Publications | Down Survey | 2002 Issue Contents

No Galant Ship
Ian Wilson

Let's just say it's a warm and windy day in the summer of 1910, and you are being chauffeured along the dusty roads of Co Down in a new motor car. The host of your little motoring party seems to have an affinity with small harbours and quays, and a leisurely route is followed along the deeply indented coastline. At Killyleagh the schooner Industry is discharging coal, and at Quoile Quay a Scottish steam "puffer" has just come up on the tide with a load of bricks from Irvine. Looking across from Strangford (through the rigging of a Manx ketch) a largish steamer can be seen at Portaferry quay. (One of your companions laughingly suggests a bizarre scheme to drive motor cars on to double-ended boats and save 40 miles of driving!) With a fair breeze and an incoming tide, two more sailing ships are passing through the Narrows. "Yon will be going up to Kircubbin, or maybe Ballydorn Quay" observes an old fellow admiring the car.

Driving on, soon Ardglass is reached, and, among the fishing vessels, a smart Dutch steamer is winching aboard barrels of herring. Almost round the corner, in picturesque Killough, one of Kelly's Belfast colliers is just leaving on the tide. "Where are you bound?" calls the harbour-master~ "Whitehaven to load for Ballywalter!" is the reply as the ropes splash into the water. As your party has booked lunch in the Slieve Donard Hotel, it's now all back on board and proudly your driver directs his modern machine towards Newcastle, passing through Dundrum with a prolonged toot on the long horn to warn some slow-moving horses and carts hauling cargo from the extensive quays, over which masts tower...

Of all the coastal counties in Ireland, I would suggest Co Down had the greatest number of commercial harbours, quays and open discharging beaches. Cork perhaps runs it close. In 1910, the supposed era of the idyll imagined above, I would estimate there were about 25 places where one could see cargo being handled (not counting the larger port of Newry). The reasons for this were
complex: the demands of a relatively populous and prosperous hinterland and its need for export channels for its farm produce; the incomplete railway system; the proximity of Scotland, northwest England and the Isle of Man; the sheltered nature of many of the coastal villages; the difficulty of moving heavy loads before the advent of the motor lorry. The most important truism in studying coastal trade is that, until relatively recently, it was always the case that heavy goods were moved by water from as near as possible to their point of origin to as near as possible to their destination. Thus it is wrong to think of navigating a small sailing ship through the rocky narrows of Strangford Lough and winding channels to Ballydorn quay as "difficult"; it was the only way things had ever been done. In this article, I want to study closely two similar, yet significantly contrasting, photographs to illustrate these and related points.

The view of Dundrum taken from the sands of Dundrum Inner Bay dates from about 1886, that of Portaferry from about 20 years later. At once it is evident that Dundrum is the more major port; the heyday of Portaferry had passed, the 1820s and 1830s when Gelston's shipyard produced oceangoing vessels, and emigrant ships left for North America. It was the railway connection, clearly apparent here, which boosted Dundrum harbour. RM Arnold, the railway enthusiast and historian, says in his amazingly detailed book "The Co Down" that in his opinion Dundrum was one of the most interesting railway-connected harbours in the British Isles. The sidings from the main Belfast-Newcastle line extending down the quays belonged to the East Downshire Steamship Co, a firm inseparable from the harbour story. They also owned a small fleet of ten-ton wagons, marked in their livery, with which they distributed coal to their depots at Newcastle, Banbridge, Downpatrick and Ballynahinch. The Marquis of Downshire was an original shareholder when the firm was founded around 1870, and the Downshire family both before and after this helped develop the harbour. The railway reached Dundrum in 1869. The sidings were useful for other cargoes, most notably the export of potatoes, but also for sand, which was obtained at low tide by barges near the bar at the Inner Bay mouth. (The East Downshire also in the 1890s operated their own deep-water sailing ship the Ruby, to import Canadian timber.)

And it is low tide when our intrepid photographer has ventured out, risking his weighty gear if he misjudges the incoming ripples. Good photographs of Dundrum harbour are rare, probably because there was no "other side" from which to obtain a decent view of the quays. They ran parallel to the Inner Bay, entered at high water by a long, narrow, winding channel, which required extreme skill by the pilot. The average depth at the bar at high water was 15 feet, which at once imposed a limitation on the size of ships which could use Dundrum and handicapped its future. Both the vessels here would draw about 12 feet loaded, but otherwise the great contrasts present an intriguing illustration of the development of coastal vessels.

The old sailing ship lying forlorn on the sand is the Grace of Newry, built at Lytham in Lancashire away back in 1818 and believed to have finished trading in the early 1880s. Her canvas and yards have gone. She is a real old-timer in hull shape, deep and full, with a broad transom stern and huge rudder. Later, more shapely hull forms evolved. It is questionable, of course, whether many of her original timbers survived, so repeatedly would repairs be needed over 70 years! Although it is easy to assume, owing to the large number of wrecks, that these vessels were risky, short-lived ventures, in fact many coasters achieved extraordinary veteran status. The Devon-owned Express of 1798 worked in three centuries, and nearer home the smack John and Samuel of Belfast was wrecked in 1885 on a voyage to Islay after 123 years' service!

