The People's Liners - Britain's Lost Pleasure Fleets Timeshift

THREE BLASTS ON THE WHISTLE

BELL RINGS

# Somewhere beyond the sea

# Somewhere... #

They were once as much a part of the great British seaside

as fish and chips.

Pleasure steamers linking industrial cities to seaside resorts,

treating ordinary people to all the trappings

of a glamorous ocean voyage on day trips along the British coast.

It was a fantastic experience

to be on board in your best clothes sailing

to magical places that you could only dream of

from the centre of the city.

These tourists suddenly found that they had effectively

a baby cruise liner on which they could go for the day

and they had all the luxury

that you could expect on a much, much larger ship.

The excursion steamer was the first form of mass transport,

creating a market for travelling for pleasure

long before the arrival of railways.

More than anything, what they did was to democratise luxury.

With fares aimed at the working family,

once aboard, the emphasis was on style and service.

The lower deck, there was an atmosphere

almost akin to a London hotel.

They offered the latest in entertainment.

Onboard that day the star attraction was the sex symbol of the day.

At a time when drinking hours were highly regulated ashore,

at sea, anything went.

Yes, and pretty hairy sights on the way back at ten o'clock at night,

I can assure you.

High teas on the high seas.

They brought the adventure of an ocean voyage,

whilst rarely venturing out of sight of land.

Open to all, they were the people's liners.

It's the early 1950s

and Britain's inshore steamer fleets are eager for a business,

offering coastal voyages from seaside piers

that got you back in time for tea.

Ashore is an era of post-war austerity.

The offer afloat is a taste of luxury.

The steamers operated from ports all around Britain...

..but the greatest concentration of steamers and piers

had was been along the Clyde Riviera and on the Bristol Channel.

The Bristol Channel was crisscrossed with excursion routes,

operated by large paddle steamers

each carrying between 500 and 1,000 passengers.

After the Second World War, they were all operated by one company.

Everybody knew P&A Campbell, the White Funnel Fleet as it used to be called.

They were a very, very big organisation.

We are probably looking at something about the equivalent of First Bus

or the local regional, one of the regional, big regional airlines.

It was the household name.

If you wanted to go out for a trip, you went on Campbell's.

With the World War still a recent memory,

a weary public in flight from drabness did indeed spend a day

the White Funnel way,

rediscovering the joys of the seaside.

# Fly me to the Moon

# and let me play among the stars. #

Leaving the industry of Bristol and the South Wales coalfields,

they voyaged across the Channel,

the Bristol Channel that is,

to the resorts of the Devon, Somerset and Welsh coasts.

Most people didn't have a car in the '50s,

so the trip to Ilfracombe on the boat,

that was where the holiday started.

To a lot of South Walians, it was like, obviously,

a different world.

Some of these miners obviously could have been in the pit one day

and the next day they were in sunny Ilfracombe,

maybe having a cream tea.

Maybe having a lobster tea, even.

And there was this sense of, well, they were going away.

They were going abroad.

They were going to England.

My childhood memories of the initial trips

I made on these ships was from Newport to Weston-super-Mare.

Without fail, we went there every year for our week's holiday.

We always went on the steamer as a family.

Mother, father, three, four, sometimes five youngsters.

Staying, then, in B&Bs

and the type of place then was you went out at nine in the morning

and you didn't come back until six or seven o'clock at night,

regardless of the weather.

Spending days on the beach.

Visiting the grand pier and its attractions.

The donkey rides on the beach.

The ice cream cones capped with chocolate sauce

which set immediately it hit the ice cream.

Steamers were far more than a mode of holiday transport.

Having disembarked their first load,

typically holiday-makers staying for the week,

they would then welcome day-trippers up the gangplank

for a jaunt along the coast and back.

In an age of limited holiday choices and leisure opportunities,

an excursion by steamer was a thrilling ride,

the holiday highlight.

From the deck, you might be on passage from Cardiff to Weston.

Down below, though, you could be on a transatlantic liner.

The inside was very luxurious.

Big staircases going down

and seats around

and a lot of upholstered seats

in moquette and that sort of thing.

Oh, yes.

Lovely furnishings.

Some people have tried to draw a parallel between ocean liners

and paddle steamers, which you might think far-fetched

but actually there are comparisons,

as it were. The People's liners, the paddle steamers that the

average person could travel on were hugely luxurious.

A taste of that refinement could be found in the restaurant.

Luncheons included salmon, hams and roasts

served by immaculate uniformed waiters.

Neil O'Brien's father was a chief steward.

Neil spent school holidays bunked down in his cabin

and so experienced this elegance first-hand.

Tables were immaculate in the dining saloon

with the actual flowers and all the cutlery and condiments.

