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SS Empire Tower

World War II merchant ship of the United Kingdom

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ7393663 ↗
Source-derived summary

SS Empire Tower was a British 4,378 GRT cargo ship built in 1935 and sunk by enemy action in 1943.

She was built by the Burntisland Shipbuilding Company Ltd. in Fife, Scotland. The North Eastern Marine Engineering Co. Ltd. of Sunderland built her 335 nominal horsepower three-cylinder triple expansion steam engine. She had six corrugated furnaces with a combined heating surface of 117 square feet (11 m2) heat to heat her three 180 pounds per square inch (1,200 kPa) single-ended boilers, which had a combined heating surface of 5,445 square feet (506 m2). She was fitted with direction finding equipment.

She was launched as SS Roxburgh for B.J. Sutherland and Company of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1937 the Tower Hill Steamship Company, an offshoot of Counties Ship Management, bought her and renamed her SS Tower Field.

Editorial summary

“SS Empire Tower” enters the record as world War II merchant ship of the United Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Empire, Tower and World can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1935, 1943, 1937—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Empire, Tower and World.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“SS Empire Tower” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Empire, Tower and World provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7393663. Authority coordinates are 43.500, -14.460. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1943 and 1937.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “SS Empire Tower”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow SS Empire Tower primary sources, SS Empire Tower archive and Empire research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “SS Empire Tower”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “SS Empire Tower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.