Dredged Gold from the Sea

The United Kingdom has by far the largest offshore sand and gravel dredging industry in Europe, with royalties to the Crown Estate for the licensed areas at around £14.3 million per year. Around twenty million tonnes of aggregates are dredged up each year, of which twelve million tonnes are landed at wharves in England and Wales as construction aggregates, five million tonnes in Europe as construction aggregates, and three million tonnes are used for offshore reclamation of land, beaches and shoreline via boom discharge.

There were literally dozens of British sand and gravel companies supplying the construction industries with ready mixed concrete. The sea aggregates businesses operated from the Clyde, Tyne, Mersey, Humber, East Anglia, Thames, South Coast ports and particularly Southampton, as well as from both sides of the Bristol Channel. Space does not permit the inclusion of all these companies, fortunately takeovers and the process of international rationalisation has whittled their numbers down to the present five major groupings. One smaller company whose dredgers had the most distinctive and colourful funnels and houseflags was Hoveringham Gravels Ltd., which operated their dredgers from the Thames. They had vivid orange funnels and houseflags, both showing a large woolly mammoth. This was due to finding a large section of a tusk of a woolly mammoth at their quarry at their base of Nottingham in 1953.

Sand and Suction Dredgers

The earliest small sand and gravel dredgers had no shore discharge equipment and relied on shore cranes to discharge the cargo. However, harbour suction dredgers for the maintenance of navigation channels have been around for many years clearing the sand and mud at the bottom of dredged channels. The steam powered suction dredger Hilbre Island was completed in 1933 for Mersey Docks and Harbour Board with a length of 331 feet and capable of sucking up 3,500 tonnes of mud per hour at a maximum depth of 65 feet. Many other large ports had similar big suction dredgers in their fleet of dredgers and hoppers. A similar dredger was completed by the Cammell, Laird yard at Birkenhead in 1935 as the steam powered twin masted Hoyle of 4,097 dwt for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and she became the appropriately named Sand Galore in 1962 for the Sand and Gravel Marketing Co. Ltd. of Cardiff and was broken up four years later at Grimstad in Norway.

The giant of the Mersey dredging fleet was the steel hulled twin screw suction dredger Leviathan of 8,590 grt and 10,000 dwt completed by Cammell, Laird in April 1909 on dimensions of 465.0 feet by beam of 69.3 feet with a depth of 29 feet. She was sturdily built with web frames, a fo’c’stle of length 69 feet and a poop of length 41 feet, and she cleared the channels in and out of the shallow sandy approaches to the Mersey for the next fifty three years until sold for scrapping in 1962. She had two suction pipes on each side of her hull, with four sand pumps with a total capacity of 10,000 tonnes of sand per hour at a maximum depth of seventy feet. She dredged 350,000 tonnes of sand per week from the Queen’s Channel near the Crosby and Formby buoys. She was the biggest suction dredger in the world with a crew of 58, with deck crew and engineers accommodated in the fo’c’stle and officers and galley staff aft. She was initially a coal burner but was later converted to oil firing for her twin triple expansion steam engines.

The construction of Leviathan was vital to the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board as ships had grown larger and larger by 1900, with big passenger vessels forced to wait at the deep water points of Liverpool Bay and passengers tendered ashore. The Mersey has again been dredged to new depths recently outside the entrance to the enclosed docks system in order to provide new river deep water berths for future cruise ships and passenger ferries.

Trailing suction aggregates dredgers have seen rapid growth since the 1960s with many vessels of 10,000 dwt now operating on offshore U.K. and Continental licensed sand and gravel sites. They use the same basic sucking principles as harbour suction dredgers but operate in much more exposed offshore dredging sites. The differences between the two types of suction dredgers is that the aggregates hoppers are usually almost dry, while harbour dredgers have bottom doors to dump their mixtures of mud and seawater out at sea. Wheel excavators or drag scraper buckets are used to transport the aggregates on to conveyor belts for discharge to shore. More recent aggregates dredgers have the dredge pump mounted inside the suction pipe, and can also separate different grades of aggregates by screening and sorting equipment.

