The town of Hartlepool on the eastern coast of England has an interesting history.
In 1914, during World War I, the town was partially destroyed by the German Navy. Tragically, 86 civilians were killed.
In 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship sank in the area. Its only survivor, a monkey, washed ashore and the locals, having never seen a monkey before, assumed the unfortunate creature was a Frenchman. So they hanged it. Today, Hartlepool football team is nicknamed "the Monkey Hangers."
The town was also brutally plundered and pillaged in the late 700s and early 800s by the Vikings, and the town's monastery was destroyed.
So it's fair to say the people of Hartlepool are a bit suspicious of foreign shipping.
Now, the town is making the headlines again with the arrival of former French aircraft carrier the Clemenceau.
With the ship so full of killer asbestos and toxic waste, no country in the world would accept it - except Britain.
Many people were up in arms but, in fact, this is a good thing. It will create 200 much-needed jobs during this recession - and, after all, it's not the first time the British have broken up a French ship.
'Poison? We love it!': How one British town welcomed an asbestos-riddled toxic French ship with open arms
By Robert Hardman
23rd February 2009
Daily Mail
They have not always been so keen to see foreign shipping around here. Quite apart from the Viking raids, the original Blitz was unleashed on this town by the German Imperial fleet back in 1914 - killing 86 civilians.
When a French ship was wrecked here during the Napoleonic wars, the townsfolk apparently hanged the only survivor - the ship's monkey - for being French. One might have expected a similar reception for the latest French arrival which sailed into Hartlepool two weeks ago.
After all, the 27,000-ton Clemenceau is so full of killer asbestos and toxic waste that this 52-year-old former aircraft carrier has been comprehensively ostracised by the rest of the world. During a 12-year, round-the-world quest for a scrap yard, it has been shunned by the authorities in Turkey, Egypt and India, among others.
Enlarge
Final port of call: The Clemenceau in Hartlepool
French firms were willing to do the job - at a price - but the French government, usually so keen to protect its own industries, did not want this cauldron of contamination taken apart in France. So now, the former pride of the French fleet has finally found a resting place - alongside four equally toxic has-beens from the U.S. Navy - on County Durham's industrial Riviera. And it all has the blessing of our Government.
Yet there have been no hangings in Hartlepool. Hundreds turned out to welcome this rusty warhorse as it was towed in to town. Now, the locals are queuing up for 200 badly needed jobs as they prepare to recycle these redundant battleships - weighing more than 10,000 African elephants - into a pile of scrap metal equivalent to a billion tin cans.
Indeed, having set itself up as a world leader in ship recycling, Hartlepool is seeking more toxic ships to recycle. And despite pollution warnings from a few residents, the message from Peter Mandelson's former constituency is positive: 'Poison? We love it!'
Even by the standards of the eyesores along this shoreline, this is quite a sight. You drive past a rubbish dump the size of a small Alp. And there, between Hartlepool's nuclear power station, a belching chemical works and chunks of a disused oil rig, is a huge aircraft carrier sitting in what will soon become the largest dry dock on the planet.
Not so long ago, there were 40 planes whizzing on and off the Clemenceau's runway, supported by a crew of 1,338. From its launch in 1957 to its decommissioning in 1997, the carrier sailed a million miles.
Enlarge
The decommissioned French aircraft carrier pulls into the dock
The French talk fondly of 'Le Clem' (French ships are masculine, whereas British ships are 'she'). This ship once appeared in a Citroen ad with a car racing a jet off its flight deck.
But these days, officialdom merely refers to it as Hull Q790. And within a year, there will be nothing left of the old girl (make that old chap).
Between now and the summer, a team of workers (locals, not foreigners, we are assured) will carry out 'remediation' work - stripping out the nasty stuff.
More than 700 tons of asbestos - originally designed to stop fires but lethal in its old age - must be sealed off and removed in double-wrapped bags. These will then be locked inside steel drums and dumped, for ever, in that rubbish mountain up the road.
