Shivering Sands

A not inappropriate name for one of the many constantly shifting sandbanks of the Thames estuary but no obvious shivering when viewed by a GMI group on October 7^th.

An autumn cruise on the Waverley , the world’s last sea-going paddle steamer, has become a regular feature of the GMI year and from Tower Pier there have been visits to the Medway, Whitstable and this year to the Thames estuary forts.

In 1942/3 a number of fortified towers were positioned to provide anti-aircraft protection for London and its sea approaches, some towers being controlled by the Navy (Rough Sand, Sunk Head, Tongue Sands and Knock John – each with two towers) and others by the Army (Red Sands, Shivering Sands and Nore – each a cluster of seven towers). Favourable tide conditions allowed Waverley to approach closely the Red Sands, Shivering Sands and Knock John towers giving us close-up views of these fascinating remains.

Effectively abandoned by government in the late 1950s the towers reflect the ravages of age and damage by ship collision with Nore dismantled as a hazard to shipping and Shivering Sands losing a tower. Several of the towers became homes for pirate radio stations – remember Screaming Lord Sutch? – and one for a time became the Independent Principality of Sealand!

Old Father Thames is far from dead and Waverley provides an unsurpassed picture of the estuary environment, navigation problems, the history and down-river migration of port activity, progress on the new Thames Gateway port project, the variety of shipping and trade and this year a security problem of great historical interest. On the return up river in the warmth of the restaurant an erudite discussion on the origin and distinction between terms such as quay, wharf, pier, berth and mooring – these GMI students! Altogether an enjoyable social and interesting academic day – why not join us next year?

Text and Image: Dr David Hilling

Public Seminar Announcement – ‘Managing Global Enterprises in the Late 18th Century: Anthony Calvert of the Crescent, London’

Camden, Calvert & King was one of Britain’s first truly global enterprises. In 1792, the firm had 8,300 tons of shipping at sea, on 25 different voyages to Africa, the West Indies, to Africa and the West Indies (in the slave trade), the East Indies, Botany Bay and the East Indies (in the convict trade) and the Pacific (in the whale trade). While none of the firm’s own records have survived, Gary Sturgess and Ken Cozens have reconstructed their business affairs from archives scattered across the world. This seminar will focus on the managing partner, Anthony Calvert, how he built the firm and the methods through which he created a global enterprise.

Speaker Gary Sturgess currently holds the New South Wales Premier’s Chair of Public Service Delivery at the University of NSW and the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, and has an Adjunct Professorship at the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland. His career has been spent in government, as Cabinet Secretary in the NSW Government in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and as Director of a corporate think tank in London, specialising in public service contracting.

Everyone is welcome to attend, the seminar on Wednesday 10th October 2012 which will begin at 6pm, it is free to attend and no booking is required. It will be held in Room 075, Queen Anne Court, University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, SE10 9LS.

Legacy for London Waterways?

BACK TO WATER

by David Hilling

For too long Britain has turned its back on water transport but government rhetoric and a wide range of environmental considerations suggest that we should go back to water transport wherever possible. Mode shift back to water has been recognised with the creation of a Mode Shift Centre by the Freight Transport Association.

As part of a World Heritage Site, its proximity to the National Maritime Museum and the recently restored Cutty Sark and with a view over the Thames , the GMI could hardly be other than concerned with the idea of legacy. It was, of course, a case based on its possible legacy that brought the Olympics to Stratford and Greenwich Park and much is now being made of this with respect to sporting activities and a transformation of East London based on residential, cultural and commercial developments in the area of the Olympic Park.

But why not a legacy for waterway transport? Look out of GMI’s windows at the underutilised highway that is the Thames and the few remaining Greenwich peninsula wharves used for freight – does it have to be like this? Every year over 600,000 tonnes of containerised London waste is barged from Wandsworth to an incinerator wharf at Belvedere and Crossrail used barges to move excavated material away from its Canary Wharf station site. In October dredging of Bow Creek will facilitate barge removal of Crossrail tunnel excavated material from Limmo and Instone wharves.

Bow Creek is but the southern end of the Lee Navigation which passes through the Olympic Park to Edmonton (where there is already a waterside incinerator plant), Enfield and on into Hertfordshire – a waterway which stimulated food production and industries for the expanding London market. The new developments proposed for the Olympic Park area will require considerable excavation, vast quantities of aggregates and other building materials and will create land uses which continue to generate waste and recyclables way into the future. There could, indeed should, be a role for water transport in this and the London Legacy Development Corporation is being urged to give it serious consideration and ensure that possible wharf sites and their accessibility are not taken over by land uses for which a waterside location is not a necessary condition.

