Inglis Shipyard becomes the Riverside Museum



As 2010 enters its final fortnight we reflect that next year will see the opening of the new £80m Riverside Museum (of Transport and maritime heritage) on Pointhouse Quay at the confluence of the Rivers Clyde and Kelvin. The titanium and glass clad museum building occupies the site of a famous Glasgow shipyard, the Pointhouse yard, opened in 1863 by the brothers Anthony and John Inglis, who had peviously built marine engines and other engineering products at their works in Warroch Street, off Anderston Quay. Inglis shipyard at Pointhouse was in production for almost exactly a century,during which time the firm produced about 500 ships of a range in size and type that would, undoubtedly, surprise the huge number of international tourists that will visit the Riverside Museum in the next few years. They were, of course, well known as builders of paddle steamers including Waverley and Maid of the Loch, two of the few remaining Clyde-built ships of this type. However, Inglis paddle steamers could be found much further afield than the home market - they featured in the fleets of the Bay Steamers company of Melbourne, South Australia, the earltest Yangtse-river steamers of Swire's China Navigation Company and, prominently, in the fleets of Nicolas Mihanovich and the Entre Rios Railway companies on the River Plate between Buenos Aires and Montevideo and further into the interior of the South American continent. The Mihanovich paddlers were significantly larger than their Clyde counterparts and the Entre Rios ships were built as train ferries rather than passenger boats.

Other passenger ships produced by Inglis included around 50 small ocean going liners for the British India Steam Navigation Company, founded by Campbeltown-born Sir William MacKinnon, the largest shipping company in the world for a period prior to its merger with the Peninsula & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O). Inglis first contribution to the Royal Navy was the destroyer HMS Fury in 1912 and, thereafter, they built numerous corvettes, frigates and patrol boats at Pointhouse. Arguably the most surprising of Inglis' contribution to the total of 26,000 plus ships built on Clydeside was their two Royal Yachts, the Safa-el-Bahr for the Kedive of Egypt and HMY Alexandra for the British Admiralty during the reign of HM King Edward VII. She finished her career as the coastal steamer Prins Olav on the famous Hurtigruten service in Norway. Ingis produced two ships in 1947 (any many unnamed barges), one being the vessel that has become well known as the world's last seagoing paddle steamer since 1971 and the other being the largest ship ever built in the Pointhouse shipyard, under subcontract from the Scotts Shipbuilding & Engineering Company of Greenock, the China Navigation Company's Soochow.

The picture above depicts Inglis' shipyard from the bridge over the River Kelvin in 1946. Nearest the camera is the Clyde paddle steamer Jeanie Deans (originally built at Fairfields on the opposite bank of the Clyde in Govan in 1931) undergoing a significant rebuild after over six years service in the Royal Navy as HMS Jeanie Deans during WW2. The vessel immediately astern of her and the vessel under construction in the yard are two of the four tankers, Empire Tedport, Empire Tedship, Empire Tedmuir and Empire Tedrita, built by Inglis in 1946-47. Finally, still in her austere wartime livery is the paddler HMS Aristocrat, then recently arrived after demob from the Royal Navy and ready to be converted back into her civilian role as the Clyde-based paddler Talisman. She was an Inglis product in 1935 when she broke new ground as the Clyde's first and, as it turned out, only diesel electric paddle vessel.

The high cranes in the background are those at the Govan shipyard of the huge Harland & Wolff shipbuilding group, of which the Inglis company had been a subsidiary since 1917. Although best known for their base at Queens Island in Belfast, from the 1920s to the 1960s Harland & Wolff's presence on the Clyde was almost as large as that on the Lagan. It Included 6 shipyards, the Finnieston (Steam) Engine Works at Anderston Quay, the Scotstoun (Diesel) Engine Works and the huge Clyde Foundry, one of the largest in Europe, in Helen Street Govan, which produced massive castings such as engine cylinder blocks, stern posts and rudder horns, etc.

Stuart Cameron

Chairman's Blog No13 - ps Lincoln Castle Update.

