For centuries, Britons have navigated the water and in the July issue we considered our ancestors’ experiences of travelling in traditional rowing boats, barges and punts. Steamboats also entered the nautical scene over 200 years ago, offering another means of transport and many more opportunities for pleasure rides on sea, river and lake.

The first steamboats
After various attempts in the 1700s to design vessels propelled by steam, the world’s first steamboat, developed by Scottish inventor and engineer William Symington, was successfully trialled on the River Carron near Grangemouth in 1801. With support from Lord Dundas, governor of the Forth and Clyde Canal Company, Symington built another steamboat with a powerful horizontal engine and large crank-driven paddle wheel – the Charlotte Dundas, named after his patron’s daughter. An ambitious test in March 1803 demonstrated the new steamboat pulling two 70-ton barges almost 20 miles along the canal, confirming the suitability of steam power for ships. The Charlotte Dundas was essentially the first practical steamboat, prompting the continuous development of further steamers that would revolutionise sea and inland water cargo transport and passenger travel.

Victorian expansion
Steamboats came of age during the Victorian era, fuelling the 19th century’s vast expansion in international trade, helping to consolidate the British Empire and advancing transportation around the thousands of miles of coast that comprise the British Isles. As steamers increasingly superseded sailing ships, they ran regular services and in remoter regions where decent roads had not yet been built, provided vital links with other parts of the country. It was often more convenient to carry goods by sea than by land and in Scotland, Wales and the Bristol Channel steamer services rapidly developed. Once steamer networks were fully established by the turn of the century, it was theoretically possible for a traveller to circumnavigate the entire working coast of Britain.

Piers and ports
By the late 1800s piers had been constructed at almost 80 British seaside resorts. Broadly, these provided a variety of leisure and entertainment facilities, but most of the piers built prior to 1875 were initially intended as landing stages for steamboats.

Piers generally offered a secure mooring throughout tidal ebbs and flows although some, like Southend, where the shore was characterised by mudflats, were progressively extended further, to accommodate steamers at low tide. During the last quarter of the 19th century seaside piers were mainly conceived as tourist attractions, although many were still being served by steamer traffic in the early 1900s. So too were numerous other jetties, harbours and docks around the coast, for, despite the success of the railways, steamboats remained an enjoyable and reliable mode of transport.

Coastal steamers
Steamboats transformed our ancestors’ experience of travel by water, both locally and further afield. For example, in late-Victorian London various companies operated scheduled steamers departing from Tower Bridge or Woolwich, bound for Southend-on-Sea and onwards to Clacton-on-Sea, Harwich and Felixstowe, these east-coast services being extended, during the 1890s, to Southwold, Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. While some passengers enjoyed extended holidays, day-trippers on the London-Great Yarmouth-London route were able to change steamers where they crossed at Walton-on-the-Naze, for the return journey.

Further north, steamboats departed Skegness daily for Hunstanton, leaving at 8.30am and arriving some 2½ hours later; the return journey departed at 5.30pm, arriving home in Skegness by 8pm – a return fare that cost 3 shillings in around 1900. Summer was, predictably, by far the busiest time for such excursions and when trade diminished at the end of the season, east-coast steamers generally returned to their moorings in Grimsby or Hull. Large ports like Hull were home to numerous leisure steamboats, some of which ran services still further north, along the Yorkshire coast around Bridlington, where at least five different tourist vessels operated regularly during summer.

One steamer named Dundee, built in 1886 for the Dundee Perth & London Shipping Company, sailed directly from Dundee Wharf in Limehouse, East London to Dundee Docks, being fitted out with different grades of cabin for first- and second-class passengers and deck-space for third- (or ‘deck’-) class travellers. The company also operated overnight services between Hull and Dundee, while the Aberdeen Steam Navigation Company ran passenger and freight steamer services between Aberdeen and London as early as 1828. Indeed, some of the earliest coastal steamer services, originating in the 1820s and 1830s, sailed in Scottish waters, linking ports like Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness, small steamboats carrying both cargo and passengers even navigating the Orkneys and Hebrides. Initially these Highland services must have attracted Romantic-era tourists in search of picturesque scenery; later they were popular with Victorian landscape photographers and publishers of scenic postcards.

Elsewhere, many regular steamboat services operated from around mid-century: for example, steamers ran from Liverpool to many holiday resorts along the North Wales coast throughout the summer, and to several larger towns all year round. From the 1860s the Dublin General Steamship Company offered passenger services on modest paddle-steamers from Liverpool direct to Cardiff, a faster service from Glasgow to Cardiff being provided by the Glasgow and Belfast Steam Packet Company from c1870. Excursions from Cardiff and Newport were popular, crossing the Bristol Channel to destinations like Bristol, Weston-super-Mare, Minehead, Ilfracombe and other resorts, while regular routes connected Bristol to North Devon and Cornwall.

In Dorset, much-loved by 19th-century tourists, excursion steamers took passengers from Weymouth to Lulworth Cove, as well as to Bournemouth, Poole and Portsmouth, several south-coast steamer companies operating in competition with one another during high season. The Brighton, Worthing & South Coast Steamboat Company even ran regular services from Brighton to Boulogne in France, giving many ordinary Britons their first taste of continental shores. Other local services covered destinations including the Isle of Wight, Newhaven, Seaford, Eastbourne and Hastings, a single fare between Brighton and Eastbourne costing 1s 6d in 1909. Public enjoyment of steamboat rides along the south-east coast soared during late-Victorian and Edwardian summers, when popular Sussex and Kent resorts were connected by dozens of steamers docking at various piers. Some services faithfully returned visiting day-trippers from the capital to London Bridge in the evening.

Ferry services
Before motor vehicles and modern road travel were well-established, bridges spanning waterways were scarcer and ferry boats were a more significant form of transport. Ferries ranged from small open rowing boats or narrow punts conveying foot passengers and animals between the banks of narrow rivers, to large vessels capable of carrying vehicles on wider estuaries. The new steam power was to make the greatest impact on chain ferries whereby the boat was hauled across a stretch of water on fixed chains or cables, traditionally using ropes and manpower.

In the mid-19th century numerous small boats and larger ferries – essentially legal and illegal water-taxis – traversed the River Thames, as well as more than 100 passenger steamers. Henry Mayhew, journalist and social researcher/reformer, recorded in 1861 that the first steam ferry on the Thames, the Margery, was taking fare-paying passengers as early as 1818. Conversely, the ancient Woolwich Ferry, which had originated in the early 1300s, did not embrace steam power until 1888 when several large paddle-boats entered service, each licensed to carry as many as 1,000 passengers and up to 20 horse-drawn vehicles.

Some of our ancestors and relatives used local steamboats for transport, perhaps as part of their regular routine, while others enjoyed summer excursions in river or coastal steamers, creating special weekend and holiday memories. We may have well have travelled on a steamer ourselves, for such has been their popularity over two centuries that some still operate at tourist destinations today.