Heritage and History at the portside

In November 2024, the Norwegian Church Arts Centre and the Cardiff Centre for Welsh History joined forces to host a fascinating workshop on the heritage and history of Welsh port and dock communities to reveal  a deeper understanding of south Wales’s unique heritage. The day was filled with presentations on local archival material, and discussions informed by cutting-edge research and community achievements. Among the confirmed were two PhD students at Cardiff who bonded over ports (and cholera). In this blog, Anne-Marie and Siobhan give a taste of their talks.

As Anne-Marie, a PhD student, explored in her talk, the use of Track and Trace during the Covid pandemic carries echoes of similar measures to control the spread of cholera during the nineteenth century.

Victorian ports were vulnerable spaces for the importation of disease, with ships carrying potentially infected sailors on-board who might spread disease into port towns and hinterlands. The transition from sail to steam ships which led to shorter voyages only heightened this risk.

Port and inland sanitary authorities were responsible for tracing and monitoring the movements of seamen ashore, mechanisms which were designed to mitigate such risks. Through examining Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports and newspapers, we gain a sense of the measures adopted and the amount of work involved in the collecting and sharing of information. If the aim of infectious disease surveillance was to break potential chains of transmission, a further aim for port authorities was to create networks of communication inland. But while historians have emphasised the role of medical officers in disease surveillance, the evidence for South Wales ports clearly shows the range of people involved in keeping out cholera. For instance, in November 1893, Cardiff’s Town Clerk Joseph Larke Wheately warned the Midleton Board of Guardians, Cork, that a sailor had arrived in Cardiff from a cholera-infected port and was leaving for his home in Middleton. Disease surveillance equally depended on the cooperation between port and inland sanitary authorities and was clearly both a local and national concern as sailors moved across borders.

Equally, the spaces and places inhabited by sailors ashore such as boarding and lodging houses generated concern and highlight the role played by sanitary inspectors in surveillance. We can see this in the reports of Swansea’s MOH Ebenezer Davies. Following reports of cholera in Hamburg and fears over cases being imported into the South Wales ports in 1892, Davies urged inspectors to regularly inspect and cleanse lodging houses and areas frequented by sailors. As the Ordnance Survey Map of Swansea in 1898 reveals, such boarding houses and sailors’ homes were not geographically remote from onshore communities, revealing the constant risk of disease transmission through a transient population.

As the evidence from South Wales reveals, ports were problematic places when it came to disease. They were porous spaces as sailors posed a threat not only to the poor but also to other communities. We can also see how the Victorian system of track and trace saw a wider range of officials playing their part to monitor the health of crew members on shore to prevent any contagion spreading along the coast.

Siobhan Hayes, a PhD student in the Department, took a different approach, discussing the nature of work and family in Newport.

On 4 November 2024, more than 1500 people attended the annual march to commemorate the Newport Rising of 1839. The next day, I was due to speak about Newport docks during the nineteenth century as part of the Cardiff Centre for Welsh History’s ‘Port Communities’ workshop. I reflected that, while Newport is understandably proud to commemorate its radical heritage, its status as a key port and the life of its dock communities during British industrialisation sometimes feel relatively neglected, something my work attempts to change.

In the early nineteenth century, Newport’s export volumes exceeded those of Cardiff, shipping cargoes of iron, steel, and high-quality steam coal around the world. By 1896, it was the third-largest coal export dock in Britain. As a result, Newport’s population grew from 14,000 in 1841 to almost 34,000 by 1881. Migrants came mainly from rural Wales and local English counties, but also included sick and impoverished Irish families fleeing the Great Famine of the 1840s. As the docks extended westwards to Pillgwenlly, land for workers’ houses was reclaimed by dumping ballast from incoming ships into the marshes. This housing was typically high density and overcrowded, with poor sanitation.

Opening of Newport Docks 1842, Joseph Walter (1783-1856), Newport Museum and Art Gallery

Most dockworkers were employed casually, on terms worse than today’s ‘zero hours’ contracts, without entitlement to sick pay or paid holiday. Shipping agents awarded work to ‘gangmasters’ who would subcontract a few days’ labour or a specific piece of work to skilled workers. These included ‘stevedores’, who moved cargo around the dock, often at great heights, and cargo specialists, such as ‘trimmers’, who packed coal into ships’ holds, working in cramped and dangerous conditions. Under pressure to turn ships around quickly, gangmasters favoured skilled men already known to them. Known workers could earn a good wage. Some enjoyed a more a more flexible working pattern than the rigid shift systems found in the coal and iron industries of the Monmouthshire Valleys. However, less experienced men unknown to the ‘gangmasters’ struggled to find enough work to feed their families. When weather and sailing conditions were bad, trade was poor or affected by strikes in the Valleys, there was neither work nor pay for anyone.

The docks were also a dangerous place. For example, in 1881, four Newport coal trimmers were injured by a gas explosion in the hold of the ship where they were working. The Cardiff Times noted that they had been badly burnt and needed treatment in the infirmary. Knowing they would not be paid if they took time off, three of the four were back at work the next day. Even where deaths occurred, compensation was only available under the 1880 Employers Liability Act if someone else could be blamed. When a dockworker was killed by a falling hoist in 1881, the coroner’s jury decided it had been an accident and not anyone’s fault. The widow was therefore not entitled to compensation, although the jurors did decide to give her their own fees.

Piecing together evidence of working-class lives in the nineteenth-century Newport Docks is a painstaking task, using documents held in the Gwent Archives and stories from local newspapers. But it is necessary to enable the voices of dock workers and their families to be heard and help highlight the importance of Newport Dock communities during the Industrial Revolution.