The ‘Pickfords of the North Sea’

FROM sail to electric power, the history of boat builders Goldsmiths of Grays in Essex is detailed by Graham Dent in this book.

The company was founded in the days of the tall ships in the middle of the 19th century and built ships for almost 100 years.

By the early 20th century, EJ & W Goldsmith Ltd operated by far the largest fleet of sailing barges in the ‘seeking’ trades along the south and east coasts of England.

Most of the cargo that filled the holds of the fleet of sailing barges was for these traders, as it had little or no transport cargo of its own.

The detailed history of the company in these 500 pages has been provided through research by the grandson of the company’s founder, Edward John Goldsmith junior.

Beginning from the early days of both shipping and those of Goldsmith of Grays, the chapters cover the races between fleets of barge owners on the River Thames and later the River Medway to a biography of the barges of the Goldsmith fleet.

The first River Thames Matches were in Victorian times and they resumed after the First World War in the mid-1920s. In the first, in 1863, Goldsmith of Grays was runner-up to its challenger, the fleet of the business of Mr W H Dodds.

The company later moved into providing transport for goods by road, by rail and by tramway. The North Sea liners were known as the ‘Pickfords of the North Sea’ because they transported such large quantities. There may well have been a whole family aboard the ship and together with its furniture and belongings, travelling from England to Australia or to whatever country the family was emigrating.

The family’s pets, cats, dogs and birds in cages, such as budgerigars, would probably travel with their owners and be fed and looked after by their own family. This was, of course, before the days of pet passports.

During the late 1880s, the company was also in business as a cement works in Kent, at Rainham, but this was an aspect of the business that did not last very long.

As well as many black and white illustrations of barges, there are also historic ones of the people who were involved in various aspects of the building-up of the company.

One of them was taken when a cutting was being dug and a road bridge built to facilitate the opening of a chalk pit tramway leading to Rainham Creek in a typical scene of the era.

From these pits, the chalk was quarried; a derivation of the chalk is the firmer textured by-product whiting, which was used in Victorian times to whiten the doorsteps of homes and in the making of whitewash, a covering for the whole of the exterior walls and on the inside walls of some of the rooms of the house.

Goldsmith of Grays, by Graham Dent, is published by Chaffcutter Books Maritime Publishing.

RRP £35 on behalf of the Society for Sailing Barge Research.

ISBN: 978-0-9560-596-3-5