Part of Bristol's great success as a trading city rested on its communications system as it still does today. The port opened up trade to South Wales, London, France and th Mediterranean, and eventually the colonies, but the imports arriving at the docks had to be sent on by road. So by the 16th century a network of delivery wagons covered most of the routes in the south of England and South Wales, a fact that all visitors to the city remarked on.
Defoe in the 1720s noted the great inland trade: 'The merchants maintain carriers, just as the London tradesmen do.' The cutting of canals in the 18th century made the network of deliveries even more complex, so that goods could be sent up to Gloucester and then on to the Midlands and the North; and the coming of the railway opened up the market even further, until competition from more modern ports began to have its effect. As early as 1440, Bristol merchants were using wagons and packmen to deliver their goods; by the 18th century, the network was quite sophisticated, with connecting delivery services designed to cross at fixed points, so that the whole country could be covered.
Mathews' Directory for 1793 lists 18 daily departures for wagons going all over the country, including Scotland, Ireland and Wales, together with 27 different road services for passengers, and coasters for 35 different destinations. The importance of the hauliers, as the carriers were called, in Bristol, is demonstrate! by the fact that until the 19th century they had their own street, Halliers' Row, the modern Nelson Street. As well as the professional carriers' services, most major merchants operated their own service, and would take passengers as well as goods, so that by the coming of the railways, the range of services was amazing, even if the journey; were slow and the roads unspeakable.
By 1837 there were 22 coaches running daily between Bristol and London, and 27 others passed between Bristol and Bath every 24 hours. This was a faster alternative to water transport; in the 1830s, a Bristol liner draper complained that owing to changes of fashion, his goods suffered a 20 per cent depreciation while travelling to London by barge. There must have been a certain distrust of the railways at first, for Mathews in 184; lists 22 coaches, 54 stage coaches, as well as wagons, omnibuses and carriages, running from seven coaching inns, and he lists the names of 177 carriers. All this was apart from 'land carriages' to all parts of the country, run in conjunction with the railways. For public transport, there was a fleet of hackney coaches, annually licensed and numbered which plied from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. at fixed fares per distance and time. This was transport for well-off Bristolians; the poor walked. What is surprising is that when the railways came, the carriers did not go out of business, but adapted.
They used a great deal of ingenuity to integrate their road service with rail and canal links and Knee Bros, of Boyce's Avenue, Clifton, actually invented the first-ever container: a road van that could be detached from its wheels and loaded on to a flatbed railway truck. That was in 1844, five years after William Knee had started a removals business at 26, Temple Street. He became famous for his container wagon, which in 1847, began to travel on the Bristol and Exeter Railway. His sons took over, and they, too, were innovators with their pantechnicon, which they showed off in 1912. (At first a pantechnicon was the name for a warehouse, not a van.) Albert Knee had built up the Temple Street depot into a huge warehouse, with space not just for furniture storage, but for agricultural equipment, and even for storage of the first Bristol aeroplanes, while they awaited buyers. The old railway container wagon, designed in 1844, was still going strong in 1912, alongside steam traction wagons and modem motor vans, and the firm was the first ever to send their vans on railway trucks through the Severn tunnel.
Albert Knee's son Edward joined the firm at the age of 14, when an auction room and an estate agency had been added. In 1970, the Temple Street warehouses were compulsorily purchased to make way for the new fire station, and Knees moved to one of the most interesting Victorian buildings in Bristol, King's Arcade, designed by the self-taught architect and eccentric W.J. King in 1878 as a bazaar and winter garden. The enterprise was unsuccessful, and over the century the building was gradually altered and the garden built on. The building is a real museum piece: a Victorian shopping arcade on three floors, with internal balconies, walkways, and alcoves originally designed for individual shops. At the entrance is a grand staircase with a rose window at the top. After their move to Clifton, the removals side of the business slowed down, and the firm is now mainly a depository.
Many of the firms which now trade as estate agents and auctioneers had more diverse operations in Victorian times. They were also land agents, surveyors, rent collectors and removers and hauliers, as was the firm of Davey and Co (Bristol)Ltd. It was launched by Ephraim Davey in 1846, and he, too, was a pioneer in the design of road and rail vans. From horse and cart they went on to railway vans, Foden Steam Wagons which went along at five miles an hour, each with a trailer that could carry eight tons. They had a train of 15 rail wagons and a fleet of huge pantechnicons. In the 1890s, Davey's were granted Royal Letters Patent for 'improvements in vehicles for removing furniture'; their Royal Patent Vans were supplied to the removals trade all over Britain, and also ran on Irish, French, Italian and German railways.