The largest trailing suction dredgers in the world today used for shore reclamation and navigation channel work are two sisters of 78,000 dwt completed in June 2009 and June 2010 by a yard in Sestao in Spain for owner Jan de Nul Dredging of Belgium and Luxembourg. They are Cristobal Colon, launched on 4th July 2008, and Leiv Eriksson, launched on 4th September 2009, with hopper capacities of 46,000 cubic metres, length of 223.0 metres, beam of 41.0 metres, depth of twenty metres and draft to dredging mark of 15.15 metres. They have twin suction pipes each of one metre in diameter working at a maximum depth of 155 metres, boom delivery of sand to shore, and bottom doors.

Amey Roadstone Corporation
(ARC)

The long and interesting history of Amey began in 1921 when William Amey set up a quarrying company in the Thames Valley. During World War II, the company was a leading aggregates producer and helped with the construction of R.A.F. fighter and bomber bases. In 1948, Ron Amey set up Amey Asphalt Ltd. in Oxford to supply road construction material, and its involvement in motorway construction began in 1958/59 with the supply of gravel for the new M1 motorway heading north out of London. The late 1950s gave an economic boom to Amey as the rise of the car created strong demand for road construction and thus aggregates. Inland quarries could not keep pace with demand, so a dredged aggregates business was begun at Mistley in Essex. Amey Roadstone Corporation (ARC) went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1959 with a share capital of £540,000.

The Amey sea aggregates business was formed in 1961 to manage the dredged assets side of the business from the merger of Seaborne Aggregates of Marchwood near Southampton and founded in 1951, E. Cole & Sons of Cowes, and Paul Eric Penfold of Bognor Regis. The latter person managed the sea dredged fleet, with ‘Pen’ prefix names soon used in the fleet e.g. Pen Taw, Pen Tamar, Pen Dart, Pen Itchen, Pen Yar, Pen Avon and Pen Stour. Seaborne Aggregates had previously been using the ancient sand dredger Seaborne Alpha built back in 1912 with a length of only 143 feet, quarterdeck of 47 feet, and a loaded freeboard of only nine inches. The waterfront at Marchwood at this time featured a large collection of antique vessels lying just off Husband’s shipyard. The merged company was renamed as Amey Marine Ltd. in 1968 and was based at Britannia Wharf on Marine Parade in Southampton, and by 1973 it had a dozen sea aggregates dredgers with six having the ‘Pen’ prefix and three having an ‘Amey’ prefix.

In that year of 1973, the company was renamed as ARC Marine Ltd., and a standard ‘Arco’ suffix’ began to be used for all of its sea aggregates dredgers, including Arco Avon ex Pen Avon, Arco Dart ex Pen Dart, Arco Scheldt ex Amey III, Arco Severn, Arco Tamar ex Wm. Woolaway, Arco Taw ex Pen Taw, Arco Test ex Amey II, Arco Thames, Arco Trent ex Amey I, and Arco Yar ex Pen Yar. The rivers after the ‘Pen’ and ‘Arco’ names gave clues to their operating areas of Southampton and the Isle of Wight, Bristol Channel, Thames, Humber, Essex and other areas. Arco Thames and Arco Tyne of 4,357 dwt were big new trailing suction dredgers completed in 1974.

The Bristol Channel sea aggregates business of William Woolaway & Sons of Barnstaple had been taken over in early 1968 with two sea dredgers. The Amey Quarrying and Building Supplies Group was acquired in 1973 by Consolidated Gold Fields, which merged it with two other quarrying operations of Greenfields and Roadstone Corporation to form Amey Roadstone Construction. Ron Amey retired from the business, and continued his keen love of sailing with a succession of sloops and yachts named ‘Noryema’. He was a member of the Royal Burnham Yacht Club and his yachts named ‘Noryema’ won international success sailing for Britain in the Admiral’s Cup and the 1975 Southern Cross series in Australia.

