Blog at the Ballast

Throughout the 1800s the Firth of Clyde was populated by steamers. These ships  were praised for their speed and would sail as far as Largs, Campbeltown and Inverary, taking holidaymakers to resorts and providing a commuter service for those travelling from holiday homes. They provided an integrated transport system, allowing for fast connections with the new railheads along the coast. The ships were often run by railway companies themselves and the vessels remained especially popular for leisure journeys until the 1960s. However, there were also smaller steamers that ran ferry services along the river, such as Clutha No 10.


Clutha No 10 was a steel screw steamer built by the Murray Brothers of Dumbarton in 1891. Together with No 9, the steamer was certified to hold up to 360 passengers, making them the largest capacity ferries in the fleet. Here we can see No 10 coming into dock at one of the eleven stops that were located either side of the Clyde.

 Although the Cluthas began as a service of only six vessels in 1884, they quickly grew to be a fleet of twelve passenger ferries operated by the Clyde Navigation Trust. They ran a round trip service of about three miles from Victoria Bridge to Whiteinch and passengers were charged one penny per journey. The ladies’ cabin was available for an extra penny, and there was also smoking room.The small passenger steamers remained popular for nearly two decades, but were deemed unnecessary with the introduction of the subway in 1896 and the trams in 1901. The service was discontinued in 1903 and little is known about what happened to the Cluthas after this. No 10 was purchased by the Admiralty and transferred to the River Medway.

Thanks to this site, which provided much of the information for this post. New steamer images have been added to our Dan McDonald collection on Flickr.

Olivia Howarth, archives trainee.

• York Street Ferry (York Street to West Street) 
• Clyde Street Ferry (Clyde Street, Anderston, to Springfield Quay) 
• Hyde Park Ferry (Hydepark Street to Springfield Quay) 
• Stobcross Ferry (Finnieston Quay to Mavisbank Quay) 
• Finnieston Ferry (Finnieston Quay to Mavisbank Quay) 
• Kelvinhaugh Ferry (Yorkhill Quay to Princes Dock) 
• Govan Ferry (Ferry Road, Partick, to Water Row, Govan) 
• Meadowside Ferry (Meadowside Street, Partick to Holm Street, Govan) 
• Whiteinch Ferry (James Street, Whiteinch to Holmfauld Road, Linthouse) 
• Renfrew Ferry (Yoker to Renfrew) 
• Erskine Ferry (Dunbartonshire to Renfrewshire)

The Glasgow firm of Penman & Co, boilermakers, Caledonian Iron Works, was established around 1870 and by 1900 occupied a three-acre site at its Caledonian Iron Works in Strathclyde Street, Bridgeton (built 1889). The firm was incorporated in 1907 and from 1920 was owned by Babcock & Wilcox. It specialised in land boilers, which were exported worldwide.

Image from here

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Galgael are holding a workshop tomorrow (Thursday 26th April) to show you how to build a St. Kilda mailboat from found material (redeveloped flotsam) pulled from the River Clyde.

Go here for details of times and how to find Galgael.

There is a good post on the University of Glasgow's library and archive blog about him and his first speech as University Rector in 1971. It includes a link to a digitised version of his speech available here.

Excuse the slightly squint images for today's photo, that's how I put them in the scanner. The images are of the hovercraft/hoverbus built by William Denny & Brothers and launch in 1962. It was one of the last projects the company undertook before they went into liquidation in 1963.

Denny's were a firm known for innovation and this hoverbus was one of the first in the world built for commercial operation.

The BBC has a great clip of the hovercraft on its maiden voyage from Dumbarton to Oban in 1963. Click here to get to the page and then click on the video icon next to the Denny Hovercraft link to view it.

The maiden voyage also took the D2 down to London and British Pathe have this clip of her arriving on the Thames in June 1962

£1-A-TIME HOVERBUS

One of the most famous ships in the world, today's photo is of the Cutty Sark.

She was built by Scott & Linton in Dumbarton in 1869, specification details are available from the Clydebuilt database here.

I won't say much about her as there are much better resource out there for information about such a well known ship but I will flag up the archives of the Cutty Sark Trust, which look very interesting and include "photographs of the ship at different stages of her life, logbooks and accounts for Cutty Sark, maps, charts and newspaper articles about the ship."

Today's photo is of the Clutha No.5, a passenger ferry built by TB Seath & Sons of Rutherglen for the Clyde Navigation Trust. The no. 5 came into service in 1884 and worked until 1903.


The Glasgow Story website has information about the history of these passenger ferries and an article written by Andrew McQueen is available online at Scribd which gives a fuller history of these "waterbuses".

Specification details available from the Clydebuilt site along with this interesting information provided by Stuart Cameron, about what you can see in the photo:

"In the background the spire of the University of Glasgow can be seen in the background on Gilmorehill. The ship on the left is berthed at D&W Henderson's fitting out quay on the west bank of the River Kelvin. The two ship's under construction are in the Pointhouse shipyard of A & J Inglis. To the right of them is the north bank slipway of the Govan ferry the the Partick Steamboat Wharf."

Specification details available from Clydesite here

As with the Baron Haig and Baron Vernon, it was built for H Hogarth & Sons of Ardrossan.  Specification details are available on the clydebuilt database here.

They are sitting in front of the Corinaldo and the Norwegian is across the way.

A project to renovate the 1962 replica of the Comet will get under way this weekend.  The project is being run by Inverclyde Council, Ferguson's Shipbuilders (whose archived plans we process before they go to the University of Glasgow Archives) and The Trust.  More details are available here.


I was alerted to this story via the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society blog this afternoon after our afternoon tea break in which we had just been talking about the Comet and the problems of preserving ships on display - what a coincidence.


At the Ballast Trust we actually have a few copies of the booklet produced in aid of the Comet Trust Fund in the 1960s and copies of the drawings used in 1962 to reconstruct the original comet.