CHAPTER 27
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Terry Chapman
After many years associated with the town and port of Penryn, Roland Roddis made a pilgrimage around Cornish harbours just after the Second World War. He wanted to record what he could see was already a rapidly disappearing way of life, and reflected that, with the little cargo and fish then being handled, ‘what was once a full-blooded flow from every port has become confined to the export of china-clay from St Austell Bay and Fowey’.1 For the rest of the twentieth century the decline was muted until, early in the twenty-first century, came the announcement that, after almost 200 years of shipping minerals, even Par was to close.2 Very soon after Roddis had made his tour Cornwall County Council’s 1952 Survey revealed the extent of change. The Survey identified thirteen ports capable of handling cargo; some fifteen more that mixed trade with fishing; and a further ten were merely ‘anchorages’.3 Of this total of almost forty port locations all are still there, although many show various degrees of dilapidation. As with much else concerning Cornwall’s coastline, few, if any other, of Britain’s counties can boast such a rich natural resource. Yet, as Roddis noted over half a century ago, from a trading point of view little now seems to be made of the majority of this asset. This chapter focuses on the handling of cargo through Cornwall’s trading ports and attention is drawn to other chapters which deal with particular commodities, such as china clay and fish. A pertinent issue here is the confinement of Cornwall’s western ports to general cargo during the first half of the twentieth century and then the near disappearance of trade in the second. But, as Roddis also observed, while general trade declined the output of clay from the eastern ports remained nominally constant. Starting with the ships themselves, some of the more important influences in this spatial disparity are examined below.
Before the arrival of reliable land transport systems, firstly rail and, more recently and increasingly, road, the sea was the main highway for the export of Cornwall’s produce and for her imports, which included the goods required in the production of those exports. Rivers, from the Tamar in the east to the Helford in the west, were originally used to bring agricultural and extractive products downstream. Going up were mainly fertiliser and lime for the former and coal and timber for the latter. With its granite spine and nowhere more than a dozen or so miles from the sea, Cornwall did not see much of the canal age. Among more ambitious but uncompleted proposals, six short canals were started at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Regular traffic then continued on at least one, the Tamar Manure Canal, almost to the Second World War.4 Rather than canals to link burgeoning inland industries to the sea, Cornish ingenuity established firstly horse-powered tramways and then proper local railways. Earlier chapters have shown how existing Cornish ports then grew or new ones were established to meet the needs of increasing industrialisation. Notice that it was the needs of industry that stimulated growth in ports and their umbilical land links. Notice, too, that for domestic markets at least, it was the Tamar’s spanning by Brunel’s national railway in the mid-nineteenth century that started the decline in Cornwall’s trading ports under discussion here. Ports are complex, multifaceted interfaces between land and sea, reliant on land as well as sea communication and offering a diverse array of facilities and services. Inevitably several of these, such as shipbuilding, shipowning, shipping services and cargoes, are touched upon in other chapters.
Much as with early mining ventures, the locally built ships that plied early trading routes were often jointly owned in family or community 64th share-schemes. Successful owners acquired fleets of larger ships. Some owners progressed from wooden-built and sail-propelled ships to vessels built of iron and driven by steam (and eventually by motor). But many of those that survived the First World War failed during the depression of the 1930s. Local family names that can be found following such a course include the Bains of Portreath, the Chellews of Truro and the Stephens of Fowey.5 Some local companies, such as Penzance coal merchants Bennett’s, foundry-men and traders Harvey’s, and millers Hoskins, Trevithick and Polkinghorne also operated their own small fleets. No longer ship-operators, Bennett’s are still trading as fuel suppliers. Becoming timber and builders’ merchants after the First World War, Harvey’s (no longer in existence) used to float timber up to wharves in Truro where now stand national retail outlets.
