspects of engine design, though two articles reviewed shipbuilding in two nations: one (Germany, as in this issue) reporting a decline; the other (Japan) doing rather well. Most of the engine design articles covered large-bore turbocharged engines, something we have often looked back at on this page, then an emerging technology however commonplace such units may be today. In fact the idea of a large single-screw tanker was so novel in 1961 that it merited an article to itself, one outlining the service experience with the Altair, of 47,380 dwt powered by one 15,000 bhp two-stroke engine, and coincidentally carrying the same name as a container ship featured in this issue’s review of 2010.
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