And the restaurant was silver service.

They were renowned even after the war,

P&A Campbell, for their food.

However refined your palate,

dining on a steamer came with a sense of occasion.

Fish and chips for high tea.

In a saloon. My goodness.

Only grown men went into saloons

and I was never allowed to eat fish and chips.

So this was a great thrill.

The thrills didn't stop there.

On some trips entertainment was thrown in, too.

And it wasn't just any old entertainment.

Like their upmarket ocean-going cousins,

these people's liners showcased the stars of the day.

The entertainers were quite exceptional.

I remember

on one occasion

even Shirley Bassey was on board.

# I've got you under my skin. #

I don't know whether she would like to remember that

in her star-spangled future

but she was there.

Shirley Bassey wasn't the only celebrity to grace the decks.

Campbell's used to do a lot of showboats.

Summer showboats, midsummer showboats

and I can remember Easter 1956 they did, er,

they did an Easter showboat

and onboard that day the star attraction

was the, well, it was the sex symbol of the day

in the UK anyway

and her name was, it was Britain's answer to Jayne Mansfield then,

and her name was Sabrina.

Oh, she was a sensation.

Sabrina came on board the Glen Gower for the day.

Caused all sorts of mayhem, havoc.

People really enjoying her presence

and, if I can remember,

even the crewmembers were enjoying her presence as well.

The captain suddenly noticed that the ship had slowed down

and lost speed.

He looked round and found that all of his stokers

from the stoke hold

had sneaked up on deck to get an eyeful.

That evening, we were...

I stayed on board the Glen Gower in Cardiff with Dad,

with my father,

and prior to this

I made it known to the crew,

I said to a couple of members, I thought it would be great

if maybe Sabrina could kiss me goodnight.

You've got to remember, I'm only eight years of age now.

Do you know, she actually came down into the dining saloon

and she did kiss me goodnight.

My school friends, they never believed me when I did eventually

get back to school and told them Sabrina had kissed me goodnight.

But I did have some evidence, you see,

which I still have today.

And that was actually a photograph

that Sabrina gave me,

signed, "To Neil. Love, Sabrina."

"I had this Easter 1956 on the White Funnel Fleet. Neil O'Brien."

A thing that I will always remember.

On the cusp of major social change,

British society in the early 1960s was still fairly in insular.

People grew up, married

and settled in the same locality as their parents.

Around the Bristol Channel though,

the steamers helped to broaden horizons,

enabling connections across the water,

relationships blossoming in their wake.

If you mingle about in Swansea

and in Ilfracombe,

you'll find that there is an exchange of personnel, as it were.

People met and married.

Some settled in Swansea,

others settled in Ilfracombe.

One Sunday evening, we'd just backed out of Ilfracombe.

I had just put my ropes away.

I spotted this very attractive young lady sat with a much older

lady drinking tea in the lounge.

I caught her eye and she caught mine.

I went in and asked them.

And this girl was on my mind.

I went back out to the lounge, sat with them,

introduced myself and offered them a cup of coffee.

"Oh, yes, please."

I subsequently sat with them for most of the way back up Channel

and made a date for the following Thursday.

We got married three and a half years later

and we are still married now

and have produced...

How many children?

HE LAUGHS

The steamers not only helped to create families,

there was a sense of family on board, too.

Robin Wall's father was a Purser on the Campbell Fleet.

One thing that I'll say about the Campbell's family,

and I don't mean the Campbell's themselves, I mean their workforce.

Half of them I called "Uncle," although no relation.

Whenever we stepped aboard the ships we were treated like royalty.

Robin would sometimes stay aboard and lend a hand,

mucking in with the crew,

some of whom acted as childminders.

My dad would be wanting to go ashore for a pint so he'd say,

"Just go down and give Mr Munden a hand polishing the engine."

You know, "Yeah, all right, Dad. Thank you very much."

And I'd be there, a ten-year-old, working away while he had his pint.

Robin eventually joined Campbell's himself,

becoming a White Funnel man in 1960.

As an ordinary seaman,

he found himself working alongside his father.

And days afloat on the Bristol Channel

often meant nights ashore in South Wales.

It was wonderful. We were based mainly in Cardiff.

And all the delights of Tiger Bay and stuff like this

as a 16-year-old kid.

Cardiff's Tiger Bay was one of Britain's first

multiracial neighbourhoods.

By the early 1960s there were over 50 nationalities living there.

I never saw a black face when I was a little boy.

And we walked through Cardiff and you hardly see a white face

and all these guys knew my dad.

"Hi there, Mr Wall." And we'd walk up and I thought this... you could... the smell...

And a Chinaman playing mah-jong, you know, and, oh.

