Heysham Port: A Century of Manx and Irish Services
by Dick Clague

Ferry Publications Ltd
September 2004, £9.99
Available from the Maritime Museum , City Museum
and local bookshops

Reviewed by Michael Nunn

Good tale well told about a local industry, and an asset and which needs sustaining

What Heysham centenary?
The year's well-nigh spent, there has been no festival or big themed celebration, the local press breathed not a murmur about it, I had seen nothing at the Museum. So I thought that, having checked my reading, the one hundredth anniversary of the opening of the Port of Heysham was – outrageously - to go unnoticed.

Fortunately, the recent appearance of this book, with exquisite timing, quelled any such fears. And a related exhibition of some fascinating photographs in the Maritime Museum was the venue last Wednesday (September 15) for its author, Dick Clague, here in Lancaster to talk about his subject and do a book signing.

Appropriately, the exhibition and the book-launch of Heysham Port marked the one hundredth anniversary of the start of regular sailings out of the new port on 1 September in 1904. The steamships Antrim and the Londonderry, both newly delivered from Clydebank, made their first voyages from Heysham to Belfast and Douglas (Isle of Man) for workers and the directors of the owning company as well as the public, and "The Port of Heysham was open for business.'

And his well-written, concise and well-informed work is indeed a very useful contribution to a wider understanding of how our local area has developed over the years – and why. This well-written and well-illustrated book (some of the photographs were taken by author Dick Clague) does exactly what its title says: it describes the building, growth, use and the often patchy development of the port from its conception, construction around the end of the nineteenth century, and is bang up-to-date with its present function and operations.

Railway expansion
The port's origins and history are fascinating. It began life as the brainchild of the entrepreneurial Midland Railway, which (eventually) ran the line (see line website) from Morecambe Promenade to Lancaster Green Ayre and onwards via Halton and Wennington to Leeds (see video review and the recent British Railways Past and Present book review). From the earliest days, many of the railway companies ran shipping ventures to feed into their trains and to take their own passengers abroad on holiday or on business, as well as to capitalise on the additional freight revenues they could derive from their maritime interests.

The Midland Railway was based in Derby but extending from Carlisle in the north (and beyond by means of running powers; they were one of the owners of the Forth Railway Bridge) to Bournemouth in the south and to Southend on the Thames estuary, the Midland was anxious to grab its share of the plentiful Irish traffic in people, livestock and other freight.

Having recovered from the financial burden of the planning and opening the spectacular Settle-Carlisle line, it took the plunge. It was in direct competition with the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway's maritime operations at Fleetwood, and the other rival ports of Preston and especially Liverpool where the London & North Western Railway (who owned what is now the West Coast Main Line) reigned supreme – but not alone.

New facility for the dawn of the twentieth century
Heysham's new port was thoroughly up-to-date. The author - and others – have claimed is that it was the first port whose operations were almost entirely powered by electricity – a novelty for an age to whom the car was still a rarity. The Midland was commercially sharp as well as politically brazen.

So it took off with services transferred from Barrow, which was too far from the main centres of population to compete with the rival port of Fleetwood, and Morecambe which was not a ‘24/7' harbour because of the extreme tidal ranges, and not big enough for the increasing sizes of the vessels of the day. The potential trade at the time needed a bigger and more accessible harbour – and that is just what the Midland had in mind as an extension to its extensive railway network of operations.

I make no apologies for dwelling on the port's railway links. It came into being as the child of late Victorian ambition and continued in railway ownership until as recently as 1984.

A significant contributor to the local economy
Yet, despite some uneven fortunes over the last couple of decades, it still plays an important part in the local economy of our area. Working round the clock, it handles significant quantities of freight and continues to employ a considerable number of people, many of whom are from the local community. Thus the port is, in today's appalling accountancy-speak, a significant engine of growth and generator of wealth in the local community.

As has been the case during the whole of its lifetime, the future of the port to some extent depends on broader political and economic conditions, and also on more localised matters such as access and infrastructure. This is neither the time nor the place to comment on the need for a motorway link to the port, though accessibility to the seaport is clearly going to be a key consideration to potential future users and, inevitably, the obligatory investors.