They also invented something called Parisian Furniture Polish, and boasted that 'carpets brought for cleaning are beaten by the latest improved steam machinery.' The third generation of the family disposed of the removals side of the business to Pickfords after the Second World War, and from then on the business concentrated on estate agency and auctioneering. As early as 1906, Davey's were printing a register of properties for sale on a give-away sheet.
There are unsubstantiated claims that Pickfords were established in the city in 1646. This is unlikely since the firm did not really get going until the 18th century, in the North.
But they were certainly in Bristol in 1835, when they were using not just road links but waterways as well. Their warehouse was at Stone Bridge, Quay Head, and in 1845 they were advertising that 'a wagon for Gloucester every afternoon meets the Railway train to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and all parts of the North', showing that they integrated their delivery services with other forms of transport. By 1865 Pickfords was agent to all the major railway companies up to Scotland, to all ports, to Dublin and to and from any part of France. They also had a fleet of barges. As horse-drawn buses began to take some of the trade from carriers, who delivered people as well as goods, the firm turned more, in the second half of the 19th century, to removals. The Bristol regional office still has letters (many of them with black borders, showing that a bereavement had caused the move) expressing gratitude for the way the staff had handled the operation: 'Not a single article rubbed or defaced, and no break- ages.' The bill was 4 guineas for a removal from Wolverhampton to Bristol, in 1897.
Carriers apart, the need for a public transport system in the Victorian city became obvious. The railways and cabs carried some of the population, and there were private horse omnibuses, but the huge population increase meant that- a proper system, covering more of the city and the suburbs, was badly needed. It took a long time to arrive: the first horse-drawn tramway line, from the King David Inn, Perry Road, to St. John's Church, Whiteladies Road, opened in 1875, run by the Bristol Tramways Company Ltd., ancestor of the modem City and Badger lines. The Western Daily Press described the opening run: 'Each car was drawn by four splendid horses in new harness. The uniform of the drivers and conductors is of a greyish colour with scarlet trimmings.
Everything being ready, the whistle was sounded and the cars started their journey.... all along the route crowds of people were assembled, and as the cars went by, hearty cheers were offered.' By 1880 there were seven tram routes and, at the end of that year, the horses had pulled the trams 500,873 miles and carried over three and a half million passengers. The trams were a great success, and changed Bristolians' lives. The tram routes dictated a new pattern of shopping, for the inhabitants of the big new suburbs could now catch a tram to the old shopping centre in the heart of the city. From this point on, the ambitious shop-keeper aimed to move nearer the centre of the city, and the pressure for sites encouraged the non-retail traders to sell what had become valuable property and move out to the suburbs, a pattern that continues to this day.
The trams also had the important effect of making the population more mobile: workers could take jobs further afield, and this in turn encouraged them to move out to the suburbs without feeling cut off; the trams enabled parents to send their children to schools further away, and they opened up many new areas for leisure and recreation. But Bristol Tramways did not stop at trams; they hoped to monopolise the public transport system, and by 1886 they also owned 99 hansom cabs, 56 brakes, nine omni- buses, 38 wagonettes - and 50 wheelchairs! They tried out the first steam carriage in 1880, using horse buses instead of trams, and they also ran a funeral bus.
The Bristol Cab Company with its distinctive livery, blue with red wheels and its drivers wearing white top hats, started in 1886. Thanks to Sir James Clifton Robinson, pioneer of electric traction, Bristol was one of the first cities to have electric tramways; electrification was complete by 1900, and in 1901 some of the horses were sold. But there was another rival, the motor bus, which made its first appearance in 1906. These were run in addition to trams, and were hired out for excursions, so that, before the First World War, the Tramways company was offering such diverse services as driving lessons and riding instruction.