As you may recall the PSPS were offered the former Humber Car / Passenger paddler Lincoln Castle earlier this year. For very real reasons the society council made the difficult decision not to take on the ageing vessel due to the level of work required to make her a viable entity for ongoing preservation whilst not posing a risk to Waverley, Kingswear Castle and Balmoral.

It transpired at the time the PSPS council were making the decision another potential buyer had appeared and all (we thought) was well. HOWEVER this was a false dawn and despite the forming of a preservation group the owner of the vessel took matters into his own hands and demolition of the 1940 Inglis built vessel started.

I recently received an email from Chris Woolley containing the following link which takes up the story and has photos of the vessel in the stages of demolition.

ps Lincoln Castle update.

It is my personal opinion that any potential preservation candidate should of course be considered but in these difficult economic times the financial implications not only of the project but the effect on existing interests must always take precedence. The society's volunteers have helped it keep it's vessels in service through good and bad. Taking on Lincoln Castle would have been a paddler too far.

Thanks to Chris for sending the update link.

Gavin Stewart
Scottish Branch Chairman

Chairman's Blog No 10 - ps Lincoln Castle.

Dear All,
By the time you read this, you should have had a letter in your latest Paddle Wheels concerning, our offer of the PS Lincoln Castle currently moored in Grimsby. I will avoid muddying the waters with too much detail about the visit and my impressions, as one of the chief drivers as to what happens next will be the surveyors report, based on fact, rather than my relatively uneducated impressions based on a cursory visual inpsections.

It is however vitally important that we know "the will of the people" so please please please take the time to respond to the questionaire in the letter. If we are to move forward on this it must be in the knowledge that this is a move broadly supported by the membership. Equally if we let her go for scrap (this is the alternative intended, albeit with great reluctance by the owner if we do not proceed) it must be in the knowledge that this is because this is what the society as a whole believed appropriate.

The idea behind this blog is simply to let you have a good look round the ship, inside and out.

These three pictures give a general view of the ship as she is berthed in Grimsby, by the very well signposted Fishing Heritage Centre.

The first place we visited was the car deck and the equivalent on Waverley of the Promenade Deck. The original wood decking has been overlaid with steel chequer plate. Of note along the starboard side is the added bar structure which, it would not be too unkind to say probably began life as a large garden shed at B & Q! What these photos fail to convey is the vast expanse of deck space. With the sponsons extending well aft, there really is a huge amount of space.

As the rain was getting heavier we retreated indoors for a look around the engine room. Considering that the vessel was operating as a pub /resturant, a suprising amount of loving care had been lavished on the non revenue earning part of the ship - and with a flick of a switch, the owner had the engines turning for us!

Next a look at the lower deck passenger spaces. First off, the "Grand staircase" leads down from the port and starboard alleyways to the lower bar aft. Almost exected to see Kate Winslet make a grand arrival, Titanic style! The lower bar has a significantly greater amount of headroom than Waverley, about 7 ft anyway. The next pic is in the lower bar forward area, the equivalent of the entire crew accomodation space on Waverley.

What I haven't shown here are photos I took of where the boiler used to be which is now a rather modern looking galley and each of the bunkers which are now bar and catering stores.

Above, some view from the main deck forward bar. The first view is looking aft, down the starboard side. Again it's hard to convey the size if this space which is filled somewhat by having the bar bang in the middle! The next photo is looking aft from further back on the starboard side and I guess the stairs leading down to the lower forward bar as described above are roughly in the same position as the crew accomodation stairs on Waverley.

I also took a fair few photos of things like the bilges for the purposes of a technical record but they are, to be honest, a bit boring for inclusion here! In any event, matters such as the material condition ohe shell plating are best left to be determined by the surveyor. There are cement repairs in the bilges as a means of addressing "pinholing". They vary from about 1/2 thick screeding, up to about 2-3" thick rather than the image most of us might have of a cement Box Repair of wooden shuttering surrounding about a foot deep block of cement. However I must repeat these visual observations are largely worthless and will be much better informed by the surveyor's report.

