Wreck

The beautiful melancholy of a shipwreck off Ebbe’s Snook, Northumberland.

One foggy morning off Ebbe’s Snook on 29 February 1960, loaded with lime and cement, the Glasgow-built coaster Yewglen ran aground on the perilous rocks after a navigational error whilst the captain slept. Locals and visitors are fascinated by the storm-savaged shipwreck, flotsam scattering on the shoreline. Abandoned, the rusting hulk remained an alluring landmark on the Northumbrian coastline at Beadnell Point for months to come.

The nuts and bolts of the Yewglen are still embedded in the rocky reefs and sea bed near Beadnell Point more than 50 years after the stranded wreck was recorded by keen photographer and amateur filmmaker Austen McOlvin Laws on trips to the Northumbrian coast with his family between February and October 1960. Born in 1908 and brought up in Sunderland, Laws studied pharmacy and opened a chemists and photography shop on Benton Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1937, combining business with pleasure for 50 years.