Last century the Colonial Sugar Refinery Co produced sugar in Australia and Fiji and shipped it all over the British Empire. CSR is no more but in its heyday it was a huge monopoly, owning vast areas of Queensland and Fiji, had its own refineries, railways, harbours and a dozen cargo ships, plus tugs.
The Maro was a 50ft, wooden, diesel tug built at the company’s Auckland Chelsea Refinery yard in late 1945-6 by the CSR’s own in-house shipwright – talk about vertical market integration.
It had a Gardner 8LW engine, single screw and was built to handle the company’s ships and barges that called at the refinery on Auckland harbour’s North Shore.
Seems strange that they built a tug at that time as just down the road at Devonport Naval Base the NZ and US Navies were decommissioning and disposing of a lot of surplus wartime equipment. A fleet of mothballed boats was in Auckland harbour until completely disposed of in the late ‘40s. A lot of USN stuff like YTLs, Sea Mules and workboats went up to the smaller Pacific islands, the surplus RNZN tugs were distributed around the country’s smaller ports. Wellington, my home town, ended up with 2 former Royal Navy Envoy Class tugs. Some of the USN workboats went up to Hong Kong as police boats.
The Maro does look a little like the USN workboats that had been made across the harbour and its silhouette is more similar to a traditional US tug than to any British design of the era – low superstructure over the engine-room, square
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