The sea aggregates dredger Pen Stour of 2,928 dwt completed in 1971 was sold three years later to Francis Marine Aggregates & Concrete Ltd. of Chichester and renamed Chichester Gem. A small fleet of three sea dredgers was based in this area near Chichester Harbour, the most easterly of the three harbours of Portsmouth, Langstone and Chichester, in Chichester Gem, Chichester City and Chichester Star. However, Chichester Gem rejoined the ‘ARC’ fleet in 1986 as Arco Swale, renamed from Nabstone when Westminster Gravels Ltd. was taken over. She was converted into a self discharging dredger in Holland in the summer of 1986 but was laid up on the Tyne at the end of 1992 and arrived for scrapping at Bruges on 19th March 1997.

British sea aggregates dredgers rapidly increased in size up to 10,000 dwt and included Deepstone of 8,962 dwt completed in 1972 by the IHC Smit B.V. yard at Kinderdijk for Western Gravels Ltd. She dredged from the sea banks off Spurn Point at the entrance to the Humber and transported the aggregates to Hull, the Tyne and the Tees. She is powered by a large twelve cylinder four stroke Werkspoor engine of 6,600 bhp to give a service speed of 14 knots. She has a bucket wheel and conveyor belt discharge system via a single arm boom of length 16 metres positioned aft on the starboard side. She has a sand pump of 3,600 bhp capable of 1,264 tonnes per hour of sand from a depth of fifty metres. She was purchased by ARC Marine Ltd. in 1986 and renamed Arco Humber to dredge mainly from the main sand banks of the North Sea for discharge on the Tyne, Thames, Amsterdam, Dunkirk and other Continental ports. The dredge pipe is of 0.9 metres diameter with a Californian type draghead, with tower and wire mesh screening equipment on her deck.

The sand dredger business of Sand Supplies (Western) Ltd. of Bristol was acquired in 1989, and T. R. Brown and The Holms Sand & Gravel Company of Bristol in 1987, adding several more sea sand dredgers to the fleet with the last Bristol based dredgers working from Poole’s Wharf at Hotwells until 1991. The ‘ARC’ fleet in 1996 consisted of fourteen sea aggregates dredgers in Arco Adur, Arco Arun, Arco Avon, Arco Axe, Arco Dart, Arco Dee, Arco Humber ex Deepstone, Arco Scheldt, Arco Severn, Arco Swale, Arco Test, Arco Trent, Arco Thames and Arco Tyne.

Arco Thames and Arco Tyne were completed in 1974 of 4,357 dwt by the Appledore yard in North Devon with a single side arm working to a dredging depth of twenty metres, one sand pump of 1,600 bhp as well as mechanical discharge via conveyor belts and booms. They were powered by Mirlees Blackstone diesels of 3,400 bhp giving a service speed of 12 knots. Arco Tyne arrived at Alang in India for scrapping on 27th July 2004 under the name of Tyne, while Arco Thames was sold in 2001 to Portuguese owners and renamed Pelicano. The newer quartet of Arco Avon, Arco Adur, Arco Arun and Arco Axe of 5,348 dwt were completed during 1986/89 by the Appledore yard in North Devon. They can dredge to a maximum depth of 43 metres with single side arm and submersible sand pumps of 1,496 bhp, hopper size of 5,027 tonnes, and mechanical discharge via conveyor belts and booms.

Five more sea dredgers joined the fleet in 1997 in Cambrae, Cambrook, Cambeck of 4,745 dwt renamed Arco Beck, Camdijk of 9,823 dwt renamed Arco Dijk, and Cambourne of 4,560 dwt renamed Arco Bourne. The latter vessel had been built by the Ailsa yard at Troon in 1981, whereas Cambeck and Camdijk were products of the IHC Holland yard at Kinderdijk, the trio being part of the takeover of Civil & Marine Ltd. by ARC Marine Ltd. in November 1995. Cambrae of 5,200 dwt built by the Ferguson yard at Port Glasgow arrived at Bruges for scrapping on 3rd September 1999, and Cambrook also retained her name until sold in 2002 and renamed Maya. ARC Marine Ltd. have sand and gravel terminals at Dagenham and Silvertown on the Thames, and while working from these in October 1998 Arco Arun met with disaster. She grounded in the Thames and damaged her port bow and then capsized and partially sank on her side. She was salvaged by SmitTak of Holland on the third attempt three months later, and towed to Hull for repairs.

