THE DUNEDIN STAR

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 123, 20 November 1935, Page 4

THE DUNEDIN STAR

LAUNCH AT BlEKMhead ■;..;

SISTER SHIP BUILDING

Immediately, after the launch of the Blue Star Line's refrigerated motorship nunedin Star at Birkenhead on October 29, workmen began to lay the keel of the vessel's 12,000-ton sister ship on the same stocks. Before the tugs had had time to nose their way into the river to bring the hull of the vessel back into dock the'first two keel-plates of the new ship had been laid, and the number 1009, that of the Dunedin Star, had been replaced at the head of the stocks by the number 1014, the shipyard, "name" of the new vessel.

In a reference to'this Mr. R. S. Johnson, managing director of Messrs. Cammell, Laird, and Co., Limited, the builders, said it was an augury of Merseyside's returning prosperity in the shipbuilding world. Since 1930 they had been building an average of ten ships a year at Birkenhead during a time of acute depression, and although the Dunedin Star was the fourth and last vessel to be launched this year they were holding their own in the shipbuilding world. "Our wages bill for the last nine months as compared with the corresponding nine months of last year, has been 20 per cent, higher,!' he said. "Our repairs department has developed abnormally, and we have almost doubled it in the last two years. We have now started work on the Ark Royal, the biggest contract placed by the Admiralty since the war, and in a few months we shall employ a good many more people than we do today."

The Dunedin Star was named by Lady Vestey, wife of Sir Edmund Vestey, director of the Blue Star line, after her New Zealand birthplace.