I thought, if this is going to sea, I'm going to have a bit of this.

It was wonderful.

In the predominantly white society of the time,

Robin's nights out in Tiger Bay

were a foretaste of multicultural Britain.

Also this reflected in the crew members as well, on board.

They came from all races and all walks of life.

It had a profound effect on me.

Very much part of the communities

they served around the Bristol Channel,

the White Funnel ships were witness to a changing society

ahead of their times in many ways.

Excursion steamers were also agents for change

right around the British coast

and had been since the first steamboat arrived on the Clyde

in the early 19th century.

Freed from the vagaries of the wind,

this first passenger-carrying steamship, The Comet,

cast off in 1812.

The Comet is the equivalent of Concorde

and within a decade

there are dozens of boats plying from the big cities.

The advent of the steamship was a transport revolution,

predating the first steam railway by almost 20 years.

Prior to this steam engines had been housed in industrial buildings

so, for many people, the early steamboats were the first time

they'd experienced the wonder of steam.

The excursion steamer makes tourism.

People start to get into the habit of travelling for pleasure.

Within six years of The Comet's maiden voyage

steamboat operators were advertising sightseeing trips

and trying to attract the widest possible clientele on board.

The democratisation of the steamboat

and later the railway,

comes from the fact that they enabled all to travel,

whereas previously travel in any sort of comfort

had been the prerogative of the rich.

We like to think that Thomas Cook, a former Baptist preacher

and active member of the Temperance Society,

invented the excursion with his railway tours,

but he was, in fact, following in the steamboat's wake.

The steamboats in Scotland invent excursions.

The railways follow suit and Thomas Cook, of course,

picks up this idea in 1841.

Ironically, his day trips are

designed as part of the Temperance Movement,

to give people an alternative to wasting Saturday in the pub.

In Scotland, it works the other way round.

What we get in Scotland is the Sunday steamer

being used as a way to drink.

In Scotland, the steamer actually sabotages temperance.

In England, the railway makes temperance with Cook.

What happened is that in Scotland

there is legislation passed in the 1850s

that says you can only get a drink on a Sunday

if you are a genuine traveller.

And within two weeks of this legislation

an enterprising steamboat proprietor was organising what nowadays

we call booze cruises down the Clyde.

So popular was this Sunday pastime,

it helped coin a piece of Scottish slang,

in which "steaming" means an advanced state of intoxication.

And that's why in Glasgow patois

steaming is steaming.

The boats meant drink.

A favoured destination for Sabbath steaming

was Rothesay on the Isle of Bute,

to some the Blackpool of the Clyde.

You got, on a Sunday, this mob of happy holiday-makers

swilling off the boats - and it's no accident that the biggest urinal

in Scotland is on the pier at Rothesay -

and then spending a merry Sunday

perhaps drinking a little more,

going to the beach, stripping off, swimming,

all the things that would offend middle-class proprieties.

So the steamers are really an agent of mass working-class tourism.

They are called by one local MP the cheap trams of the working class.

The Victorian and Edwardian era was the high tide for Clyde steamers.

There were probably around 30, 40, 50 paddle steamers

beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century,

all competing for the business,

all with a different colour of funnel,

different colour of hull, all with different things on board -

a hairdresser, a post office,

some that sold no alcohol, the famous Ivanhoe.

So they all had their point of difference

but the steamer that could race to the pier

and be first at the pier was the one that got all the passengers,

and that was the one that got all the glory.

MUSIC: Song Of The Clyde by Kenneth McKellar

Chasing the desires of the day, steamers got faster,

larger and ever more luxurious, each with a devoted following.

A 1930s flyer was the Jeanie Deans, the most commodious, the Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary and the Lucy Ashton were the ones that we travelled on.

We always hoped it would be the Queen Mary because it was plush.

She was big, she was fast.

She still had a residue of her pre-war grandeur.

People thought of her as a liner rather than

a steamship on the River Clyde.

She was a cut above the rest.

On her daily trip, the ten o'clock from Glasgow to Dunoon

and Rothesay, Queen Mary would pass the Clyde shipyards,

where Cunard's latest luxury liner was taking shape.

The directors of the Cunard company decided to build a new

and vast liner for the transatlantic and call her Queen Victoria.

And they felt they had to have Royal approval

and they went to see King George V

and they said that they were going to name her Queen,

at which point he is reputed to have butted in and said, "How wonderful!

"My wife, Queen Mary, will be quite delighted."

So they never got to tell them that it was going to be Victoria,

and they were far too embarrassed to say anything.

They had the accept the Royal will.

When they got back to headquarters, they discovered,

to their horror, that there

already was a Queen Mary plying her legitimate life on the Clyde.

