Piece of Tyne history is sold for £85

Dec 18 2008 by Tony Henderson, The Journal

A DREAM piece of the North East's maritime history was snapped up yesterday – for just £85.

Two cast iron beds from the liner Berengaria, which was broken up at Jarrow in 1939, were sold at Boldon Auction Galleries in South Tyneside.

The liner had been bought for £108,000 by Surrey MP Sir John Jarvis who, after the Jarrow March in 1936, set up a fund in order to help the Tyneside town which was suffering from mass unemployment.

A park in Jarrow is named after Sir John, who sent the ship to the town to be scrapped as a way of providing work for 200 men.

The furniture and fittings were auctioned in January 1939, and the beds were bought by the South Shields family which owned the breaker’s yard.

When the liner was launched in Germany as the Imperator in 1912 she was the world’s biggest ship. She made her maiden voyage to New York in 1913 and then spent the First World War in Hamburg harbour.

After serving as troop transport until August 1919 the ship was transferred to Britain as reparation for the torpedoeing of the liner Lusitania by a German U-boat.

She became the flagship of the Cunard line, which changed her name to the Berengaria, with the ship being converted from coal burning to oil burning engines. For the next six years the ship operated on Cunard’s express service in conjunction with the Tyne-built Mauretania and Aquitania.

Berengaria remained one of the most beautiful and most popular liners of her time. She was sold for scrap in 1938 after Cunard had introduced the liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth two years before.