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A trip on the 'Waverley'
by
David Archer
David Walker & I have recently returned from a trip aboard the paddle-steamer Waverley from Folkestone, around Kent, to alight at Tower Bridge in central London (well, that was the plan).
PS Waverley, said to be the last sea-going paddle steamer in the world, is a traditionally built replacement for the original Waverley which was lost through enemy action whilst evacuating troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Her shallow draft made her ideal for this but soon after leaving with over 600 troops on board, she was attacked by 12 German Heinkel bombers. Despite evading several bombs and downing two enemy bombers she eventually succumbed to their attacks and sank. Many men were lost but approximately 450 were saved and brought home on other ships.
After the war, a replacement was commissioned by the LNER railway company and launched on the Clyde in 1946. After a somewhat checkered career she was famously gifted for £1 to the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society at the end of her working life in 1974. Waverley then began a second career as one of the country’s best-loved tourist attractions. Because the tourist season on the river Clyde in her native Scotland is relatively short, she finances her maintenance by daily excursions from April to October from piers around all the west & south coasts of Britain including the Solent and the Isle of Wight. The trip from Folkestone to London was to be the first part of her journey back to Scotland.
David Walker approached me several months ago to see if I would like to accompany him on this expedition, to which I readily agreed. We spent some time planning the logistics of the operation, deciding to travel by train from Birmingham International to Euston, then a short cab trip to St Pancras to catch the South-Eastern service down to Folkestone. We arranged overnight accommodation at the Channel Tunnel Premier Inn in Folkestone.
Waverley was scheduled to leave Eastbourne late morning,
stopping at Folkestone at about 1.30pm to pick up embarking passengers
including ourselves. We spent a very
pleasant morning visiting the old Folkestone Harbour railway station, used by
the famous Golden Arrow in earlier times, which has been converted into a very interesting
tourist attraction.
We were able to track Waverley’s progress on a ‘Vessel Finder’ app which reported that she was running about 45 minutes behind schedule, not a big deal. Unfortunately, about 30 minutes before her arrival, the heavens opened with a very heavy squall of rain.
We managed to shelter from the worst of this but were obliged to venture out in the tail-end of the squall for the boarding process.
Difficult to manoeuvre, Waverley had made a spectacular stop from her cruising speed by simply reversing her paddles.
Fortunately, the squall passed as quickly as it had arrived, and we were able to find a relatively sheltered spot to sit and dry out.
Between the occasional squall we had good sightings of the French coast, and our transit around the South and North Forelands of Kent was accompanied by a fresh North-Easterly breeze. This led to rather choppy transit of the North Sea off the Kent Coast, and we were all somewhat relieved when Waverley rounded the North Foreland and entered the slightly more sheltered approaches to the Thames Estuary. But then we were surprised by the boarding, after several attempts, of a pilot to see us through its shifting sandbanks.
A little later, we received a most unusual request from the captain. Because the majority of passengers had congregated on the port side of the ship, to benefit from both the shelter of the superstructure and the warmth of the evening sunshine, the ship had developed a noticeable list to port. Not dangerously so, but sufficient to cause one paddle to dig deeper in the water than the other. This was causing a drift which had to be offset by the helm. The net effect was to reduce our speed from our planned 14 knots to only about 10. Could passengers therefore spread themselves more evenly over the ship?
Of course, very few people did, with the result that we were getting more and more behind schedule. Eventually, of course, the inevitable happened, with an announcement over the ship’s Tannoy that, as a result of our late departure and delays in transit, there was no-one available to open Tower Bridge to permit our transit to Tower Bridge pier where we were due to disembark. The only other port available to permit our safe disembarkation was at Gravesend.
Well, how many of you readers could honestly put your finger on a map and point to the exact location of Gravesend? I certainly couldn’t.
Fortunately, two very nice ladies helpfully suggested that we get a cab to Ebbsfleet, which is a mainline station on the Eurostar route into St Pancras. The only problem was getting a cab, easy enough in central London, but not in an obscure town 30 miles outside London at 8pm on a late September evening. Once again, we were helped by the kindness of a local stranger, who phoned a local cab company on a behalf, and 10 minutes later we were on our way. Then, everything slotted into place. We arrived at Ebbsfleet to discover that a fast train was leaving in just 3 minutes, then at St Pancras we quickly located a free cab and reached Euston directly opposite our required platform with 10 minutes to spare. Talk about timing.
The 9:50pm train to Birmingham took the scenic route via Northampton and Long Buckby, finally arriving at Birmingham International just after midnight. It was a long day, very exhilarating despite not ending in the planned transit under Tower Bridge. Many thanks to David Walker for inviting me to escort him.