And so they came cap in hand, the board of Cunard, to the board of

the Caledonian Steam Packet Company

and begged to have the name Queen Mary.

And it was graciously agreed that the one on the Clyde would

become Queen Mary II.

She would have a wonderful huge painting of Queen Mary

in the foreground gifted by the Cunard company.

Dealt with as equals by the owners of the world's fastest luxury liner,

the Clyde steamers were at the height of their prestige.

Then war was declared.

Within days, excursion steamers all around the coast were being

requisitioned by the Admiralty, and by early 1940,

some 30 vessels had swapped deckchairs for armaments

and were engaged in one of the most hazardous naval duties of the war.

Paddle steamers made superb minesweepers

because they were shallow draft so they could often float over

minefields where other ships would hit the mine.

They were fast, they had broad decks

and they were ideal for minesweeping kit to be carried.

Fundamentally,

what was done was a wire was paid out each side of the ship over

the stern attached to a paravane, which was a torpedo-shaped float.

The idea was that the wire would cut the mooring

lines of the floating mines

and they would float to the surface where they'd then be

sunk by gunfire or rifle fire from the deck of the steamer.

But if that was dangerous, it was nothing compared to what

they steamed into at perhaps Britain's most desperate hour.

'May 26th, 1940.

'The beaches at Dunkirk and the beginning of an eight-day

'saga that prevented the complete annihilation of the Allied Armies.'

With the British Expeditionary Force cornered on the beaches

of Dunkirk, the call went out for any ships to rescue them.

The minesweeping flotillas were very quickly called in

and told to make for Dunkirk.

Amongst the crowds awaiting rescue was army supply driver Jim Chivers.

We got dive-bombed from Stukas and that.

We were just lucky we didn't get hit or anything.

We just lay waiting there, eating some blooming biscuits

and bully beef or something or other, whatever was going around,

until we got the orders, you know, to go up to the boat.

That boat was the Medway Queen.

I went down below and I just flaked out.

The Medway Queen, yeah, I'm definitely thankful to her

cos I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.

And she's often been called the Heroine Of Dunkirk

because she took more people off the beaches than any other paddle

steamer, and possibly more than any other merchant ship.

She made seven crossings, no change of crew,

and carried over 3,500 people off the beaches.

The day after Churchill's "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech,

Yorkshire-born writer JB Priestley, author

of An Inspector Calls, broadcast the first of his BBC radio postscripts.

'We have known them and laughed at them,

'these fussy little steamers, all our lives.

'We have called them the Shilling Sicks.

'We have watched them load

'and unload their crowds of holiday passengers -

'the gents full of high spirits and bottled beer, the ladies

'eating pork pies, the children sticky with peppermint rock.'

'But they were called out of that world.

'Yes, these Brighton Belles

'and Brighton Queens left that innocent foolish world of theirs

'to sail into the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines,

'torpedoes, machine-gun fire, to rescue our soldiers.

'And our great-grandchildren,

'when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory

'out of defeat and then swept on to victory,

'may also learn how the little holiday steamers made

'an excursion to hell and came back glorious.'

Of the 50+ paddle steamers called up for service, 17 were sunk throughout

hostilities, six of those at Dunkirk and a further 11 had to be scrapped.

So the end of the war in 1945 brought the urgent need for new steamers.

With government compensation to fund new builds,

most steamer companies looked to the future...

MUSIC: Tomorrow by Johnny Brandon with The Phantoms

..and chose efficient diesel motor propeller ships.

Emblems of post-war modernity, they embraced the technology

and design of the day.

But on the Clyde and Bristol Channel,

the two busiest steamer regions, operators opted for what they knew.

Four brand-new paddle steamers were commissioned -

two for Scottish waters, the Waverley and Maid of the Loch...

..and two for P&A Campbell's White Funnel Fleet.

All new builds but, in terms of design and appearance,

they all looked back to an earlier age.

MUSIC: Tomorrow by Johnny Brandon with The Phantoms

The two paddlers launched by White Funnel were the largest

and most regal yet - Bristol Queen and Cardiff Queen.

Their pre-war elegance struck a chord with post-war holidaymakers

and they became firm favourites on the Bristol Channel,

each building a devoted following with passengers and crew.

Bristol Queen was very special. She was the cream of the cream.

She was lovely inside, a first-class passenger ship.

The decision to stick with paddle propulsion also proved popular.

My mum described it,

it was like a swan coming out of the river over the top of the water

and all you could hear was "flop, flop, flop, flop, flop!"

of the paddles.

It's a beautiful sound, a paddle,

the sound of paddles going through the water.

It's the sound of power and an overall sense of "hey,

"yeah, we're going somewhere!"