All the toxic slime must then be flushed from the ship's bowels into tanks and only then can the demolition crews can move in. They will chop off the control tower above the flight deck, before removing the deck so that a huge cutting machine can be lowered inside the hull.
'The ship will then eat itself from the inside,' explains Glyn Wheeler, the managing director of Able UK, the firm with the £9 million contract to make the corrosive Clem disappear.
Each chunk of the ship will be sawn into lumps no bigger than an office desk - the maximum size for the blast furnace just across the River Tees. And from there, within a year, it will begin life again as a girder, a car part - or a tin can.
Enlarge
Three years ago the vessel was turned away as an environmental hazard by India
But Hartlepool has not always been so keen to accommodate other people's toxic shipping. Since buying this 125-acre site in 1996, Able UK began dismantling oil rigs without much opposition. Yet the mood changed in 2003 after the company accepted two old U.S. Navy ships with a view to scrapping many more.
The environmental lobby and the local council quickly stepped in with objections.
Millions of pounds of legal fees later, however, the scheme got the go-ahead from the council last year after Able agreed to new environmental demands.
The ship recycling plan is even supported by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
These charities, not known for their love of the scrap metal industry, were more worried by the alternative scenario.
The same ships could have been sold on to unregulated scrap metal dealers who, in turn, drive unwanted hulks on to the shipbreaking mudflats of India and Bangladesh. There, armies of desperate men, women and children are paid a pittance to strip the vessels in shocking conditions, while killer toxins are released into the sea and atmosphere.
Here in Hartlepool, it may not be a pretty business, but it is a model of eco-friendliness in comparison. And the project is said to be worth £20 million to the local economy.
'Look at that,' says group development director Neil Etherington, showing me a Greenpeace photograph of an Indian woman picking her way through a pile of asbestos from a ship. 'That picture was taken in 2005. She is probably dead by now.'
Etherington takes me on a tour of the Able site. Entire oil platforms are scattered here and there, as if Neptune has plucked them from the North Sea oil fields and flicked them ashore. Men in overalls are chopping bits off them with welding torches, while huge diggers scoop the cuttings into piles of stuff for the furnace.
An entire multi-storey accommodation block from an old BP rig is sitting near the largest crane I have ever seen. It looks like the Eiffel Tower on caterpillar tracks - it cost £14million and can lift almost anything.
Farther down is the dock where the 'ghost ships' are parked. The Clemenceau is flanked by the U.S. Navy ships - two tankers and two support ships. It could soon be joined by three British merchant ships which may be destined for the chop.
But all these ships are too large to be lifted out of the water. Nor can they be chopped up underwater. So the engineers need to remove the water from the dock.
This was once a 25-acre dry dock - allegedly the world's largest - but it has been full of water since the dock gates broke during a storm in 1993. So a dam is being built and, by May, the water will be pumped out of the dock and the ships will be on dry land.
Enlarge
Workers will chop off the control tower above the flight deck, before removing the deck so that a huge cutting machine can be lowered inside the hull
It is a hell of an engineering exercise, but Neil insists it is the way forward.
'Companies and governments are realising it is more responsible to pay for ships to be recycled properly than to strip them on the cheap.'
If more ships can be found, the dam will be opened, more unwanted ships will be floated in and the process will be repeated.
Hartlepool Borough Council, once opposed to the scheme, is now in favour. 'If the recycling is carefully monitored, I'm pretty relaxed about it,' says Hartlepool's mayor, Stuart Drummond. 'To have anyone creating jobs in this climate is great.'
Not everyone agrees. Mike Young, a retired engineering worker, belongs to Friends of Hartlepool, an action group dedicated to evicting the ships.
'This town has some of the highest cancer rates in Britain, so why do we want to bring more pollution here?' he asks. 'This is a private company that has never dismantled ships before [true] and it has been fined for waste problems in the past [true].'
