The whale factory vessel Kosmos with a gross tonnage of 19000 was built by North Eastern Marine at Haverton Hill shipyard and owned by Anders Jahre. The keel was laid on 21st June 1944 and ths ship was launched on 10th July 1948. The ship can be seen under construction and there are views of the deck, engine room and the dining salon 
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
I was 3/0 of this v/l in 1971, working as a factory ship off the then, Spanish Sahara. We had a fleet of 16 purse seiners and one transport v/l (an old side trawler) used to supply a factory ashore in Nouadhibou. As I remember, this was the part of the cost to the company for the right to fish in the area. Our production was fishmeal and oil which was discharged into bulk carriers of PHS van Ommeren and norwegian tankers. She subsequently was working off the pacific coast of Chile and, I believe, towed out and scuttled when no longer viable.
In the late autumn of 1969 having travelled down through spain and (via n africa ) to gibraltar ,I worked as a crew on a two masted gaff schooner Tulaqu down to las palmas. There was a South African fishing fleet based there and after repetedly pestering their shore skipper got a job on a purse seiner the “Linda”. We fished (and possibly poached) off spanish sahara and took our catch back each night to the mother ship The SUIDERKRUIS,where we would offload and take on fuel water and supplies. I have so many memories of the characters I met and would love to know what became of them all. Just before Christmas 1969 arrangments were made to fly the crews back to Walvis Bay and South Africa for the holiday and I went aboard the Suiderkruis and helped work her up to Cadiz where I went ashore and hitched my way home to England.I was 21 years of age and have never forgotten it. Please keep the comment relevant to the photograph (some extra detail or history) and avoid addressing it to an individual. Email, postal or web addresses should not be added.
Hi, me and my father was talking about his days on the Suiderkruis and how he would love to get in to contact with the people he met there. If you are still on this blog, please let us know. His name is Paul Loubser.
Do your experts remember the Souther Venturer and Southern Harvaster built at M/bro just after the war? whaleing was a normal method of obtaining huge amounts of fish oil known a sperm oil in engineering circles. There was no substitute in those days.
Kosmos V was converted into a South African fishmeal factory ship and renamed the Suiderkruis. Relaunched in 1966, it became a notorious factory ship off Namibia.
Actually Kosmos V was renamed L’Interpeche (registered in Bermuda) and the vessel described in this thread was indeed she and not the erroneous referral to Suiderkruis which was a different ship operating in roughly the same area the time.
L’Interpeche and Suiderkruis is the same ship. The other factory ship was called Willem Barentz
Kosmos V was built as a whale factory ship, but she left the shipyard without any whale factory machinery fitted. I believe she was not granted a whaling licence, she spent a lot of years trading as an oil tanker. She was eventually converted to a fish factory ship. She was a lot bigger than the previous ships of her type, she also differed in her propulsion machinery, she was fitted with two Doxford opposed piston diesel engines, whereas the previous built whalers had two triple expansion steam engines fitted.