In the late '40s and early '50s,

Campbell's certainly WERE going somewhere.

They ran six White Funnel paddle steamers.

Passenger numbers were buoyant.

One steamer institution that was as popular as ever was the bar.

Drinking culture at the time was still a mostly male preserve

and alcohol was mainly drunk behind closed doors

or on a steamer below decks.

Fathers' perennial desire to go down and see the engines was

a euphemism across steamer fleets.

Licensing laws ashore restricted drinking hours, but once at sea,

the bar was always open.

Of course, there was no Sunday opening in South Wales

so, of course,

they would flock across on the ferry boat from Cardiff Penarth to

Weston, and on Weston Pier, they had a restaurant,

they had a bar and they had a bit of a fairground.

Some people wouldn't go off the pier and, similarly,

further down the Channel,

the Swansea people were going across to Ilfracombe.

They could drink all the way across because as soon as the ship

sailed, the bar was open,

so if it was half past nine in the morning, that was fine.

The whole of the South Wales valleys would descend on Cardiff

pierhead on a Sunday morning and it could be thousands and thousands.

And the steamers on the way back, it was just like a church choir,

really.

They'd be in the bars or even in the saloons or even if

they had enough, they'd be up on deck.

The actual songs that they sung, as we know,

that Wales is the land of song, they would be there singing,

and I can hear that sound, those sounds, even now.

MUSIC: Sosban Fach Welsh Traditional Song

And yeah, some pretty hairy sights on the way back at

ten o'clock at night, I can assure you!

16 years old, blonde hair, blue eyes, and women would tease you

and sort of goose you and, you know, that sort of stuff.

You certainly saw the variety of life.

The boozy boisterous bars were also a feature of steamers

north of the border. Post-war, business was booming.

From the bar up to the promenade deck,

it was steaming as usual on the Clyde.

The 1950s were the heyday, the halcyon days of the steamers,

and there were still 14 of them on the Clyde.

They were full every day.

# We could have gone to Monte Carlo... #

People would go on the steamers for their main fortnight's holiday.

That was their main fortnight's holiday.

My parents used to take us on holiday to Island of Arran.

# We could have gone to some island paradise

# And there have had a tear

# But there was no appeal we feel real

# Like going doon the watter fur the ferr... #

And from Glasgow, there is this immense exodus called

"doon the watter", which lasts until the late 1950s, early 1960s.

# So we're going doon the watter

# Ach, we're going doon the watter fur the ferr

# We'll wend our way to Rothesay Bay

# Cos our heart lies there... #

At the height of the season, there was

a daily departure doon the watter from Glasgow, along with

further sailings downriver, ten each morning from Gourock alone.

# We're going doon the watter fur the ferr. #

The steamers could carry between 500 and 1,500 passengers per trip.

Queen Mary II had room for over 2,000.

Demand was high.

The person charged with looking after all these passengers on board

ship was the purser and his assistants.

One young assistant was student teacher Duncan Graham,

who worked across the Clyde fleet over five consecutive summers.

It gave him a porthole on to 1950s dreams and aspirations.

To be transported to Rothesay was just as magic as for you or

I to be transported to the Canaries or the south of Spain.

Rothesay had palm trees, beautiful gardens, beautiful views,

entertainment. You could take a rowing boat.

But it was a playground with cleanliness, beauty,

it was like lifting a curtain on to a different world.

The same steamer would call at a number of resorts per trip.

Part of the purser's job was to sell tickets

and Duncan noted that different groups chose different destinations.

Working class people made either for Largs or Rothesay,

which was laughingly called Scotland's Madeira, by the way.

'Come on, China, or we'll miss the boat.'

Having called at Rothesay, some steamers would continue on to Arran.

The Isle of Arran was above all the middle class holiday resort.

Chaps wore shorts and shirts and played golf and hiked in Arran

and the boarding houses were a class above.

They hid the HP sauce, it wasn't in the windows,

as it was in the boarding houses in Rothesay.

So if you were a sort of middle class holidaymaker,

you went to Arran.

Class differences were also apparent between officers and crew.

Being a purser on the Clyde steamers was a wonderful introduction

to human life for a young innocent student like myself.

I mean, the first day on a payday

when we handed out the wages in cash

and I saw the women on the pier desperately trying to get

hold of some money before their husbands dashed off to the pub,

I learned about the harshness of life.

At the other end of the social scale,

Duncan also witnessed the excesses of some of the Clyde captains.

Ladies came aboard, some of whom were very charming,

particularly to myself,

who in my innocence I did not realise were ladies of the night.

Of who quite the most wonderful was a lady called the Duchess.

She lived permanently, as far as I knew,

in the Royal Hotel in Innellan.

