"...a mundane sludge boat...."

[davidwheeler]

This is the story of the only commercial ship since 1945 specifically  designed and built  to the maximum dimensions to allow it  to travel the length of the Exeter Ship Canal. It is not typical of vessels found on most English canals. You would have been  surprised had you met it on one.

 

Background

 

In the mid 1950s, Exeter City, like many urban areas, was heading for a crisis. With an increasing population and an obsolete treatment system the Council was faced with a foul smell and a dissatisfied electorate. The antiquated method of drying sewage in the open air and then giving it away free for fertiliser had become unacceptable and required an urgent rethink and solution.  It was a public health crisis. And a political one.

 

The then available  options were explored. Several local authorities - London, Gloucester, Glasgow - had adopted dumping treated sewage sludge at sea and this seemed the obvious straightforward solution: the existing and proposed new works adjoined the River Exe and the Exeter Ship Canal. The Council owned the Canal and controlled the river navigation. Build the new works, build a new wharf and acquire a ship to carry the sludge away…

It was only the beginning. The size and draft of the ship would be  governed by the size of the locks and the profile and depth of the canal. The maximum dimensions of Turf Lock - the critical sea  lock - 122’ by 29’2”. Maximum draft to clear the top cill - 12’. Several of the swing bridges had a  width of 26’. Most of the ships using the canal in those days hovered around the 200 gross tonnage mark. So from the outset, a small vessel. How much could it carry and for how many times a year? What speed would be needed for an efficient round voyage?  How powerful the engine? What would be the consequences of the need for an extra ½ knot of speed? How much sludge would the works produce? What consistency of sludge to load? How would quantity  vary over the projected life of the ship? And what of the river. How would the ship’s movements be affected by tides, bad weather, and by sickness, holidays,  mechanical breakdowns, and regular dockings? Once the idea of dumping at sea was adopted all these and many other  difficult technical questions seemed to have found favourable solutions  to everyone’s satisfaction. Or most people’s.

 

The next stage was to convert the plan from words into action. The City’s engineers, three of whom had experience of shipping but not of  ordering a ship, prepared outline specifications of what was, they decided,  required and the contract went out to tender. John Bolson of Poole got the contract. At that time the ship was the only build on their slipway and the build progress soon overtook the prepared plans and the need for, and lack of, close and constant supervision became glaringly clear. There were changes and disagreements and oversights and misunderstandings but eventually the ship was launched and even that was not according to plan:  on the stated day when the Councillors and  officials would all  have been there to watch, the weather was bad and the launch delayed. A  couple of days later, in January 1963, the yard said the tide was right, the weather was right  and the launch could not wait.  Down the slipway it went and the Council party missed it. But, later when the Council took delivery on 5th April 1963 they had a  celebratory  lunch at a local hotel  and went for a ride on the brand new ship ‘SW2’, of  Exeter. One of them - they were all rather elderly males in the photos - was sea sick. The contract cost of the SW2? £95465. And why the name ‘SW2’? ‘SW1’ was the works’ van. So ‘SW2' became the works’ ship.

 

So now all should have been well yet  it wasn’t. The ship arrived in the Exeter Canal in May 1963 but its wharf was not ready for it. Not only that but the new works had not been finished. Nowhere near operational. 

For two or three years the ship did not go to sea more than once a week. The Council was still using the old slurry lagoons to dry the sewage into a cake, which the ship was not designed to handle. So the ship stayed alongside the wharf and feelings ran high. Not only was there the dissatisfaction of the ratepayers but there was rivalry within the Council departments as to which should have control over the ship. Canal Management or Sewage Works Management.  In order to go out on the one tide and back on the following ebb, the ship had to have priority on the river. It didn’t always get it. The ship had to leave Turf Lock, fully laden, at between 1 1/2 and 1 1/4 hours to High Water, to get back on the following falling tide with enough clearance, light, to enter the lock. Neap tides meant less than a full load. Spring tides gave a little leeway but timings were always tight.  Quarter of an hour late and the ship could be stuck, aground, until the next tide. Or moored above the lock, idle.  There were incidents.

 

In due course local bye-laws were passed which gave the ship that priority. But this itself could cause tension. I remember one morning in December 1968 when there were four ships on the estuary - three coming up from Exmouth and one to go down from Topsham Quay. The first arriving was the SW2, light, the second a laden timber ship for Topsham, the third a tanker with a full load for Exeter. The SW2 took the first lock on a falling tide. There was a risk that the petrol tanker would ground before the lock was ready for it. The timber ship had to force itself alongside the quay at Topsham, driving over the mud, and the outgoing ship, the largest but  light, shot off down the estuary, the tide having already fallen 2’ on the 12’ tide. There was a risk of grounding on the mud flats before Exmouth.It was desperately tight. As it was, that many ships on the river  in those days was a rarity. Now it is a memory. 