Stuart Mears

Coasts of Clyde

The following embedded links take you to YouTube versions of the classic British Transport Films' promotional documentary 'The Coasts of Clyde'. It is loaded in three parts (presumably due file size, bandwidth or some other restrictions). If interested you can buy higher resolution copies of this film on DVD.

I think this film demonstrates why there is still a band of 'steamer enthusiasts' that have kept the last of the Clyde steamers, Waverley, going for the last 35 years (the ship has now been in operational preservation for significantly longer than it was in commercial service - 27 years). Those of us on the wrong side of 50 can still recall with some fondness the days when there was a fleet of steamers on the Firth of Clyde. Waverley has been the sole survivor of the breed since 1978. The film includes views of the Clyde paddle steamers Jeanie Deans, Caledonia, Jupiter and Waverley and a brief clip of Maid of the Loch, which is currently statically preserved at Balloch on Loch Lomond. There is a very brief glimpse of three passenger steamers alongside Rothesay pier at the same time, something that most certainly will not happen again (at 3 mins 35 seconds in part 2). (The nearest that you can get to the Clyde steamer fleet feeling nowadays is to visit the paddle steamer fleets of the Lakes of Geneva and Lucerne in Switzerland - but you don't get the open sea feel there). The Rothesay clip depicts part of the paddler Caledonia at the Craigmore (near) end of the pier, the turbine steamer Queen Mary II berthed at the middle berth (Berth2), on one of her regular 'Doon-the-Watter' sailings from Glasgow Bridge Wharf to the Kyles of Bute, and the Waverley berthing at the Ardbeg end of the pier, a berth that she has recently started to use again following the significant remodelling of Rothesay pier. There is some 'artistic licence' at work in the making of the film e.g. the sequence describing the passage through the famous 'Narrows' of the Kyles of Bute involves two different paddle steamers - the first part shows Jeanie Deans entering the narrow channel from the East Kyle (at 4:41), the Jupiter passing through it (at 4:50) and back to the Jeanie Deans exiting the Narrows and turning to port to head down the West Kyle to Tighnabruaich (at 5:04).

Incidentally, I think the Cunard Line vessel at the start of Part 1 is the liner Media, which was a product of the John Brown shipyard at Clydebank in 1947, the same year that the Waverley was built by A & J Inglis upstream at Pointhouse. The Media stayed with Cunard only to 1961 when she was sold to Italian interests. In 1989, by which time she was named Lavia, she was gutted by fire at Hong Kong (07/01/1989) while undergoing renovation (an uncanny repeat of the fate of the famous Clydebank-built Cunarder Queen Elizabeth in 1972). Lavia was towed to shallow water where she heeled over onto her side on a sandbank. She was righted and towed to Kaohsiung in Taiwan, arriving 17/06/1989 for demolition. This was around the time of my first visit to Hong Kong by I didn't see her there.


Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



It was in those days that my enthusiasm for the Clyde and its ships and shipyards and particularly its excursion steamers was born. It was an advantage, undoubtedly, that my best pal at the old Burgh Primary School in Rutherglen at that time was Robert Dalgleish, whose grandparents lived in Dunoon. We became juvenile members of the Clyde River Steamer Club in the mid 1960s and I am still a member of the 78 year old club. The picture below shows Rab and myself enjoying a sail on the paddle steamer Caledonia, leaning back on the hatch covering the companionway down to the crew accommodation, right up near the bow of the steamer. The date was the 18th May 1968 and the Caledonia was on a special charter that day to the Rutherglen West Parish Church where Rab and I were members of the 38th Glasgow Scout Troop. The sailing had started at the Bridge Wharf in Glasgow and visited the Kyles of Bute and Loch Riddon. Many years later, as a final year undergraduate, Rab based his degree thesis on a study of the economics of operating steamers on the Clyde. Sadly, the Caledonia was withdrwn from service at the end of 1969, an event that encouraged the formation of the Scottish Branch of the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society. Although it proved impossible to keep the Caledonia operational theBranch members were successful in preventing her demolition and, in 1972 she began a new career as a static bar and restaurant on the River Thames at the former Savoy Pier just upstream of Waterloo Bridge. She continued in that role until badly damaged by a fire in 1981. Unfortunately the prospect of returning her to the Clyde for restoration as a possible running mate for Waverley could not be brought to fruition. She was replaced on the Thames by another Clyde Steamer, none other than the turbine steamer Queen Mary that also features in the film. She remained in the role until 2009. The vessel is currently being transferred to La Rochelle in western France for use as floating hotel.

