12 PORTS: BRISTOL – SHIPSHAPE AND BRISTOL FASHION

You can’t see the sea from Bristol Docks – it’s eight miles down the River Avon at Avonmouth, where the city’s modern dock facilities are. These grew steadily from the 1870’s onwards when the original harbour in the centre of the city became too small to cope with the growth of trade and the bigger ships that went with that.

As early as 1051 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that Bristol was trading with Ireland, and by the sixteenth century it was already a major maritime centre with ships sailing up the river to a harbour built at the confluence of rivers Avon and Frome. The cargoes unloaded on the dock came from other British ports and more distant locations in Europe and beyond. A few years earlier in 1497, the explorer John Cabot had set out on the transatlantic voyage that would ultimately lead to him discovering the coast of North America and landing there very briefly.

The tobacco, sugar and cocoa that flowed into the city docks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries enabled Bristol to grow and become rich, reflected in the streets of elegant Regency houses built in the centre and up the hill in Clifton. Fuelling that prosperity was industry, created to process raw materials brought across the Atlantic from the West Indies. All this was at a human cost: for fifteen years between 1730 and 1745, Bristol was Britain’s most important port in the slave trade and the shadow of slavery continues to fall across communities in the city long after its abolition.

Maritime connections are hard to avoid in the city; Bristol is thought to be the birthplace of Edward Teach, better known as ‘Blackbeard’ the infamous and brutal pirate. Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was rescued by a Bristol ship and brought back to the city where he met the author in the famous Bristol pub the ‘Llandoger Trow’.

Busy as Bristol was, trade was hampered by the fact that the harbour was tidal. This might not sound important, but the difference between low and high tide in the docks and river could be up to 40 feet (The Bristol Channel still has the second highest range in the world). This made operating a dock very difficult as ships were left high and dry when the tide went out. Mariners had to be prepared, ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’.

The solution was to build what is now called the ‘Floating Harbour’ an area of tideless water enclosed by dock gates. Designed by William Jessop and opened in 1809 the new harbour improved matters and also led to a further flowering of Bristol’s shipbuilding industry.

Into this picture strode the Victorian engineering giant Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunel arrived Bristol in 1829 having survived a near-fatal accident in the Thames Tunnel the year before. Soon he was involved in various engineering projects, winning a competition to design a new suspension bridge at Clifton in 1831 and working for the Dock Company providing designs for ways of preventing the harbour from silting up. In 1833 he was then appointed as the engineer of the Great Western Railway a new scheme to build a line from Bristol to London.

If all that was not enough, the lure of the sea provided too much for even Brunel. There is an apocryphal if fanciful story that in a discussion about the speed at which passengers could be whisked from London to Bristol on his new railway, he asked why not extend the journey by linking Bristol and New York with a steam ship? Whatever was actually said or decided, the end result was the creation of the Great Western Steamship Company, financed by local business interests, and the construction of the SS Great Western in 1838, a wooden paddle steamer that began the process of making transatlantic travel a quicker and safer prospect.

Following the ship’s 15-day maiden voyage to New York in April 1838, it began a regular service between Britain and the United States. Most observers then thought that the company would repeat the exercise and built a sister ship, but Brunel, restless as ever had moved on, and instead proposed a new, bigger steamship that had revolutionary new features. Not only it would be made of iron, but it would have a screw propeller; when the SS Great Britain was launched in 1843, it was the largest ship in the world and was described as the ‘wonder of the age’.

It began by first speeding travellers across the Atlantic, and from 1852 it carried thousands of emigrants to Australia for over twenty years. After a further brief life as a windjammer (under sail alone) it was shipwrecked in the Falkland Islands in 1886, and remained there until 1970, when it was rescued and brought back to the UK. The SS Great Britain was brought back to the dockyard where it had been built over a century before and to a harbour much changed since its launch. The construction of new docks at Avonmouth in the Victorian period and their subsequent expansion in the twentieth century had hastened the demise of the city docks, now too small to handle larger ships, and hampered by the difficult river journey up the Avon from the Bristol Channel.

By the time the SS Great Britain returned in 1970 the Floating Harbour was in terminal decline, with both dock facilities and shipbuilding very reduced - just a few years earlier, proposals to build a new road system and fill in parts of the docks had been made, and then abandoned after protests from Bristolians. We at the SS Great Britain can’t claim that we were responsible for the amazing transformation that has taken place since 1970, but as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ships return next year, we can argue that we perhaps provided the spark. The regeneration of the city docks has provided new cultural treasures such as the Arnolfini, Watershed and M Shed Museum, housing and leisure facilities.

Bristol remains a vibrant city, its development now powered and sustained by its multicultural community, new technology and industry, universities and arts and cultural life. The docks remain at the heart of the city, now reclaimed by local people and tourists, with huge swathes of what was a bustling port a hundred years ago accessible to all and providing some recognition of how much the city owes to its long and rich maritime past.

Tim Bryan is Director of the Brunel Institute, SS Great Britain Trust in Bristol.
You can find out more at: www.ssgreatbritain.org