Shipping Lines - Continuing the search for an image of the Wavertree

A steamship berthed in the Wet Dock in the heyday of the timber trade.

Something else I wanted to say about the history of the tall ship Wavertree which loaded dressed timber at Montrose in 1889. She had been completed by a shipyard at Southampton a few years previously around 1885 so she was relatively new when she arrived in the South Esk, writes John Aitken.

She had been ordered by R. W. Leyland & Co. of Liverpool and named after a district in that Merseyside city. She was one of the last big sailing ships to be constructed of wrought iron.

Her first few years were spent transporting jute from eastern India (now Bangladesh) to Scotland, including Dundee; after that we find her in the ‘tramping trades’, finding cargo and taking it to and from wherever required at a competitive rate. In 1910 she lost her masts off Cape Horn and barely made it to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Her owners decided not to re-rig her and sold her off as a floating warehouse to a firm in Punto Arenas, Chile. She was later converted to a sand barge in a river at Buenos Aires, Argentina.

After a while, representatives of South Street Seaport Museum in New York came across her hulk and negotiated a programme of preservation and towed her north to Manhattan.

In order to complete her story, it would certainly be interesting if some Angus traveller could provide an image for this newspaper of the current state of the Wavertree, thought to be the last surviving tall cargo ship to have berthed at the port of Montrose.

Having moved to Montrose in mid-1978, I’ve wondered from time to time what the immediate area was like prior to the construction of the Sea Oil base. A news item in a file copy of the ‘Review’ dated September, 1968 gave details of some of the industrial activity going on. Under the heading “Coaster to be broken up at Montrose – “The 400-ton coaster Mount Battock, a familiar visitor to Montrose in bygone years, arrived here on Monday (sic) to be broken up by Montrose Shipyard. It is about two years since the last ship was broken up and a channel had to be dug to get her to the slipway.”

In the 1920s, the Coaster Construction Company had built a small number of modest-sized vessels at their shipyard on Rossie Island. James V. Hepburn set up a boat builders’ business in May, 1945, thus reviving an old-established industry. The layout allowed eight 80-foot craft to be built. Between May, 1945 and 1947 numerous miscellaneous vessels were constructed.

The shipyard was taken over in 1948 and re-named Montrose Shipyard Ltd. after a programme of reorganisation a series of vessels were built with its main contract being for six wooden coastal minesweepers for the Royal Navy. By 1959 the shipyard was in the process of changing hands once more with a group from Aberdeen shipbuilders, including Messrs. John Lewis whose bulging order book required additional facilities to complete replacements for the Aberdeen middle water fishing fleet. Called Montrose Structural & Marine, more than a dozen vessels were completed. Years of inactivity followed until the P&O development and the rest is history.