Having worked on the building of the dry dock, he says that the site has a porous base which will allow contaminated waste to seep into the earth below (a claim denied by Able UK).
Armed with documents and solicitors' letters, Mike is fearful for the future of his children and grandchildren.
He says Hartlepool council has performed a U-turn and has signed up to this project after pressure from the Government which, in turn, has been under pressure from Washington. The U.S. Navy, he points out, has dozens of these 'ghost ships' in urgent need of disposal.
Yet on the streets few people seem concerned. This is an industrial town which already has its own nuclear plant. About a third of the 20 people I stop are in favour of the toxic ghost ships as they provide jobs, roughly a third haven't a clue what I am talking about and a third voice some sort of worry. Just one is strongly opposed.
The man in charge of the operation, Glyn Wheeler, points out that Able is a world leader in dismantling oil rigs which have the same asbestos and toxicity problems as ships.
No doubt, if there is a single blunder with the toxic waste or if they start importing foreign workers on the cheap, then there will probably be a host of noisy new opponents.
For now, though, as it prepares to swallow hundreds of tons of lethal French filth in perpetuity, I think Hartlepool can reasonably claim that it has atoned for hanging that poor French monkey.
The Hartlepool Monkey, Who hung the monkey?
The monkey-hanging legend is the most famous story connected with Hartlepool. During the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked off the Hartlepool coast.
The people of Hartlepool hanging the monkey, 1805
During the Napoleonic Wars there was a fear of a French invasion of Britain and much public concern about the possibility of French infiltrators and spies.
The fishermen of Hartlepool fearing an invasion kept a close watch on the French vessel as it struggled against the storm but when the vessel was severely battered and sunk they turned their attention to the wreckage washed ashore. Among the wreckage lay one wet and sorrowful looking survivor, the ship's pet monkey dressed to amuse in a military style uniform.
The fishermen apparently questioned the monkey and held a beach-based trial. Unfamiliar with what a Frenchman looked like they came to the conclusion that this monkey was a French spy and should be sentenced to death. The unfortunate creature was to die by hanging, with the mast of a fishing boat (a coble) providing a convenient gallows.
In former times, when war and strife
The French invasion threaten'd life
An' all was armed to the knife
The Fisherman hung the monkey O !
The Fishermen with courage high,
Siezed on the monkey for a French spy;
"Hang him !" says one; "he's to die"
They did and they hung the monkey Oh!
They tried every means to make him speak
And tortured the monkey till loud he did speak;
Says yen "thats french" says another "its Greek"
For the fishermen had got druncky oh!
Hammer his ribs, the thunnerin thief
Pummel his pyet wi yor neef!
He's landed here for nobbut grief
He's aud Napoleon's uncky O!
Thus to the Monkey all hands behaved
"Cut off his whiskers!" yen chap raved
Another bawled out "He's never been shaved",
So commenced to scrape the Monkey, O!
They put him on a gridiron hot,
The Monkey then quite lively got,
He rowl'd his eyes tiv a' the lot,
For the Monkey agyen turned funky O!.
Then a Fisherman up te Monkey goes,
Saying "Hang him at yence, an' end his woes,"
But the Monkey flew at him and bit off his nose,
An' that raised the poor man's Monkey O!
In former times, mid war an' strife,
The French invasion threatened life,
An' all was armed to the knife,
The Fishermen hung the Monkey O!
The Fishermen wi' courage high,
Seized on the Monkey for a spy,
"Hang him" says yen, says another,"He'll die!"
They did, and they hung the Monkey O!. They tortor'd the Monkey till loud he did squeak
Says yen, "That's French," says another "it's Greek"
For the Fishermen had got drunky, O!
"He's all ower hair!" sum chap did cry,
E'en up te summic cute an' sly
Wiv a cod's head then they closed an eye,
Afore they hung the Monkey O!.
dailymail.co.uk
thisishartlepool.co.uk
In 1914, during World War I, the town was partially destroyed by the German Navy. Tragically, 86 civilians were killed.