A big modern fleet of suction trailing aggregates dredgers was now operated in areas around the Thames, Isle of Wight, the Bristol Channel, and off the east coast between Harwich and the Humber. In January 1999, ARC Marine Ltd. was taken over by the Australian owned Hanson Group, and the fleet then operated under the title of Hanson Aggregates Marine Ltd. with a head office in Southampton and a discharge wharf at Frindsbury at Rochester on the Medway. A fleet of ten sand and gravel dredgers was working for the British subsidiary of Hanson Aggregates Ltd. in 2009, in Arco Adur of 5,360 dwt, Arco Arun of 5,360 dwt, Arco Avon of 5,360 dwt, Arco Axe of 5,348 dwt, Arco Beck of 4,745 dwt, Arco Dart of 1,700 dwt, Arco Dee of 1,812 dwt, Arco Dijk of 9,823 dwt, Arco Humber of 8,962 dwt, and Arco Bourne of 5,658 dwt. They have colourful orange funnels with seven white and two orange small squares forming an ‘H’ on broad blue band with a black top. They are easily recognisable by their clutter of deck screening and separating equipment and have blue hulls and red boot topping. Amey Plc has today moved away from road building and aggregates to the support services sector including railway and motorway maintenance services.

British Dredging Aggregates Ltd.
British Dredging (Shipping ) Ltd.

The Bowles family of Cardiff established a road haulage business under the name of F. Bowles & Son in 1896. Small dredgers were operating on the Bedwin Sands, Middle and Welsh Grounds, and Nash Bank of the Bristol Channel from 1920 as an additional activity to operating coasters. The steam coasters Deloraine of 265 grt built in 1900 and Alexandra of 203 grt built in 1901, the latter later fitted with a three cylinder four stroke Bolnes oil engine, was operated by Joseph Bowles from South Wales ports during the inter war years, landing the aggregates at the Empire Wharf in Cardiff. In February 1939, the coaster Hartford of 410 grt, completed in 1912 by the South Shields yard of J. P. Rennoldson & Sons, was fitted with pumps to suck and carry sand in bulk from the Bristol Channel grounds with a westerly limit at Lundy Island. The collier Rookwood of 623 grt was completed in 1936 for France, Fenwick & Co. Ltd. by the Robb yard at Leith, and purchased in August 1939 by Bowles for conversion to a motor sand and gravel dredger, the first in the Bristol Channel, and she was operational in 1940. Rookwood was later renamed Sand Martin in 1951 on purchase by the South Coast Shipping Co. Ltd. of Southampton and was broken up in 1973.

A further quarterdeck coaster was purchased as Springburn in 1948 and renamed as Sunfold of 472 grt, and had been completed in June 1917 by the Wallsend yard of Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd. She was converted to a sand and gravel dredger, and was joined two years later by Bowstar of 561 grt, which had been completed as a motor coaster but was converted into a sand and gravel dredger. The first purpose built Cardiff owned motor dredger, Bowline of 596 grt, was completed in 1953 in Holland to give a fleet of five Cardiff owned sand and gravel dredgers. Bowcrest of 597 grt followed in 1955 and Bowpride of 780 grt in 1960, with the larger Bowbelle, Bowqueen and Bowprince of 1,850 dwt in 1963 and Bowfleet of 2,340 dwt in 1965.

In 1965, F. W. Bowles & Sons Ltd. purchased the Bristol Sand and Gravel Co. Ltd. of F. E. Peters and its four dredgers to form the British Dredging Co. Ltd., replacing an earlier Cardiff company of the same name formed in 1932. The motor dredger Badminton of 610 grt, completed in November 1956 by the Charles Hill yard at Bristol, and the steam coasters Camerton of 891 grt and Dunkerton of 505 grt both from the Ailsa yard at Troon in 1950 and 1934, as well as the new motor dredger Peterston of 746 grt from the Ailsa yard in 1961, joined the Cardiff dredger fleet. The British Dredging Co. Ltd. thus became the largest British company operating in the sand and gravel trade, not only in the Bristol Channel but also from the Thames at Orchard Wharf, as well as from the Tyne with Bowprince obtaining her cargo from the sandbanks off Spurn Point on the Humber or from the Norfolk Bank off East Anglia.

