The BAHAMA KING in Central Dock, Hartlepool. When the Teesside Branch WSS received the Albert Weller photograph albums I was delighted to find this view of the BAHAMA KING. It is unfortunate, however, that the original negative does not feature among the many excellent negatives also in the collection.
I was delighted because I had seen this ship myself (from the same viewpoint) during my first-ever visit to Hartlepool Docks on 6 April 1961. Even then I gained the impression this veteran ship was laid-up. This was back in the days when Nassau was British, and the Bahamas had only a small number of ships registered there.
She was subsequently reported as being broken up in that year, but it was many years later before I tracked down in the typed book BRITISH BULK CARRIERS 1945-1979 that she had arrived at Hamburg on 21 April 1961 for scrapping. So this picture shows her probably during her last few weeks afloat.
She had been completed by Fred Krupp at Kiel in April 1929 as the tanker CALIFORNIA STANDARD under the Panama flag. Owned (in 1939) by Foreign Tankship Corp., Roger Jordan's book THE WORLD'S MERCHANT FLEETS 1939 makes it clear this was a subsidiary, as the ship name implied, of Standard Oil Co. of California. In 1950 she was sold to Bobe Soc. Anon, still Panama flag, and renamed GENEVE. In 1956 they converted her to an ore carrier. She was re-engined in 1958 around the time she was acquired by Western Shipping Ltd. and became their BAHAMA KING. Her final gross tonnage figure was 11,567.
Ron