Lady Wright
 The Lady Wright at Bathurst
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The Lady Wright was a passenger ship on the Gambia Current in the West African state of Gambia . It was used for regular traffic along the river.
Technical specifications
The Lady Wright was designed to carry 280 passengers on three decks. It was 160 feet long (= 48.77 meters) and had a displacement of 565 t. It was operated by two diesel engines, each with 330 hp. The ship could reach a maximum speed of twelve knots .
It had space for twelve passengers for 1st class on the third deck, which were divided into five double and two single bed cabins. For the 2nd class there was space for 18 passengers, also on the third deck, one twin and four four-bed cabins. The ship held a maximum of 250 deck passengers and had a cargo capacity of 120 t. The crew consisted of 18 men.
The remarkable thing about this ship was the widespread use of light metal at the time, so over 35 t light metal was used where 70 t steel would have been used in the same place.
The ship was depicted as a motif on postage stamps in 1953, 1978 and 1992.
history
The passenger ship was launched on June 28, 1949. It was built for the then British colony of Gambia by the John Morris and Co. shipyard in Gosport and commissioned in 1950 as a replacement for Lady Denham, who sank in 1948 . The ship was christened Lady Wright , the name of the wife of the then British Governor Andrew Barkworth Wright .
During its operation, it moved over a distance of 390 kilometers or 320 miles from the Gambian capital Bathurst (today's name: Banjul) on the Atlantic Ocean upstream to Basse Santa Su . She covered this distance in around a week. Occasionally Fatoto was also called . The timetable stipulated that the Lady Wright would leave Bathurst every second Monday at 6:00 p.m. and headed for around 20 ports upstream of the Gambia.
The Lady Wright , like the later Lady Chilel Jawara, also served as a mobile post office. The mail items were stamped "TPO - Traveling Post Office" at no extra charge.
At the end of the 1970s there was an arson attack by left-wing government opponents against the ship.
After 30 years in service, the ship was replaced by the Lady Chilel Jawara in April 1977 and scrapped in 1979.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Andreas Fletcher: The Gambia Classic Publications, California, 1977
- ↑ a b c d e f g River trip , accessed July 2011
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Lady Wright , accessed July 2011
- ↑ a b c Lady Wright , accessed July 2011
- ↑ Michael Tomkinson: Michael Tomkinson's Gambia Tomkinson, London [u. a.] 1987, ISBN 0-9055-0000-8
- ^ Omar A. Touray : The Gambia and the world. a history of the foreign policy of Africa's smallest state, 1965-1995 GIGA-Hamburg, 2000, ISBN 3928049666