Volume Eight - Pre-Victorian to the present day - more aspects - Chains at Penarth Dock - Macey, Mules and Wallace Family History . . .

In December, William put in 2 weeks of night shifts and on the 19th December, he received a welcome boost to his income just in time for Christmas – ‘Receive my dividend from Dock Club. This pays £2.4s.6d’ (£1.22). I give Mother £1 and May & Emily 1/- each’ and 2 shillings for stockings. Mother gets new boots’. The dock workers must have been running some sort of cooperative.

On Christmas day - ‘Me & Arthur went to service in the Arcot Street School Room morning. Home remainder of day. Amy and Joe and children came down to tea. Our girls go to Cardiff to Mrs Sparks. Spent a very happy Christmas. All my accounts up to par’. Who was Joe? Who was Mrs Sparks?

William began the new year without celebration - ‘Monday 31st December 1906 – Home all day. Work all night’. No bank Holiday leave then.

	There is an interesting entry for March 3rd 1907. It says ‘The s.s. Pampa & Guardia Nacional sail today’. There was a steamship called the Pampa which was built on the Clyde in 1906. It was built for a French owner. Perhaps it was passing through from The Clyde to France. Why William recorded this particular ship and not the many others that were passing through the port is not known.
s.s. Pampa

Williams’s knowledge and interest in boats continued: ‘Sunday April 14th – We go for a walk. Mr Deippe brings the Ellen a Reed onto the beach to be broken up’. Christian Deippe was a merchant seaman who was born in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany in 1834. He came to Penarth and ran a seaman’s Boarding House in Maughan Terrace as well as a breakers yard on the banks of the Ely River.