On the Button in 4 Days of Fog: Schooner Days MXCIV (1094)

by C. H. J. Snider

RECENT numbers about the "Prospect of Whitby" and the sailing fleet of colliers that used to supply London with fuel, as did lake schooners for Toronto, have struck responsive chords in British breasts.

Harry Stone, an Old Countryman who builds fire and burglar-proof safes, (the Harry Stone Safe Co.) hails:

"For many years I have read and enjoyed your Schooner Days, and often wondered if you would some day discuss the coal carriers of the east coast.

"You mention Whitby in Yorkshire. I remember leaving the great old fishing port of Grimsby on the Humber in Lincolnshire for Whitby, in ballast once, in a dense fog. It was only eighty miles or so, even allowing an offing for Spurn Head and Flamborough Head; both of which we had to clear, but the wind was lightish, and we were four days without seeing a thing, and the foghorn going all the time.

Suddenly, the third-class cruiser Galatea passed us, not 50 feet away, going slow. We got a bearing from the officer on her bridge, and discovered that we had been off Whitby for two days, without being able to see the place! It wasn't poor seamanship.

"More than a hundred schooners, ketches and brigs sailed from Hull on the Humber with coal, around 1890. We received 5 shillings per ton for coal from Hull to London. Passing Cromer, on the northeast bulge of Norfolk, we would hoist our bunting, and the lifeboat station at Cromer would forward a message to the home office by postcard, with such a report as 'The good ship Dispatch passed Cromer 8 a.m. heading south, wind S.W. Cromer is about 90 miles from Hull, with nearly 200 more to get to London by water, but we would be expected at the Thames mouth.

"A London firm, Gory & Son, built a number of barges, and with a sea-going tug towed three of these at a time, each carrying 600 tons of coal. That was the beginning of the end of the sailing coal trade. Coming home once with a cargo of clay we passed one of these barges adrift off the Deeps. She refused our help, and I don't know what became of her.

"Steam gradually took over, but up to and during the First War small sail was in evidence on the coast. Trawlers replaced the fishing smacks, and the smacks were converted into ketches. They would carry about 110 tons of coal. They were very fast, and so made it pay."

(They would have to be fast, to make money on a round trip of 400 to 500 miles, which must have taken a week at least and only yielded £28. That would be $136, as the pound was then valued.)

Dickensians were amused at the barker's quotation about the Prospect of Whitby "mentioned in the fillum Gryte Heckspecktyeshuns w'ich we 'ave all seen and also in the novel by Charles Dickens of the syme nyme." Some have asked Where? We re-read Great Expectations without finding the Prospect specified, though the description of the "house with three storeys of bow-window," where the beauteous Clara lived with her pepper-and-rum parent, might suggest that ancient hostelry. Dickens must have known the Prospect. He also knew the sailing colliers. To quote from the 'novel of the syme nyme.'

"Here were colliers by the score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as counterweights to measures of coal swinging up, which were then rattled over the side into barges"—just as we showed in the illustration for No. MLXXXIV—and again:

"In and out, under the figurehead of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as is done by many Johns) and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality of bosom and her knobby eyes starting two inches out of her head."

Yes, Dickens knew his colliers. The last British sailing collier we saw was one of those 110-tonners or smaller, the Maggie Kelso of Dumfries, unloading Welsh coal at St. Mary's in the Scilly Isles, preparatory to taking on a cargo of potatoes. Maggie was a wee black schooner with a square double topsail forward, and under her cocked-up bowsprit a red-cheeked, black-haired doll-like figurehead, "formal of bosom and staring of eye," even as Dickens described.

THAMES COLLIERS LONG AGO.—A repeat of the famous E. W. Cooke etching.