Christopher Bland on Shipbuilding
The original Sir Christopher Cockerell laid the service, he invented the Hovercraft. It was then taken over by the Ministry of Aviation who thought it had military potential.
It was then passed over to four Companies like Westland Aircraft, Vickers, Folland and Britten-Norman Cushion Craft and they all had a go at developing basically experimental Hovercraft, but the first one that really worked was in about 1959-60 which was the SRN 2, which we did an experimental service on the Solent in 1964, between Appley and Portsmouth. To be precise, the Marine Barracks at Eastney.
Then Hovertravel, this is when the year-round public service started in July 1965, which was the brainchild of … actually it was Mr Norman of Britten-Norman who were also developing their own Hovercraft called the ‘Cushion Craft’.
It made all the sense in the world at Ryde because there was no water at low tide which suited the amphibious capabilities of the Hovercraft.
There were fairly well to do people on both sides from an income point of view and it could do the four mile trip in give or take 10 minutes, whereas the Ferry which had been in operation for some hundreds of years, had to rely on Ryde Pier for starters, which is about half a mile long and if Queen Victoria had that Hovercraft, they certainly wouldn’t have built Ryde Pier in 1965, so Hovertravel started July ’65 and still runs to this day.
Over the years it started off with a Hovercraft manufactured by Westland Aircraft and then turned into British Hovercraft Corporation and they developed from an 18 seater to a 38 seater to start with a gas turbine aeroplane engines, and then in the early 1980s we went on to diesel engined Hovercraft which pertain to this day.
You then come to the … much more important probably was the enormous Hovercraft that travelled on the Channel between Dover and Calais which were again manufactured by the British Hovercraft Corporation and I also neglected to say that there’s a second service on the Solent running between Cowes and Southampton. That was not as clever as the Ryde Portsmouth service because it didn’t actually have any shallow water so the competition could come from a boat, which in due course it did, and that service is now run by a catamaran.