Graham Hall on Rivers and Harbours

My job as a Harbour Master, besides a little bit of running around in boats and telling people where they could moor and things like that, mine was principally trying to gain the finance to improve the infrastructure because Bembridge needs a great deal of dredging.

All the silt from Arreton Valley elsewhere comes down the Eastern Yar river and deposits itself in Bembridge Harbour and it silts up very quickly, so the vast majority of the revenue that’s made there is used to hire dredgers to dig this silt out again.

So this is, you know, this is where your principal function was. It wasn’t in so-called Harbour Mastering, it was in trying to raise finance and decide how you were going to do the dredging and because of my background at sea where I’d done some hydrographic surveying, I could do all the surveying for measuring the mud myself.