Robert Dalgleish and me on PS Caledonia, 18th May 1968

Stuart Cameron

A & J Inglis - Paddle Steamer Specialists

Scotland's last two paddle steamers, WAVERLEY and MAID OF THE LOCH, share a common heritage in that they were both built by the firm of A & J Inglis Ltd at their Pointhouse shipyard on the River Kelvin near to its confluence with the River Clyde in Glasgow. The firm built about 500 ships in the 101 years that they were business at Pointhouse Shipyard. A significant proportion of the 500 ships built at Pointhouse were paddle steamers. It is thought that at least 6 Inglis-built paddle steamers are still in existence in 2008. These include the former Humber passenger and car ferry LINCOLN CASTLE at Goole and the paddle train ferries EXEQUIEL RAMOS MEJIA (http://www.histarmar.com.ar/BuquesMercantes/Ferrobarcos/Ferrobarcos-EzRamosMejia.htm) and ROQUE SAENZ PENA (http://www.histarmar.com.ar/BuquesMercantes/Ferrobarcos/Ferrobarcos-RSaenzPenia.htm) in Argentina. Apart from WAVERLEY none of the surviving Inglis paddlers are operational.

In fact Inglis supplied a significant number of paddlers for the Argentine coastal and river fleets including some of the largest paddle steamers of their type ever built. One such vessel was the paddle steamer VIENA seen below (in a Robertson of Gourock picture) on the Clyde before departing for South America


VIENA was one of several large paddle steamers built on the Clyde for service in Argentina. principally from Buenos Aires. Most of them were built by Denny of Dumbarton or Inglis at Pointhouse.

The VIENA was an Inglis product and was launched into the River Kelvin on 8th June 1906.

She was based on the Paddle Steamer PARIS that Inglis had built ten years earlier for Mensajeries Fluviales del Plata (see http://www.clydesite.co.uk/clydebuilt/viewship.asp?id=1911). However, VIENA was built for Nicolas Mihanovich's Argentine Navigation Company. Some sources state that Mihanovich's son Pedro was aboard the vessel when she ran trials in the Gareloch on 17 October 1906. It is stated that she attained 16.5 knots. She seems a bit big to have run trials on the Gareloch measured mile - the picture below looks to be off Gourock.

VIENA was about 330 feet long with a beam of about 40 feet. Her gross tonnage was 2376 and she had accommodation for 340 First Class passengers and 120 in Second Class. The vessel was powered by a triple expansion steam engine built in Inglis' own engine works.

A few years after building VIENA, Inglis used the same basic design when they supplied the two large paddlers CABO SANTA MARIA and CABO CORRIENTES for Hamburg Sud Amerika Damfschiffarts in 1913. After WWI they were taken over by the Argentine Navigation Co and became GENERAL ARTIGAS and GENERAL ALVEAR respectively. VIENA was renamed WASHINGTON in 1915 (picture of VIENA as WASHINGTON).

Other large paddle steamers supplied by Inglis to the Argentine fleets about that time included the LAMBERE, BRUSELAS (http://www.clydesite.co.uk/clydebuilt/viewship.asp?id=1965) and her sister BERNA.

VIENA as WASHINGTON passed through various ownerships but remained in service until 1960. After several years of lying derelict at Rocha, Buenos Aires she sank in the basin on 3rd June 1967. The wreck was raised and scrapped by Satecna S. A. in 1981

About the same time that Inglis was supplying the paddlers to South America they also built the 1400 ton paddle steamer WEEROONA (below) for the Huddart Parker company's established excursion routes from Melbourne Australia. WEEROONA served with the US Navy during WWII and was owned subsequently by the Australian Government until scrapped in 1951.

Stuart Cameron