Huddersfield's sea faring tradition has taken me into deep waters.
Melanie and Claire Tasker visited the Shipwreck and Heritage Centre in Cornwall and discovered the steamship SS Huddersfield had been wrecked off the Cornish coast in bad weather in 1908.
Fortunately, everyone aboard was saved. But how did a land-locked textile town have a ship named after it?
Old friend Mike Shaw, former editor of the Colne Valley Guardian, tells me there were also steamships named SS Golcar and SS Longwood in the same period.
An electrical engineer called Fred Taylor, who had premises at Acre Mill, on the site of what became the Weaver’s Shed restaurant, launched the Golcar Steamship Company in 1898.
He later moved his business to Manchester Road, Linthwaite, and years later, during a change in ownership, documents were thrown in a skip.
A worker rescued some and passed them on to Mike.
Mike tells me that Fred was the company’s marine engineer while wealthy stockbroker George Shaw of Botham Hall at Longwood, handled the finances.
Shaw’s brother-in-law, a Mr Allen, was manager from his offices in Glasgow. They bought a seven-year-old steam ship for £7,250 and renamed it SS Golcar. Business boomed.
In 1889, they bought a five-year-old steamship for £9,200 and named it the SS Longwood.
They also replaced the Golcar ship. But by 1908 there was a dramatic slump in the freight market.
The records Mike saw were incomplete but he interviewed an elderly lady years ago who had been a shareholder and she thought there had been a third ship – possibly the SS Huddersfield?
If that was the case, and this vessel sank in 1908, it would explain why the company ceased to exist. But wait, there’s more.
A further dig into records found there had been an SS Huddersfield that sank in 1903, after a collision with another steamship in the River Scheldt in The Netherlands, on a journey from Antwerp to England. Tragically, 18 passengers died.
This ship was owned by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company. There is better news for HMS Huddersfield Town, a trawler escort, that served throughout the Second World War.
It took part in D Day landings in 1944, supporting the Americans on Utah Beach, and rescued 62 men from a torpedoed American merchant ship in the Channel in 1945.
It was sold at the end of the war, re-named Leeds United and scrapped a year later.
Finally, there is apparently a vessel named Huddersfield Town still afloat.
This is a standby safety vessel, equipped with helicopter pad and facilities for the rescue and initial care of survivors from accidents on offshore installations.
Come on Town.
