SS Robin
Nowadays, most of the traffic on the Thames consists of pleasure boats and tourist launches. The big ships dock downriver at Tilbury and couldn’t get into the Pool of London even if
they wanted to – the QE2 bridge at Dartford has sealed the city off forever from heavy vessels.
A century ago it was very
different. London was built as a port in Roman times, and back in the 1890s it was still teeming with craft of all
shapes and sizes, many of them built on the Thames and its tributaries.
And the remarkable story of one of those ships begins at Blackwall. Not a destroyer, or a grand liner but a plucky little steam coaster – the SS Robin – which defied all the odds to survive to this day.
For centuries, before the railways and metalled roads criss-crossed the country, the only reliable way to transport bulky goods was by ship. With the coming of steam power and the invention of screw propulsion, the steam coaster evolved – replacing the sail-driven ketches, brigs and schooners, which had plied their trade up and down the coast of Britain. And though the little coasters weren’t big or glamorous, they were as vital to the British economy as the deep sea fleet – carrying goods from Glasgow to Liverpool, from London to Newcastle, and distributing goods to and from the great ocean terminals to the smaller towns around the country.
SS Robin was typical of the classic steam coaster design, which evolved in the 1840s and stayed the same until the 1950s. Her keel was laid down in Orchard House Yard, on Bow Creek, Blackwall, alongside that of sister ship Rook.
Shipwrights Mackenzie Macalpine passed the finished vessels on to the East India Dock, where they were fitted out and, on September 16, 1890, launched.
The pair of steam coasters now went their separate ways. Robin was towed to Dundee, where the famed engine builders, Gourlay Brothers,
fitted her boiler.
Rook had a long career, which sadly ended when she ran onto rocks off Clipperau Point near Holyhead on October 4, 1925. The vessel, now renamed Samoa, was a total wreck. But Robin would go through many owners and a change of name before she came to rest.
Robin’s maiden voyage began on December 20, 1890. Under the ownership of Arthur Ponsonby of Monmouth, 20 men signed on at Liverpool for a voyage to Bayonne, in south-west France.
For the next decade, Robin plied her trade between Britain and Ireland – with side trips to French ports – hauling grain, coal, iron ore, china clay and railway steel.
Then, on May 17, 1900, Blanco Hermanos of Oviedo ,Spain bought the little ship. Renamed Maria, her work transferred to the north-west coast of Spain, working out of Bilbao. Then, in 1913, she shifted to Santander, under the ownership of Perez y cia.
The Maria ran coal from Gijon to Santander, and played her part in the First World War supplying iron slabs for the French Government, escorted by two destroyers to protect her from U-boats.
And so her work continued until 1966, when she had her first major refit – the coal furnaces were converted to fuel oil and the mizzenmast taken out. But it seemed that time had caught up with the coaster when, in 1974, she was finally sent to the breakers.
But there was to be a reprieve. The director of Britain’s Maritime Trust heard of the ship’s plight and, rushing to Bilbao, inspected the craft and decided she was worth preserving.
On May 24, 1974, the sole survivor of the once-mighty British steam coaster fleet was saved for the nation.
Maria was sailed back to Britain. At an average speed of 7.5 knots, running on an
84-year-old boiler, she reached Chatham in the Medway on June 17 at 11.30am.
Robin probably cost a few hundred pounds to build back in the 1890s. By the time restoration was complete it was estimated that a quarter of a million had been spent.
But one item cost nothing to refit – her name. And now she lives again as SS Robin, part of the Historic Ship Collection, and the final memory of the Blackwall’s shipbuilding past.
Many thanks to Joseph Brown of Poplar.