Dockside: A Working Life

Trawlers are moored two deep along the dockside at Fleetwood, an indication of how busy and important the town’s fishing industry once was. Their catch is being unloaded and here we see a young man, probably only in his early teens, dragging a basket of big and heavy fish backwards down a wet and slippery looking gang plank.

He probably thought nothing of it, just getting on with his job and earning a living but from my modern viewpoint it shows how tough and often dangerous a working class person’s life could be back then.

At the start of the 20th century Fleetwood was one of four major fishing ports in Britain alongside Hull, Grimsby and Aberdeen. Fleetwood was the only one on the North West and this gave it a competitive advantage. At its height in the 1920s it employed over 9,000 people; many others were employed in related industries and services in and around the town. In this picture we can see just how busy the fishing port was.

There are approximately 26 steam trawlers in the docks which had extensive processing and packing buildings and all serviced by a large railway goods yard providing excellent transport links.

This slewing 75 ton capacity crane, on a 200ft barge, was ordered by the Montreal Harbour Board around 1907/8. The crane could well be a design by BenratherMaschinenfabrik near Dusseldorf, who were contracted to design the Buccleuch Dock crane just prior to this order; Vickers had a talent for side agreements with their suppliers to improve their margins.

It is also contemporary with theBenrather designed 150 ton capacity “Titan” floating crane that was used to outfit the Olympic, Titanic and Majestic at Belfast.

Slipway cranes were ubiquitous with the shipyard for around 90 years. These cranes were built to replace two Brown Patent Balanced Cantilever gantry cranes around 1914. The southern gantry of the previous cranes is clearly visible, as the raised set of rails in the centre of the photograph. To the left, is a jib of a scotch derrick on top of the northern gantry.

Several of these derricks were used to complete the construction of “Emperor of India” after the northern crane was blown off the end of rails in a storm in November 1912, killing two workers in the assembly shed.

This is a view looking south at the top of the slipways in the Vickers Shipyard that was not visible to the public – I like the young lad who looks to be in charge of much larger horse and cart! Apart from that, not much work appears to be going on; the image has a tranquil feel about it, but the riveting and caulking on the slipways and in the plater’s machine shop, on the left, would mean that it was rarely quiet.

This image is post 1912 and could be during WW1, with quite busy stocks; the “new” cranes and part of the south gantry of the previous cranes in the background at centre right serve to narrow the date.

The fine, sandy beaches of the Furness peninsular are attractive to locals and holidaymakers alike; not to those responsible for keeping safe navigation channels to the Port of Barrow. Dredging – removal of deposits - is necessary and specialist vessels do this work.

Alongside within the dock system, we see Mountjoy, a bucket dredger which can swing its ‘conveyor’ arm below the water where a continuous chain of buckets removes deposits, bringing them to the surface to be transferred to a barge for deposit at sea. Relentless, difficult work for the crew whose work hours are at the whim the tides.

Tugs rarely attract attention, completely lacking the glamour of many other vessels; powerful, yes but small and apparently insignificant. Not so, however - you only have to see one manoeuvre a large ship or submarine into position or through a narrow opening to appreciate it and its small crew’s skill and dexterity. Here we see steam tug Furness working hard (dense smoke from the funnels is the clue) with a section of floating dock, soon after launch.

The section’s size, shape and complete lack of streamlining will make it among the most difficult tasks the crew will have to face.

We see group photos of sports teams, schools, friends yet rarely at work but here we see workers from Barrow port, their headgear possibly suggesting a hierarchy - varied flat caps for most, three with peaked caps and two with smarter peaked caps (and white shirts!), maybe bosses.

You could argue that the real élite are wearing woolly hats - the dock’s diving team in their work suits. No shirt and tie here, these are diving suits with watertight gaskets, allowing a brass and copper helmet to be attached to carry out their difficult and dangerous work in the murky depths.

Built in Newcastle and completed at Alloa in 1922, Ravenefjell might once have been a tidy cargo ship. That is no longer the case here in Barrow Docks, bringing a cargo of timber for the paper mill at Salthouse which had a voracious appetite for its raw material.

The cargo fills the shabby vessel in a manner resembling that of a hirer determined to overfill a skip. A dozen or so crew members, seen amidships and astern, apparently stare at the camera, perhaps with some hostility, maybe concerned at the way their cargo had been loaded being recorded?

The Graving Dock, completed in 1872, was part of the expansion of the docks and associated facilities. Once it was filled with water, the ship for repair was floated in, and the dock drained so workers could work on the hull. Ships were also reconstructed here; such as the Furness Railway steamer the Lady Evelyn, which was cut in two over the winter of 1903-1904 and an additional 40 foot section slotted in and another deck added.

