Barges
and the Port For
centuries the Hythe, up river from Wivenhoe, was Colchester’s cargo
port, th4 destiny for many Thames barges, and downstream Brighlingsea was
a fishing port and yachting centre. Both were larger than Wivenhoe’s
port. But there had been several small quays and warehouses in Wivenhoe in
the past, and some fish is still being landed. From 1966, however,
Gliksten’s – later Meredith’s - operated a much larger scale timber
port on the site of the former Wivenhoe Shipyard. This was succeeded in
1981 by the general purpose Wivenhoe Port Ltd., which was to close after
considerable friction in 1988: a story to which we return in our section
on `Narratives of Change’. Colchester’s Hythe port also closed in
2005. Barges
- Freda Annis Of course there were several men from the Hythe who used to go down - there was one man, in particular, used to cycle down to what we called the ‘Third Stile,’ and then the barge would come up that far, just past the iron bridge, and one of the men would come over in a boat and he would pilot it up the river. It was difficult to know the landmarks. Well, there was so much silt. They used to have a boat at the Hythe, the mud dredger, and it had sort of a circle, like a bucket, and they used to go up and down the river and take it up and then dump it on the marshes. So I’ve often wondered what’s happened because I wouldn’t think, if the barrier was shut, they’d ever get it open if it’s silted up like that. Bill Webb Then, in those
days, Thames barges used to sail up to Colchester and they would quite
often tack up here past Wivenhoe, and a number of times I’d be out in
the yard, and stand on the rail there and just watch them tack, and they
were brilliant, those skippers. They could come across that river, and
they could tack, and the stern would come round like that and miss us by a
hair’s breadth! Brilliant! At one time, they used to bring horse manure
from the horse buses in London, for fertiliser on the farms, and take hay
back for the horses. They used to call them ‘stackies.’ There was a
lot of those barges around, even during the War. The
demise of the harbour - Peter
Hill There was more than
one occasion when the people who operated the barrier were either late in
bringing the gates together, particularly at night – because it’s not
a manned barrier, so they would have to call people out. And eventually,
they worked out that they should be in touch with some monitoring station
in Peterborough, that could give a more accurate estimation of what’s
likely to happen with wind and tide, and so there was more notice given to
the EA people, and they would get a team of people then to go and close
the gates. And they were leaving it closer to the last minute - I can’t
remember the exact figures now but when the tide had risen so high, then
it was only then that it was too late to close the barrier and they got
caught out. So we took the issue up with them and they agreed to revise
their practices. But I guess that was a regular feature for people living
on the Quay, during the Seventies and Eighties, all the frontages had
sandbags in the front of their houses, and the water would regularly come
two or three feet over the Quay. And it was very eerie in those days, as
well. You could be standing in the Rose and Crown, having a drink, and
then suddenly this grey shadow of a big vessel would go past the window.
It was fun, in its own way. And when the harbour
was closed, actually by Act of Parliament in the 1990s there would have
been something like three to four hundred shipping movements on the Colne
– that would be vessels up to about 1,200 tonnes, coastal vessels – so
that was a regular part of the feature of Wivenhoe. There’s some
wonderful pictures that the Nottage have still got - photographs taken of
the ship launches and things, sometimes the vessel being stuck on the
river bank on the other side, there are one or two stories like that
kicking around from those days. Yes, so that’s a sad change. Colchester
had been losing money on the harbour operations for years. Costs around
the harbour were greater than the revenues it was able to charge, so I’m
not sure whether it was just the Borough Council, I think it was some
bigger legislation that it shouldn’t have been the responsibility of the
Borough Council ratepayer to subsidise the harbour. And then the number of
vessels started to dwindle with the loss of Wivenhoe Port here. There were
probably one or two ships a week, at least, coming into the harbour
because of the Wivenhoe Port, so the days were numbered, so it took an Act
of Parliament to extinguish an historic right, I guess, of vessels to come
up the river. And the Borough Council had to provide pilotage and manage
the river, and provide all the buoyage down the river, and dredging –
the cost of dredging was enormous – so it was a river that was slowly
silting up.
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