Wayne Pritchett on Rivers and Harbours

Lisa: Did you have a clear idea of when you were at school of what you wanted to do for work?

Yes, I mean where I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, after my father died, I was quite interested in working down the Quay on the river because as I say, we lived near it, within sight of the place.

But my grandfather also had a smallholding, a couple of fields near Pan Chalk Pit where he kept pigs and chickens and so on so I did sort of briefly get into sort of agricultural as well, but I really wanted to get on the river.

But of course, when I left school, by the time I’d left school, my mother who’d been widowed for 12 years remarried in 1957, having been widowed in 1945, and she married a farmer and of course it was a small farm, about 50 acres. It was difficult for them to manage on their own and I was talked into really helping with the family farm. Which seemed a good idea at the time but you know you’ve done a lot of hours which you didn’t get paid for because it was a family farm but that was sold off some years later because my stepfather was quite elderly and he couldn’t sort of manage the place any more, and that was my opportunity then to go where I wanted to go, down to work on the river, down the Quay, which I did.

Well, it was much later than I thought because when I left school 15, I was quite well known down the Quay. I used to spend my childhood playing down there and when it was known I had left school in 1958, I was even approached by Mark Croucher, who was the Managing Director of Vectis Shipping Company, and he asked me if I wanted a job on the boats, but I went back to tell mother what he’d said but they talked me into working on the farm instead, so that’s what happened.

And I left the farm and I went for a little while to work for another farmer briefly. That was out at Dinglers and Lower Watchingwell Farm, that’s almost in to Shalfleet, and I worked there for a little while, but I left there when I saw a job advertised up at Morey’s Timber Yard in Newport.

They wanted someone to help transport the timber from where it was unloaded, which was a place called Medham, which is just up the river from Kingston Power Station in the river known as Medham. The big Baltic timber ships couldn’t get up to Newport, they could only get as far as Medham where they would tie on buoys and they wanted someone to go down to help bring the timber on a regular basis from Medham up to Newport onto the Quay and discharge it where it was took on up to the Morey’s Yards in West Street in Newport or the one at Sandown.

So, I started working for Morey’s, the first Monday in May 1963 and of course I was based down the Quay. The timber ships which brought the timber from Medham to Newport, didn’t belong to Morey’s, they didn’t have ships, the belonged to the Vectis Shipping Company. They had the contract to bring the timber up, but I had to go down with them to see that certain cargoes were brought up at that time, whatever size the timber they wanted. Morey’s also had another gang of workmen which actually discharged the timber from the Baltic ships into the Lighters and that was separate from what I done. I used to go down with Vectis Shipping Company, bring the lighter loads of timber up to Newport, where it was discharged on the Quay and this was probably in a year, we used to have a timber ship every month and it used to take a least a couple of weeks to clear the timber from that ship off the Quay.

Perhaps two months of the year we were idle, they found us other jobs to do and I done that up until 1973. Ten years later, we had a bit of a shock because the timber arrived in the river already pre-packaged and they decided what they would do then, the timber ship would tie on Medina Wharf at Cowes, the timber would be unloaded onto lorries and brought to Newport, so all the business of transferring timber up the river by ship stopped.

So, I thought that was time to get out of it so I left Morey’s.