NEW HARBOUR AT HOLYHEAD.
June 17th, 1880.
To possess the best possible packet service between England and Ireland is a matter of national importance. In the old days of sailing ships the perils and uncertainties of the passage across the Channel were notorious. When steamships carried mails and passengers, and when the bridging of the Menai Straits for railway traffic had been achieved, it was necessary to provide improved harbour accommodation, and other works, both for convenience and safety, at Holyhead. These works included a spacious harbour, and a breakwater securing the additional space of a sheltered roadstead. The length of the North Breakwater is nearly 8000 feet. The harbour and deep-water sheltered roadstead are together between six and seven hundred acres in extent. It took twenty-five years to carry out the design, at a cost of about £1,500,000. This outlay included the works and buildings for Government use in the postal service. The engineer-in-chief was Mr. James Rennel, and on his death, in 1856, Mr. afterwards Sir John Hawkshaw.
To celebrate the completion of the works, the Prince of Wales visited Holyhead on the 19th of August, 1873, when he declared the Breakwater complete and the Harbour of Refuge open. The Duke of Edinburgh, Master of the Trinity House, Sir Frederick Arrow, Deputy Master, and many distinguished representatives of various departments of the public service assisted at the ceremony. Near the Lighthouse a gun-metal plate records the fact that the Breakwater, "commenced in 1845, was on August 19th, 1873, declared complete, by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales," in whose public life the proceedings of the day form a memorable event.
But there was yet much to be done for the Anglo-Irish route, viâ Holyhead. The communication had so increased that the North Western Railway Company found enlarged harbour accommodation a necessity for the benefit of their own traffic.
It is not often that Royal sanction is given to the undertakings of shareholding companies; but the new harbour at Holyhead, while it was constructed at the cost and for the benefit of the London and North Western Railway Company, has so much importance for commerce and traffic, as to make it a national object. The Prince of Wales was accordingly asked to inaugurate the new harbour, and a large number of distinguished and official persons were invited by the Directors to be present on the occasion. At the luncheon, the Chairman of the Company proposed the usual loyal toasts, and the Prince of Wales responded in the following terms:—
"Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen,—I am deeply flattered by the kind manner in which this toast has been proposed and received in this large and distinguished assemblage. I feel it a matter of the greatest pleasure, and at the same time the greatest pride, to be among you here to-day. It is a matter of pride, ladies and gentlemen, to be connected with this Principality, and it has afforded me the greatest pleasure to accept the invitation of the Chairman and Directors of the London and North Western Company to inaugurate this new harbour. It is not the first time, as you are aware, that I have had occasion to come to Holyhead. Seven years ago I had the pleasure of inaugurating your breakwater, which I am glad to see is now successfully terminated and is of the greatest possible utility. The sunshine we have enjoyed to-day may be taken as a good augury for the success of the London and North Western Railway Company in their new undertaking. This undertaking has cost them a very large sum of money, but it will, I am sure, be of the greatest benefit to commerce, and will tend to make the Holyhead route still more than it is a connecting link between England and Ireland. Before sitting down I have a toast to propose, which I feel sure you will drink with the greatest pleasure; it is 'The Health of the Chairman, Mr. Moon, and Success and Prosperity to the London and North Western Railway Company.' I also desire to declare the new harbour open."
Both on land and water there were many loyal demonstrations; and gentlemen representing all the leading railway companies, French and Irish, as well as English and Welsh, were entertained by the Directors of the London and North Western.
The opening sentences of a leading article in the Times on the following day, form a tribute due to the Prince for his part in the ceremony:—
"The representative duties of Royalty in this country are heavier than the private functions the hardest-worked Englishman has to perform. Only the other day we were recording the part played by the Prince of Wales in an ecclesiastical pageant in Cornwall. On Wednesday he was introducing a foreign Sovereign to the Corporation of London. Straight from that ceremonial he had to take flight across the island to open formally the new harbour at Holyhead. In these scenes and a hundred like them a Prince's functions cannot be discharged satisfactorily unless he be at once an impersonation of Royal State and, what is harder still, his own individual self. He must act his public character as if he enjoyed the festival as much as any of the spectators. He must be able to stamp a national impress upon the solemnity, yet mark its local and particular significance. In presenting a King of the Hellenes to the citizens at the Guildhall the Prince of Wales had to remember that his guest and the guest of the City was both a near and dear relative and the embodiment of an illustrious cause. In laying the first stone of a cathedral at Truro he had to be both Duke of Cornwall and the Heir of England. In presiding yesterday at Holyhead he had to recollect the provincial associations connected with the title he bears, and not forget the imperial importance of a work which creates a new link between two great divisions of the United Kingdom. That he achieved his task successfully was a matter of course. No apprehension ever touches those who are present at a scene of which the Prince of Wales is the centre, that he may chance to chill by lack of interest, to choose his words of admiration inopportunely, or to praise without sympathy. The work he came, as it were, to sanction by national approbation is a grand engineering undertaking, and is grander yet in its probable moral consequences. The Prince of Wales understood and expressed its significance from both aspects."