Chapter 16 - The Coastal Trade of Connah's Quay in the Early Twentieth Century: A Preliminary Investigation

Summary

The coastal trade of individual ports has been little researched. Where ports have been studied it is often with reference to their technical development, engineering works or role in the more exotic overseas trades. Coasters called at ports more frequendy than deep-water ships because their voyages were shorter compared to the longer overseas journeys and thus had a greater impact on harbour activity. With a few honourable exceptions there has been little research on the trade or fortunes of individual ports and even less on small ports. This is probably as much due to a dearth of records as a lack of interest. By good fortune one source has survived which records the trade of Connah's Quay from 1905 to the First World War, ironically among the records of a railway company. Connah's Quay was a small port on the Dee Estuary about eight miles downstream from Chester. It no longer operates as a port. The Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway (WMCQR) was approved by Parliament in 1862 and was built by 1865. The railway company developed the wharves at Connah's Quay. It was absorbed by the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MSL) in 1890, and by 1897 the MSL was part of the Great Central (GC). In 1904 the GC formally took over the WMCQR. It required the port of Connah's Quay to keep a register of all ships entering and clearing the port, including their registered tonnage, the type and quantity of cargoes they were carrying, their captain's name and their port of despatch or destination. This source can be used to shed light on the nature of the trade of this tiny port.

The port register was kept from 1904 to 1922 and appears to have recorded all ships which used the wharves in chronological order. Ships calling at the other small ports of the Dee Estuary were not included, and the temptation is to see the register as a record from which invoices for port charges were compiled. Given the number of pieces of data and the long time period, an initial project was formulated to extract all the information for four years: 1905, 1906, 1912 and 1913. This was entered on a computer database which could then be analyzed using SPSS. All statements which follow based on this source were determined in this way.