Comparing cargo records of early twentieth-century national and local general trading fleets reveals an interesting inversion. Local fleets are described as often carrying china clay out and coal on their return. National concerns, such as Everards’ and Coast Lines, are said to have carried coal out, with clay (or road stone) on return. Both local and national lines might have carried clay to west-coast Runcorn for the midland potteries, returning with Welsh coal. With careful cleaning of the ships’ holds in between, clay for paper mills went through east-coast Grimsby with coal on return from an English port on that coast. Originally of Greenhithe on the Thames, Everards’ (now owned by Fishers), more known today for their coastal tankers, were the foremost carriers of coal for Cornwall’s gas and electricity generating stations, when these were operating. As well as regularly carrying clay for home and near continental ports on return legs, for many years the company also owned quarries on the Lizard to provide back cargoes through Porthoustock.6 Liverpool-based, the national general line Coast Lines Ltd expanded rapidly after the First World War by absorbing smaller concerns. One such was the Little Western Steamship Co. of Penzance, owned by the millers Bazeleys’, who, as well as general trading, specialised in carrying flour out to south Wales and bringing coal back.7 By the 1950s Coast Lines’ ships, including Cornish Coast, which had served as a support ship for the D-Day landings, dominated general freighting.8 But, like Hain’s of St Ives, they too then succumbed to the cargo handling revolution a decade or so later. From before the Second War, however, Coast Lines had offered a ten-day combined passenger and freight service to United Kingdom ports as far north as Aberdeen from their wharf on Boyer’s Cellars in Falmouth.9 Although still relatively busy with various maritime-related activities, including currently berthing the two Port Auxiliary Service boats, the site is clearly not the bustling scene it once must have been. Coast Lines’ Truro office is now an outdoor activity shop; that in Penzance, opposite the Trinity House Centre, a marine engineering works.
During the First World War both Falmouth and Penzance were hazardous but important convoy rendezvous centres, receiving vital stores from across the Atlantic and despatching them to the Western Front. Strategically placed, during both wars the ports were centres for allied naval operations, with their ship-repair capacity also fully utilised.10 Between the wars and in later depressed periods the River Fal was used to moor temporarily redundant shipping with, at the depth of the slump, over 100 vessels laid up in various tributaries. Exports, including clay, naturally fell off during the Second World War as imports became more important, with vital dock-workers being exempted from conscription into the armed forces. After the war the Fal and its environs filled again, this time with redundant warships. These included submarines lying in Restronguet Creek, running down from the now silted mining port of Devoran.11 Still working up until the First World War, today locally preserved quays and ore-hutches quietly attest to Devoran’s otherwise vanished industrial past.
Lime for agriculture and building, coal, cement and timber continued to be imported into Cornwall by sea up to the Second World War. So too did fertilisers, both natural and manmade, and, although reduced, the latter remains among today’s few sea-borne imports. Although the 1952 Cornwall County Council Survey confirms the Roddis’ view of shrinking post-war trade, coal was still then the county’s main import.12 While still coal-burning, up-country parts of the nationalised gas and electricity industries had operated their own collier fleets. But, as seen, it was a mix of local and national bulk carriers that brought the coal needed for Cornwall’s twentieth-century industrial, marine and domestic use. The county’s many previously privately owned gas-works were concentrated into just three when gas was nationalised just after the Second World War. Most of the coal then roasted to produce town gas arrived by sea. Within twenty years, however, as natural gas first supplemented and then supplanted coal as the primary energy source, even these had closed. The site of Falmouth’s gas-works is now what must be one of the most impressive carparks in the country; that in Penzance currently stands empty beside the lower entrance of the recently opened shopping arcade; while the name of a minor road running up from Newham Quay quietly commemorates where once briefly stood Truro’s later gas-works. The once privately owned electricity generating station on its North Quay made Hayle Cornwall’s main importer of coal. At its height when nationalised the station burned 150,000 tons of sea-delivered coal per year, but again, as electricity was increasingly imported into the county, the station was firstly reduced to a supplementary role before finally closing early in the 1970s. Without the associated shipping the dredging needed to keep the channel open also stopped and, before the end of the decade, Hayle had closed completely as a trading harbour.13 Once the home port of mighty foundry-men, shipbuilders and traders Harvey’s, Hayle harbour still awaits its much prophesised rebirth.
27.1 Par Docks (Ward Jackson collection)
Penzance has long provided an essential sea link with the Isles of Scilly; this service is still carrying passengers and freight and importing some agricultural produce for onward land transmission. Much of the life went out of Cornwall’s other trading ports not only as a result of the rise in road transport but also because of a fall in demand for two of the county’s three extracted products. Metalliferous mining and its associated engineering, once output through many ports, has of course disappeared. So too have quarried products: stone was exported via, among others, Looe, Newlyn and Penryn and slate from Port Isaac, Tintagel and Wadebridge. Some clay was still going out through ports including Newquay, Pentewan and Porthleven in the early years of the twentieth century, before a combination of natural and economic factors forced their closure. As Roddis observed, however, the vast majority of Cornwall’s china-clay output went and continues to go by sea, but, following the recent closure of Par, it is now concentrated in vessels calling at Fowey. Although the entrance to Charlestown, Cornwall’s first china-clay port, was improved in the 1970s, the ships that could use it still proved too small, and the port no longer sees any such traffic. Instead, with commercially picturesque echoes of its industrial and maritime past, its burgeoning restaurants and square-sail support facilities, Charlestown may now point to a possible future for others among Cornwall’s currently languishing ports.
