by Geoff Body
The considerable extent of the S&D Highbridge Wharf is apparent from this view from a vessel discharging timber at the seaward end of the harbour.
The Highbridge boatyard pictured in 1998 and located where the original course of the River Brue joined the later channel.
Dunball
The lower River Parrett through Dunball has been used by shipping since the time of Christ. Danish and other marauders sailed along its lower reaches, pilgrims made it part of their route to Glastonbury and the Romans had settlements with water access there. At Downend the remains of a Norman motte and bailey guarded the river approaches from slightly higher ground and a small port probably existed there for a time.
For centuries little then happened beyond the normal activities of a rural community, apart from a river realignment to reclaim some land in 1677. But all that changed with the opening of the Bristol & Exeter Railway’s line to Bridgwater in 1841. The excavations for the new line excited false hopes of coal deposits but, instead, the availability of limestone and the close proximity of the river led to the establishment of lime and cement works, with a tramway to feed them with Welsh and Dean coal discharged at a wharf on the river bank. By 1850 Dunball had three cement and lime factories, two producing bricks and tiles and a manure works. Just beyond the railway lay the supplying quarries.
By an Act of 1867 the main-line railway was authorised to acquire the 1844 tramway to the wharf from its original coal merchant builders, themselves Bristol & Exeter directors. The much-improved connection was opened two years later and the wharf itself subsequently extended. This was a busy period, with the wharf often receiving as many as four vessels at the same time and handling about 100,000 tons of ship cargo a year, mainly of inwards coal and timber. A daily train, broad gauge until the 36-chain branch from the main line was converted to standard in 1892, took coal on to Exeter. The wharf itself had sidings, cranes and stables for the horses which made local deliveries. There was also a ‘mudders’ hut’ for the men who raked the quayside mud out into midstream to provide a flat bottom for visiting vessels, with the tide then clearing the mud away. Across the main road the Greenhill Arms, named after the lord of the manor, provided refreshment for men from the vessels, works and railway.
The beginning of the twentieth century was a busy time for Dunball. In the half year from May to November 1905, 198 vessels were dealt with representing a total of 10,906 tons and an average of 55.8 tons per vessel. For the same period eight years later, with Britain now on the brink of war, the number had dropped to seventy-five vessels and the tonnage to 4,258. The pattern over the months of the year did not vary greatly, although December was usually less busy. One of the larger visitors was the 68-ton Champion, which arrived five times in April 1913 and thirty-six times in the year as a whole. The smallest was little Lily, just 25 tons, which called once. She had been built at Penrhyn in 1897 and had had several owners before being bought by A. Oxenham of Lynmouth.
Motorised in 1927, she was the ubiquitous little vessel which foundered off the Usk two years later while heading across the Bristol Channel with a load of coal for her Weston, Clevedon & Portishead Railway owners.
Elsewhere details are shown of the vessels using Dunball in 1904 – some twenty-six being berthed there at one time or another during the year and these making thirty-eight arrivals in the December. Ketches and other sailing vessels predominated, but had already been joined by small steamers. The proportion of the latter increased after the First World War until it reached two-thirds, although the tonnage handled slowly and steadily declined. Even so the location remained important, not least because of the advantage it had always enjoyed of having a greater depth than the upstream section on to Bridgwater and the fact that it could often be used when higher parts of the river were frozen over.
In the second half of the twentieth century Dunball changed completely when the M5 motorway was driven through the cement works area on the inland side of the station. The old works disappeared one after another and then the wharf lost its rail link in 1962. Even so the shipping activity continued, now with modern vessels and large bulk cargoes. Not far from the former railway wharf Shell-Mex and BP added a fuel storage and delivery depot in 1953 with Bibby’s animal feed site adding to the coal and timber still arriving at the original location. Channel-dredged sand and gravel came in to a separate wharf site near the end of the King’s Sedgemoor Drain, with the wharf proper still being used by modern motor vessels which would have dwarfed the trows and ketches that once were the location’s regulars.
A crane stands waiting for the Mary-C to moor up at Dunball Wharf in July 1999. Beyond is the former Bibby’s wharf and plant.
Although the Walpole oil terminal, just downstream from the original wharf,closed in 1987, Dunball was still active twenty years later, making it Somerset’s last surviving port. It could take much larger vessels, although these needed some 10ft of water, which occurred every seven or eight days. They would wait at Gore Buoy off Burnham until about two-and-a-half hours before high water and arrive at Dunball just before the flood had topped, turning with their bows into the river bend so that the tide could ease them against the wharf, in exactly the same manner as their sailing vessel predecessors. Later cargoes were mainly animal feed in bulk for Bibby’s, Portuguese granite sets for road-making purposes and rock salt from Northern Ireland. A.G. Watts operated the wharf, acted as shipping agents, and provided road transport. ARC (Southern) Ltd brought in self-discharge sand aggregate boats to the separate stacking area by the wharf.
The two motor vessels Balmoral and Oldenberg even made occasional excursion visits and moored exactly where the old wooden Champion had appeared so often with its cargo of coal from Penarth or Cardiff.