Almost nothing from this scene remains now, apart from a short section of the dock which holds water, with the rest of the dock walls incorporated into the Dock Museum. The sandstone to construct this dock was brought from Hawcoat Quarry. Once ‘cutting edge technology’ of its time, the graving dock has been superseded by the nearby Devonshire Dock construction hall – which is also built on reclaimed land originally part of the channel between Hindpool and Barrow Island.

Barrow built, the ship here is being berthed at Ramsden Dock with the assistance of tugs. Two dock workers are standing in a small dinghy; one of them is sculling to manoeuvre it while the other is holding the end of throwing line used to pull down the larger mooring lines which will secure the vessel to bollards on the dockside. The water is being churned up around the dinghy by the ships propellers making the task of catching the throw line tricky and potentially dangerous. The men in the dinghy must have been confident and skilful at their jobs.

The ship was broken up in 1912

Commander and Mrs Craven on the balcony of the oddly shaped harbour building near the dock gates. Maybe he was waiting to see the P & O liner Orion entering the dock system, after he had conducted the launch on 7th December 1934. Or maybe he was watching a ship about to leave.

Charles Craven became MD of Vickers in 1923 and was instrumental in bringing non-government work into the shipyard, specifically liners. Dock workers are getting ready with ropes on the dockside and there is a railway notice- board to the left with LMS headings. Ramsden Dock Station is to the left of this picture. One of the many travelling cranes of the dock system is on the right.

The Deep-Water Berth in front of Ramsden Dock Station. A ship is about to dock with day trip passengers on board. Furness Railway staff are waiting at the lower landing platform on the right whilst another man checks his watch above. The platform can be raised or lowered by means of the pulleys and chains seen in the picture, to enable access at all states of the tide. Other members of the public, watching from the quayside, are stood in front of a Furness Railway wagon.

Like many pictures of this era every person in view is wearing some sort of headgear, from the caps of the boys on the left to the ornate hat of the lady on the ship.

What a ship, what a photograph! Sailors and workers climb up the ship’s bow; crewmen seem to crowd the deck, and hundreds of workers line the dockside to the left. Quite a few on the dock hold ropes with fenders; ready to haul and shift them if it looks like the ship might scrape against the dock wall. Dock work then, as it is now, was hard - and it also could be very risky.

In the early 20th century it was also often a precarious hand-to-mouth existence as, depending on the amount of work needed, men were hired only by the day – or ‘on the lump’ as it was called.

A small group of workers, sleeves rolled up and ready for the job, undertaking the hard work of unloading a shipment of logs. It looks like a dry day, which would have made the task less risky. Edward Sankey spent his formative years growing up in a railway house next to Buccleuch Dock; directly across the water from where he lived was one of the town’s timber yards.

No doubt the jobs they did there, and the foreign ships with their cargos from all over the world, were a source of fascination for him; which is why this photograph, like so many in the collection, shows dockside work.

There’s an arresting contrast in this image between the men in the tiny rowing boat and the SS Quernmore. It’s a dynamic image, showing the reality of moving a large ship in the confines of Ramsden Dock. As the ship is towed backwards, the men in the boat handle a mooring line to stop it catching on anything. Crewmen look out from the Quernmore’s stern, keeping an eye out for any potential problems.

The daily physical strain of labourers at the docks, especially in wet and cold weather, took its toll on men’s health.

To the untrained eye this looks like a number of men are just stood, lining the dock to watch as the Orontes as she passes through for fitting out at Buccleuch Dock. Closer examination, however, shows workers on either side of the dock ready with fenders to stop the ship scraping against the dock wall.

Other men are about, ready to grab and haul ropes if neeeded. The crewmen in the tugs (there’s another one barely visible at the bow) would have been alert to every move necessary to protect the ship as it passed through the narrow dock basin – ships this size took careful handling in such a relatively small passage.

A busy scene at the newly built fitting-out berth, at Buccleuch Dock, shows the Japanese Battleship Kongo in the final stages of construction. The berth had been constructed to allow larger ships to be built that would not fit through the entrance into Devonshire Dock.

Steam is being raised and a locomotive is busy on the Vickers internal railway. Scenes like this could be seen from the High Level Bridge until the end of surface-warship building at Barrow. This ship was commissioned 16th August 1913, and sunk during the Secnd World War.

The warehouses in this image stood along Fleetwood dockside. Fish landed by the trawlers was brought in for processing and packing in ice for onward distribution. Imagine the scene, men are unloading trawlers and dragging baskets of fish into the warehouse where others are preparing them; a busy, smelly and potentially dangerous place. The young girl and younger boy (brother?) seem out of place.

What were they doing there, why did the photographer include them in the picture? The photographer is trying to record the activity so is this a typical scene and the presence of children normal?