Chapter 6 - Coastal Shipping: The Neglected Sector of Nineteenth- Century British Transport History

Summary

The popular view of internal British nineteenth-century transport history in undergraduate texts may be characterized as the triumph of railways over older modes of travel, such as stagecoaches, horse-drawn wagons and canal boats. This is sometimes used as evidence of the supremacy of modern over preindustrial technology and as such contains more than a smidgen of Whig history. The railway is portrayed in Darwinian terms as the more advanced species that killed off other forms of transport by offering superior service, speed and lower prices. Thus, long-distance coaches and wagons ceased operations when a rail line was completed and were then relegated either to areas that lacked railways or to service as intra-urban, short-haul carriers between railway stations and factories or workshops. Canals entered an era of long-term, genteel decline, helped by the fact that some railways absorbed canal companies and at times even laid their tracks in drained canal beds. This can also be seen as progress, since new technology superseded the outdated.

Even a cursory glance at the tables of contents of established transport history texts, such as Dyos and Aldcroft, Barker and Savage or Bagwell reveals that substantial portions are devoted to the advent of the railway, its impact on other forms of transport and its effects on the society and economy. Moreover, there are a plethora of enthusiast books on the history of particular rail lines, classes of engine, towns, engineers and types of carriage. The sheer size of Ottley's massive bibliography, plus its supplement, gives some idea of the amount of information available on various aspects of railway history. In this obsession with the new technology of the iron rail, coastal shipping has been relatively ignored. The tacit assumption seems to have been that, like the horse-drawn wagon, coach or barge, coasters were obsolete and hence “naturally“ superseded by the railway. An excursion through the pages of the standard texts shows that the space devoted to coastal shipping is minuscule. In comparison to the nearly 13,000 items in Ottley's compilation, a bibliography on coastal shipping and trade from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries would contain only about 250 entries, even including fleet lists barren of all but the most basic factual information. Nor can it be claimed that such neglect was a phenomenon only of the “first generation” of transport history texts.