In 1973, Western Dredgers Ltd. was taken over under the supervision of Richard Bowles, Chairman of the company, adding the sand dredgers Instow of 725 grt completed in May 1964 at Foxhol in Holland, Isca of 550 grt completed in November 1960 at Westerbroek in Holland, and Moderator of 835 grt completed in October 1965 by Boele’s Scheeps yard at Bolnes to the fleet. The British Dredging (Shipping) Ltd. fleet now numbered eighteen sand and gravel dredgers with the last steam powered dredger Camerton retired that year and sent for scrapping. New larger motor dredgers were now joining the fleet in Bowherald and Bowknight of 4,500 dwt. Bowcross had been completed in 1967 at Goole as Chichester Cross for Francis Sand and Gravels Ltd. of Chichester and was purchased in 1971, and Bowstream had been completed in 1971 as Hudson Stream for the Hudson Steamship Co. Ltd. and was purchased in 1972.

The colourful yellow and blue houseflag of the British Dredging (Shipping) Ltd. fleet featured an upper half representing a heap of gravel outlined against the sky with the lower half depicting the channel in the sand made by the dredger. The letters ‘B’, ‘D’ and ‘C’ were added in red to the flag, but the funnel colours were plain white with a black top. The Cardiff fleet was one of fourteen dredgers in 1978, but marine casualties, sales and demolitions depleted the fleet. Bowfleet was broken up in February 1985 at Rochester after being laid up in the Royal Albert Dock in London, and Bowqueen and Bowbelle were sold in 1988 and 1992 for further service, and Bowsprite was wrecked on 5th December 1988 four miles off Nieuwport in Belgium with the unfortunate loss of four crew members.

The disaster in the Thames off Cannon Street Railway Bridge in the early hours of 20th August 1989 claimed 51 lives after Bowbelle sailed in ballast under the command of Capt. Douglas Henderson from the Nine Elms wharf near Battersea for the Thames estuary. She was in collision with the Thanes pleasure boat Marchioness, built in 1923 and a proud member of the Dunkirk evacuation fleet in May 1940, and Bowbelle rolled over her with 131 people on board including catering staff at a private birthday party. Visibility was poor at the time and the lookouts in the bow of Bowbelle and on the Marchioness did not react quickly enough to avert the disaster as the dredger passed under the bridge. After her sale to Portuguese owners in 1992, Bowbelle was renamed Bom Rei, and later capsized and sank on 25th March 1996 off the coast of the island of Ponta do Sul to the north of Madeira.

Welsh Piper of 1,251 grt was completed in 1987 at the Appledore yard in North Devon as the last new sand and gravel dredger in the fleet and worked from Avonmouth after 1992 to the Bristol Channel grounds. British Dredging Aggregates Ltd. established a terminal at Avonmouth in September 1992 to receive over 150,000 tonnes of sand per year. Bowprince was sold for further service in 1991, and the larger sisters Bowherald and Bowknight dating from 1974 were sold in 1993/94 to the South Coast Shipping Co. Ltd. of Southampton and renamed sand Kestrel and Sand Kite respectively. The fleet was further depleted in 1999 by the sale of Bowcross for further service, and the last dredger in the fleet, Welsh Piper, was registered under RMC Aggregates (South Wales) Ltd. during Millennium year. The large international cement group of Cemex, founded in Mexico in 1906, purchased the London based RMC Group for $5.8 billion on 1st March 2005, thus ending this South Wales fleet of sand and gravel dredgers.

South Coast Shipping Co. Ltd.

This important Southampton based sand and gravel shipping company worked the grounds around the Isle of Wight from 1946 as the newly formed South Coast Sand and Ballast Co. Ltd., using two small former ‘Empire’ coasters renamed as Sand Skipper and Sand Runner. The company was renamed as the Zinal Steamship Co. Ltd. in 1950 and two more former small ‘Empire’ coasters were added in 1953/54 as Sand Diver and Sand Star. The company was renamed as the South Coast Shipping Co. Ltd. in 1956, jointly owned by the Burgess Shipping Co. Ltd. and William Cory & Son Ltd., the collier owners. The diesel electric powered Sand Dart and Sand Grebe of 650 dwt were added during 1957/59 from P. K. Harris yard at Appledore and the J. Bolson yard at Poole to give a fleet of seven sand and gravel dredgers.