From its ambitious if unpromising birth in the early nineteenth century, efficient land links to surrounding mines, pits and quarries had enabled man-made Par to grow into the busiest port for its size in the country. A natural, deeper and much older trading port, Fowey’s potential as a china-clay exporter was first tapped with the nineteenth-century opening of rail links to both Par and Lostwithiel. The capacity and facilities of both ports expanded during the early years of the twentieth century, while, over the same period, the many companies involved in producing clay for shipment consolidated into the single local giant, English China Clays (ECC). Although clay is still produced, ECC has, of course, now also gone. Before its takeover, however, the company had first leased then purchased the port of Par before increasing its capacity. It later took over Fowey, improving handling and easing congestion in its sidings by converting the Par rail link to a private road for clay lorries. It also briefly tried operating its own small shipping fleet.14 Improvements in the eastern clay-ports were, of course, in marked contrast to what was happening as a result of declining general trade in ports further west. The neglect of Hayle’s harbour, once trade ceased, has already been mentioned. Looe’s once busy wharves have been turned into car parks. Portreath’s tricky series of harbours remain, but its wharves have been given over to housing and parking for residents and, importantly now, visitors. Part of Penzance harbour itself was filled to provide parking, a decision criticised by some, but probably for now, at least, vindicated. Perhaps Cornwall’s most changed trading port, though, is Truro. Small coasters or river barges linking to larger ones out in Carrick Roads used to serve the many quays along the city’s river banks. But, with the inexorable rise in road traffic, it is perhaps somehow appropriate that infilling for car parking in the 1920s and a bypass in the early 1960s have quite literally sealed Truro’s sea-trading fate.15 Hopes are that the amount of traffic using down-river quays will increase, particularly in the growing market for recyclable materials.
There were organisational as well as economic and physical changes in Cornwall’s trading ports during the twentieth century. When regular employment was scarce during the depressed inter-war years unemployed men would congregate around docks hoping for a few hours’ casual work. Registration schemes were introduced in many ports, including at least three in Cornwall, to protect those regularly employed on what dock-work there was. To ensure sufficient manpower in ports vital to an embattled island nation such schemes were formalised and extended during the Second World War. Then, as part of their post-war social reconstruction programme and based on wartime arrangements, Attlee’s government established the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) in 1947. From then until abolition under Thatcher in 1989, all manpower in most of the country’s trading ports, including initially no less than thirteen in Cornwall, had to be registered in the Scheme. Dock-work, as legally defined, could be carried out only in Scheme ports by registered dockers, who were then loaned to employers that had similarly to be registered as such. Originally there were around 80,000 registered dockers nationally, of whom almost 300 were in Cornwall. Later reorganisation, allowing more detailed analysis, confirms the picture of decline in the west and stability in the east. There were very few dockers in Cornwall’s three still trading western ports, Falmouth, Penzance and Truro, by the Scheme’s abolition and only the two main clay ports, Par and Fowey, still employed appreciable numbers (in local terms). Although born of good intent, in many ways the Scheme perhaps outlived its usefulness. By the end, and increasingly inflexible, it had come to be seen as an uncompetitive cost burden and the clay-ports’ employers, like many of their up-country counterparts, were probably not sorry to see its demise.16 Today, employers still trading either have their own dock labour or use supplying agencies when necessary.
27.2 Map of jetties at Fowey in 1939
27.3 Quays at Truro before the First World War (Helen Doe)
Local difficulties with the NDLS reflected those encountered nationally. Indeed, Cornwall was in many ways fortunate to see only rarely the disruptive intransigence more often associated with major ports during the latter half of the twentieth century. A major factor underlying such truculence was the move of freight away from labour-intensive break-bulk carriage to the capital-intensive unitised or bulk handling now almost universally adopted. The new technology, of course, required a more skilled but much smaller workforce. While dockers in established but declining conventional Scheme ports, such as London and Liverpool, resisted the change, those in ports operating the new facilities outside the NDLS, such as Dover and Felixstowe, saw their ports expand rapidly. Establishing a container terminal in deep-water but largely land-locked Falmouth was actively pursued. Under a 1970 Parliamentary Act, renewed a decade later, the terminal would have been within the Docks to the north-east of Pendennis Head, served by a road and rail tunnel through part of the Head. Although initially supported in some quarters, by the time the prospect arose again – and its likely cost had risen seven-fold – questions over the terminal’s economic advantages when weighed against its environmental impact coincided with opposition from within the then over-supplied industry. The clash was subsequently resolved when, on taking over the yard, new owners denied access to the proposed site.17 Problems with landward access remain. If ever, as seems possible, there is a resurgence in short-sea trading, Falmouth, while concentrating on its ship-repair operation, seems likely to continue as only a relatively minor trading port.
