STEPHEN Nunn’s article on the steam tug Brent, was an excellent account of why this historic ship is worth preserving.

May I add two more reasons why she is special.

A total of 120 coal-fired TID tugs (known affectionately in the dockyards as “Tiddlers”) were built between 1943 and 1945.

A further 62 were built as oil-burners for service in the Mediterranean and the Far East (where coal was unavailable), and one of these, TID 164, may be found on the Medway at the Chatham Historic Dockyard.

Although Ron Hall converted Brent to oil-burning for ease of operation, she was built as a coal-burner, has a bunker, and worked as a coal-burner throughout her time with the Admiralty and with the Port of London Authority.

TID 159 Brent is, therefore, the last of the coal-burning TIDs. (The last one built was TID 183 — there was no TID 13) Stephen mentions that the TIDs were welded. Previously ships were riveted by skilled shipwrights working in traditional dockyards.

In wartime Britain the dockyards were busy replacing warships, and the merchant ships sunk by U-boats.

There wasn’t the manpower or the dockyard space to build the large number of tugs required for 1944’s D-Day invasion, which included towing the concrete Mulberry harbours across the English channel to Normandy.

The ingenious solution was to build each tug in eight prefabricated lateral sections, in different parts of the country.

It was women, who had developed their fabrication skills in building such things as bridges, cranes and railway wagons, who became shipwrights and welded the separate sections which were then carried cross-country by low-loaders.

Each section had overlapping ends that could be welded to its neighbours, thus making up the entire vessel.

This was done at three separate coastal locations. Brent, as Stephen tells us, being assembled and launched at Pickersgill’s yard in Sunderland.

At the height of production the three yards were producing a new tug every five days (the record was four). If Brent appears boxy and angular compared with traditionally-built craft it is because she, and her prefabricated sisters, were in a very real sense the first of the flatpacks.

So the little tug we are privileged to have on Maldon’s Hythe is a Geordie, built by women, the only surviving coal-fired TID, and a testament to the ingenuity of the people of wartime Britain.

Don Baines, High Street, Maldon