Drove down to the boat down the steep hill in a car with

a chauffeur and came aboard, dressed in all her finest.

She looked like a duchess.

I believed she was one, in my innocence. And she...

I would hand her aboard and she would go up to the captain's

cabin and she would reappear three hours later,

once we had done whatever cruise we were doing, she would come down.

And she would give me half a crown, as she left the boat.

She would sweep half a crown into my hand, along with a ticket.

Cos she had a ticket, which was interesting. And off she would go.

The hired car would be waiting at the end of the pier and of course,

years later, I learned all about the Duchess and learned that the

steamer I worked on wasn't the only one that she visited.

She had a very select clientele.

Appearances were often deceptive in the world of the steamers.

On their daily voyages down the Clyde,

the pleasure boats passed an unremarkable vessel.

It sailed a very similar route from city centre to the coast,

but few people gave her a second glance.

She carried the lowliest of human cargo.

Shieldhall's role was to take treated sewage out to sea

and dump it.

Alongside her utilitarian function,

Shieldhall had a surprising double life.

Fares across steamer fleets were priced at a level the majority

could afford, but unique to Glasgow, the corporation offered free

excursions to those who couldn't pay for the usual trips.

It was carrying on a tradition that

started around about the time of the First World War for groups

of people, particularly pensioners,

who really couldn't afford an excursion or a day out,

and she'd take 60 or 70 people out for the day.

They would then steam the ships down the Clyde

and around about a mile and a half off Garrach Head,

the ship would steam in a slow circle and drop the cargo.

The passengers by this time would typically be in at lunch,

unless they particularly wanted to see the cargo being discharged.

The ship would then steam around in a big circle,

complete the discharge, turn around and go back up the Clyde again.

As living standards began to rise,

there wasn't the same social need for Shieldhall's free trip

and lunch, so the excursion was thrown open to community groups

and a whole new set of passengers came aboard.

By the time that the late '50s, early '60s came along,

there was groups such as the local Wine Circle,

the Women's Institute, would receive an invitation to present

themselves at the sewage works, again completely free of charge.

By the early 1960s, the steamers had become such

institutions that they seemed a mainstay of Clyde life.

But with growing affluence, holiday horizons were expanding

and the incredible enterprise that had turned a sewage

vessel into a quasi cruise ship was struggling to keep pace.

Once you could have a cheap holiday

and you could sample the delights of Marbella rather than

that of Rothesay, and once you took the weather into account,

then it was a non-starter and like all the seaside

resorts in Britain, Rothesay and Largs began a slow decline.

Maybe people are not quite as hardy as they used to be.

The days of braving it out on the decks of a Clyde steamer when

the rain's tipping down and people's aspirations moved up a notch really.

And for the first time since the invention of the Comet, the excursion

steamer, once an agent of change, was now out of step with social change.

Personal mobility was also moving up a gear.

In the 1950s, few families, including my own, had cars

and then there came the mass market, the Mini I think in 1959.

By the mid '60s, people wanted boats to take them across the river,

so they could carry out their own life on excursions.

It was the beginning of the age of the car ferry.

With the rise in car ownership nationwide,

it was also the age of the motorway and at the top end of the

Bristol Channel, a modern motorway bridge linking South Wales to the

south west of England was taking shape,

casting a long shadow over the steamer trade.

In the '60s, the trade declined,

partially attributed to the Severn Bridge in 1966 being built.

So, instead of going from Treharris in Cardiff to

Ilfracombe on a ship, being ill, being cold, being wet,

you could drive there in three hours with the whole

family for three gallons of petrol, you were down there for two quid.

And steamers had become dated.

An independent generation no longer content to

follow in their parents' holiday footsteps were finding

destinations and distractions of their own.

# I'm not like everybody else

# I'm not like everybody else... #

It wasn't the in thing to do,

to go on board a paddle steamer to go down to Ilfracombe.

# I'm not like everybody else... #

They just fell out of fashion, I think.

Perhaps that's the kindest thing to say.

# Like everybody else. #

Whilst the '60s swung, the steamers were shunned.

As incomes fell, maintenance was cut back.

Bristol Queen and Cardiff Queen, pride of the Bristol Channel

and only launched 20 years before, started to look scruffy.

The ships were clanking around and running late with paddle trouble.

Something Ross Floyd experienced on board

the Bristol Queen on a trip to Lundy Island in the summer of 1966.

She was clanking and banging and eventually,

the purser came on and said that due to a technical malfunction,

the steamer would be returning to Ilfracombe, a great groan went up

and that was the end of the getting to Lundy for that year.

Slowly, they disappeared.