Neighbouring Plymouth’s previously nationalised Millbay Docks are now run by a private, currently British-owned, company. The port’s main user, however, is a French freight and passenger ferry operator based in Roscoff. Since Breton farmers first established the outlet for their produce in the early 1970s, the company has also opened routes to northern Spain and southern Ireland. Having seen such success, supporters of the Falmouth container terminal, and a latterly considered roll-on–roll-off (ro–ro) operation, had hoped to increase trading links with what is termed the ‘Atlantic Arc’. The arc envisaged stretches from the northernmost Scottish isles around the whole of Ireland and down to the Canaries. At the close of the century Plymouth University’s Business School examined the prospects for such links, together with the necessary improvements in South West ports. Almost a quarter of the 250 regional businesses surveyed were in Cornwall, reporting USA, France, Germany and the Benelux countries their main export markets. With the notable exception of china clay, little use of local ports (or airports) was found and the report concluded that the Atlantic Arc’s development potential either did not exist or still awaited exploitation.18 A separate report examined the related question of expanding South West ports, particularly Falmouth, Plymouth and Poole. Noting that distribution of the region’s ports (inevitably?) reflected past rather than present trends, the report found prospects for future development of all three weak. For Falmouth, in particular, they could find no convincing case for a ro–ro or any other type of facility.19
Both Falmouth and Fowey had once been thought likely to benefit from any discoveries of oil and gas in the Celtic Sea. Although nothing came of prospecting in the 1970s and 1980s it is nevertheless interesting to contemplate the possible local impact – costs as well as benefits – had commercially viable deposits been found. During mackerel seasons of the same period, Falmouth and Penzance harbours also hosted mainly East European fish-factory ships, colloquially known as ‘Klondykers’. To preserve fish stocks, the activities of such giants in all British waters were severely restricted in the early 1980s. Rusting Klondykers, if they still exist, are no longer seen off Cornwall. Increasingly, though, smart white cruise-liners are, and there are hopes that both Falmouth and Fowey will in future welcome more such lucrative visitors.
In summary, output from Cornwall’s two main eastern clay-ports remained nominally constant throughout the twentieth century, while, in contrast, the rise in road transport that coincided with decline both in demand for the county’s other extracted products and correspondingly in imports, particularly of coal, forced the closure of most Cornish western general trading ports. With them went a world of sail lofts, coal dumps and other facilities.20 Gone, though, are the vessel losses. Reading shipping histories, and even setting hostilities aside, phrases such as ‘lost off’, ‘collided with’ or ‘last seen’ seem heart-wrenchingly frequent.21 On another level, a recent analysis of all three of Britain’s maritime industries – ports, shipbuilding and shipping – perhaps helps to put the fate of local ports into a broader context. From their pre-First World War zenith, all three industries’ post-war decline was hastened by the Depression. An initial post-Second World War boom soon passed as foreign competitors re-emerged, leaving largely unchanged Victorian organisations slow to adapt. With modernisation only belatedly attempted, decline came perilously close to collapse.22
Some may regret that it is holidaymakers, and more permanent economic escapees, who currently provide most of the activity in Cornwall’s hitherto trading ports: Fowey and Par had seemed inextricably linked to china clay, yet now only Fowey survives. Possible scope for future expansion was noted earlier in Charlestown’s regeneration through what is sometimes known as ‘cultural consumerism’. It is a move which, with the opening of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth, as well as remaining an important ship-repair yard and minor trading port, could follow. Small amounts of fish and cargo still move through Padstow, but its popularity at the head of the spectacular cycle trail along its one-time rail link and its celebrity restaurants seem also to be moving the port towards specialisation in a manner similar to, although on differing points on the cultural continuum from, Newquay and St Ives. Five other Cornish ports were recently unsuccessful in their bid for National Lottery assistance with a mix of commercial and cultural development proposals.23 The variously mutating plans for Hayle’s future show just how difficult it is to secure agreement and funding that balances the often conflicting demands on water-frontage. Perhaps fitting was the fin de vingtième-siècle award of special development funding that recognised Cornwall as among the poorest regions in the whole of the then European Union. With the aim of fostering sustainable but environmentally considerate economic growth, maritime projects that would attract grants include: improving links with the Scillies and further developing Fowey’s bulk-carrying capacity along with that of Fowey and Falmouth for cruise-liner calls, with the latter also continuing to grow its maritime engineering base. In addition, any development of road and rail capacity should be integrated with that of trading ports.24
Should future environmental depletion eventually force a complete change in current economic forecasting then the migration of cargo carriage from sea to land seen here might have to be reversed. In his contribution on Cornwall’s extractive industries in Cornwall Since the War, written years before clay’s foremost example of cultural consumerism, the Eden Project, Colin Bristow posited abandoned workings as an enormous nature reserve.25 In the same spirit, this author suggests that containers from short-sea traders (sail assisted?) or aboard lighters floated on and off flooded-down monsters in the Bay could in future be handled where derelict clay buildings now stand: right alongside Par harbour’s conjunction with its road and rail links.
