A New Pier

Dear blog reader and friend

I must apologise for being absent for the past couple of months.

My Mum died at the end of April and I simply have not felt like blogging up until now. However normal service now resumes in terms of my local history research.

I have some interesting news for you. My Mum had agreed a couple of months before her death that I could share all of our family photos of Shandon with you. I have also found, since Mum died, that I hadn’t written down every one of Mum’s stories but I do have in writing Mum’s version of how our family found Shandon and our friends in Shandon. I look forward to sharing both of these with you in the near future.

I hope you find the attached interesting.

Best wishes

Jacqueline

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DUMBARTON HERALD AND COUNTY ADVERTISER

NEW PIER AT SHANDON

From the time the steamers first began to ply on the Gareloch there was a ferry boat station in connection with them at Shandon, where all the steamers used to call. For the long period of half a century the Shandon ferry continued under the management of Mr Duncan McKinlay, who still survives. But in 1882 the erection of Craigendoran steamboat harbour by the North British Railway Company, involving the calling of their Gareloch steamer both at Craigendoran and Helensburgh led to its withdrawal from the Shandon ferryboat station.

This for a period of fully four years has been felt by the inhabitants of the Shandon district, the most populous on the east shore of the Gareloch between Row and Garelochhead, to be a very great inconvenience, and to supply a want, amounting in many cases to a positive hardship, the new pier now erected at Shandon has been erected by the following neighbouring proprietors:- Messrs Henry Bell, Summerhill; William L Brown, Linnburn; John J Kerr, Ardgare; Andrew C Henderson, Shandon; Andrew J Kirkpatrick, Lagbuie; Wm Swan, LLD, Ardchapel; and William J Walker, Garemount.

In terms of an agreement made by the promoters of the pier with the trustees of the late Sir James Colquhoun, Bart., the pier, as now completed, is handed over to them, and becomes their sole property as a portion of the Colquhoun trust estates, to be used and maintained by the trustees on the same conditions as their other piers on the Gareloch. The new pier, situated at a point on the shore directly opposite Shandon Free Church, has been erected solely at the expense of the promoters above-named, and including the obtaining of a feu-disposition for its site from the Board of Trade, and other necessary expenses, will cost them, it is understood, somewhere about £1500.

The piles throughout are of greenheart timber, faced and coped at the pierhead with elm wood. The structure is an exceeding handsome one. The gangway and terminal platform are off creosoted pitch-pine, and on the pierhead there is a commodious waiting-room and pier master’s office and store-room. The pier has been built by Messrs Watt & Wilson, contractors, from a design by Mr W R Copland, CE. Now that it is completed, it should afford to the inhabitants of the surrounding district the means of easy communication with Helensburgh and Greenock, and thus also with the Clyde river steamers generally, of which the want has been of late years so severely felt by them.