A proper railway, please
Given that Heysham Harbour was the creation of, by, from and for the railway and its users, it would be appropriate as well as being eminently sensible and practical to restore the direct railway link from Lancaster to the port, and upgrading it to accommodate more of the heavy traffic and freight which is inevitably going to have to go back onto the rails. Not least because …

The present rail passenger service to Heysham is a joke. There are two round trips from Lancaster in the middle of the day, but what about early-morning, late-night and other trains to get employees to and from work? Have you seen the Titfield Thunderbolt-style operation that is performed when you get a train to Heysham, with the driver getting out to change the points only a minute after it has left Morecambe station? Were it not a laughing-stock, it would be a museum piece (has the Folly Gallery thought of getting someone to video it?), and the Midland Railway would howl with contempt at the lack of common sense and complete disregard of the basic concepts of transport integration from the port's official ‘stakeholders' – ie the owners, government and the local authorities etc.

A good read
But I digress. The book, supported by the company which has owned Heysham Port, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company since 2001, is a good read about the varying fortunes of the town's chief industry, as well as a useful contribution to the historical literature of these parts. It will also particularly please the maritime and the shipping enthusiasts, though there is not a whiff of the anorak at all (are you sure? this is a bit about trains again! – Ed). The ‘guest' Chapter 3 on operational matters, Sailing the Douglas-Heysham Route, is particularly interesting as it is written by Capt Ken Crellin, a through-and-through mariner who had worked on this run for decades before his recent retirement.

That is not to belittle or decry the rest of the text, which is lucid and shows the results of painstaking and thorough research. Talking to the author was fun, too. He is an urbane man with extensive knowledge on both this particular and other related subjects. Whilst there are already publications on the port and its history, so much has changed in political, commercial economic issues as well as the physical landscape over recent years that he felt a new assessment was needed.

Facilities for you and me
Dick Clague works as a "Maritime Correspondent,' so I asked him how he rated the facilities at Heysham Port for passengers, with or without a car. "Padded Spartan,' came the reply. He explained that getting to make the trip by boat across the Irish Sea was by definition not easy, and certainly not ideal from other west coast ports.

I wondered about the alternative crossing via Liverpool. To get from there to Belfast, "You have to go across the river to Birkenhead,' he said. Sounds like an excuse for some nostalgia on the Mersey Ferries, I thought, though you can still sail from Liverpool Pier Head to Douglas, the capital, main port and seat of the ancient parliament of the Isle of Man, and to Dublin. The shortest crossing to Ireland, between Stranraer and Larne, is at the end of a very long drive from anywhere in England and even from the vast majority of places in Scotland. This makes it an even less attractive proposition, and no great shakes for the customer – oops, I really mean passenger, or traveller. The author also gave me to understand that there are still thrice-daily ferries from Fleetwood to Larne which carry trailers, lorries and cars.

To sum up, then, this is an interesting and attractive book which adds to our understanding and appreciation of our local area. I hope that the current ‘stakeholders' that I mentioned above - our local councillors, MPs and similar bodies – will read this book, because they need to understand clearly that the future of every single one of those jobs at Heysham Port and the not inconsiderable revenue it and they bring to the area depend to a very large degree on their good offices. People's livelihoods are at stake here.
Readers' views on this subject would be very welcome.

As for me, I am seriously considering a day or even an overnight trip to Douglas, a place I have not visited since childhood. A day on the ocean wave, (with sailors, dare I say?) does have its appeals, even in the autumn. Watch out for a review in these columns, should this notion come to fruition.

But I expect that, unlike our predecessors, we shall have to get the bus to Heysham so as to get on the boat.

Copyright © 17 September 2004 Michael Nunn

Image credits:

Cover – Main image copyright Lancashire West Partnership

Frontispiece (Duke of Rothesay) copyright Heysham Port

TSS Londonderry copyright Lancaster City Museums.