The former converted collier Rookwood was purchased from the British Dredging Ltd. fleet at Cardiff in 1951 and renamed Sand Martin, and operated until broken up at Passage West in January 1974. New sand and gravel dredgers included Sand Snipe of 1961, Sand Lark of 1963, Sand Gull of 1964, Sand Tern of 1964, Sand Swift of 1969, Sand Swan of 1970 and Sand Skua of 1971. The purchased Sand Finch in 1970 had been completed in October 1958 as Selskar at Spaarndam in Holland and joined the Woolaway Gravels Company as Ron Woolaway in 1960. The purchased Sand Wren in 1969 had been completed as Empire Reaper in 1943 and converted to the sand dredger Pen Adur for Seaborne Aggregates Co. Ltd. in 1964. She was sold in 1973 to Bowen & Cain of Southampton and renamed Margaret Smith, but capsized and sank when her cargo shifted on 28th June 1978. Sand Gull later also capsized and sank off Shanklin, Isle of Wight on 14th August 1992 and was raised and broken up at Marchwood in October 1992.

The arrival of the much larger Sand Wader of 5,127 dwt in September 1971 to the Southampton fleet brought the fleet up to ten dredgers. Sand Wader was completed by the Ailsa yard at Troon on dimensions of 96.5 metres length, beam of 16.9 metres and loaded draft of 6.1 metres, but was in fact owned by Hall Dredging Ltd. of the Ready Mix Group but worked on charter for the Southampton fleet. Sand Wader was powered by twin six cylinder Ruston Paxman diesels manufactured at Newton le Willows and geared to a single screw shaft to give a service speed of 12 knots. A similar dredger to Sand Wader of 5,271 dwt was completed in May 1975 by the Ferguson Brothers yard of Port Glasgow as Sand Weaver. She was a trailing suction dredger with sand pump delivery to shore from a hopper of 2,200 cubic feet capacity. She was powered by an eight cylinder Mirlees Blackstone diesel engine of 4,800 bhp to give a service speed of 12 knots. She was equipped with a forward thruster together with a controllable pitch propeller and had been constructed with part high tensile steel. The smaller Sand Serin of 2,120 dwt joined the fleet in December 1974 from the Wallsend yard of Clelands (Successors) Ltd. and often worked from Landguard Point at Felixstowe.

The Southampton based sand and gravel company operated from number 110 berth, and was jointly owned by the Ready Mixed Concrete Group (RMC) and William Cory & Son Ltd., and wore the famous black Cory funnel colours with a ‘black diamond’ on a white central band. The fleet of ten dredgers in 1981 had the ‘black diamond’ on the funnel replaced by an orange diamond bearing ‘RMC’ in black during that year. Two new sister dredgers in 1990 in Sand Harrier and Sand Heron of 5,916 dwt were completed at the Hardinxveld yard of the De Merwede Scheeps. They are trailing suction dredgers with sand pump discharge from hoppers of 2,500 cubic feet capacity. They were constructed of part tensile steel, and have service speeds of 11.5 knots from eight cylinder four stroke Mirlees diesels of 5,286 bhp.

The purchase of Bowherald and Bowknight from the British Dredging (Shipping) Ltd. fleet of Cardiff in 1993, renamed as Sand Kestrel and Sand Kite, maintained the Southampton fleet at ten sand and gravel dredgers. Sand Kite was involved in a disastrous collision with the Thames Barrage on 27th October 1997 in fog while inbound with 3,200 tonnes of aggregates. She reversed away from one pier after the collision and attempted to use an adjoining span but damaged her bow again and sank on top of the retracted gate, spilling some cargo. Refloated again, her damage repairs were considerable, and she was sold in 2001 to Portuguese owners and renamed Albatroz and broken up at Aveiro in 2007. Sand Kestrel was sold to Spanish shipbreakers in July 2000, and the similar sized Sand Wader of 1971 was also sold in Millennium year to Portuguese owners and renamed Anjos.

