Ships of Steel: A British Columbia Shipbuilder's Story

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

Allied Shipbuilders of Vancouver was never a major company, but it was
always a remarkably interesting one. Founded in 1949 with only 10
employees, in the span of 50 years it built 257 hulls—consisting
mostly of tugs, barges, fishing boats, ferries, and oil-rig supply
vessels—before moving into the ship-repair business.

In its early years, Allied specialized in constructing barges for
service on the Mackenzie River and adjacent waterways. The work entailed
building the barges in Vancouver, cutting them apart, and sending the
sections by rail to Northern Alberta for reassembly and launching into
the northern waters. Building such a variety of vessels over half a
century meant that Allied could seldom take an assembly-line approach.
Employees and owners had to be versatile and flexible. Three generations
of the McLaren family headed Allied Shipbuilders, and this book owes
much to the precise and thorough recollections of the middle-generation
Arthur McLaren, a naval architect as well as a shipbuilder.

Ships of Steel is a first-rate account, comprehensive and readable. It
deals impressively with both the technical and human elements of
shipbuilding. The many illustrations have been reproduced to a uniformly
high standard, and a detailed appendix lists all the vessels the company
built. In broad strokes, the history of Allied Shipbuilders is that of
many family-owned companies whose contributions to the economic and
social fabric of the nation have, sadly, too often remained unsung.