Richborough Port
 
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Location of Richborough Port |
Richborough Port was a secret British military port built in the First World War near Richborough , north of Sandwich in Kent , from which the British Expeditionary Corps operating in northern France and Belgium were supplied with supplies . In 1918, around 20,000 tons of supplies per week were moved there on an area of around 500 hectares.
prehistory
Before 1911, the later Richborough Port on the lower reaches of the Stour between Ramsgate and Sandwich was known as "Sandwich Haven". During the construction of the Royal Navy port in Dover, a large gravel pit (now Stonar Lake) and a loading dock (called “Pierson's Quay”, “Old Quay” or “Stonar Quay”) were created. After coal deposits were proven in the east of Kent in 1890 , there were considerable efforts from 1906 to demolish mines there. This, in turn, led to the construction of the East Kent Light Railway (EKLR) from 1909, although it was still a long way from being proven to be profitable coal mining , which was supposed to bring the coal from the mines to the new coal shipping port in Sandwich Haven. In 1911 the EKLR received approval to build a new quay. But since, with only a few exceptions, the numerous planned and started mines were abandoned at the latest with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 without ever extracting coal, the only partially constructed coal port was a poorly used bad investment.
Military port
In December 1914 , the Inland Water Transport Section was formed within the British Engineer Corps, the Corps of Royal Engineers , with the task of organizing and carrying out military transports across the English Channel and on the canals in Belgium and northern France. The purpose was to provide the British Expeditionary Force fighting there with sufficient supplies. The base was initially Dover , but the port was mainly used to repatriate the wounded and the barge depot there, where the motor barges were loaded and from which they then drove across the English Channel, was too narrow, so that an alternative was needed. Folkestone was busy shipping new troops, so in January 1916 it was decided to convert the Stour at Richborough, below the Roman fort Rutupiae , into a barge base. At that time, Richborough had only one house and a short stretch of quay wall for barges to dock. The War Office took possession of the site and had an extensive transshipment depot and supply warehouse set up there. The mouth of the Stour was deepened by dredging, the river bed was diverted and widened in some places to enable the construction of a new 750 m quay wall for loading motorized barges. A new railway connection was carried out by the SECR line between Minster-in-Thanet and Sandwich up to the area now called "Richborough Port". A total of about 90 km of railroad tracks were laid to and in Richborough Port.
Already in December 1916 there was a brisk barge traffic across the English Channel. From February 10, 1918 then the three new lead RoRo - train ferries of the War Office, the Train No. Ferries 1 , No. 2 and No. 3 , from Richborough Port to northern France, in order to bring heavy equipment ( tanks , guns , locomotives and hospital trains ) across the canal quickly and safely and with the shortest possible loading and unloading times. Shortly afterwards, Train Ferry No. 4 also added the former Canadian railway ferry Leonard , built in 1914 , which had crossed the Saint Lawrence River between Québec and Lévis until a bridge was inaugurated in December 1917 . At the end of the war, 242 motorized barges were in service from Richborough Port, some of them also from Southampton , ten of them each with a capacity of 1000 tons.
In 1918, the last year of the war, Richborough Port had become a 500-acre and well-equipped seaport that could handle 30,000 tons per week. In addition to the quays, railways and storage and loading facilities, there were workshops in which motor barges and other small ships were built, locomotive maintenance and repair sheds, and a large troop camp for thousands of soldiers awaiting their shipment to Calais and Dunkirk . All buildings were single-story, their walls and roofs painted with camouflage colors that matched the surroundings. The secrecy was so good that the German army command had no knowledge of the existence of the facility until the end of the war. Although German planes flew over the area on their way to bomb bombs over London, they were never shot at or illuminated with searchlights from Richborough , and not a single bomb was dropped on the facility.