In 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship sank in the area. Its only survivor, a monkey, washed ashore and the locals, having never seen a monkey before, assumed the unfortunate creature was a Frenchman. So they hanged it. Today, Hartlepool football team is nicknamed "the Monkey Hangers."
The town was also brutally plundered and pillaged in the late 700s and early 800s by the Vikings, and the town's monastery was destroyed.
So it's fair to say the people of Hartlepool are a bit suspicious of foreign shipping.
Now, the town is making the headlines again with the arrival of former French aircraft carrier the Clemenceau.
With the ship so full of killer asbestos and toxic waste, no country in the world would accept it - except Britain.
Many people were up in arms but, in fact, this is a good thing. It will create 200 much-needed jobs during this recession - and, after all, it's not the first time the British have broken up a French ship.
'Poison? We love it!': How one British town welcomed an asbestos-riddled toxic French ship with open arms
By Robert Hardman
23rd February 2009
Daily Mail
They have not always been so keen to see foreign shipping around here. Quite apart from the Viking raids, the original Blitz was unleashed on this town by the German Imperial fleet back in 1914 - killing 86 civilians.
When a French ship was wrecked here during the Napoleonic wars, the townsfolk apparently hanged the only survivor - the ship's monkey - for being French. One might have expected a similar reception for the latest French arrival which sailed into Hartlepool two weeks ago.
After all, the 27,000-ton Clemenceau is so full of killer asbestos and toxic waste that this 52-year-old former aircraft carrier has been comprehensively ostracised by the rest of the world. During a 12-year, round-the-world quest for a scrap yard, it has been shunned by the authorities in Turkey, Egypt and India, among others.
Enlarge
Final port of call: The Clemenceau in Hartlepool
French firms were willing to do the job - at a price - but the French government, usually so keen to protect its own industries, did not want this cauldron of contamination taken apart in France. So now, the former pride of the French fleet has finally found a resting place - alongside four equally toxic has-beens from the U.S. Navy - on County Durham's industrial Riviera. And it all has the blessing of our Government.
Yet there have been no hangings in Hartlepool. Hundreds turned out to welcome this rusty warhorse as it was towed in to town. Now, the locals are queuing up for 200 badly needed jobs as they prepare to recycle these redundant battleships - weighing more than 10,000 African elephants - into a pile of scrap metal equivalent to a billion tin cans.
Indeed, having set itself up as a world leader in ship recycling, Hartlepool is seeking more toxic ships to recycle. And despite pollution warnings from a few residents, the message from Peter Mandelson's former constituency is positive: 'Poison? We love it!'
Even by the standards of the eyesores along this shoreline, this is quite a sight. You drive past a rubbish dump the size of a small Alp. And there, between Hartlepool's nuclear power station, a belching chemical works and chunks of a disused oil rig, is a huge aircraft carrier sitting in what will soon become the largest dry dock on the planet.
Not so long ago, there were 40 planes whizzing on and off the Clemenceau's runway, supported by a crew of 1,338. From its launch in 1957 to its decommissioning in 1997, the carrier sailed a million miles.
Enlarge
The decommissioned French aircraft carrier pulls into the dock
The French talk fondly of 'Le Clem' (French ships are masculine, whereas British ships are 'she'). This ship once appeared in a Citroen ad with a car racing a jet off its flight deck.
But these days, officialdom merely refers to it as Hull Q790. And within a year, there will be nothing left of the old girl (make that old chap).
Between now and the summer, a team of workers (locals, not foreigners, we are assured) will carry out 'remediation' work - stripping out the nasty stuff.
More than 700 tons of asbestos - originally designed to stop fires but lethal in its old age - must be sealed off and removed in double-wrapped bags. These will then be locked inside steel drums and dumped, for ever, in that rubbish mountain up the road.
