Graham Hall on Rivers and Harbours

When the harbour was formed in the 1850s by building an embankment across Brading, because the Harbour used to go all the way up to Brading; it was a very big Harbour then, very good. They built the embankment to bring the railway to Bembridge in Victorian times.

Well the chap who did that was a chap called Jabez Balfour and of course he was a bit of a rogue and there was a book about him, ‘The Victorian Rogue’ and Jabez had a savings of loan companies.

Well, a Building Society and he sort of borrowed all the money from that to develop the harbour and that there but forgot to repay it, so he absconded to Argentina where there was no extradition.

So his creditors sent the heavy gang over on a British ship to Argentina, knocked him on the head, put him onboard the ship and kept him under sedation, shall we say, until the ship was at sea and became part of British territory, when he was arrested and brought back to the UK, where he served six years inside.

He was in fact an MP as well, so, you know, what goes around comes around. So that’s sort of where Bembridge Harbour started, and it’s been fighting to exist ever since if I might say that.

We don’t make a lot of money, but we do provide a lot of employment for people.