 

Ill feeling within the Council was settled by creating the ship as an autonomous unit answerable to a nominated manager but then controversy erupted again with wide press publicity. Over massive overtime pay to the crew. In the early days the ship operated with a crew of five. And then six - master, mate, two engineers and two deck hands. The Ministry first stipulated a dumping area of five statute miles from any land. That allowed for out and back within six hours. Then the Ministry designated a specific area, 9 to 10 nautical miles from land. That entailed going out on the flood of one tide and returning on the flood of the next - an 18 hour day. With the crew paid overtime. Every time. “Sludge Vessel Runs Into Another Storm” ran the headline in the local newspaper, five years after the arrival of the ship,with the new works still incomplete. And it wasn’t just cost that raised emotions. There were persistent complaints that the wash created by the ship ‘sends waves 30 yards up over Exmouth beach’. Yachting enthusiasts complained about threats to their moorings and danger from the wake from the passing ship. The Fisheries Committee claimed risk to fishing. There were regular reports from passing vessels and overhead aircraft of pollution in the water. On one occasion a Royal Navy helicopter appeared over the ship, lowered a  bucket into the brown liquid streaming astern of the ship and flew off with its sample. The mood was against the expense and the very system itself.

 

Whatever the politics of the day, in those early years the ship, and thus its crew’s jobs, was under constant scrutiny and sometimes, direct threat. There was a conscious decision by the crew to keep the lowest profile and to save costs where they could. This meant that for several years, when the ship required docking, the crew did the work. The Council agreed to pay. To start with the bonus was divided according to rank rather than to actual labour, and this was changed to equal shares until the Council balked. After that the work was done by the dockyard. Save for the engine maintenance, which was throughout done by the crew. It was a big powerful engine - Lister Blackstone 6 cyl unidirectional turbo charged diesel developing 495 bhp at 750 rpm. 2 Lister Blackstone 6 cyl auxiliaries each driving 60kw 220v GEC generators at 1500 rpm for the pumps. 

 

In 1974 responsibility for water and sewage passed from the Council to South West Water and the SW2 became the Countess Wear. I asked, at the time, the Chairman of the Council’s relevant committee how he felt about losing the ship and his retort was in effect a curt ‘Good riddance!’

Under South West Water steps were taken to increase efficiency. One engineer was dispensed with, direct control of the engine being transferred to the bridge. The installation of  an auto pilot meant that when one of the deck hands left, he was not replaced. From the 1980s the ship was run with three crew: master, mate and engineer. The ship was making about 180 voyages a year, averaging 3 ½ voyages a week, carrying 290 -300 tons. Rather less on neap tides. If for any reason the ship could not sail, there were storage tanks. And road tankers. In 1990 a Computerised Position Recorder was installed by the Ministry. It allowed the Ministry to know where the ship was, when it pumped the sludge. A maritime tachograph. Rumours continued as to the ship’s future. In the late 1980s a company engaged in a similar operation, but with a very different vessel, showed an interest, but it came to nothing. To the relief of the crew. 

So the years went by.

 

There was one constant throughout the ship’s service and that was the master. Capt Ron Gardner. He joined the ship at Poole as mate in April 1963. He became master in 1976 and remained so until dumping was banned in 1998. During his time as master the ship never missed a tide, was never involved in an incident. I believe that gradually the ship became something of an institution. There were fewer complaints and more enquiries - ‘What is that ship in the middle of the field?’ from people in cars passing over the M5 viaduct. ‘What is that big ship passing the beach?’ at Exmouth. A Ship Profile appeared in Ships Monthly in March 1992. Spring 1996 saw it featured in Coastal Shipping. A large size 500 limited edition print of a painting of the Countess Wear entitled ‘Racing the Tide’ by Robert Dennis became available in 1999. The Countess Wear was the front cover of Coastal Shipping in February 1999.

The end came when the European Union ban on dumping sewage at sea came into force at the end of 1998. Newspaper reporting was mainly nostalgic: “Sludge Boat Makes Final Exeter Canal Voyage” was the day’s headline board of the local newspaper. ‘Sewage ship marks the end of an era’, ‘MVCountess Wear sets out on her final voyage’, ‘A chapter of Exeter’s nautical history comes to an end,’ ‘Captain Ron Gardner had a tear in his eye as he contemplated the final trip…’ When the ship returned to its berth after a civic reception at the Canal Basin  in January 1999, as it passed the Water Authority’s administrative building, it seemed as though the entire staff poured out of it, waving and cheering as the ship passed by.

