Volume Eight - Pre-Victorian to the present day - more aspects - Mr Martin's Recollections of Penarth Dock . . .

At the end of the dock and next to the river Ely, the Penarth Pontoon and Slipway Company employed many men of various trades including boilermakers, riggers, shipwrights, engineers - 'all gone, that's the sad thing, all gone.'

As an apprentice at Penarth Dock Engineering, the same company following closure of the dock and a forced move away from marine to general and precision engineering I was the subject of some leg pulling by the older and wiser engineers. I recall being sent to ask Mr Hopkins, the storekeeper, to ask for 'the long weight' or so I thought - it was in fact the long wait! Oh, and a spirit level bubble as well!

Harry and others used to play tricks on new lads who had just started work at the dock by asking them if they had been weighed yet for their new boots? 'Go over and speak to nice Mr Harris' at tip number nine they would say. Mr Harris was a 'grizzly old weigher' and his response was allegedly 'Get the hell out of here, boy'!!

Harry goes on to describe that before the coal tipping started at six o'clock in the morning the tip roads were full from end to end with wagons of coal awaiting shipment to all parts of the world. The sidings at Llandough and also at Grangetown and Canton would also be full of coal wagons 'Its a shame to see the decline of the coal trade.'

When the Welsh miners went out after the General Strike of 1926 they were out for a 'devil of time'. The dock workers at Penarth were put on part-time as a result. 'We might do a couple of days a week, nothing in others' he remembers. Mr Martin and his workmates didn't want to go to work since maybe someone would acquire a boat, and then they would go down to the eastern mud and dig up coal which was to be found in abundance. They could then sell the coal because everybody wanted coal for heating and cooking in those days.

During the 1926 strike, coal dust was sold to the Patent Fuel Works at Cardiff to be compressed into hard fuel blocks. Harry recalls that a lot of the railway locos ran on these fuel blocks at the latter end of the strike.

One of Harry's duties as part of the Service was to go around and note the all the numbers of wagons of coal that had been delivered to the Crown Fuel Works. 'A terrific trade' where a great deal was exported to France.