Graham Hall on Rivers and Harbours

I came down and I started as the General Manager and Harbour Master of Bembridge in 1990, sometime about then, 1989 and it was a whole new world. Bembridge Harbour is a private harbour.

It used to be owned by British Rail or Southern Railways and it used to be the contraflow for the whole of the bulk cargoes to the Isle of Wight because the railway used to come right down to the key and all the bulk cargoes used to come in on little ships and be landed onto the railway tracks there.

All the ballast that was used to build the railways used to come through there. They dug it up outside, brought it in here and loaded it onto the trains at the Quay at Bembridge but this all fell into disrepair really because people started using the roll on-roll off Ferries where the lorries would come on and off and there was really no demand for bulk cargoes or anything because in the old days they used to have a train ferry running from Bembridge over to the Mainland where railway carriages were pushed onto the train and it was pulled over there but that trade had died. It had become moribund.

There were some yachts here. It was mainly a yacht harbour and I came on the scene a few years after it had been purchased by a company that changed hands on a regular basis.

It had been owned by a large Dutch dredging firm, Zanen Verstoep, it had been owned by individuals and eventually the present company, the Bembridge Harbour Improvement Company had been formed and they’d bought the harbour.

The objective was to improve it slowly, using its own funding to produce the capital to do it. It’s quite interesting.