The photo above shows a view east along Victoria Dock from a point near the Dock entrance off the River Hull, it shows how the creation of the Dock really hemmed-in St Peter’s church (s.p.b.s), Drypool, this before the damage done by enemy bombing during the early 1940s.
To return to the line of thought at the end of the last blog, Earle’s Iron Ship Yard was so-called because many iron-hulled ships were built here at a time when this technology was being pioneered. MacMahon writes ‘with eight slipways, by 1878 they had built 200 ships’ … ‘five for the Navy’…. ‘and a brace of steam yachts for the Czarewitch’ (Gillett and MacMahon A History of Hull (1989, 336).
Immediately east of the mouth of the River Hull was another shipyard (now the site of the Deep) locally known as ‘Sammy’s Point’ long after Samuelson’s shipyard had ceased trading. MacMahon states that across a decade the Humber Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company (Martin Samuelson being the principal investor) built 95 iron ships and that in a single day in 1864 three new ships were launched.
So by 1869 (the date of Goodwill and Lawson’s Plan, s.p.b.s) Drypool was fast loosing any semblance of its once rural identity and the loss of the church after the Second World War might be seen as the last nail in the coffin. So much change has taken place in southern Drypool that it is hard to visualise the Dock and the shipyards when actually looking at The Deep, Victoria Dock Village and the A63 east of Myton Bridge. However, maps like those being referred to in this sequence of blogs allow the landscape history of a given area to be peeled-back – a story through time.
(to be continued – Southcoates and Marfleet).
Point of view 18 – Personally I wouldn’t bother if every statue in the land were done away with for the simple reason that perceptions of a ‘great person’ might/do change from one generation to the next given further evidence coming to light and/or changes in social and political perspectives. That said, a sinister side to the present controversy is when one tries to re-write history or obliterate episodes that did happen. Britain doesn’t have a history of this sort of political manipulation and it should stay that way.
Secondly, how is drawing attention the tactics of of law enforcers in Israel anti-semitic? It is in no way a racist comment, it is a comment on government policy. The word ‘racist’ is too often used incorrectly.