The last of the Thames barges race to save British maritime history

The barge skippers are highly competitive, in their own way, but their race is now largely about the preservation of British tradition, recalling a time when thousands of these craft plied the River Thames, transporting cargo — coal, barley, rubbish — under red ocher sails.

Only a couple dozen barges survive.

On a clammy Saturday this month, eight of them appeared in the early morning haze, ghosts of the maritime past, but real.

They cast off from Gravesend, a Thames-side town that boasts the oldest remaining cast iron pier in the world and was once a mustering point of British imperial sea power, but today, not so much.

Some of the barge skippers cranked up their auxiliary diesels to hurry to the starting line, four miles down river. Others, having no engine, coasted along.

The brawny boats looked like what they were: hard workers.

They were designed to ferry enormous loads in their holds, up and down the Thames and its nearby rivers and estuaries, in shallow, shoaling waters, subject to notorious tides and nervous wind.

With their flat-bottomed hulls, steadied by leeboards instead of a keel, the barges could be easily settled in the shoreside mud on a low tide for loading or unloading.

While they were “in trade,” they hauled brick, cement, timber, sand, coal, grain and gunpowder. They ran barley to London’s brewers and wheat to its bakers. When the city’s transport was dominated by horse and carriage, the barges brought London straw and hauled away manure — in what was known as “hay up, dung down” trade.

“They were practical boats, but clever, suited to their task,” said Richard Walsh, 80, a former owner of the barge Wyvenhoe, who was on board as a guest on match day.

He pointed out the ingenious rigging that makes them among the largest sailing vessels in the world that can be handled by a crew of two — or, as the lore has it, “a man, a boy and a dog,” though many were husband-and-wife teams.

“The racing made the barges even better,” Walsh said.

The Thames Sailing Barge Match has been running since 1863 — with pauses for economic recessions and world wars. It started with a barge owner named Henry Dodd, who made his fortune hauling rubbish — and probably inspired Charles Dickens’s character Noddy Boffin, the wealthy London “Golden Dustman,” in the novel “Our Mutual Friend.”

Dodd noticed that skippers on the river would often try to best each other, and he decided to formalize the competition, according to a historical account by Frank Carr, a onetime director of Britain’s National Maritime Museum. Soon the shipyards were playing with hull shapes and sail plans, and barge owners were vying for prize money and boasting rights.

In a fresh breeze, the barges are capable of 12 knots, or 14 miles per hour. That’s nowhere close to America’s Cup racers, which can do 50 mph. But it’s pretty fast for an ordinary sailboat — and nearly as fast as the average cruising speed of modern container ships.

“Ease away the sheets!’ called out Wyvenhoe skipper Gerard Swift, who grew up on a Thames barge in the 1960s.

The Wyvenhoe had a smart downwind start, and as the barge gathered speed, the skipper at the wheel coaxed her on, “Let’s go, girl, let’s go.”

The barges were well-matched. Racing in three classes, they fought each other for the lead. The two barges in the coasting class, Gladys and Pudge, kept up a day-long tacking duel.

The race was supposed to run 43 nautical miles — starting in Lower Hope Reach and heading down river past Southend-on-Sea to the North Oaze Buoy before returning to finish at Gravesend. But as the fleet reached Canvey Island, the already light winds slackened, and the race committee shortened the course. By the time the fleet turned to race back, the crews were trying to keep up with seaweed that slid past them in the tide.

All this was happening amid the narrow confines of navigable waterways, busy with commercial traffic, as container ships, sand dredgers, tug boats and ferries made their way through the race.

The Thames remains a working river — its low banks, by turns, a smudged watercolor of marsh and birds, then the harder angles of industry. We passed the Tilbury Sewage Treatment Works and the London Gateway, one of the largest ports for container ships in Britain.

There are low hills, which are actually landfills, and the shuttered Coryton Oil Refinery and long-ago decommissioned Coalhouse Fort, built in the mid-19th century to protect the estuary from the French.

The fort would have witnessed the heyday of the sailing barges. According to the Society for Sailing Barge Research, 4,860 barges were built for trade from the 18th century to World War I. There were maybe 8,000 in all, including the smaller vessels that were unregistered.

Almost all have been lost, abandoned or dismantled.

A few of the ones still around spent decades in ignominy — as houseboats, dockside restaurants. Others have done their turn as corporate training venues.

Wyvenhoe was made to look like she was blown up in the opening sequence of the James Bond movie “The World Is Not Enough.”

Others took a long nap in the mud before they were revived by enthusiasts.

Asked why the modern-day owners are obsessed with the barges and dedicated to keeping them afloat — and racing — Walsh said, “We British have salt in our veins.”

He mentioned that the barges preserved “the maritime tradition of this island nation.”

Walsh thought maybe the barges had something to teach the world — that cargo could still be moved by wind. “Why don’t we do it again?” he said. “Maybe we could save the planet.”

The cost of restoring and preserving the sailing barges is beyond the means of most patrons. Some of the boats have continued to deteriorate while fundraising efforts languish. Walsh named nine barges in recent years broken up for scrap: Felix, Scone, Vigilant, Venture…

Among those that have benefited from public money is Pudge, a veteran of the “Little Boat” evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in the early days of World War II.

The barge was towed across the English Channel at night, and near the French beaches encountered an explosion that lifted her out of the water, according to records maintained by the Thames Sailing Barge Trust. “She came down the right way up,” her skipper recounted.

Pudge helped save the lives of 160 soldiers.

There was nothing quite so dramatic on the most recent match day. Toward the end of the race, the wind finally filled in and the barges made pace. The finish line was by Three Daws pub, serving the waterfront trade since the 1450s. Wyvenhoe finished second in her class.

Jim Dines, her owner, who had been roving fore and aft all day, finally had a moment to talk. He joked that he works to keep the boat afloat.

He crewed on a barge at age 12 and wanted to buy one when he was 19, but didn’t have the money. He served as an engineer in the merchant marine for years, aboard oil tankers. He now runs a boatyard on the Blackwater River and bought Wyvenhoe in 2018.

“The steel was paper thin,” he recalled. Today, below decks, the salon is half polished wood and half an ongoing construction site.

“They just get under your skin,” said Dines, 54, remembering seeing the barges on the quay as a boy. “They are just a big square big old box. But they sail so well.”

The barges are huge — his is 80 feet long and 20 feet wide — but it can dance around the river like a skiff. He thought the barges perfectly evolved, perfectly at home in their home waters.

He knows that every few years one disappears. “But people are still looking after them and they’re rebuilding them so they’ll keep going. I dunno. I don’t see that they’ll ever disappear, I hope.”