The exact location of this 1904 scene, entitled ‘Royal Navy No. 4 – Meat Coming on Board’, is not known, but it is from a series of postcards many of which were photographed in and around the Portsmouth area.
Since the middle of the eighteenth century medical opinion had been actively promoting the health advantages of visiting the seaside – breathing in the fresh and bracing sea air instead of the pollution that hung permanently over the inland industrialised towns and cities. Pivotal in this movement was Dr Richard Russell, whose advocacy of the health benefits of taking the plunge into sea water is credited as being one of the moving forces behind the establishment of Brighton as a seaside resort.
Yet this advice ignored the fact that the coastline itself was becoming increasingly industrialised, with the same attendant problems of pollution and overcrowding. As Britain increasingly ruled the waves – both in naval and commercial terms – and depended on its coastal ports for its increasing import and export trade with the rest of the world, it was in many cases a simple exchange of the smoke, noise and effluent of inland factories for the smoke and noise of steamers, railways, shipyards and a host of other manufacturing industries which relied on those ports for their existence.
Great cities such as Liverpool, which had been relatively small towns before the Industrial Revolution, expanded rapidly throughout the nineteenth century, attracting workers in their tens of thousands as industry spread along the strip of land with easy access to the waterfront.
Shipyards lined the Mersey, the Thames, the Tyne and the Clyde as demand grew for more and larger steamers to transport the goods of the Empire home to Britain, and to export the country’s huge manufacturing output to the rest of the world.
In the days before refrigeration, preserving the huge catches of herring was of primary concern. Pickling the fish in barrels of brine was the simplest and most reliable method available, providing employment for thousands in the barrel-making industry around the coastline.
Within the span of the nineteenth century, Southampton Docks (seen here in 1902) grew from an idea into one of the largest and most successful dockyards in Britain, employing thousands of people. From the establishment of a pier and harbour commission in 1803, and the construction of the Royal Victoria Pier in 1831, the docks were almost continuously expanding. Taken over by the London & South Western Railway in 1892, the docks became part of an integrated cargo-handling and transport system which enabled manufactured goods to be taken rapidly from factory to ship, and imported goods from ship to distributor. Directly and indirectly, these huge docks sustained the livelihood of tens of thousands of people throughout southern England.
Traditionally, fishing had long been the major coastal employer. With the profusion of herring, especially in the North Sea, the fishing industry grew throughout the nineteenth century, peaking in the last decades.
The associated industries of boatbuilding, barrel-making, ship’s chandlers, sail- and net-making and wholesale fish markets all grew to keep up with demand, employing ever more people.
Railways reached most coastal ports in the middle of the nineteenth century, offering faster delivery of the fish to the markets of the great cities.
However, during the nineteenth century, industrial manufacturing concerns overtook fishing as the major source of employment in many places. The population growth in many harbour towns during the second half of the century was rapid and considerable. Ever larger ships required ever larger docks, which employed more and more stevedores to handle the huge increases in cargo being imported and exported.
By 1900 tourism had pushed fishing into third place. The introduction of fast passenger railway services and statutory holidays made travel to the coast easier and, by the late nineteenth century, had brought a visit to the seaside within the reach of an increasingly large proportion of the population. Thus in many coastal towns the leisure industry developed as a source of employment alongside heavy industry, while elsewhere one or the other dominated. Indeed, the first passenger-carrying railway was developed out of an industrial railway as early as 1806 – long before horse-drawn rail travel gave way to steam. That first passenger-carrying railway – from Swansea to Mumbles in south Wales – was responsible for the development of the village into a tourist resort, offering a pleasant day out from the industrial landscape of Swansea. Benjamin French, who first proposed that passengers could be carried by rail, remains one of the great unsung heroes of the travel revolution. So popular was his railway that before the end of the century double-decked carriages were needed to meet demand.
The transport system, and the possibility of travel, expanded rapidly in Victorian Britain because of the introduction of the steam train. For the wealthy, travelling to hotels was both easier and faster, and hoteliers quickly embraced the development of the railway, laying on horse-drawn carriages to collect their guests from the nearest railway station and deliver them back again at the end of their stay. The group here has posed for the camera, c.1860, outside the Dyke Hotel at Devil’s Dyke near Brighton. The hotel was rebuilt in 1871.