13 days after the Bristol Queen did a celebratory cruise to mark

the opening of the Severn Bridge on the 8th of September 1966,

her sister ship was laid up.

Any sailor falls in love with his first ship

and my first ship was the Cardiff Queen.

And um... She was taken to Newport,

someone had the idea of tying her up in the River Usk and making her

a nightclub and the ship obviously didn't agree with this cos

she broke adrift. So they took her down the river a couple of yards to

Cashmore's yard and I got pictures of people sat there with

burning gear, burning up the Cardiff Queen.

But that was her end.

Bristol Queen lasted just one more year.

By this time, Ted Davies was an apprentice pilot in

Barry, South Wales, and on his weeks off, did relief work on the Queen.

I was on the Bristol Queen for six days as ordinary

seaman in August '67.

And the day after I left her, I had to return

to my job as an apprentice on the pilot boats at Barry.

Ted arranged to meet his Bristol Queen shipmates for a night

out in Cardiff the following Saturday.

Unfortunately, that Saturday never came

because she backed out of Barry one morning on her way down to

Ilfracombe, she sounded a mournful three blasts on the whistle...

WHISTLE SOUNDS

..which bounced off the harbour walls

and I saw her go out into the Channel

and thought nothing more of it.

'Just as we got to the marker buoy, which is

'three miles from Barry, I heard a thud and then a crash.

'We must have hit something very, very heavy.

'It must have been submerged,

'sort of floating just under the surface cos I saw nothing.'

I could see her out in the Channel, drifting for a while.

She eventually managed to get under way

and she limped back up the pontoons in Cardiff.

Bristol Queen had suffered catastrophic damage to

a paddle wheel.

I was due to do a trip down to Lundy Island.

And I never sailed on her again.

On the 21st of March 1968, Bristol Queen was towed away for scrap.

I saw her come down, emerge

and slowly make her way down towards Barry.

And feeling so sad that a ship that I had enjoyed working on

and enjoyed seeing over the years and the last of Campbell's

paddle steamers being towed away to her demolition.

It was like a part of me sort of went as well

when the Bristol Queen actually went.

Oh, I've listened to this record twice, three times a year

every year since the Bristol and Cardiff Queen were taken off service.

HOOTER SOUNDS ON RECORD

Oh, there she is! Blowing the hooter!

She was wonderful.

HOOTER SOUNDS AND ENGINE CHUGS

That sound still sends shivers up my spine.

Hopeful that there was still life in the British seaside holiday

though, P&A Campbell finally moved into the age of the propeller

ship, the second generation of diesel powered steamers.

And so they brought Balmoral,

a former Isle of Wight excursion ship, to the Bristol Channel

and ran her with two other twin propeller motor ships.

Launched in 1949, Balmoral had the looks of luxury motor yachts of the

era and was built as a replacement for paddle steamers lost in the war.

Now, she was replacing the much loved Queens.

The replacement of the paddle

steamers by motor ships was

a difficult period.

All right, I love paddlers, but Balmoral is something very special.

There were purists, dangerous people, who said,

"I shall never go on a motor ship,"

but as time went on, the lure of being able to go to sea was

paramount and you saw the old faces begin to return.

I can always remember when Balmoral first came to the Bristol Channel.

I was on board and I went up on to the bridge

and her first captain was Captain Jack Wide, he more or less

skippered all the pre-war and post-war paddle steamers.

I said to him, "What do you think of her, Captain?"

And I can remember his words now, "Neil, she's a flyer."

And by God, could she move!

Flying the flag of the White Funnel Fleet, Balmoral continued the line.

The traditions of over 80 years of coastal cruising being

carried on the decks of one ship.

By 1971, the sole survivor in the Bristol Channel.

She basically got into a set pattern.

Normally, on a Tuesday, Thursday, and sometimes on a Saturday,

we'd do the Swansea run, across to Ilfracombe,

and then out to Lundy Island.

That was a lucrative run in those days. Ilfracombe to Lundy Island.

Lundy Island, in the early '70s,

was where everybody seemed to want to go.

Nothing for us to take 700-800 passengers out to Lundy Island.

And all these passengers had to be landed by launch as well.

And then interspersed with that,

we'd be running day trips from Swansea up the Bristol Channel

to Cardiff and Weston, the odd occasional trip to Tenby as well.

Balmoral kept White Funnel steamers afloat,

linking the same destinations as the Queens.

# This is a tale from the water meadows

# Trying to spread some hope into your heart... #

But even Balmoral, the fuel efficient motor ship,

couldn't halt the inevitable dip in trade,

as the British seaside holiday continued to decline.

I suppose I was aware that the writing

was on the wall for Balmoral and P&A Campbell Ltd, as it was,

from the mid '70s.