Dr David Hilling is Research Adviser and Visiting Lecturer in Maritime History at the Greenwich Maritime Institute. He was a lecturer in Geography at the University of Ghana from 1961-66 and a lecturer and senior lecturer at the University of London (Bedford College and Royal Holloway), until retirement in 1996. He has undertaken consultancy work on African port organisation and the cruise shipping market and destination/port lecturing on cruise ships (Western Mediterranean, Iberia, Atlantic Islands, Western Africa). During his career he has lectured at the Universities of Western Michigan and West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Dr Hilling is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is also UK vice president of the European River Sea Transport Union.

Image by Victoria Carolan

IMEHA2012 – 6th Congress of Maritime History, 2-6th July 2012, Ghent

It is now four years since the Greenwich Maritime Institute hosted the 5th International Congress of Maritime History and the baton has now been passed on the University of Ghent who are hosting the 6th congress in the series.
The delegation representing the GMI is formed of Professor Sarah Palmer, Chris Ware, Victoria Carolan, Richard Bateman, Gina Balta and myself, as well as various other graduates, colleagues and friends.
Over 300 maritime historians are expected to arrive throughout the duration of the conference and it kicked off with a wonderful welcome reception last night at the Ghent Museum.
Today the conference is in full swing with papers already presented on: Marine resources and environmental sustainability; British imperialism and the transformation of violence at sea; Nordic Shipping from 1960; Adapting trade to warfare 1700-2000; Ports and Cities in the Atlantic World; to name just a few and emphasise the variety of papers included.
This afternoon we are looking forward to Victoria Carolan presenting ‘A Girl in Every Port: Maritime Comedy Films 1900-1960’ and Martin Wilcox on ‘A record of abortive and devoid of achievement? The British distant-water fishery and the White Fish Authority, 1951-1981’.
Tomorrow we look forward to participating in another day of the conference, in Antwerp.

To see more information please see the congress websitre: http://www.imeha2012.ugent.be/

Suzanne Louail, Ghent

New GMI Research Article: ‘Railways, Roads and the British White Fish Industry, 1920-1970.’

It has long been a truism of British fisheries history that the spread of the railways in the nineteenth century created the modern white fish industry. Cheaper and faster transport opened up new markets for fresh fish, and thereby caused a boom in the catching sector, which by 1900 had largely assumed the form it was to keep until the post-war period. What had previously not been researched was the way in which the relationship between land transport and the fisheries changed in the twentieth century, and how it came to be that no fish now moves by rail.

The idea for this particular piece of research first came about when several boxes of papers from the Hull Fish Merchants’ Protection Association were deposited at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, at the University of Hull. Despite the fact that they actually do smell of stale fish, these records are a goldmine of information on the landward side of the fishing industry from the 1890s to the 1990s. Transport is among the issues that feature most prominently, from acrimonious disputes over road access to the docks in the 1930s, to the increasingly stormy relationship between British Railways and the Association in the 1950s and 1960s, and culminating in the railways’ almost complete abandonment of fish traffic in the late 1960s.

Using the Association records, complemented by records of the London and North Eastern Railway, British Transport Commission, British Railways, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the White Fish Authority, this article charts the changing relationship between the fishing industry and the transport industries between 1920 and 1970. It concludes that, although some diversion of traffic to cheaper and more flexible road haulage was inevitable – and that this became obvious as early as the 1920s – the final transition was a product of the fragmentation and disharmony of the fish trades, and intransigence and failures of negotiation on both sides.

This article written by Dre Martin Wilcox, has been published in the latest issue of Business History, a tier one academic journal.

GMI Research Seminar – ‘The Secretive Billionaire: Sir John Reeves Ellerman’, 14th March 2012

Michaela Barnard of the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull will presenting the next GMI Research Seminar of the 2011/12 programme on Wednesday 14^th March 2012. Her paper is ‘The ‘secretive billionaire’: Sir John Reeves Ellerman and the Ellerman Wilson Line, c.1916-1926.’.

A so-called secret rich list’ of Britain’s wealthiest private citizens produced in 1929 revealed that Sir John Reeves Ellerman (1862-1933) had accumulated assets well beyond those of his contemporaries. Indeed, with annual earnings totalling £389 million in 1929 and liquid assets of around £9 billion, Ellerman’s fortune, according to Rubenstein, ’was three times greater than the second largest British estate left prior to the 1970s’. It remains, however, that relatively little is known – either personally or professionally – about Ellerman who had an ‘almost morbid passion for secrecy’. Indeed, the extent to which he remained aloof from public life is encapsulated in one obituary describing him as ‘… the Silent Ford, the invisible Rockefeller’.

Ellerman’s business empire embraced a variety of industries including finance, newspapers and brewing. But shipping ranked as one of his earliest and leading concerns. In 1916, with a view to consolidating his position in north-west Europe, Ellerman bought the Hull-based shipping company of Thomas Wilson, Sons & Co., Ltd (TWSC) – reputedly the largest privately owned shipping company in the world at that time – for the sum of £4.1 million. This paper considers a number of sources relating to TWSC, re-styled Ellerman’s Wilson Line (EWL), during the period 1916-1926, including the extensive correspondence between Ellerman and the Managing Director of TWSC/EWL, Oswald Sanderson (1863-1926). This, it is anticipated, will serve to illuminate our understanding of both large-scale British business during this period and, more particularly, Ellerman – the ‘secretive billionaire’.

