Thames Barges & River Severn Barges

The River Severn Trows.

It is sad that the Severn, Britain's longest navigable river, has so few reminders of its trading history afloat, or even in existence. The shallow river barges that once sailed over 170 miles upriver beyond Shrewsbury to Welshpool all disappeared back in the 1890's, whilst the local style of down-river sailing barge, the Severn 'Trow' is now only represented by the restored 'Spry' preserved at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, and a few rotting wrecks. A few of the handsome steel barges that replaced them survive as dredging lighters, but it is difficult to imagine that the Severn Navigation was busy until well after the second world war.

One of the problems was that much of its traffic started or finished in the Midlands. However big and efficient the river barges became their goods usually had to be transhipped into narrowboats to reach most of their customers in the industrial areas of Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Trows could trade from Gloucester and Bristol to Stourport and Worcester, but if it had to be transhipped you might as well take it all the way by road. In the 1950's the Severn still transported thousands of tons of fuel oil in tanker-barges but that ended very suddenly with the building of pipelines and the opening of the M5 motorway. For a number of years there was an occasional and erratic load of grain from Gloucester to Tewkesbury but that too has finally ended. The docks in Sharpness remain in business for big ships, but it is a rare event when a coaster ventures up the Gloucester and Berkeley Canal to Gloucester docks.

Upriver trows probably remained square rigged until their disappearance, but the bigger craft that remained in work until the 1930's were ketch rigged, with a bowsprit to fly a jib in front of the foresail, and a topsail set above the mainsail gaff. The hulls were carvel built with a characteristic vertical transom stern, carrying the ship's name and port. Happily the handsome 'Spry of Gloster' has been most carefully and thoroughly restored, and after a short sailing season in 1996 for recording purposes, is now preserved in perpetuity at Coalbrookdale.

Spry moored in Gloucester Docks alongside the National Waterways Museum in 1996, the year that
the long restoration was completed and the River Severn once more saw a trow under sail.

River Thames, Grand Union Canal.

Navigations feeding into the Thames estuary mainly employed craft developed from the old Thames sailing barges, flat bottomed boats fitted with huge sprit sails, lowering masts and leeboards to improve their windward sailing abilities. They were all originally 'swim-ended', with both bow and stern shaped like a clumsy horizontal wedge but the later versions developed a fine straight stem with a graceful run aft up to an elegant transom stern.

Crewed by only two men, they were equally good working up tiny tidal creeks or in the congested docks of the London river. With tanned sails, bright paintwork and bold scrollwork at bow and stern these supremely efficient utilitarian craft have been beloved by both artists and historians for generations and are well documented. Although only a few dozen remain of the thousands that were built, the numbers now remain fairly stable thanks to the dedicated care and maintenance of their proud owners.

Above Right - A Thames sailing barge passing Chatham dockyard under auxiliary power, with her mainsail brailed up above the spirit, the massive wooden spar that is so characteristic of these craft.

Diligent, one of a fleet of horse drawn barges that worked the River Wey in Surrey, seen here in retirement near Sittingbourne in Kent.
Two of these craft are now preserved, one at Guildford, one at the Ellesmere Port Boat Museum.