Interwar years
After the end of the war, the port was used to repatriate troops and materials until the early months of 1919, then it was shut down and finally auctioned with all equipment and accessories. The buyer was the private Port of Queenborough Development Company Ltd., which wanted to develop the port into an efficient civilian trading port within five years. Since the company could not afford the purchase price, the government took possession of the port area again. Some of the equipment was sold and removed, e.g. B. the loading bridges for the railway ferries, which together with the three ferries in 1923 to Great Eastern Train Ferries Ltd. were sold and then used by this in Harwich . The port facilities, which also became increasingly useless due to the increasing siltation of the Stour, were initially managed by the South Eastern and Chatham Railway until they were sold in 1925 to the industrial investor group Pearson & Dorman Long , which planned to build a steel mill there. This plan was also not implemented because the global economic crisis destroyed the plans. In the years up to the beginning of the Second World War , only a few buildings were then used for the maintenance of mining machines.
Second World War
Only in 1938 did business start again when Jews and other political refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were housed in the former military camp. After the start of the Second World War, the vast majority of men in the camp volunteered for action against Nazi Germany and were eventually admitted to service in or with the British armed forces. In 1971 a plaque was unveiled on the wall of the former Richborough Transit Camp to commemorate the camp and the 5000 or so people who found refuge here from Nazi persecution.
In 1942 the camp became a military base again, now called "Kitchener Camp". It was obtained from a battalion of British Marines . In June 1943 an allied base for landing craft and their crews was set up there under the name "HMS Robertson" , which existed until August 1946.
The so-called "Beetles", important parts of the two Mulberry ports , which were assembled when the Allies landed in Normandy on the Normandy coast at Vierville-sur-Mer and Arromanches , were manufactured by Royal Engineers in Richborough Port and on D-Day hauled across the English Channel.
Post-war until today
Part of the site, about 30 hectares in the southern part of the former military port and camp, was bought in 1954 by Pfizer UK, a subsidiary of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company , and used to build a feed factory. Over the next 45 years, Pfizer gradually expanded its presence in Sandwich, with Pfizer Central Research, which opened in 1971, as the central facility, so that around 3,000 people were employed there at the turn of the millennium. However, dismantling began in 2007, and in February 2011 the company announced the closure of its entire research complex in Sandwich. In June 2011 Pfizer gave the area the new name "Discovery Park" and offered it for sale, but also announced that around 350 people would continue to be employed there; this number was increased to 650 in November 2011. In August 2012, the entire Discovery Park site was sold to Discovery Park Ltd. sold, a consortium formed for this purpose that planned to set up an investor-friendly commercial zone on the site. Pfizer stayed on site with around 25,000 m² of rented office and laboratory space.
Also on the grounds of the former Richborough Port, at its northwestern end (51.31 N, 1346 E) Richborough Power Station was built a 342- in the late 1950s, MW - coal plant . It was in operation from 1962 to 1996, fueled with coal from the Kentish mines until 1971, then converted to oil and finally in 1989 to Orimulsion , which was imported via Richborogh Port. The three 97 m high cooling towers and the 127 m high chimney were blown up in March 2011. Today there are plans to set up a “green” energy park there.
There are still visible evidence of the former port facilities, in particular the remains of the old quay wall immediately north of the Stonar Cut about 1.5 km from the mouth of the Stour, but also extensive asphalt mixed macadam parking areas for heavy military equipment. The route of the rail link along the north side of the former power station area down to the Stour is still clearly visible in the area.
Web links
Notes and individual references
- ↑ Originally planned as East Kent Mineral (Light) Railways
- ↑ Usually just referred to as Royal Engineers (RE).
- ↑ lner.info
- ↑ trains-worldexpresses.com
- ^ The company also sought to acquire the wharfs of the Royal Engineers Inland Water Transport Section in Calais and Boulogne .
- ↑ The fourth ferry, the former Leonard , was sold to the Shell subsidiary Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Co. and converted into a tanker ( lner.info ).
- ↑ combinedops.com Robertson
- ↑ Caissons made of concrete and steel with embedded long metal posts on which pier heads slid up and down with the tide . They each had a load capacity of 80 tons. ( combinedops.com Construction)
- ↑ Pfizer to close historic UK site ; Chemistry World, February 2, 2011
- ^ Sandwich Pfizer site sold to private consortium , BBC News, Aug. 2, 2012
- ↑ Video of the demolition
- ↑ richboroughenergypark.co.uk
Coordinates: 51 ° 18 ′ 36 ″ N , 1 ° 21 ′ 4 ″ E