Wayne Pritchett on Rivers and Harbours

I left Morey’s and I went to work for a company called The Island Transport Company. Now they were a subsidiary of John Samuel Whites, the shipbuilders at Cowes.

They had three cargo vessels. Initially those vessels had been built to bring steel and shipbuilding material from the Mainland to the shipyard in Southampton, but when the shipyard stopped building ships, they still retained those three cargo ships and they got into the general cargo trade going to Southampton and Portsmouth, bringing back general goods.

But of course, they found it difficult because Vectis Shipping Company had already been established many years and so had the British Road Services who also had a bigger fleet of ships, so we didn’t have a lot of luck bringing a lot of material back and it didn’t last too long, and I could see the writing was on the wall. Island Transport Company would soon sell those ships because they were unprofitable.