All the toxic slime must then be flushed from the ship's bowels into tanks and only then can the demolition crews can move in. They will chop off the control tower above the flight deck, before removing the deck so that a huge cutting machine can be lowered inside the hull.
'The ship will then eat itself from the inside,' explains Glyn Wheeler, the managing director of Able UK, the firm with the £9 million contract to make the corrosive Clem disappear.
Each chunk of the ship will be sawn into lumps no bigger than an office desk - the maximum size for the blast furnace just across the River Tees. And from there, within a year, it will begin life again as a girder, a car part - or a tin can.
Enlarge
Three years ago the vessel was turned away as an environmental hazard by India
But Hartlepool has not always been so keen to accommodate other people's toxic shipping. Since buying this 125-acre site in 1996, Able UK began dismantling oil rigs without much opposition. Yet the mood changed in 2003 after the company accepted two old U.S. Navy ships with a view to scrapping many more.
The environmental lobby and the local council quickly stepped in with objections.
Millions of pounds of legal fees later, however, the scheme got the go-ahead from the council last year after Able agreed to new environmental demands.
The ship recycling plan is even supported by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
These charities, not known for their love of the scrap metal industry, were more worried by the alternative scenario.
The same ships could have been sold on to unregulated scrap metal dealers who, in turn, drive unwanted hulks on to the shipbreaking mudflats of India and Bangladesh. There, armies of desperate men, women and children are paid a pittance to strip the vessels in shocking conditions, while killer toxins are released into the sea and atmosphere.
Here in Hartlepool, it may not be a pretty business, but it is a model of eco-friendliness in comparison. And the project is said to be worth £20 million to the local economy.
'Look at that,' says group development director Neil Etherington, showing me a Greenpeace photograph of an Indian woman picking her way through a pile of asbestos from a ship. 'That picture was taken in 2005. She is probably dead by now.'
Etherington takes me on a tour of the Able site. Entire oil platforms are scattered here and there, as if Neptune has plucked them from the North Sea oil fields and flicked them ashore. Men in overalls are chopping bits off them with welding torches, while huge diggers scoop the cuttings into piles of stuff for the furnace.
An entire multi-storey accommodation block from an old BP rig is sitting near the largest crane I have ever seen. It looks like the Eiffel Tower on caterpillar tracks - it cost £14million and can lift almost anything.
Farther down is the dock where the 'ghost ships' are parked. The Clemenceau is flanked by the U.S. Navy ships - two tankers and two support ships. It could soon be joined by three British merchant ships which may be destined for the chop.
But all these ships are too large to be lifted out of the water. Nor can they be chopped up underwater. So the engineers need to remove the water from the dock.
This was once a 25-acre dry dock - allegedly the world's largest - but it has been full of water since the dock gates broke during a storm in 1993. So a dam is being built and, by May, the water will be pumped out of the dock and the ships will be on dry land.
Enlarge
Workers will chop off the control tower above the flight deck, before removing the deck so that a huge cutting machine can be lowered inside the hull
It is a hell of an engineering exercise, but Neil insists it is the way forward.
'Companies and governments are realising it is more responsible to pay for ships to be recycled properly than to strip them on the cheap.'
If more ships can be found, the dam will be opened, more unwanted ships will be floated in and the process will be repeated.
Hartlepool Borough Council, once opposed to the scheme, is now in favour. 'If the recycling is carefully monitored, I'm pretty relaxed about it,' says Hartlepool's mayor, Stuart Drummond. 'To have anyone creating jobs in this climate is great.'
Not everyone agrees. Mike Young, a retired engineering worker, belongs to Friends of Hartlepool, an action group dedicated to evicting the ships.
'This town has some of the highest cancer rates in Britain, so why do we want to bring more pollution here?' he asks. 'This is a private company that has never dismantled ships before [true] and it has been fined for waste problems in the past [true].'