Three coachmen sit on the box, and a small boy with a whip stands in front of the carriage in this ambrotype of c.1865, as their seven passengers pose for the camera before setting off on a day out. While the location is unknown, the architecture might suggest a location on the west coast of Scotland or the southwest coast of England.
The PS Southend Belle was built in 1896 by Denny Brothers of Dumbarton, on the Clyde, for the Southend, Woolwich & Clacton-on-Sea Steamship Company, her ownership being transferred in the following year to the newly formed Belle Steamers. She was used widely along the east coast and operated the company’s first regular service to Great Yarmouth in 1897. She is seen here c.1903, preparing for departure from Great Yarmouth back to London. The identity of the second steamer to the right of the picture has not been confirmed. The size of the crowd on the quayside attests to the continuing popularity of the coastal steamers long after cheap rail travel offered a much faster service to the east coast resorts.
The importance of the railway in the development of the coastal ports and resorts of Britain cannot be overestimated. Before the advent of the train, carriage to and from the country’s docks and harbours was dependent on horse-drawn transport and, especially, the eighteenth-century canal network. Canal transport may have been cheap but it was slow and the loads that could be carried were small. A single train could deliver as much freight as a dozen canal barges, and in a tenth of the time. As ships became larger, so the need for fast bulk freight transport grew, and, as railways could be built much more cheaply than canals, the world was opened up to natural harbours which had hitherto had only road links with the rest of the country. The great ports of the south coast were developed, and huge docks were constructed, during the first decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, and that development was matched by the establishment of numerous railway companies to link these new facilities with the rest of the country. Tens of thousands of people, from engineers to navvies, were employed in the construction of thousands of miles of track.
The ports were like magnets to the new railway companies, with several companies competing for the lucrative freight trade. Similarly, the emerging resorts all attracted the attention of the railway entrepreneurs, and the cumulative effect of this was that many of the railway companies never turned in a profit. Amalgamations and consolidations punctuated the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century as belated attempts were made to rationalise costs.
Watchet harbour, a stereoscopic ambrotype view by James Date (see also under Watchet, page 64): one of a series of views taken by the local Watchet-based photographer in 1861. Steamer services connecting the small Somerset port with Cardiff and Bristol were first introduced in the 1850s. As at many other small harbours, boats in Watchet harbour were beached at low tide, so that the ferries could not tie up at the quay. In June 1859 ten ‘excursionists’ were drowned when the small boat ferrying them to a steamer anchored off Watchet sprang a leak and sank.
Although seaside ‘watering places’ had been holiday destinations of the wealthy since the end of the eighteenth century, mass tourism, and the popularisation of the holiday resort as a destination for all, can be traced back directly to the Bank Holiday Act of 1871, which for the first time enshrined the worker’s right to take a holiday, even if he or she was not paid for it. Taking steamer trips from London to any one of the south coast resorts, popular though they were, might not have been practicable within a day away from the factory, but a train journey most certainly was. Thus, by the last quarter of the century, the ‘day trip’ was firmly established and growing in popularity. And the influx of visitors into the seaside towns needed to be catered for, creating considerable numbers of jobs, albeit temporary, in the growing leisure industry.
The main feature of the railway, as far as tourists were concerned, was that the journey took the same time, irrespective of social status. The day trippers travelled just behind the wealthier holidaymakers. The carriages may have been more basic, but third-class passengers got to the seaside at exactly the same time as first-class!
As The Times reported on 30th August 1860, ‘Down comes the excursion train with its thousands, some with a month’s range, others tethered to a six hour limit, but all rushing with one impulse to the water’s edge.’
The construction industry also provided considerable employment in the coastal resorts, with the building of promenades, piers and amusement facilities. Between 1810 and 1900 over eighty seaside piers were constructed, fifty of them in the last three decades of the century.
Miss Emma Howe of West Hartlepool was a postcard collector in 1906 when this card was mailed to her by her Aunt Bessie – ‘another one for your collection my dear. I hope you like it.’ Without collectors like her, few of these fine images would have survived. The paddle steamer Frenchman was built as a passenger-carrying tug in South Shields in 1892, and during her thirty-six-year working life worked the winter months in Hull docks and the summer months as a Bridlington-based pleasure steamer running trips along the Yorkshire coast.
