Wayne Pritchett on Rivers and Harbours

In the early days, when I used to dredge it myself into the dredger, to dispose of the mud, we had an old fashioned dust cart with the body cut down and I used to have to did the mud out of the river with the steam crane, load it into this lorry, get out of the crane, drive this tipper lorry across Seaclose Field, and in the winter we had some metal tank tracks put down, and where Medina High School is, that Copse, I filled that Copse right up with mud over the years and then they decided to build a school and they stopped us.

They said, “You can’t put mud there, kids are going to sink in it” but of course the mud in the river up at Newport, it’s not too salty. That mud, within a year, grass grows on it and you would never know it was ever mud from the river, you know, so it wasn’t really bad stuff, not once the Gas Works closed.

When the Gas Works was open it was a different story. You could smell that mud when the tide was out, halfway across the town, when the Gas Works was going.

So, when they stopped us tipping the mud in the Copse there, they then gave us permission to take the mud up to Bleak Down, up the back of Godshill there. Well, that was fine if you could find a Company what had lorries with watertight bodies to carry mud on the Main Road.

I think the late Keith Marsh had some trucks like that, and I used to load his lorries up and these drivers used to take it up to Bleak Down and on one occasion, I’ll always remember, a Police motorcyclist came down the Quay, and he said to me, “You better get up Quay Street” he said, “there’s a load of mud in the road.” I said, “In the road?” He said, “Yeah, this lorry went up Quay Street, a car pulled out the parking bay, he put his brakes on and the mud shot out of the back.”

And then we had trouble at Blackwater Hollow, as they went up Blackwater Hollow, it was running out the back, so we had to stop doing that.

And then of course came a Company from Freshwater started up in the dredging trade, the Burton Brothers, and they dredged all round Bembridge and God knows where, and we had an arrangement with them that they would dispose of our mud, and they often had periods when they never had any work, and they laid their empty dredger hopper barges, that’s the ones where the bottom opens up, they used to lay them up at Newport, and we had an arrangement with them, that we didn’t charge them Harbour Dues providing they took our mud out free, and I had that going with them for a long time.

Then we gets round to where you dispose of the mud. Newport being a small Harbour, the Department of Food and Fisheries permitted us to drop our mud at what’s called ‘Hurst Narrows’ off of Yarmouth Hurst Castle. There’s an area out there where the tide goes fast and the biggest hole, you dispose the mud out there. Now of course, all the mud is taken out past the Nab Tower.

Then they wanted us to send the dredgers out to the Nab Tower which would be a waste of time because Newport being tidal, time the vessel floated, got out to the Nab Tower, it would be two days before he’d get back to Newport so that was totally impracticable, so the Ministry of Fisheries and Food agreed and they allowed us to still have Hurst as our dumping ground. I think we were about the only Harbour allowed to dump down Hurst.

But then of course we had problems with some of the Contractors because we used to time those ships going out, you filled them up with mud, I used to fill them up with mud and of course if they got out on that tide, or else they waited for the next tide, they had to wait for a full tide before they floated, and I used to time them. You come back in the morning, I thought myself, well that bloke won’t be up tomorrow afternoon, I’d get in and he was back here empty. And I thought, they never had time to go to Hurst, never had time to go down to Hurst and come back on the same tide. It couldn’t be done.

What we found out was some of these Contractors, not Burtons, some other people we had, what they were doing, they were going round off of Gurnard somewhere, particularly with a dark foggy night, open the bottom up, drop the mud and come back, not where they should have done.

This was definitely going on and we caught one lot because we had a phone call one day from the Watchtower on Island Harbour and he said, “You’d better get down here” he said, “nobody will get up the river.” He said, “There’s a mountain of mud in the middle of the river, and of course the dredging company claimed that one of the chains broke and the doors open accidentally but never knew if that was true of not.

But they couldn’t get away with it ‘cos when the tide went out, there was a mound of mud as high as this room and they had to go down there and dig it up again. Yes, so we had some fun with things like that.