The Grace and her ilk were being replaced by steam coasters from the 1870s on. The steamer at the quay is almost certainly the East Downshire's Lady Arthur Hill, completed by the somewhat forgotten Belfast yard of McIlwaine and Lewis in June 1885. Why was it that steam, used to propel passenger vessels since 1820, took so long to usurp the sailing coaster? The answer lies where technology and economics meet. Steamers were a bigger capital investment, requiring more crew and more expensive insurance and maintenance. Early cargo steamers had inefficient engines which needed such space for themselves and their coal that freight capacity was low. By the 1880s, sizeable coasters like the Lady Arthur Hill were just beginning to appear in numbers. She has a midships bridge (but no wheelhouse to shelter the helmsman), under which were several quite comfortable officers' cabins, one of which might be used for passengers. Greater ambitions had been held for Dundrum as a passenger port, for, as far as can be judged, it was an early incarnation of the East Downshire firm that in 1868 began a service from Belfast and Dundrum to the North British Railway harbour at Silloth, and Whitehaven. The fact that Dundrum was a strictly tidal harbour, however, made development of a regular passenger service awkward.

Another interesting feature of this photograph is the modern steam crane discharging the steamer, and all in all it is a fascinating glimpse of a smallish, but yet significant, railway port.

Despite being taken twenty years later, the view of Portaferry is actually far more rooted in tradition. No steam crane here, nor railway wagons; the steamer's winch and derrick supply
the attendant carts. Across the end of the quay lies the small ketch Uillage Belle, perhaps awaiting the ebb tide to carry her through the Narrows. Only the oldest residents would have recalled the days when Portaferry was a thriving port, days like 3 April 1828 when huge crowds gathered to bid bon voyage to the locally-owned Hibernia as she departed for Canada with 135 passengers.The more strategically placed ports of Newry and Belfast affected Portaferry's status, but until the 1920s its quay was often an animated scene with the staple cargoes coal in and potatoes out in season - the odd load destined for as far away as Lisbon. Much of the animation came from the characterful, antiquated little fleet of survivors like the Uillage Belle, which, in the absence of a rail link and before the coming of motor lorries in the 1920s traded leisurely to and from Belfast with farm produce for the city markets and general goods back for the Portaferry merchants McMullan or Elliott. Amazingly (to us!) it was routine for fifty or sixty tons of turnips or oats to be conveyed by sea from Kircubbin, Portaferry or Strangford to Belfast as late as 1922 or 23. In 1907, the Belfast port records show the Killyleagh-owned schooner Industry arriving with potatoes from Ballydorn (where the red ex lightship now is) - perhaps in our age 40 minutes drive for a heavy lorry!

The Uillage Belle belonged to the Drysdales, a seafaring family in Cloughey, where in fact she was wrecked in November 1916 after being blown ashore from her moorings. The steamer is impossible to identify but I would very tentatively suggest she is the Normand of Whitehaven. Life was hard in the little steamers - the Village Belle and her sisters could lie snugly windbound in a sheltered bay when the steamship owners expected a passage - but arrival at a small Irish port would often mean a walk to a friendly neighbouring farm for fresh eggs and milk, or maybe clean straw for the sailor's mattress, his "donkey's breakfast".

Although the railway never ran down the Ards Peninsula to Portaferry; plans were drawn up in 1907 for a new line, and in the collections of North Down Heritage ~Centre there is a tattered but intriguing folio from the office of LL Macassey and Son, the Belfast engineers. Things were changing quickly, though, and it was very shortly after this abortive scheme that Ireland's first regular motor bus service began, from Newtownards to Portaferry. Lorries began to appear in increasing numbers and the beautifully - named ketches and smacks disappeared - the Elliotts' Witch of the Wave, John Cully's Passing Cloud, John Clint's Day Star.

Now there is no cargo handled at any of these small places. The modern docks at Warrenpoint are the only commercial facilities in Co Down. Go to Dundrum and you can still risk getting your feet wet to gain the same vantage point as our photographer, but the view, until recently much the same, is now of a dramatic development of new houses on the harbour. Even the old BCDR warehouse of 1869, or a cut-down remnant of it, has been converted for apartments! Ships used
Dundrum until about 1985. The last collier came to Portaferry about 1972, but the berth latterly was half a mile southwards towards the open sea. The quay we see here gave way to the ferry slip. But at least a sea-going ship is welcomed occasionally at Cook Street jetty, when the excursion steamer Balmoral comes in from the Isle of Man.

When we left our Edwardian motoring enthusiasts, they were en route to the Slieve Donard Hotel, and of course that is very much still there, even though lunch is a little more than the two shillings and sixpence they would have been anticipating! But let's not start comparing today's prices - Captain William McClurg bought his schooner Industry, mentioned here, in 1901 for £285!

"... neither shall gallant ship pass thereby." (Isaiah 33.21)

Ian Wilson is the manager of North Down Heritage Centre, Bangor. His main research interest is Irish maritime history on which he has written, broadcast and lectured widely.

R Anderson and I Wilson, Ships and Quaysides of Ulster (Belfast 1992). R M Arnold, The County Down (Whitehead 1981). M McCaughan, Sailing the Seaways (Belfast 1991 ).