Notes and References
1 Roland Roddis, Cornish Harbours (London: Johnson, 1951), p. ix.
2 Western Morning News, 6 July 2006, p. 8.
3 Cornwall County Council, Development Plan 1952: Report of Survey Written Analysis. Part 1 – The County (Truro: Cornwall County Council, 1952), fig. 16.
4 Charles Hadfield, The Canals of Southern England: Extracts Concerning Canals in the County of Cornwall (London: Phoenix House, 1955), p. 16.
5 Alan Kittridge, Cornwall’s Maritime Heritage (Truro: Twelveheads, 2003), pp. 5–7
6 K.S. Garrett, Everard of Greenhithe (Kendal: World Ship Society, 1991), pp. 18, 31.
7 Clive Carter, The Port of Penzance: A History (Lydney: Black Dwarf, 1998), p. 32.
8 Roddis, Cornish Harbours, p. 58; Roy Fenton, ‘Coast Lines 1917–1970: The Rise and Decline of a Coastal Shipping Empire – Part 1’, Ships Monthly (October 1985), p. 24.
9 Coast Lines Ltd, Seaway Diary 1938 (original document held by Falmouth History and Research Project).
10 Carter, The Port of Penzance, p. 40; John Pollock, Falmouth for Instructions: The Story of Falmouth in the Great War 1914 –1919 (Truro: Penray, 2004), p. 62.
11 Peter Gilson, The Upper Fal in Old Photographs (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), pp. 43, 87, 91.
12 Cornwall County Council, Development Plan 1952: Report of Survey (Truro: Cornwall County Council, 1952), p. 52.
13 John Higgans, ‘The History of the Cornish Port of Hayle’, unpublished: held in Cornish Studies Library, Redruth, 1991, pp. 60, 76.
14 Kenneth Hudson, The History of English China-clays: Fifty years of Pioneering and Growth (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1969), p. 138.
15 Gilson, The Upper Fal in Old Photographs, pp. 147, 158.
16 Terence Chapman, ‘The National Dock Labour Scheme in Cornwall’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Exeter, 2005, p. 212.
17 Chapman, ‘The National Dock Labour Scheme in Cornwall’, pp. 193–96.
18 Rosemary Gripaios, et al, Exporting from the South West (Plymouth: Plymouth Business School, Autumn 1991), pp. 1–3.
19 Peter Gripaios, An Examination of the Case for New Port Developments in the South West of England (Plymouth: Plymouth Business School, 1992), pp. 3,12.
20 Carter, The Port of Penzance, p. 32.
21 See: Charles Waine and R.S. Fenton, Steam Coasters and Short Sea Traders (Wolverhampton: Waine Research, 1994 edn); Philip Thomas, British Ocean Tramps, Vol. 1: Builders and Cargoes and Vol. 2: Owners and their Ships (Wolverhampton: Waine Research, 1992).
22 Alan Jamison, Ebb Tide in the British Maritime Industries: Change and Adaptation 1918–1990 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), p. 166.
23 Western Morning News, 10 August 2006, p. 10.
24 Cornwall County Council, Connecting Cornwall (Truro: Cornwall County Council, 2005), Action Programme 3.
25 Colin Bristow, ‘Wealth from the Ground: Geology and the Extractive Industries’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War: The Contempory History of a European Region (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1993), p. 123.