The famous Blue Taxis were launched, charabancs were built in the city from 1908 onwards and, by 1913, the Tramways Company owned 225 trams, 42 charabancs, 230 taxis and 150 horses. The tramcars and charabancs alone carried one and a half million passengers a week. By the Thirties there was a network of motor bus services in the entire region, and the bus was beginning to oust the tram. In 1927, Bristol Tramways started running four super-de-luxe buffet coaches from Bristol to London. The coaches were divided into three sections: the front had 18 non-smokers' seats, in leather with folding tables, and the rear section had eight similar seats for smokers. The centre section had a toilet compartment, a steward's pantry where tea and snacks could be made, and there was a 20 gallon water tank on the roof. The conductor was the buffet attendant and could be summoned by an electric bell. This kind of service signalled the end for the trams; the last one ran on July 17th, 1939, and the same crowds that flocked to see the service begin came to see the final journey. (In fact, 66 trams were reprieved because of the war, and they ran until 1941).
The famous Blue Cabs had come to an end in 1930, when they were sold off for as little as £4 each. From the Second World War on, it was the age of the bus. When the motor car took over from the horse, it brought the end of several other trades: blacksmiths, livery stables, wheelwrights and cart-makers, corn chandlers and nearly all the harness makers and saddlers disappeared, too.
Only one Bristol saddler and harness maker survived the changeover, H.A. Matthews and Son, now of Keynsham. Frederick Matthews set up in Redcliff Street in 1882, making saddles and harness for the hauliers, the railways, Bristol Police and the Corporation, and they also worked for the Wills and Smythe estates. When the telegraph and telephone arrived, they made safety harnesses for the men who had to climb the poles, and in the First World War, the firm supplied the Army, employing 20 harness-makers. By the Twenties, the motor car was affecting trade, so the family went into haulage as well, taking a whole day to haul beer from George's Brewery from Bristol to Bridgwater. Next came a Model T lorry, used for fetching and delivering to sheep fairs. Nowadays the business is mainly agricultural equipment, though saddles are still part of the stock. The changeover to agricultural equipment is a neat illustration of the kind of crisis that could happen in the Depression of the Thirties. Frederick's son Harold went to a man who owed the firm a very large sum for harnesses.
The man said he couldn't pay - but in his garden were lots of wheelbarrows, shovels, bales of wire and gates. So Harold took them in payment. When he arrived home, his father asked: 'What's all this? We're not agricultural merchants.' And his son replied: 'We are now!' With shipping, Bristol's other transport system, the story starts much earlier. Long before there was a proper network of roads, Bristol merchants would send their goods by sea to London, Wales or the North. Hotwell water went by this route, and it took six weeks to reach London by ship - just as well that the water's chief virtue was that it did not deteriorate in the bottle. Wine was delivered by sea, too. as was timber, and coastal trows were used for passenger transport before the railways came. The merchant ships had always carried some passengers, but the real start of long-distance passenger services came with steam power. The shipping firms which have survived over a century were founded at a time when Bristol's port was in crisis. Up to the end of the 18th century, Bristol had been second only to London in its importance, but two factors made it lose out to Liverpool in the 19th century. The first was the greed and dilatoriness of Bristol Corporation, who charged high dues on all cargoes coming in, and who dithered endlessly about improving the facilities. The other factor was the invention of the steamship.
When Brunel's s.s. Great Western went on its maiden voyage from Kingroad to New York in 1837, the Corporation thought it would notch up another first for Bristol, and with it the monopoly of the trans-Atlantic passenger and cargo trade. But when the Great Western came back, it was expected to pay huge dues - and the vessel was so big that she only came down the Avon with great difficulty. As steamships got bigger and heavier, it was evident that Bristol would lose out to Liverpool, whose dues were far lower and whose dock was larger and deeper.
In 1846, Mark Whitwill, whose father had promoted the Great Western, joined the firm his father had started in 1831, and from 1848 to 1855, Whitwill's ran a regular service of sailing ships from Bristol to New York and Quebec, and from 1852, to Australia as well, carrying passengers and cargo. But from 1842, no steam ships came from America to Bristol; they docked at Liverpool, and there was a gap until 1871 when Mark Whitwill bought the s.s. Arragon. With her, he re-opened trade with America, eventually chartering and buying ships which provided a service to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Montreal. Because of the difficulties of using Bristol as a port, and the shilly-shallying of the Corporation, Mark Whitwill II became an ardent advocate of 'dockisation' as it was called, either by deepening and improving the port itself, and of excavating the Avon's river bed through the Gorge (an impracticable idea because of the rock foundations), or by building a new dock at Avonmouth.
