but Brixham, not Dartmouth, was the base for the local fishing fleet, and proceeds were shared to prevent steam trawler crews getting extra for better catches. Yet within ten to fifteen years steam trawling was to become established. The yard books of local shipbuilders Philip & Son show steady orders for steam yachts and launches from 1882. Probably the first to apply steam to humble fishing vessels and demonstrate they could be commercial, when Bidder decided they were not viable, he sold and moved on.
Enter Francis Simpson. Bidder had financed all three trawlers, two built at Sandquay on the east bank of the Dart. Simpson, who arrived in 1873, was a wealthy marine engineer from the Midlands. RearCommodore of the Royal Dart Yacht Club, active in local politics and mayor for ten years, he was a builder of steam launches and yachts for nigh on forty years, first near Coombe Mud, then Sandquay, and finally opposite at Noss Point, where he built Simpson, Strickland & Co., a large modern works that employed 230 men in 1897.
His coup was to attract a local Kingswear mechanic, George Kingdon. Kingdon had good credentials. He had worked on the early steam trawlers and had been chief mechanic at Froude’s ship-testing tank at Paignton. When Froude died in 1879, Kingdon came to Dartmouth with a patented compound engine and boiler he had invented and wanted to manufacture. Compared with rivals, it was lightweight, more reliable and a more efficient user of coal. After successfully installing one in Simpson’s yacht, Kingdon was recruited in 1880 to develop his engine, which he did in the back garden of Simpson’s house on Ridge Hill, ‘Combecote’ – which is still there. Near Dartmouth, by Robert Hurrell Froude, 1819, showing the new paper mill and waterwheel (the largest west of Bristol) built by Arthur Holdsworth at Warfleet. This was the romantic period, but even so you can see the poverty in the cottage on the left.
and extensive property interests – he went into business with local trawler owner, Samuel Lake. The idea was to develop a steam trawler, applying to ships the principle that had transformed land transport. It was to be the ‘most interesting and original work GPB did with ships’.3
George Parker Bidder. Born in Moretonhampstead, a child prodigy for his mental calculation, George Parker Bidder summered here in middle age and always considered the Devon air good for him. His experimentation with steam trawlers in Dartmouth was pioneering. E.F. Clark
Lake’s career is particularly enlivening; Dartmouth born, by the age of ten he was at sea and came back a rich man. Forward-looking, he promoted the new north embankment and coal bunkering, both of which increased the town’s prosperity. He built the first poured-concrete housing in England (still standing as Coombe Cottages, overlooking Coronation Park), a
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brickworks, a paintworks and slate quarry (all failed), and was finally bankrupted when he overextended himself contracting for Milford Haven Docks and the Felixstowe Docks. As a young man, he won the Albert Medal for bravery helping to rescue shipwrecked pilgrims off Calcutta, * The Edyth lasted longest as a trawler, almost twelve months, and incorporated innovative features. ‘I was out all day yesterday in the Edyth and had a fine haul of fish – the finest Turbot I ever saw… I should think 20lbs weight,’ Bidder writes to his wife in 1872. ‘Everything is done by steam’ he tells his grandson later. ‘The Sails are hoisted, the boat hauled on deck and the big net raised up very sharply and all by steam.’ (Clark, 1983, pp. 200-01.)
and died of fever after saving the crew of a Swedish barque off Corsica in Marseilles in 1887. He was awarded Sweden’s highest honour, the Gold Bravery Medal, posthumously. Paradise, built in 1855 on the site of Paradise Fort damaged in the civil war. Bidder renamed it Ravensbury. It still stands in Warfleet, but is now called Paradise Point.
Because local fishermen believed that the noise of screw propellers would scare fish, Bidder and Lake put a small steam engine into an existing vessel, the Thistle, to prove that it didn’t. Between 1869 and 1874 they went on to experiment with larger and larger prototype trawlers, the Florence, Bertha and Edyth, all named after Bidder daughters.* It was a case of an idea before its
D.A. Gerrard/Private collection
time defeated by entrenched local interests. Edyth could carry six times the load of a sailing trawler,4
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