Name SS Glentworth Yard number 490 Completed November 1920 Builder Newcastle upon Tyne | Port of registry Newcastle-upon-Tyne Launched 1920 Draft 7.77 m | |
Owner Dalgliesh Steam Shipping Co. Ltd.,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne | ||
SS Glentworth was a shelter deck cargo steamship built in 1920 by Hawthorn Leslie & Co. in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England for R.S. Dalgliesh and Dalgliesh Steam Shipping Co. Ltd., also of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After the Great Depression affected UK merchant shipping in the first years of the 1930s, Dalgliesh sold Glentworth to a company controlled by Counties Ship Management (an offshoot of the Rethymnis & Kulukundis shipbroking company of London) who renamed her SS Box Hill.
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Details
The ship's stokehold had 12 corrugated furnaces with a combined grate area of 214 square feet (20 m2). They heated three 200 lbf/in2 single-ended boilers with a combined heating surface of 8,655 square feet (804 m2). She was built as a turbine steamer: two steam turbines with a combined power output of 620 NHP drove the shaft to the single propellor by reduction gearing. However, when she changed hands in 1934 she was re-engined with a Hawthorn Leslie 586 NHP three-cylinder triple expansion steam engine. The conversion retained her original boilers, but her furnaces were converted to oil burning.
The ship was equipped with direction finding equipment and radio.
Loss
Late in 1939 Box Hill sailed from St John, New Brunswick bound for Hull with a cargo of 8,452 tons wheat. On New Year's Eve she was in the North Sea 9 nautical miles (17 km) off the Humber lightship when she struck a German mine. The explosion broke her back and she sank almost immediately with the loss of all hands.
Box Hill was Counties Ship Management's first loss of the Second World War. CSM's losses continued until just a week before the surrender of Japan in August 1945, by which time the company had lost a total of 13 ships.
Both sections of Box Hill's wreck were a hazard to shipping and showed above the water. In 1952 the Royal Navy dispersed her remains with high explosive and Admiralty charts now mark her position as a "foul" ground.