Dover is probably the best-known Channel port and point of departure for trips to France. Ships had left Dover for France for centuries before the dawn of steam, but it was the age of the steamboat, and the building of the extension to Admiralty Pier in 1851, which saw cross-Channel traffic from the port increase considerably. The London Chatham & Dover Railway’s line was extended on to the pier in 1864, allowing passengers to disembark directly from the trains on to the gangways of the steamers. Transatlantic liners started to use the port, and Admiralty Pier, in 1904.
But Dover was also the location of the first attempt to build a Channel Tunnel. Work started on test borings for the tunnel in 1880 but was halted in 1882 because there was political concern about the security risks of having a tunnel connection with the Continent. That year, with the tunnel work effectively suspended, further borings were drilled to identify the geology of the area, and one of the first discoveries during that process was coal – the northern end of a coal seam that was already being mined across the water in France. Initially, the tunnel company prohibited the exploitation of the coal but, after the tunnel project was abandoned, a local entrepreneur, Arthur Burr, acquired the mineral rights and established a mining company on the site in 1896. Ten years later, with extensive developments on the site, the narrow strip of land between the cliffs and the sea was already proving difficult to work. The colliery was abandoned in 1914, after Burr’s company had lost over a million pounds on the project, and several miners had lost their lives as a result of water penetration into the workings. Despite eighteen years of endeavour, coal was never brought to the surface in commercially viable quantities. The Kent coalfield was subsequently developed much further inland.
Dover Colliery, seen from the top of Shakespeare Cliffs, from a postcard mailed on Christmas Day 1907. By the time the colliery was abandoned in 1914, no coal had ever been mined.
Dover’s Admiralty Pier, the regular departure point for the Channel steamers, was also used by transatlantic traffic. Here, watched by huge crowds, the SS Amerika is preparing for departure in October 1905 on her maiden voyage to New York. Despite being smaller than many of today’s Channel ferries, the 22,000-ton Amerika, built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast for the Hamburg-Amerika Line, was at the time the largest ship in the world, and her maiden voyage took her from Hamburg to Dover, then to Cherbourg and on to New York.
The Calais boat, SS Dover, tied up at South East & Chatham Admiralty Pier, as a railway train delivers a trainload of passengers to the pier station in 1906. The station closed in 1914.