The seminar will take place in room 075, Queen Anne Court at 6pm. Tea & Coffee will be available from 5.30pm and a glass of wine afterwards. The seminar is free and there is no need to book, everyone is welcome.

GMI Short Course Programme 2012

We are delighted to announce that we are running an exciting short course programme again this year which covers a variety of historical and contemporary subjects.

• Maritime Crime: There’s Wreckers About – Saturday 9th June – £60

• Silencing the Silent Service?: Naval Propaganda and Censorship during the Second World War – Thursday 14th June – £60

• ‘Enemies of All Humanity’: Sea Piracy A Modern Perspective – Saturday 16th June – £60

• Caricature and the Navy during the Eighteenth Century – Thursday 28th June – £60

• Baroque Navies at War: Britain, the Netherlands and France 1688-1713 – Friday 29th and Saturday 30th June – £120

• China’s Rise as a Powerful Maritime Nation: Factors and Influences – Friday 20th July – £60

Everyone is welcome to register for these courses so please do feel free to register yourself or pass on to anyone else you think may be interested. You can find more information about each course and a registration form on our website: http://bit.ly/wATcht

Why Conserve the Cutty Sark?

The GMI are very privileged to have Richard Doughty, Director of the Cutty Sark Trust, to present the next GMI Research Seminar of the 2011/12 programme on Wednesday 15th February 2012.

One of the main advantages of talking about the Cutty Sark is being able to say that this is a ship that needs no introduction. Richard Doughty will consider why this merchant sailing ship is so highly regarded around the world and why, despite the damage done by the fire in 2007, so much time and effort has been invested in conserving her original structure.

The seminar will take place at the University of Greenwich, room 075, Queen Anne Court, Greenwich, London, SE10 9LS at 6pm. Tea & Coffee will be available from 5.30pm and a glass of wine afterwards. The seminar is free and there is no need to book, everyone is welcome.

You may also be intersted in a recent BBC documentary, Cutty Sark:National Treasure which is still available on BBC iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=cutty%20sark

Lifting of the Cutty Sark

Restoration work on the Cutty Sark, a 19th Century tea clipper, following a devastating fire, is nearing completion.

It is time for engineers to lift the 900-tonne vessel into its final position ahead of its reopening to the public in spring 2012.

The full story of the conservation project in Cutty Sark: National Treasure was shown on Friday 3 February on BBC Two, and is now available to view on the BBC iPlayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16842625

GMI MPhil/PhD Studentship

Women’s Contribution to Social Cohesion in Coastal Communities

University of Greenwich – Greenwich Maritime Institute

Ref: PGRO-GMI-2-11

Greenwich Maritime Institute, Greenwich, London

Greenwich Maritime Institute is pleased to offer one externally funded MPhil/PhD Studentship as part of the Interreg 4a 2 Seas project GIFS (Geography of Inshore Fishing and Sustainability). The GIFS project will explore the socio-economic and cultural importance of inshore fishing including governance, economic regeneration and the cultural value of fishing, and provides an opportunity for the successful candidate to be part of a cross-border inter-disciplinary research team. The research topic will relate specifically to women’s contribution to social cohesion in coastal communities in four European countries: Belgium, Britain, France and the Netherlands and the investigation will focus on these dimensions: (1) Women’s employment, income, health and education; (2) Women’s perception and feelings of safety, security and freedom; (3) Women’s access to and construction of networks amongst themselves and with others; (4) Women’s participation in main stream institutions

The successful candidate will be working as part of the cross-border GIFS project team and will be expected to travel and participate in fieldwork, project activities and meetings in the above noted four countries.

The successful candidate will receive a £13590 per annum bursary plus a contribution of up to £4000 per annum towards the tuition fees during the term of the studentship (three years), subject to satisfactory performance. An additional £2,000 per annum will also be available for fieldwork expenses.

Applicants must hold a 1st Class or Upper 2nd class Honours Bachelor’s or Master’s degree (UK or UK equivalent) in a relevant discipline for example geography, history, woman’s studies, environmental studies, political science, sociology or anthropology. Applicants should have previous experience of undertaking research, preferably in gender studies, and ideally experience of fisheries related to European counties. Excellence in English speaking and writing is essential, preferably also with an ability to speak fluent French or Dutch.

For further information please contact: Dr Minghua Zhao, M.Zhao@gre.ac.uk, Tel: 020 8331 7661

For additional information about the studentship and links to the application form please go to:http://www2.gre.ac.uk/research/study/studentships

The application form should be completed and returned to: postgraduateresearch@gre.ac.uk and include: an attached pdf file of a comprehensive CV and a one page covering letter explaining your interest in the project and how it relates to past experience and present motivations.

The closing date for applications is noon on 31 January 2012.