First Steam-powered Dredger
The first
steam-powered bucket dredger on the canal was built in 1849, when
the accumulated silt had reduced the depth of water from 18ft to
only 14ft, and large ships had to have some of their cargo discharged
at Sharpness before navigating the canal. This dredger had a wooden
hull built by local shipbuilder William Hunt, and the dredging machinery
was supplied by Rothwell & Co. of Bolton. In the first two years
of operation, over 150,000 tons of mud were removed, and the canal
was almost back to its full depth again.
Two More Dredgers
This original dredger was quite
adequate for the routine work of maintaining a depth of 18ft in
the canal, but the construction of the new dock at Sharpness with
a maximum depth of 24ft highlighted the need for a dredger with
a greater capability. So in 1874 the Dock Company purchased a suitable
dredger from the Witham Drainage Commissioners, and it was immediately
put to work to clear the bank that had been left between the new
dock and the existing canal. By this time, the Dock Company had
also taken over responsibility for the Worcester & Birmingham
Canal, and in 1875 they purchased a small dredger for that canal
from Fielding & Platt of Gloucester. With three steam dredgers
owned by the Company, it made sense to give them numbers: the original
dredger became No 1, the Worcester dredger No 2 and the Witham dredger
No 3.
Replacement Dredgers
By the 1890s, the Company's dredgers
were in a poor condition. In particular the wooden hull of No 1
was rotten, and so the boiler, engine and buckets were transferred
to a new iron hull with gantry and bucket ladder built by Fielding
& Platt of Gloucester. The old Witham dredger was also in a
bad way, and as there was a need for a lot of dredging at Sharpness
in connection with the construction of a new quay wall, another
dredger capable of dredging to 28ft was purchased from the Bristol
Docks Committee in November 1896. Confusingly, these two "new"
dredgers were not given new numbers. The Fielding & Platt dredger
became the second No 1, and the Bristol dredger became the second
No 3. To add to the confusion, the label No 2 was transferred to
a steam-powered scraper dredger, built by Fielding & Platt,
that was used to scrape mud to the centre of the Sharpness tidal
basin where it could be sluiced away.
No 4 Dredger
The Company operated these three dredgers,
as needed, throughout the early years of the twentieth century,
but as they got older they needed more frequent repairs, which interrupted
the progress of the dredging operations. After much deliberation,
therefore, a new dredger was purchased in 1925 from the Dutch firm
de Klopp, and this time logic prevailed as it was given the next
number in the series - No 4. The Fielding & Platt dredger was
hired to the Severn Commission and later transferred by British
Waterways to the River Weaver. The Bristol dredger had all its machinery
removed and the hull was converted to a pontoon called Encore, which
now supports the office at Sharpness Marina. No 4 dredger continued
operating on the canal until it was replaced in 1981 by a diesel-electric
dredger named Thomas Fletcher after the resident engineer who supervised
the final phase of the construction of the canal in the 1820s.
Main sources: PRO RAIL 864 Dock Co. minute books. |