 

It was not the final journey along the canal. The ship was put up for sale. A group of apparently local business people bought it. Later in 1999 Capt Gardner was asked by them to take the ship out of the canal and down the Exe estuary. He agreed to do that. He had the requisite authority. As the ship reached the sea off Exmouth, the group asked him if he would take the ship on to Penzance - they seemed to have little experience and there was no licenced seaman among  them. He said he would. As the ship sailed along the coast towards Teignmouth, they told him they were not going to put in to Penzance, they were going on out  into the Atlantic, to the West Indies, and would he take the ship across. For reasons, he concluded that the ship's situation was illegal. The Teignmouth pilot boat took him off and the ship sailed on. Where to, I don’t know. In 2002 I noted  that it was then trading formaldehyde between Guyana to Port of Spain in South America. I have now no recollection of the source of that. I certainly have been unable to confirm it.

 

So there we are. The ship made in excess of 5000 voyages, carrying more than 1.8 million tons of sewage sludge. Although designed from the outset capable of carrying, as well as sewage sludge,  gas water from the City gasworks close to the Basin at the head of the canal, it never carried such cargo. On two occasions, early on, it loaded tannery waste, pumped into the holds by the fire service. Apart from these two loads, every other cargo was loaded at the Countess Wear wharf, taken down the canal, down the river and out to sea. 

 

(If anyone is interested, we could make a round trip out to sea and back, as an observer. I only ever did that once because there wasn’t a lot to do. The real interest was in  helming it, but Capt Gardner was cautious for his ship. I remember only one occasion when another took the helm:  the senior master of a big tanker belonging to one of the major fleets. But he could not get the feel of it. ‘Your own ship, you get to know her ways’’.. 

So, if we do make the trip, it will mean an early start, to get back in time for breakfast.)

 

Note 1: I am well aware of the ‘Esso Jersey’ which brought petrol to Exeter in the 1960s.That ship was not however built exclusively for trade to Exeter but to the Channel Islands as well. 

 

Note 2. Illustrations: nearly all the photos I have are someone else’s copyright. I haven’t contacted any of them because I have no idea of the level, if any, of interest in this post. 

 

I have included mine: two of the ship - one from 1966, and one from 31.12.1998. Also an aerial photo of part of the canal - the M5 viaduct crosses mid-picture. The embanked waterway passing under the fourth from left column of the M5 bridge is the Exeter Ship Canal. The waterway to the right of that is the River Exe and the beginnings of the estuary. The built up area in the foreground is Topsham. Other bits of water are flooding. Follow the canal under the M5 and up a bit and you may see a little white dot - SW2. Above that, the sewage works. Or Water Treatment Works. Finally, for interest,  a scan of one side of a card issued to ships by the City Engineer, showing Turf Lock details. The toll for vessels entering into or using Canal Locks or Basins was 4d per ton registered, with a minimum of 5/-. The card dates from the early 20th C.

 

 

[Jonah]

What a well written, interesting post. Thanks for sharing. Well done ! 👍

[GUMPY]

Superb writing!

[BEngo]

Thank you.

 That was most interesting.

[stagedamager]

Fascinating, loved that, thank you! 

[matty40s]

The first time David posted some Exeter canal history was about a week after I had been down there, walked the docks, looked at the many different craft there are there( including narrowboats, Springers et al) and had a beer opposite the old Topsham sea lock.

His history of the area is fascinating.

[Bee]

I think Bristol had something similar. (as well as Sand Jade and Sand Gem ) back in the '70s. Memory is a wee bit hazy though.

[Ken X]

I knew Bolsons Yard in Poole well.  Their records show the following entry.

 

S.W.2 - Sludge vessel. 123 feet, 256 Tons for City of Exeter, 1963

 

Reference number	D-BLN/2/95
Level of description	Item
Date	1963
Extent	1 doc
Language	English
Note	Index Card
Biographical history	Yard number 541

[cuthound]

17 hours ago, matty40s said:

The first time David posted some Exeter canal history was about a week after I had been down there, walked the docks, looked at the many different craft there are there( including narrowboats, Springers et al) and had a beer opposite the old Topsham sea lock.

His history of the area is fascinating.

 

Back when everyone was worried about what the impact of the Millennium Bug might be, I ran a project to make sure all of BT's (then) 6500 generator sets were capable of starting and supplying their full design load. 

 

The ones at Exeter Rougemont Exchange were maintained by an ex-colleague who had been my best man 20 odd years earlier, so I decided to test them personally so that I could meet up with him again.

 

After testing the generators, we walked around the docks and then had a beer in the pub overlooking the sea lock.