Bridgwater
Bridgwater has a long history as a settlement and an early harbour. It derived its origins from its location as a place where the River Parrett narrowed sufficiently to be crossed, but would later suffer because its waterway access involved a winding approach along 14 miles of the river and was subject to the limitations imposed by its varying tidal depths. The town’s history as a port falls into several fairly distinct periods. From the limited, small vessel activities of the early years, ship arrivals and departures accelerated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rose to a peak around 1880 and then began a slow decline to the First World War and a rapid one thereafter.
Early charters and other documents confirm shipping activity at Bridgwater at least as early as 1200 when the first bridge was built, and the town was soon to feature in the growing national practice of hiring or requisitioning vessels when needed to transport troops and supplies to various conflicts. By the end of the century Bridgwater vessels were involved in carrying supplies to support military adventures on the Continent, and from 1314 were doing the same service to aid the monarch’s quarrels with the Scots. But trade and commerce is never to be denied and it can be glimpsed by the existence, a few years earlier, of records of a load of lead going to Gascony in the vessel Sauneye. By the end of the century commercial activity was such that the primitive early harbour facilities needed improvement to cater for the substantial volume of local produce then being sent to Ireland, France and Spain and to aid the unloading of the wine, hides, twine, hemp and esparto grass being imported in the reverse direction.
Such was the growth in the fourteenth century that in 1348 Bridgwater was freed from the shackles of Bristol to become a fiscal port in its own right, controlling the harbours along 80 miles of Somerset coast from the Axe to the Devon border, together with an outbase, curiously, on the Mumbles in South Wales. The Langport Slip, just upstream of Bridgwater’s Town Bridge, was built in 1488, reinforcing the importance of the town as a transhipment point for inland movements. Cloth was a major shipping export cargo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but, starting in the latter, a period of decline began which had dropped the number of Bridgwater registered vessels to just seven in 1592 and only one in 1596. It was to be
another hundred years before trade really picked up again. When it did, commodities like coal and salt grew to quite significant tonnages.
Small vessels predominated in the eighteenth century, sloops, smacks and trows, with the number of vessels owned locally rising by an average of one a year from the thirty-three of 1786 and peaking at around 150 a hundred years later. The volume of inland movement grew in parallel, as did the size of commercial operators. The Bobbett family, for example, owned trows to bring coal over from Wales, lighters to take it forward after transhipment at Bridgwater and packhorses to get it to its final destination. Even places like Wellington now had access to cheaper, albeit not yet cheap, coal supplies.
The Bobbett era was followed by that of Stuckey & Bagehot, whose fleet grew out of an initial small number of barges used to move salt and other commodities from Bridgwater to their quayside storage and distribution point at Langport. From this followed the use of coasters to bring supplies into Bridgwater and then a fleet of deep-sea ships sailing as far as the North American mainland and even India. By the mid-1830s they owned and operated around thirty-five vessels. Timber was one of the principal imports with the larger vessels discharging to lighter at Combwich which was less restricted of access than Bridgwater itself, being that much nearer the Bristol Channel. Other large shipowners later included Sully’s which operated and chartered a large fleet, but majored on the coal trade with their own stacking ground beside the inner harbour and a network of factors for finding trows and ketches for their shipments from Lydney, Newport, Cardiff and Swansea.
The Bridgwater wharves were busy places at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not only with the vessels themselves, but with all the people, trades and infrastructure associated with a port. Like the rest of the country, the end of the long wars with France slowly prompted a dramatic rise in trade and commerce and by the 1820s Bridgwater shipping trade was increasing at something like 5,000 tons a year. Plans to bypass part of the downstream section of the Parrett foundered, but a better link to Taunton was achieved in 1827 when the Bridgwater & Taunton Canal was opened to link the county town with Huntworth on the stretch of the Parrett just beyond Bridgwater’s Town Bridge.
More and more South Wales coal began to come in from Cardiff and Newport, along with Forest of Dean coal from Lydney, as the output of the collieries served by those places expanded. Lower grade fuel like culm came in from Swansea, and there was a wide range of general cargoes coming into Bridgwater, among which oats, slates and salt featured prominently. Livestock, Irish linen, timber and a host of other commodities all helped to create an immense variety of goods and the services and facilities for dealing with them. The riverside wharves could not cope with all the extra business on offer and the harbour authority, the Town Corporation, had to do something.
Pressure on the Bridgwater & Taunton Canal Company led the latter to seek and obtain parliamentary approval in 1837 for an extension of the canal from Huntworth to a new dock on the seaward side of Bridgwater and a lock to connect with the River Parrett there. The move complimented the Parrett Navigation Act of the previous year so that when the new dock opened in 1841, the onward links to Taunton and Langport had also increased their capacity. Not only this, but in the same year the Bristol & Exeter Railway reached Bridgwater from the Bristol end, something which subsequently proved a mixed blessing, for while the docks were to be linked with the main line by an 1846 railway connection, the railway took so much business away from the canal that it headed steadily towards receivership. Despite this the port proper continued to expand its business with the coal and other inwards movements supplemented by more outwards flows which were dominated by bricks and tiles, often for Irish and the more distant domestic locations. The traditional business of local and inland distributing continued.
