Babcock Marine Appledore
| Private Company | |
| Industry | Shipbuilding |
| Founded | 1855 |
| Headquarters | Appledore, Devon, England |
| Parent | Babcock International Group |
Appledore Shipbuilders is a shipbuilder in Appledore, North Devon.
The Appledore Yard was founded in 1855 on the estuary of the River Torridge. The Richmond Dry Dock was built in 1856 by William Yeo and named after Richmond Bay in Prince Edward Island, where the Yeo family's shipping fleet was based.
The business was led by Philip Kelly Harris during the early part of the 20th century and known as P.K. Harris & Sons until 1963 when it became Appledore Shipbuilders.
In 1964 the Company was acquired by Court Line, a shipping and airline business. A new shipyard was built on a greenfield site in Appledore at a cost of about £4m opened in 1970. Court Line collapsed in 1974 and Appledore Shipbuilders was nationalised and subsequently subsumed into British Shipbuilders. By the late 1980s the only yards still held in state ownership were the smaller Appledore and Ferguson yards. Appledore was eventually sold to North East Shipbuilders Ltd in 1989, with the combined company renamed A&P Appledore International.
In the late 1990s the two square-rigged sail training ships of the Tall Ships Youth Trust, the Prince William and the Stavros S Niarchos, were completed at Appledore, by performing substantial modifications to two bare hulls begun in Germany.
Appledore built two Róisín class patrol boats for the Irish Naval Service: LÉ Róisín (P51) was completed in 1999 and LÉ Niamh (P52) in 2001. In 2010, Ireland ordered a further two, 90m, 23 knot offshore patrol vessels from Babcock with an option for a third, to be built at Appledore. The first Samuel Beckett-class OPV was commissioned in May 2014. In June 2014, the Irish government took up the option for the third ship to be built at Appledore (delivered in 2016) and ordered a fourth in 2016 (to be delivered in 2018)
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