Having worked on the building of the dry dock, he says that the site has a porous base which will allow contaminated waste to seep into the earth below (a claim denied by Able UK).
Armed with documents and solicitors' letters, Mike is fearful for the future of his children and grandchildren.
He says Hartlepool council has performed a U-turn and has signed up to this project after pressure from the Government which, in turn, has been under pressure from Washington. The U.S. Navy, he points out, has dozens of these 'ghost ships' in urgent need of disposal.
Yet on the streets few people seem concerned. This is an industrial town which already has its own nuclear plant. About a third of the 20 people I stop are in favour of the toxic ghost ships as they provide jobs, roughly a third haven't a clue what I am talking about and a third voice some sort of worry. Just one is strongly opposed.
The man in charge of the operation, Glyn Wheeler, points out that Able is a world leader in dismantling oil rigs which have the same asbestos and toxicity problems as ships.
No doubt, if there is a single blunder with the toxic waste or if they start importing foreign workers on the cheap, then there will probably be a host of noisy new opponents.
For now, though, as it prepares to swallow hundreds of tons of lethal French filth in perpetuity, I think Hartlepool can reasonably claim that it has atoned for hanging that poor French monkey.
The Hartlepool Monkey, Who hung the monkey?
The monkey-hanging legend is the most famous story connected with Hartlepool. During the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked off the Hartlepool coast.
The people of Hartlepool hanging the monkey, 1805
During the Napoleonic Wars there was a fear of a French invasion of Britain and much public concern about the possibility of French infiltrators and spies.
The fishermen of Hartlepool fearing an invasion kept a close watch on the French vessel as it struggled against the storm but when the vessel was severely battered and sunk they turned their attention to the wreckage washed ashore. Among the wreckage lay one wet and sorrowful looking survivor, the ship's pet monkey dressed to amuse in a military style uniform.
The fishermen apparently questioned the monkey and held a beach-based trial. Unfamiliar with what a Frenchman looked like they came to the conclusion that this monkey was a French spy and should be sentenced to death. The unfortunate creature was to die by hanging, with the mast of a fishing boat (a coble) providing a convenient gallows.
In former times, when war and strife
The French invasion threaten'd life
An' all was armed to the knife
The Fisherman hung the monkey O !
The Fishermen with courage high,
Siezed on the monkey for a French spy;
"Hang him !" says one; "he's to die"
They did and they hung the monkey Oh!
They tried every means to make him speak
And tortured the monkey till loud he did speak;
Says yen "thats french" says another "its Greek"
For the fishermen had got druncky oh!
Hammer his ribs, the thunnerin thief
Pummel his pyet wi yor neef!
He's landed here for nobbut grief
He's aud Napoleon's uncky O!
Thus to the Monkey all hands behaved
"Cut off his whiskers!" yen chap raved
Another bawled out "He's never been shaved",
So commenced to scrape the Monkey, O!
They put him on a gridiron hot,
The Monkey then quite lively got,
He rowl'd his eyes tiv a' the lot,
For the Monkey agyen turned funky O!.
Then a Fisherman up te Monkey goes,
Saying "Hang him at yence, an' end his woes,"
But the Monkey flew at him and bit off his nose,
An' that raised the poor man's Monkey O!
In former times, mid war an' strife,
The French invasion threatened life,
An' all was armed to the knife,
The Fishermen hung the Monkey O!
The Fishermen wi' courage high,
Seized on the Monkey for a spy,
"Hang him" says yen, says another,"He'll die!"
They did, and they hung the Monkey O!. They tortor'd the Monkey till loud he did squeak
Says yen, "That's French," says another "it's Greek"
For the Fishermen had got drunky, O!
"He's all ower hair!" sum chap did cry,
E'en up te summic cute an' sly
Wiv a cod's head then they closed an eye,
Afore they hung the Monkey O!.
dailymail.co.uk
thisishartlepool.co.uk
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