Comments on: The Docks Of Old London

By: Richard Hartman

Richard Hartman — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:12:18 +0000

Seeing the tidal range of Thames made me realize that natural occurring Graving Docks were available.

By: Antony R Macer

Antony R Macer — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 20:53:07 +0000

Ah! the docks… The subtlety of the smells!
Even in the ’60s, Upper and Lower Thames Street’s airs were enriched by the contents of the warehouses.

By: Marcia Howard

Marcia Howard — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 20:50:44 +0000

My eldest brother worked on the docks in the very early 1960s and used to tell of the HUGE spiders who arrived in the cargoes of Banana. I shudder just to think about it.

By: M D West

M D West — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 15:58:53 +0000

This year 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of the King George V dock (the last one built)…now the site of London City Airport(already 33 years old). I believe the huge iron mooring bollards, still there but cut off flush to level the quayside for the airport construction, still throw the aircraft magnetic compasses out of alignment

By: paul loften

paul loften — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 12:51:00 +0000

I agree with Mary what a shameful sight.
On another note the old dockers leader Jack Dash became a London tour guide after he retired. The heart and soul of old cockney London showing us its heart and soul ?

By: mary woodward

mary woodward — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:17:25 +0000

what a truly terrible, ghastly sight is that ivory floor …at least in this respect we are getting a bit better

By: Hels

Hels — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 10:15:50 +0000

Trading was certainly the part of the economy that an ambitious person wanted to be in. It was a tough life for the dock workers and a dangerous life for the sailors but for the people who sat in London making the decisions, it mostly went very well. Alas those little boys on the training ship pre-WW1 seemed VERY young.

By: Dean Armond

Dean Armond — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 09:22:54 +0000

A lovely article with stunning images.

I took the liberty of sharing it but made sure that ‘The Gentle Author’ got credited.

Thank you, I know that it will bring a lot of pleasure to people still able to remember the docks.

By: Mary

Mary — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 09:09:34 +0000

These images look as if they could have been taken fifty years earlier so little has changed, perhaps the telegraph poles and the lack of sailing ships hinting at more recent times. Business appears to be booming just two years after the end of WW1 followed by a global pandemic. It is very sad to see the “ivory floor”, but realise that modern times have brought some changes for the better.

By: Ron Bunting

Ron Bunting — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:12:18 +0000

That isn’t the vessel Hougoumont ,which was the last sailing vessel to carry convicts to Australia but is in fact the steel four-masted barque named Hougomont, 2428 tons, built at Greenock in 1897, and hulked at Stenhouse Bay in South Australia in 1932.

Hougoumont was A three-masted full-rigged ship of the type commonly known as a Blackwall Frigate, Hougoumont was constructed at Moulmein, Burma in 1852. The ship’s original owner was Duncan Dunbar, a highly successful ship owner who entered the convict transport trade in the 1840s, providing nearly a third of the ships that transported convicts to Western Australia.

Little is known of Hougoumont’s later service, but there are records of emigrants arriving in Melbourne on board Hougoumont in 1869, and was still listed in Lloyd’s Register in 1883, but is not in the 1889/90 volume.