Steamships and their story

by E. Keble Chatterton

At an earlier stage we saw that the cross-channel steamship service owed its inauguration almost exclusively to that shrewd Scotsman, Napier, who, after devoting a great amount of patient study to the subject, evolved the Rob Roy. But we must not omit to give credit also to others whose work in this connection has been of such historic importance. From about the second decade of the eighteenth century there had been a service between Holyhead and Dublin, carried on by means of sailing packets, as there was, indeed, between Scotland and Ireland, as well as England and the Continent. Then had come the first steam service when the Talbot, of 156 tons, built in 1818 at Port Glasgow, for David Napier, began running in the following year between Holyhead and Dublin. In 1819, also, was inaugurated the Liverpool and Dublin service, and in 1823 one of the oldest steamship companies still in existence, the Dublin Steam Packet Company, was formed. It must be recollected that the journey between London and Dublin was a long and tedious one, for there was no railway, and considerable sums of money were expended in order to improve the road between Holyhead and the English capital. The sailing packets took on the average about twenty hours to cross the Irish Channel. The Royal William, already alluded to when we discussed the first Atlantic steamers, was one of the early steamships of this City of Dublin fleet. In 1836, when George Stephenson proposed the construction of the Chester and Holyhead Railway, he intended that the company should also provide ships between the latter port and Ireland, but the various steamship companies opposed this until 1848. The London to Liverpool railway was opened in 1838, and so, since the Liverpool to Dublin route was the quickest way to get from London to Ireland, Holyhead was given the cold shoulder for the next ten years. But when the continuous railway was opened between London and Holyhead, the popularity of the Welsh port returned, and the directors and principal shareholders of the Chester and Holyhead Company, who had formed themselves into a small independent company, ordered four new vessels, the Cambria, the Anglia, the Hibernia, and the Scotia. Of these the first [is illustrated herewith]. These ships were 207 feet long, 26 feet wide, and 14 feet deep, with a draught of 8 feet 10 inches. They had a gross tonnage of 589, carried 535 passengers, and possessed the remarkable speed of 14 knots. Instead of the slow passages of the old sailing packets these four ships lowered the average voyage to 3 hours 34 minutes. In 1859 this Chester-Holyhead railway was amalgamated with the London and North Western Railway, and in 1863 the latter introduced a new type of craft, with the same speed as before, but of 700 tons. Both a day and a night service were presently instituted, and this service has continued to be one of the most efficient and the fastest of all the cross-channel ferries from this country. Of four new vessels which were built for the Holyhead-Kingstown service in 1860 we may mention the Leinster. She was a large vessel for those times, with a displacement of 2,000 tons, and constructed of iron. [The illustration facing this page] shows a capital model of her engines, which were of the oscillating type, and since we have previously described this kind it is hardly necessary to deal with them now, further than to remark that they gave the ship a speed of nearly 18 knots.

Coming now further south, it will be remembered that Napier’s Rob Roy, which had first plied between Greenock and Belfast in 1818, was in the following year transferred to the Dover and Calais route, and was thus the first regular steamship to open the mail and passenger service between these ports. This was followed for a long time by other steam “ferries,” some of which were Government mail packets, and others were privately owned. The General Steam Navigation Company, which had been formed in 1820, and commenced its steam coastal trade, was not long before it had inaugurated a service between London and Hamburg, and by 1847 it had steamships running between London and the following ports:—Hamburg, Rotterdam, Ostend, Leith, Calais, Havre, as well as from Brighton to Dieppe, and Dover to Boulogne. These were all paddle-steamers until the screw was introduced in 1854. In April of 1844 their paddle-steamer Menai was advertised to leave Shoreham Harbour, calling at Brighton Chain Pier—or rather Brighthelmstone, as it was then still known—and thence proceeding to Dieppe. She was thus the first channel steamer to run between these places.

It was not until the old stage-coach had given way to the railroad that the numbers of travellers between England and the Continent increased. By June of 1843 the South Eastern Railway had reached Folkestone, and in February of the following year it had also joined Dover. The London, Chatham, and Dover Line was of later date, and did not reach Dover until 1860, where they were able to put to the best use their capable fleet of passenger boats which steamed to Calais. But in 1845 the South Eastern Railway had, like the Chester and Holyhead Line, formed themselves into a separate company, to run a line of steam packets, owing to the fact that the successors to the Rob Roy were deemed unsatisfactory, and endless objections were made by the complaining passengers who reluctantly crossed the choppy waters of the English Channel. Previous to this date the South Eastern Railway were wont to hire steamships to carry their passengers between England and the Continent to Boulogne, Calais, and Ostend. When their line had joined up Dover they started running from there to Calais with their own boats in two hours, twenty-eight minutes, calling at Folkestone on the way for twenty-eight minutes. The first of these steamboats were the Princess Maud and the Princess Mary. The run from Dover to Ostend took four and a half hours.

In 1848 the Admiralty, which had been responsible for the steam mail packets service (as also we have seen earlier in this book they had charge of the transatlantic mails), handed over their charge to the Post Office. But neither of these Governmental branches was able to make a success of this, and after a time the Post Office withdrew their mail packets and in 1854 put the carrying out to contract. A Mr. Churchyard was accepted as the contractor, and his agreement continued until 1862. It will be recollected that two years previous to the latter date the London, Chatham and Dover Company had connected their line to Dover, and they obtained the contract in succession to Churchyard for carrying the mails from Dover to Calais. At the same time the South Eastern Railway Company withdrew their steamboat service to Folkestone. It should be mentioned that the General Steam Navigation Company had also withdrawn from this route owing to the competition on the part of the railway companies, who were in a superior position by being able to run their passengers on both their own railways and their own steamboats.

The general character of these early cross-channel steam-craft was very similar to that of the Cambria. Some of the steamboats employed on this Dover-Calais route have been marked by the possession of exceptional features. It was in 1875 that the Bessemer was designed with the object of making the dreaded passage across the Straits of Dover less disagreeable and free from the infliction of sea-sickness. To this end she was given a unique apparatus which was to swing with the motion of the vessel, and in such a manner that the passengers would always be kept on a level, however much the ship might roll. She was built double-ended, so that she would not have to be turned round when she reached the French port. But emphatically she resulted in a complete failure, for not only was this ingenious deck found to be unworkable, and had to be fixed, but the Bessemer collided with Calais Pier, and succeeded in knocking away about fifty yards thereof.

THE “ATALANTA” (1841).

From a Painting. By permission of the London and South Western Railway Co.

THE “LYONS” (1856).