Volume Six - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - Select Aspects - Reconstruction of Three Tips - 1912 - 17 . . .

The response from J. Cameron was even more forthright:

"Gentlemen, I am in receipt of your letter of the 26th inst., and note that the notice was only sent to the Company in common with your other clients. With reference to the last clause of your letter. I think you must be under a misapprehension, as your tender for these hoists was made on the form at the end of our specification, not on your own form. Therefore you will realise that the conditions printed in red on your tender form as per copy you sent me, cannot apply to this contract. Yours truly, J. Cameron."

Opps! On April 10th, Mr E. Edwards, Secretary of the TVR was instructed by the General Manager to append copies of these correspondence to the Contract presumably in case of the need for litigation should the supplier fail to meet the deadlines set!

With the zenith of the coal trade at Penarth Dock only a year away and the dark storm clouds of the 1914 Great War developing on the horizon, pressure to deliver, install and commission the tips would have been almost certainly kept up throughout the period.

In parallel with the work involved in clearing away and making good the old tip prior to work commencing there appears to have substantial work involved in the construction of secondary concrete staging to the existing short stonework jetties and upgrading the hydraulic systems through the introduction of new accumulators adjacent to the new tips. Presumably these enhancements were to improve the speed and thus the overall efficiency of loading and dispatching ships of greater tonnage as the size of the world's merchant fleet increased.

An advertisement for the East Ferry Engineering Works Co., Ltd. featuring the coal tips at Penarth Dock appeared in an American publication being a supplement to 'Cassier's Engineering Monthly' entitled 'Conveying ; an illustrated record of the progress of mechanical handling of materials in all its branches' - July 1918 edition. [495]