In 1868 he was a member of the board of Bristol Port and Channel Company, a private company set up to do what the Corporation failed to carry out. The Corporation favoured development at Portishead, and eventually was forced to take over the private scheme, a move which led finally to the opening of Avonmouth Docks in 1877, Portishead Dock in 1879 and the Royal Edward Dock in 1908. But it was too late to recover the trade from Liverpool and only the huge imports of Canadian grain at the end of the 19th century kept the port of Bristol in business. Passenger ships continued to do good business, especially with emigrants to the colonies, though the arrival of the aeroplane signalled another decline. Mark Whitwill remained a prominent figure in Bristol society: he was one of the prime movers in setting up the Hospital for Sick Children, heading an appeal in 1865, and he became its first President when the hospital opened in 1866. For many years a director of Bristol and West Building Society, he was also a promoter of the Severn Tunnel. His son, Mark III, as it were, was a leading figure in the Volunteer Rifles, and the firm went on trading as Whitwill's until 1974, when it merged with another old firm, James and Hodder, which was founded in 1852.
In 1985, Hodder Whitwill merged with C. Shaw Lovell. Hodder's was a firm founded in the 1850s by Hartly Hodder, a shipping owner and broker who started in Sharpness, and then moved to Bristol. He was the first to run a screw tug in the 1870s, and when he retired in 1902, his son took over; he was a councillor and an alderman, and in 1923 became the consul for Germany - a post he felt it was politic to drop in 1939. He also was Danish vice-consul, and the King of Denmark made him a Knight of Danborg. In the Thirties, Hodder's joined forces with another old Bristol shipping firm run by William and Herbert James, and started a travel agency, something rather unusual at that time. It came into being because Eileen Hartly-Hodder, grand-daughter of the founder, taught a drama student who was no good at acting but good at selling, and she had the idea that he would be ideal to head a travel bureau.
Despite family argument, she persisted with the idea. The travel agency, in Shirehampton, is still going strong, and is the one part of the original firm that trades independently. Little more is known of the early history of the firm because their head office in Queen Square was bombed during the last war, and all records were lost. The family had a distinguished war record, with a DSO, a DSC and an MBE between them. After two Hodder brothers died, their mother took charge of the firm, followed by her daughter, Eileen Hartly-Hodder, who already had a career as a teacher of speech and drama. She found it difficult to cope with both jobs, though she successfully chartered ships, engaged seamen as crews, and arranged passages to countries all over the world. In 1974, she sold out to C.J. King & Sons. Christopher John King set up in Prince Street in 1850 in what was then only just being recognised as a distinct trade, stevedoring. Until then, ships' crews often discharged the cargoes themselves, but as the size of ships entering Bristol increased, stevedoring crews became the rule, unloading cargoes of wine, tobacco and timber, and when at last Avonmouth opened in 1877, C.J., with his son and his brother Samuel, opened an office and played a leading part in developing handling methods and machinery there.
One of his first inventions was The Gadget, a small vessel fitted with a steam winch and carrying rope and tackle which could be attached to the yard-arm of the ship to be discharged. Another first was banana handling: the first banana boat, the s.s. Port Morant, arrived at Avonmouth in March, 1901, and C.J. King's unloaded it. In 1907, 56,000 bunches were put on rail from the Elders and Fyffe steamship in only eight hours, when all the unloading was done by hand. The company was also the first to install at Avonmouth in 1910 two Mitchell floating grain elevators, mechanical devices for transferring grain from ship to shore. During the Boer War, the cargoes discharged were guns and ammunition, and a decade later there was a mysterious Sunday morning meeting with the military on the Downs, followed by a never-explained embarkation and disembarkation of guns and transport, carefully timed by the watching brass hats.
