Alfred Ehrenreich

[8] In addition to a tannery at Tyler Street, Newark, New Jersey, the Ocean Leather Company had reclaiming plants in Morehead City, and Cape Lookout, North Carolina plus Fort Myers and Sanibel Island, Florida.

These plants handled sharks, rays, porpoises, turtles and other large sea animals that were landed by its fleet of fishing vessels.

There were about twenty other processes to extract by-products from the carcasses including glue, dies, medicine, enzymes, fertilizer, animal feed, oil (from the liver) and the fins that were sold to the Chinese market.

In 1923, whilst still in Europe, he applied for a years extension to their passports, informing the American consulate in Vienna that they intended to visit France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and the British Isles.

[13] Ehrenreich employed fishermen with the expert knowledge for shark hunting and one such was Captain William E. Young (1875-1962) who acted as an operations manager.

[14] In about 1923 he joined Ehrenreich's team in Paris and put together an expedition to Djibouti, in French Somaliland, where he helped set up a station for catching and processing sharks.

[17][18][19] The ship chosen for conversion was Istar, a 300 ft luxury yacht, built in 1897 for New York property millionaire Robert Goelet, and originally named Nahma.

During the prohibition years in America it became a rum-runner, after which Prince and Princess Andrew of Russia proposed to take it on a world cruise with paying guests.

[20] However, this failed to materialise and the vessel came into the ownership of two Englishmen, ex-Royal Naval Commander Charles Lester Kerr and ex-army Major Robin Thynne, both of whom became directors of Marine Products.

[21] The Istar's conversion to a factory ship was managed by Rudolf Hauschka, who had been with Ehrenreich during the shark fishing pilot scheme in Carnarvon.

The eventual outcome was that Istar was leased to a French syndicate for £200 per month plus a percentage of the profits, and the ship left London for Madagascar in 1929.

The ship had been insured and efforts were made to restart the business in Durban but this failed, leading to bankruptcy proceeding against Marine Products in London.

[26] In 1930 Ehrenreich and his wife made frequent trips out of the country due to ill health, and on 16 July 1931 he died of cancer at the Willow Road address.