Day 25
Ship Building in Leith: København
Kobenhavn in a photograph from the Victoria State Library
For Day 25 of 100 Days of Leith author R.O. Neish has written a small piece about shipbuilding in the port of Leith featuring the largest sailing ship ever built in a British shipyard, the København.
Shipbuilding in the port of Leith
By: R.O. Neish
There was more than 660 years of recorded shipbuilding at Leith, with the closure in 1984 of the last shipyard at Henry Robb Ltd, so ended the industry that had employed many thousands over the years.
On the Ramage & Ferguson shipyard slipway (now built over and forming part of the water of Leith walkway) at the outbreak of the First World War was a very large ship intended as a five-mast sail training ship for the Danish Navy. She was on the stocks for almost two years, and when launched as København, Yard No 242, she was sent to A/S Danske Ostasiatiske Kompagni, Copenhagen. In 1918 she was taken over by the Admiralty as an oil storage hulk and given the name Black Dragon. Under the Admiralty she stayed moored in Gibraltar for many years, eventually to become something of an eyesore, tethered to her mooring buoys at this huge navy base on the southern tip of Spain, strategically placed for any shipping movements into or out of the Mediterranean.
She was subsequently renamed C.600 and was broken up in 1960.
Then in 1921 , in the same Leith shipyard, a new ship was built using the original drawings, and launched as the København, Ship No 256 the largest sailing ship ever built in a British shipyard. Her magnificent hull, with her long sweeping graceful lines was, then, built twice and who knows, but for the twists of fate that war brings to man, what she might have become if it had been possible for her to be used as a sail training ship, as originally intended? There might have been no mysterious disappearance of the København with the terrible loss of life this incurred.
København disappeared on voyage from Buenos Aires to Australia 21st December 1928. She disappeared completely, no trace has ever been found of the ship or her 26 crew and 45 cadet sailors. Her loss is one of the many unsolved mysteries of the sea.
You will find more on this magnificent ship in the series of books on Leith-Built Ships Vol I, They Once Were Shipbuilders, along with Volume II to be published January 2021-Leith Shipyards 1918 to 1939. Both books by the author R.O. Neish.