Boelwerf

The Boelwerf, initially called J. Boel & Zonen, was a shipyard on the river Scheldt in Temse, Belgium, which produced ships from 1829 until 1994.

The Boelwerf was founded in 1829 by Bernard Boel (1798-1872), who had worked as a carpenter at the Antwerpen South shipyards. He was succeeded by his son Jozef Boel. During the first fifty years of its existence, the shipyard built wooden ships and employed a limited number of workers. The company built only one ship a year, mainly tjalks. Starting from 1900, the number of ships built, and with it the number of employees, grew steadily.

After World War II, J. Boel & Zonen flourished after breaking through internationally. At the company's 150th birthday, the Zaat, as the shipyard was known in the local dialect, counted 3,000 employees. A considerable part of them were locals from Temse. The anniversary coincided with the construction of a 57,000 m³ LPG carrier with the symbolic construction number 1500: the Petrogas II, which still sails under the Singapore flag and is now called Hariette N.

During the same period, the Boelwerf's trade union delegation became a model of strijdsyndicalisme ("battle unionism") in Belgium. The leaders of this delegation, Jan Cap (ACV) and Karel Heirbaut (ABVV) often got national attention for their actions.

On 19 December 1980, J. Boel & Zonen underwent a series of demergers. Several holding and shipping companies, such as the Almabo holding and its gas carrier division Exmar, were sliced off, leaving only the actual shipyard, now called Boelwerf. After Cockerill Yards, a shipyard in Hoboken, across the river Scheldt, had gone bankrupt, the Boelwerf acquired Cockerill's shipyard. Following this merger, the company employed 3,500 workers in two large shipyards.

Due to the international crisis in ship building, the Boelwerf got into financial straits in the mid-1980s and was declared bankrupt on 28 October 1992. The court-appointed receiver, Christian Van Buggenhout, filed a complaint for fraud, which he withdrew consequently. From the mid-1980s until the beginning of the 1990s, the shipyard had been kept afloat by the government, which had offered large shipping loans to the shipyard's potential clients. After the bankruptcy, most of these loans were either remitted or lost.

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