The firm did not know it, but it was a rehearsal for the First World War. The firm had also invested in tugs, right from the beginning: the first was the Memmac, launched in 1859; it aroused hard feelings, and the tug was threatened by the Pill boatmen who made a living hauling ships bodily down the Avon. Merrimac's successor was a paddle driven tug which became well known to Bristolians in the 1880s. When the 44 ton iron paddleboat, the Gem, arrived in Bristol on Whit Monday, 1883, citizens were offered a pleasure trip from Hotwells to Chepstow, fare Is. The Gem, launched in 1871, began work in the days of 'seeking', which was the privilege of towing windjammers as far out as Land's End, the English Channel and even Bantry Bay. Competition was fierce, and frequently lights would be doused in order to slip out westwards unnoticed by the rival tugs waiting in the darkness. But with this underhand rivalry went a strict ethical code, and once a tug had spoken to her potential customer, the competitors left her severely alone. The King tugs became famous: two of them escorted the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert, when it arrived in Avonmouth in 1908 for the opening by King Edward VII of the Royal Edward Dock, and one of them worked in the Dardanelles in the First World War. King's was the first firm to operate motor tugs in the Bristol Channel, and when the second war came, they taught the American G.I.'s the art of stevedoring and handled vast amounts of food and petrol and ammunition which came into Avonmouth, while continually under air attack.
Salvage was another function carried out by the tugs; earliest record of one of the King tugs at the scene of an accident was in 1878, when the s.s. Gipsy ran aground at Black Rock Quarry, just past the Suspension Bridge, and broke her back. In the Great Fog of 1929, five large vessels ran aground in the Avon, but by the following afternoon, thanks to the tugs, the river was clear and back to normal. With the decline in shipping in recent years, King's has had to diversify, and one of their present subsidiaries is a joinery business which found a new role in the Falklands War, making transoms, decks and keels for assault craft.
The firm closed its stevedoring operation in the Port of Bristol, after 131 years, and the tug company merged with another firm in 1983. Other nautical trades grew up to support the shipping industry, the oldest of them being ships' chandlering. John Tratman opened his business in 1812 in Thunderbolt Lane, Bristol's shortest street, a narrow lane between Prince Street and Narrow Quay. He styled himself ships' provider and sailmaker. By the 1840s he had branched out into paints and varnishes as well, and was wealthy enough to buy shares in ships that were being commissioned; he married one of the daughters of John Edwards, founder of the wine shipping firm Turner Edwards.
He also moved his shop to the end of Narrow Quay where he had room to set up a tinsmith and blacksmith's shop and a sail loft. By the 1880s, his two sons were running the business, and, at the end of the '14-'18 War, E.C. Lowther joined as a partner. Lowther was a master mariner, and his purchase of half the shares enabled the firm to move to the shop on Broad Quay, famous later on for its neon capstan advertisement. The shop was an appropriate purchase, for it had once been a mission for seamen. Lowther's function was mainly contacting and entertaining the visiting captains to the port, and one of the main customers in the Twenties and Thirties was Elder and Fyffes, whose banana boats were supplied to such an extent that Tratman and Lowther opened a branch in Swansea especially to provide chandlery for this customer. The changeover from sail to steam made a big difference: the sail loft was used to make items for pleasure trips; awnings, boat covers, hatch tents and tarpaulins, instead of the massive sails for clippers and schooners. They also had a rigging department where all the ropes and wires were hand-spliced, while the tinware department produced an incredible range of marine hardware, including pots and pans, lifeboat tanks, metal chimneys, rail-guards and cowls.
A permanent occupation for one tinsmith was the renewal or replacement of the glasses in navigation lights. During the years between the wars, Tratmans continued to thrive, and they purchased a motor vehicle to do the run to Avonmouth to deliver ships' stores; previously they had delivered with a handcart. During the Second World War they supplied the Merchant Navy, and the sail loft made canvas items for the frigates being built by Charles Hill at Albion Dockyard; they also repaired damaged warships. They bought the house next-door in Broad Quay during the war, only to have it blitzed . The war over, Tratman and Lowther faced huge changes, because oil was taking over from coal and the steam-powered coal barges which they supplied disappeared; the barges had provided their main business. Another factor that affected them was the trend towards mass-produced chandlery and the decline in the use of canvas. In 1950 they changed course and went into the yacht chandlery business, spotting a growing leisure market.
They bought a quantity of Royal Navy surplus stock, and started selling dinghies, making the sails for them in the old sail loft. They also branched out into the domestic paint and wallpaper business, foreseeing a boom in DIY. The new formula was a winner, masterminded by John Tratman III, who died in 1952. The firm was later taken over by C.J. King & Sons who eventually sold out to Ladyline in 1986.
