Volume Three - The Pontoon Era - The Great War 1914 - 18 . . .

Therefore, nothing could be more calculated to enhance the prestige of the channel ports, or to attract public attention to the immense possibilities of the local ship-repairing and engineering industries than a complete statement of their War work.

Even life-long residents in South Wales have no conception of its magnitude, and up to present (1920), the Government has failed to appreciate it at its full value.

Apart from the personal matters, it is important that the work of the repairers and engineers should be more widely known, and it is inconceivable what could be more effective than the plain straightforward record of how thousands of vessels were kept at sea, for the purpose of food and munitions during the War, by the untiring efforts of the ship repairers of the Bristol Channel'

The effects of the war continued even when the war had ended as this American news report of February 1919 illustrates :

South Shields , England, Feb. 5. - 'The British sloop 'Penarth' is reported sunk by a mine twenty-three miles off the Tyne River. Two trawlers have picked up forty members of crew.' - New York Times [767] [768] 6th February 1919.

The vessel was actually not a sloop  but a twin-screw Royal Naval minesweeper and was lost on the 4th February 1919 with the loss of two of her crew of 80. She was a Aberdare Class (later Hunt class) vessel of 800 tons launched in May 1918 at the yard of Lobnitz & Company on the River Clyde.