By Paul Barnett. Published December 2019 by the author for the “Friends of Purton”.
This fascinating book and guide tells the story of the large number of coastal ships and canal lighters that have been “hulked” at a number of designated places along on the banks of the river Severn from Sharpness, Purton, Lydney and up the river as far as the old Droitwich barge canal built by Brindley in 1771. Since early times ship owners of coastal vessels have had the problem of disposing of their wooden craft when they have become uneconomic due to old age. Many wooden coastal sailing ships suffered from what is technically called “sagging” due to the shear loads on the hull, that is the bows and stern sagged with age arising from many years of being heavily loaded resulting in leakage which became uneconomic to repair. Coastal ship and barge owners then had the problem of disposing of their craft and were reluctant to incur the cost of official disposal. Why not strip the ship of anything of value, its masts, rigging, chain plates, dead eyes, anchors, cables and deck fittings and quietly tow the vessel to a near-by remote creek at high tide in the night in the expectation that it would sink into the mud and letting the vessel, now bereft of any evidence of previous ownership, be left to decay in its muddy grave.
Such a practice although technically illegal was carried on at many a tidal creek around the country particularly in remote creeks around the Cornish and Devon coasts. The high tide of the Severn was another well-known graveyard. This practice is now known as “hulking” but in the traditional sense it meant something rather different. So I want to start this review with a little bit of historical background.
The practice of hulking was common in the sailing navy until the advent of steam m the mid 19th c. Rated naval ships of the line no longer required were often given useful extended lives as floating hulks. Their masts and rigging were removed and the hulls were used for a variety of applications, notably as floating warehouses, camps for prisoners of war, hospital ships, quarantine vessels and prisons. They were often manned by retired commissioned officers of the Royal Navy or ex army personnel. Old East Indiamen, the vessels of the East India Company were also used and when their work was done after serving as hulks, they were towed to the breakers’ yards where their valuable oak and teak planks, deck beams and knees were used in the construction of smaller craft to conserve oak trees and other hardwoods which by the early 19th c. were starting to be in short supply. The most famous hulk known to the wider public is depicted in the famous painting by J.W.M Turner (1775 -1851) “The fighting Temeraire” 1838, one of Nelson’s flagships at Trafalgar, being towed to the breaker’s yard by a steam tug. It is arguably his most popular and best known work now hanging in The National Gallery. Turner uses some artistic license and shows it with a mast and yardarm with a furled sail. Some famous wooden hulks were rescued, restored and recommissioned and later served as famous training ships for cadets, notably HMS Britannia, which became the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, HMS Conway and close to home HMS Formidable, the nautical training school at Portishead. These are all examples of famous hulks which lasted into the 20th c.
But the most famous hulk of all is the iron ship ss Great Britain which was finally re-rigged as a sailing ship and sailed from Penarth with a cargo of coal in 1886 bound for Panama. A fire broke out in the south Atlantic and the vessel was damaged. She finally made it to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands where she was purchased by the Falkland Island Company, became a hulk and served as an important coal bunker for the South Atlantic Fleet before being finally classified as a wreck in 1937. The rest is history!
So, the hulking of ships has an ancient pedigree and fortunately the Severn became the most important official graveyard for coastal craft at the start of the 20th c. It all started on an official basis in 1909 when following a storm and a particularly high tide there was very nearly a breach of the Sharpness canal at the village of Purton. The Sharpness canal (also known as the Gloucester and Berkeley canal) of length 16.5 miles, was started in1795 but was not completed until 1825 after a chequered history and was an important commercial artery. It enabled ocean-going sailing ships to connect with the canal system of the Midlands and turned Gloucester into an important port.
At the village of Purton the canal is very close to the tidal river Severn and in 1909 after the violent storm coupled with an exceptional tide, the solution to save and rescue the canal was to beach redundant vessels of all types along the river bank and so started what today are the historic Purton hulks. Ship owners from that date could legally beach their redundant craft. Purton was not the only site. The small port of Lydney, which dates from the reign of Henry 11 and was an important shipbuilding area, was always vulnerable to the Severn tides. The pill silted up and a new canal was cut and a dock was built in 1811 to export coal from the Forest of Dean and also tinplate. Like the Sharpness canal at Purton the dock at Lydney was vulnerable to the winds and tides and the foreshore became an official ship graveyard around 1920, with hulks as interesting as those at Purton. The foreshore at Sharpness also became a graveyard but this included the remains of steel ships and ex naval vessels which were broken up at the Crown Ship Breaking Company. Further up the Severn at Droitwich, barges and trows were left to die. All the sites are accessible for inspection other than the Sharpness foreshore where entry is forbidden and special permission is required from the Sharpness Dock Company.
Trade on the Sharpness canal increased rapidly and by the middle of the 19th c. the larger merchant schooners tended to off-load their cargo and tranship into barges to improve the utilisation of the busy canal. These barges were towed by tugs up to Gloucester. The tugboat, Mayflower, now moored opposite ”M” shed in Bristol harbour, operated on the Sharpness canal from the 1860s and is the oldest working steam tugboat in the world.
Over a period of 40 years, Paul Barnett, a maritime historian from Gloucester with academic accreditation from many universities has researched and photographed most of the known hulks on the river Severn. He started to catalogue and research the history of the various hulks as a pastime. He gave guided tours on the Purton hulks and he concluded that his years of research would be of interest. His book, which has been written over the last 20 years is an historical record of 120 ships that have been laid to rest along the banks of the Severn. It is complete with a photographic record of all the ships, barges and trows listed while in service with a brief history together with pictures of their remains at Purton, Lydney, Sharpness and up river to the now derelict Droitwich canal.
The author was born and grew up on Tyneside, in Wallsend within the shadow of the famous shipyard of Swan Hunter, into a family of merchant seamen. He spent his working life as a hydrographic surveyor and settled in Gloucester. He was fascinated by the hulks at Purton and elsewhere. After many years exploring the river and researching he decided to compile a list of all the known hulks on the banks of the Severn. The book is well indexed and was published “For the friends of Purton” (www.friendsofpurton.org.uk) of which he is the founder. The Purton hulks are suffering from the ravages of the tides and sadly from vandalism but there is still plenty to see of much interest particularly the almost complete 7 FCB’s (Ferro Concrete Barges) built in Gloucester under license from Wates in the war and due to the shortage of steel and plied the Sharpness canal until the early 1960s.
These unique barges are now included in the Historic Ship Register as well as the Kennet barge Harriett of 1910. It is more than just a guide book but a work of extensive research and scholarship of interest to any student of maritime history. It is well referenced. Good value for only £15 or £18 including postage from the author.
Paul Barnett, after forty years of research has given us the definitive history of the largest ships’ graveyard in the United Kingdom.
John Anning .