You only had to look at the crew. They were all old men.

It had to end because they were all getting older

and there was not the interest and there wasn't the demand or

the requirement for new people to come in.

Neil O'Brien, by this time Balmoral's purser, went to see his boss,

the Trilby wearing Mr Clifton Smith-Cox.

I was a youngster, you know,

and I genuinely could see a demise in Campbell's. It was such a shame.

I didn't want to see it and I thought to myself,

"Hey, there's no career here for me."

I said, "Mr Smith-Cox, I think I've got to throw the towel in here

"because I can't see this going on much longer,"

and Mr Smith-Cox was absolutely superb about this.

He agreed with me entirely and I said,

"Look, I'm going to go to pastures new,"

and so unfortunately, I left Campbell's, I joined then

Cadbury's and sold chocolate for them for 25 years.

Balmoral ploughed on, but the end came in 1980.

P&A Campbell's folded

and after almost a century of White Funnel pleasure

trips on the Bristol Channel, Balmoral, the last steamer, was sold.

She went off as a floating bar, somewhere up in Dundee.

I thought I'd never see her again.

Balmoral sailed for a Scotland

that was also losing its steamers...

The Clyde had witnessed a catastrophic drop

in the excursion trade

and no-one was better placed to know

the commercial realities than John Whittle,

General Manager of ferry operators Caledonian MacBrayne,

which now ran the Clyde steamers.

One Friday I went to Arran on the ferry...

..came back on the last journey

and there was myself,

two other passengers and a car on board

for a crew of 28.

My heart sank a bit at that.

One by one the much loved steamers were scrapped

until there was only one paddler left on the Clyde,

the post-war Waverley -

and even she was struggling.

We had to face reality and bite the bullet.

But...it was part of our heritage.

Paddle steamers had made such a dramatic impact

on the shipping services

and this was the last of the line.

John had only one business option -

the Waverley had to go.

He invited Douglas McGowan,

a leading member of the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society,

to meet him.

You can imagine my absolute surprise and astonishment

when he said that he was going to offer the ship to us

as a gift.

And so began Waverley's preservation,

the last seagoing paddle steamer in the world.

Nothing gives me more pleasure today than seeing families, like today,

enjoying themselves on the decks of the Waverley, having fun

and looking at those children watching the pistons going around,

eyes almost popping out of their heads. Amazing.

Waverley now calls at ports all around the UK,

but for a few weeks each year,

she sails her home waters...

MUSIC: Hoppipolla by Sigur Ros

..and connects once more with the communities she was built to serve.

Decks chatter with sightseers...

..father really does go down to see the engines...

..and hen parties flock to Rothesay...

MUSIC: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers

Keeping alive theses traditions,

Waverley has now sailed longer in preservation

than as a commercial Clyde steamer.

And down on the Bristol Channel,

the Balmoral is back...

..leading a drive to revive coastal cruising here, too.

At Sharpness docks, a dedicated team strive to ready her for sea again.

I work on board doing odd jobs,

which range from helping to keep the woodwork in nice condition

and, when she's laid up,

I can also clean out the lavatories.

You know, the little things have to be dealt with, as well,

and I'm not ashamed to do them.

Three years of volunteer endeavour

and the last in the line of the Bristol Channel White Funnel ships

is about to cast off once more.

BELL RINGS

With a good crowd aboard,

it's slow speed ahead down the River Avon

towards the Bristol Channel,

following the course of the first White Funnel excursion steamer

over 125 years before.

With her go the dreams of a former age.

Oh, my goodness.

This is a really magical moment.

Here we are in the river,

making our fresh start

just like it was in the old days.

Amazing.

To hear the engine room telegraphs when we set off

and hear the ring when they put her ahead,

coming out of the Cumberland Basin,

that was just...

That brought the hairs up on my neck. Absolutely brilliant.

I've personally been sailing on the ship since I was 12 years old

and I've been sailing on her ever since,

so to be back afloat and underway on her again is just wonderful.

MUSIC: The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Redding

# Sitting in the morning sun

# I'll be sitting when the evening comes

# Watching the ships roll in

# Then I watch them roll away again... #

A greater cross-section of society

has travelled by these people's liners

than on the better-known elite ocean liners.

As the last operational vessels of

the two generations of excursion steamer,

the paddler and the propeller ship,

Waverley and Balmoral,

are direct links to a forgotten part of our maritime heritage.

Once boisterously, now more sedately,

from the early 1800s on,

the pleasure steamer translated our national love affair with the sea

into something easily accessible and open to all...

..a gloriously populist pursuit.

THE DOCK OF THE BAY CONTINUES...

THREE TOOTS ON THE WHISTLE