Clockwise from top left: An unidentified ship beached in a river estuary, c.1860; Caernarfon docks and castle, photographed by Francis Bedford, 1860s; an unidentified ship tied up at the quayside on a river estuary, c.1860; Criccieth beach, north-west Wales, photographed in the late 1860s by Francis Bedford for sale to the growing tourist market.
In the 1850s and 1860s long exposures required photographers to take pictures of ships either when they were beached, or in calm weather when they were tied firmly to the quayside
Photography came along in the 1840s and, although it was originally too insensitive to record spontaneous human activity, by the 1860s plates were fast enough, and exposure times were short enough, to ensure that the great developments of the second half of the nineteenth century were recorded by the camera.
Photography’s value as an industrial tool had been demonstrated during the move of the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park in London to Sydenham in 1853/4, and thereafter hardly a single major architectural or industrial project went unrecorded.
Initially the photographs were rather devoid of people – unless the workers were posed during the exposure – but, as the century progressed, more and more realistic images of people at work started to appear. It is through these remarkable pictures that we have such a vivid view of the development of industrial Britain, and coastal developments were no exception.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing before the anchor chains of the SS Great Eastern in 1857 while it was being constructed at John Scott Russell’s shipyard on the Thames at Millwall remains one of the iconic industrial photographs of the middle of the century. Originally known as the Leviathan, the ship took five years to build and was photographed by Robert Howlett and others at various stages of her construction, providing us with some of the earliest known photographs of shipbuilding. At the time of her launch in 1858, she was by far the biggest ship in the world.
It was the reduction in exposure times that came with the introduction of the glass plate in 1851 that made such advances possible.
A decade later, on the Clyde, local photographer Duncan Brown took many photographs of the workers at Napier’s and other yards, and he was probably the first photographer to chronicle the development of the Clyde shipyards.
Activity in even the smallest ports, such as Watchet in Somerset, was being recorded by local photographers by 1860. In Watchet’s case, it was James Date, who also photographed a key development in the town’s history, the arrival of Brunel’s broad-gauge railway in 1861.
Railway tunnels, Shakespeare Cliffs, Kent, photographed by Wiltshire-born photographer Russell Sedgefield in the mid 1860s.
An unusual employment opportunity for local boys: Felixstowe and Woodbridge Urban District Council licensed this bizarre ‘goat carriage’ taxi service, which was immortalised on locally made postcards.
Victorian photographs were available in many different formats. Large albumen prints were usually kept in portfolios, while smaller carte-de-visite prints (see pages 14 and 15) fitted into slots in the family album. Stereoscopic views were available as glass positives (ambrotypes) and as pairs of paper prints, while lantern slides were designed to be projected on to a screen using the magic lantern. This slide by Dundeebased James Valentine shows his own yacht in full sail on the Firth of Clyde in the 1870s.
To the Victorian photographer, the profusion of relatively static shapes and patterns found in harbours was ideally suited to the limited sensitivity of their plates, producing images that appealed to their quest for both the romantic and the detailed picture.
Such photographs, however, are remarkably rare and highly treasured by collectors. The cameras of the day were large and cumbersome wooden boxes, and the wet collodion process required the photographer to coat his own plates just before exposure, and to process them immediately afterwards. So, to get such pictures, the photographer needed to transport all the paraphernalia and chemicals of early photography on location and set up a darktent near the camera position, resulting in no more than six or eight exposures in a typical day.
It was well into the 1870s before ready-coated plates were easily obtainable and reliable enough to persuade photographers to abandon their old methods.
The combination of simpler-to-use materials and chemistry with lighter and more easily transportable cameras from the 1880s led to a huge expansion in the use of photography.
Cameras that incorporated internal facilities for the coating and subsequent processing of plates were introduced in the 1850s and achieved considerable popularity from the 1870s onwards. These encouraged itinerant photographers to move from town to town, from fairground to fairground, and from one holiday resort to another, taking portraits of anyone who entered their tent or caravan. Thus, having a picture taken at the seaside became a popular memento of a holiday and a lucrative source of seasonal income for the photographer.
Such images were unique direct positives; there was no negative from which paper prints might be made. They were produced either on blackened glass and known as ‘collodion positives’ or ‘ambrotypes’, or on japanned sheets of thin metal known as ‘tintypes’. They cost only a few pennies, so were impulse purchases. If they were not very good, they could just as quickly be thrown away, and several end-of-century accounts tell of tintypes littering the sites of travelling fairs, or the photographer’s beach-side pitch. That so many of them survive shows just how efficient these anonymous travelling photographers were, and how much their work was treasured.