With its large agricultural hinterland Bridgwater was the natural outlet for local produce and an important staging point for the supply of a variety of incoming general cargoes, ranging from wines and spirits to exotic spices from faraway places. These longer distance imports brought larger vessels into Bridgwater and ocean-going schooners, barques and brigs were a regular sight. Small vessel traffic included trows from Gloucester and the Middle Severn, and before the Bristol & Exeter Railway’s arrival in 1841 there were regular market boats and passenger packets to Bristol and even London.
Until that momentous year of 1841 all shipping had to sit on the mud beside the wharves of the main river to load or discharge their cargoes. Downstream of the Town Bridge the East and West quays would be lined with vessels, all having to be managed in varying water depths, mindful of the regular 2ft bore wave along the river and even wary of being frozen in from time to time by a bout of low temperatures. Upstream of the bridge was the mooring place for barges, either waiting to go alongside for transhipment or handling their cargoes over the Langport Slip. The dry dock and shipyard was on the East Quay side and the Custom House on the West.
The 1841 opening of the new dock was an occasion of great celebration as the pioneer wooden paddle tug Endeavour took its party of honoured guests to bring in the sloop Henry to accord it the distinction of being the first sailing vessel to enter the dock. Vessels of up to 180ft in length and 30ft beam could be accommodated but, even so, insufficient river depth during and around neap tides meant several days when the new wharf at Dunball had to be used instead. The same year had other significances, one of which was the opening of the Taff Vale Railway to carry coal from colliery to the sea at Penarth. From this beginning would stem the Marquess of Bute’s dock building at Cardiff and later, as the demand for coal went on increasing, the new docks at Barry. In 1845 the status of the Port of Bridgwater changed slightly by virtue of an Act of Parliament which defined its area as that from Brean Down to Hinkley Point.
Another significant but less celebrated milestone occurred in 1864 when the UK Telegraph Company opened an office in Bridgwater. Now owners, captains and agents could communicate quickly at just a shilling for twenty words. This made the linking of vessels and loads so much easier than the previous reliance on the post, and the rise in business continued. From an annual tonnage level of around 75,000 tons in 1822, the total handled by the wider port had risen to 261,282 tons by 1880, 3,677 vessels being involved. Inwards coal still predominated, but at least twenty other commodities arrived in significant quantities, especially grain. These were the busiest years for Bridgwater with the steam tugs, barges, dock workers, chandlers, repairers and other shore-based activities at full stretch.
The shipping activity at Bridgwater stretched for some 2 miles along the River Parrett. From Chilton Trinity on the downstream approaches to the town and the site of a busy brickworks, it continued past the S&D railway wharf, the dock entrance and the first silt slime batches of the Bath Brick industry. Then came the crowded wharf areas of the East and West quays before the river passed under the Town Bridge and by the Langport Slip and the barge mooring area to then reach the final group of slime batches. Altogether it was a busy, colourful and productive hive of maritime business.
From 1876 the dock was acquired by the Great Western Railway as a result of the Bristol & Exeter’s 1867 purchase of the Bridgwater & Taunton Canal, and it was provided with rail siding access crossing the river by means of a novel steam-operated bridge in which a section of rail moved sideways to allow the bridge section to be retracted. The dock now began to take on its final form with the British Oil & Cake Mills, opened in 1869, on one side and a large warehouse on the other. Sully & Co. occupied the stacking ground beside the inner dock. Both dock and river had cranage facilities and the Somerset & Dorset Railway’s 1890 branch line from Edington Junction had its own wharf on the east bank of the river.
Bridgwater Dock seen from the entrance lock and looking towards the inner basin and main dock. On the left is a collier adjacent to Sully’s coal stacking ground, with the dock warehouse beyond.
In this heyday the two paddle tugs Petrel and Victor were kept busy despite the a
ppearance of steam coasters, but the good times were not to last and a double blow fell upon the port in 1886. A major work to remove a great volume of mud from the dock and canal kept the port access limited for some six weeks, just at a time when the Great Western Railway opened its Severn Tunnel link from South Wales into Gloucestershire. Prior to this the rail movement of coal to Somerset involved a circuitous journey via Gloucester and Bristol, but now the route mileage involved in a rail journey was greatly reduced. Additionally, some shippers could not afford to retard their business while the port reopened and others found the railway rates more attractive and the train services more reliable than the traditional terms sailing vessel owners could offer. The number of vessels using Bridgwater dropped by some 30 per cent, with a similar decline in the business tonnage previously handled each year.
Although the size of sailing vessels using Bridgwater increased slowly within the port’s overall dimension restrictions, a surprising number were still small, the size range varying from 20 to 450 tons. Steamers were now appearing more often and accounted for 16 per cent of the number of vessels entering the docks in the early 1880s. Journeys, destinations and commodities were getting more varied. Coal in and bricks out – both the building and the Bath Brick scouring variety – remained the staples throughout, but outwards movements, formerly concentrated on the local coasts and across to Ireland, now often embraced the Mediterranean, Scandinavia – a good source of timber return loads – and Atlantic Europe, as well as London, Scotland and the East Coast of Britain.
