Paddle steamer Waverley

I was sitting at my table/desk late one recent afternoon, working on my laptop, when I flicked my eyes from screen to window and noticed an unusual vessel chugging up the Bristol Channel (I am lucky to live in an apartment building on a clifftop overlooking the Channel). It was instantly recognisable: the paddle steamer Waverley. 

I went immediately to the Waverley Excursions website to check the Waverley’s timetable and was delighted to see that the paddle steamer would be in the local area, cruising to various locations around the Bristol Channel, viewing the local islands and sailing along the coastlines of England and Wales, for the following couple of weeks.

I checked when she would be in the local area and, the following Sunday morning, went down to Penarth Pier to watch the paddle steamer depart for her daily cruise and get these photos. You might wonder whether I booked a cruise but no; I’m a very poor sailor so the prospect of spending a couple of hours, even worse a whole day, on a boat is my worst nightmare. I do like to look, though. 

The excursions website proudly announces that, in 1970, the Waverley became ‘the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer’. Built in the world-renowned shipyards on the River Clyde in 1946, for the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER), the Waverley began her working life on 16 June 1947, cruising the waterways of south-western Scotland, from Rothesay to Loch Goil and Loch Long, into Loch Fyne and the Kyles of Bute, and later out to the Isle of Arran, and up the Clyde to Glasgow city centre. 

Since then, the paddle steamer Waverley has been registered as part of Britain’s National Historic Fleet ‘as being a vessel of pre-eminent national significance’. I first saw her over 40 years ago when I lived for a couple of years in Glasgow. At that stage, the Waverley was just beginning the next phase of her life, as the ’history’ page on the National Historic Fleet website explains:

WAVERLEY was sold [for £1, essentially a gift] on 8 August 1974 to the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society and refitted for the WAVERLEY Steam Navigation Company and her livery was returned to the LNER colour scheme of red, white and black. In 1975, she re-entered service on the Clyde, sailing at weekends from Glasgow and in mid-week from Ayr. In 1977, she spent a week on excursions from Liverpool and the success of this led to over a month being spent on the South Coast in the following year. In 1981, she was fitted with a new boiler and embarked on her first full season of Round Britain cruising, with the peak summer weeks spent back on the Clyde.

Between 1990 and 2003 the Waverley underwent a series of refits and restorations, getting new paddle wheels and a new boiler, as well as having her timber refurbished and her paint job restored to her LNER colours. All this has prepared the Waverley for her current busy schedule of cruises in various locations around the British coast. Check the excursions website if you’re a better sailor than me and fancy a unique paddle steamer experience.

Portland: Mulberry Harbour

I’m not particularly au fait with the names and/or functions of the various structures you can find around ports and harbours, and this hunk of what looked like concrete, rearing up from the waters of Portland harbour just offshore from Portland Castle, looks rather odd, too tall to function as a dock, too obvious to hold anything secret, lacking any obvious means by which to lift goods – in short, a mystery. Enter Professor Google … 

According to the Historic England website, these are two ‘Phoenix Caissons, sections of the structure known as a Mulberry Harbour designed for, and used in, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The harbour was a part of the vital support structure behind the successful operation’. It goes on: 

The ‘Mulberries’ were … pre-fabricated concrete harbours … 4,500 men were involved in their construction, and each ‘Mulberry’ was intended to be roughly equivalent in area to Dover Harbour and be capable of handling 12,000 tons of supplies daily. They consisted of a number of exotically code-named components: ‘Phoenix’ (a hollow concrete caisson); ‘Corncob’ (a sunken blockship); ‘Whales’ (floating pierheads); ‘Spuds’ (extendable steel legs); ‘Beetles’ (concrete pontoon barges); and ‘Bombardons’ (steel mooring buoys).

The Grade II-listed structures now present in Portland harbour are two of the ten ‘Phoenix’ caissons that were ‘towed to Portland in 1946 and were positioned to the west of the harbour to protect berthed vessels from prevailing westerly winds.’ In case you’re wondering what happened to the other eight, they were ‘sent by the Admiralty to the Netherlands to repair and block breaches in the dykes, following a great storm in January 1953’. 

If the structures themselves are not fascinating enough for you, on top of the caissons, there are six sculptures representing some of the crucial people involved on D-Day: two British sailors, two American G.I.s, and two dockyard workers. As you might imagine given the nature of the caissons, the manufacture and installation of these sculptures is an engaging story in its own right, and it is well worth reading the intriguing tale on the website of those responsible, Dead Walk Designs. The website also includes a gallery of the sculptures up close, as well as a video of the whole process – highly recommended viewing!

Weymouth: D-Day embarkation

When I visit Weymouth, as I seem to be doing now on a regular basis, it’s primarily for the wildlife, the birds, butterflies and dragonflies that are either resident or passing through on their Spring and Autumn migrations, and so almost every day I walk from my guest house on the front along to RSPB Lodmoor and back. Along the way I pass poignant reminders of the importance of this seaside town during the Second World War. 

One of those reminders is this sign, placed as you can see at the bottom of a flight of steps that leads from Greenhill Road down to Brunswick Lane at the edge of the beach. 

The text on the sign reads:

Rangers Way 2
At the start of June 1944, the 2nd Battalion US Rangers descended these steps en masse before lining up on the Promenade. They then marched to the Pavilion to board the boats for the crossing of the Channel to Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, France.
"We may never see their like again."

 And, one afternoon, when I was returning to my guest house from a walk around RSPB Radipole via a meandering exploration of the older parts of Weymouth, I found another similar reminder of this town’s strategic importance for the embarkation of soldiers heading to France 82 years ago. 

This harbourside plaque reads:

D-Day Embarkation June 1944

Weymouth was one of the main embarkation points for troops assembled in South Dorset in preparation for the invasion of France during World War II. The thousands of troops who embarked through Weymouth included the US 1st Infantry Division, who landed on Omaha Beach and the 2nd Ranger Battalion who successfully disabled the heavily fortified German artillery battery at Pointe du Hoc. In the days leading up to the 6th June landings this area in front of the old 1908 Pavilion was a bustle of activity with men and supplies being loaded onto landing craft. Over the following year more than half a million American servicemen and 150,000 vehicles would pass through Weymouth and Portland to the beaches of Normandy.

As the Rangers Way sign’s quotation of General Dwight Eisenhower’s famous statement says, ‘We may never see their like again.’