Those same decades at the end of the nineteenth century were also the first years of popular snapshot photography, after the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1889. Originally limited to the relatively wealthy – because of cost – amateur photography grew rapidly in popularity as prices fell, and by the time of the outbreak of the First World War the itinerant photographer had all but disappeared, as more and more holidaymakers bought the new snapshot cameras and took their own pictures. Seaside studios continued to cater for permanent residents, but the beach photographer’s caravan or stall, once a common site, was rarely seen.
This glass positive ambrotype portrait of children in their donkey-drawn buggy was taken by an itinerant beach photographer on Blackpool sands in the late summer of 1882. The simple paper-covered wooden frame is typical of the presentation of such photographs.
In a city with a strong maritime and naval tradition, Dundee photographers were frequently called upon to take photographs of naval cadets resplendent in their new uniforms. This ambrotype dates from c.1860.
The majority of the images illustrated in this book, however, date from the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. This was the heyday of the picture postcard, when several postal collections and deliveries each day meant that the postcard could be used rather as we now use text messaging.
With millions of postcards being bought and posted each week, publishers were always on the lookout for new subjects and turned their cameras towards the factories, the ferry piers, the fish markets and the many other endeavours that offered employment throughout Britain. Thus a postcard shop might offer highly industrial subjects alongside scenes more obviously attractive to the tourists. Sending a postcard of net-makers at their looms in a factory in Bridport might seem a less obvious subject than tourists on a busy beach, but such cards were very popular and sold in significant numbers.
The great photographic publishing companies, such as Valentine of Dundee and Francis Frith of Reigate, entered the postcard market on a grand scale, commissioning local photographers to provide interesting images for postcard use. They dominated the British postcard market for more than half a century.
Many of the cards were coloured using multi-colour lithography to resemble real colour (years before real colour photography was possible) and printed in Saxony. That the production costs of high-quality colour printing were considered viable underlines the immense popularity of these early postcards.
The London boat arriving. A crowd gathers on the quayside to watch the paddle steamer Laverock arriving at Great Yarmouth in 1904. Built in 1889 by Scott’s of Kinghorn, Fife, she served the route until sold in 1908.
In this ‘Photochrome’ print from the 1890s, work is under way on a new tunnel for the approach tracks to Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. Beyond is the Firth of Forth. Four different railway companies laid lines and competed for traffic from Waverley to the nearby port of Leith.
Several photographers turned their cameras on the construction of the Forth Bridge in Scotland. The official photographer, the previously unknown Evelyn Carey, chronicled every stage of the seven-year construction programme on behalf of the builders. Photographers working for Aberdeen-based George Washington Wilson also regularly visited the river to add new images to their catalogue, while Dundee-based James Valentine produced and marketed a remarkable series as the huge structure took shape. These views were sold to the growing numbers of visitors who took paddle-steamer trips from Burntisland, Granton and other piers on the Firth of Forth to see the mammoth construction at first-hand. One such steamer can be seen in this Valentine photograph, taken from South Queensferry in 1888.
This book takes the form of a virtual journey starting from London and travelling clockwise around the coast of mainland Britain. In so doing, it will cover several thousand miles before ending back at the Thames estuary. This will be a journey that no Victorian or Edwardian ever undertook, and had such a book as this been available in Edwardian times it would probably have generated the sort of interest that we show today towards books and television documentaries about remote parts of the world.
To the average Londoner in the early years of the twentieth century, Scotland – or North Britain, as it was still officially known – was just about as remote and unknown as central Africa is to us today. Travel was relatively slow, and long-distance travel was an expensive luxury only the middle and upper classes could contemplate. The occasional trip by train or by steamer to one or other of the east coast resorts was the only experience of travel most working-class Londoners would ever have had.
Newspapers were not illustrated with photographs until the early years of the twentieth century, illustrated books were the exclusive province of the educated elite, and there was no cinema, so, for most people, everything outside their immediate personal experience might as well not have existed.
This journey, then, encompasses the rich variety of life around Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian working coastline – a rich variety about which few of the people in these photographs actually knew very much!
Even the simple pleasure of sea bathing brought employment in every resort to the many men who maintained and rented out the bathing machines and took care of the horses.