The nameplate on the Canute Chambers offices in Southampton of the South Coast Shipping Co. Ltd. was changed to RMC Marine Ltd. on 1st December 2002, and continued managing a fleet of eight sand and gravel dredgers. The change was made to bring the company into line with the parent company corporate identity. The fleet included the new big dredger sisters of Sand Falcon and Sand Fulmar of 5,307 grt and 9,150 dwt completed in 1998 by the Hardinxveld yard of the De Merwede Scheeps. They are trailing suction dredgers of one hundred metres in length designed for U.K. coastal and near Continental dredging from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay, and are twin screw vessels powered by two six cylinder four stroke Wartsila diesels of 6,688 bhp giving a service speed of 12 knots.

The RMC Group (Ready Mixed Concrete Ltd.) was a quarrying and cement producing company founded in 1930 with head office at Egham in the Thames Valley. It took over the Hall and Ham River aggregates group in 1968, and was listed on the London Stock Exchange during the following year. One of its disused quarries was used to create Thorpe Park Leisure Centre at Staines in 1979. The Rugby Cement Group, the third largest British cement manufacturer, had been acquired during Millennium year for $1.45 billion. RMC was purchased on 1st March 2005 by Cemex of Mexico, together with eight sea dredgers, although some were still owned by subsidiaries such as East Coast Aggregates Ltd., British Dredging (Shipping) Ltd. and Mersey Sand Supplies Ltd. Sand Falcon is the largest of this group and had been lengthened by eighteen metres to 117.7 metres in 2003 increasing her dredging capacity to over 10,000 dwt. The Cemex Marine U.K. Ltd. funnel colours are white with red and dark blue diagonal stripes and a dark blue ‘Cemex’ below a black top.

United Marine Dreding Ltd.
Lafarge Tarmac Ltd.

Lafarge is the leading producer of building materials in the world, with an enormous network of ready mixed concrete production. It was founded by Auguste Pavin de Lafarge, a French nobleman, who established in 1831 a small lime kiln on the Rhone in the Ardeche region of France. Lafarge S.A. was incorporated as Chaux et Ciments de Lafarge et du Teil in 1919, and currently employs well over 30,000 people worldwide. The Le Teil quarry was mechanised in 1948 with an annual production of over 100,000 tonnes of limestone, and by the end of the 1950s the company was the leading cement producer in France with 3.2 million tonnes per year of production. The word ‘quarry’ incidentally meant a squared stone, but has come to mean a generic term for any excavation of useful materials.

Lafarge quickly opened American and Canadian subsidiaries, with the American subsidiary alone valued at a staggering $310 million in 1981. Total world sales of cement and quarried materials such as limestone, dolomite, sandstone, granite, gypsum, which is added to cement to make the mixture set quickly, and other quarried commodities had reached $3.93 billion by 1991. The Lafarge family withdrew from day to day management of their business in 1959, and today Lafarge operates in the U.K., U.S.A., Canada, Switzerland, Brazil, Asia, Gabon, the Caribbean, Australia, Singapore and many other countries and areas of the world.

Tarmac Ltd. of Wolverhampton is the largest supplier of building materials in this country and one of the leading companies in that sector in Europe. Aggregates, ready mixed concrete, mortar, asphalt, and precast building materials for the road networks, fencing, lighting, signage and traffic management sectors. Tar-Macadam was set up in June 1903 by E. Purnell Hooley, County Surveyor of Nottingham, and John Parker to market tarmac, invented by Hooley as a road building material made from slag and tar. Tarmac was used to finish the surfaces of the first motorway M1 in 1959. A new iron foundry was built on Teesside in 1954 with a wharf for ships of up to 3,000 dwt to deal with the produced iron and steel, slag and asphalt. Tarmac had become the largest asphalt surfacing contractor and ‘blacktop’ producer in the U.K. by 1971 with the acquisition of Limmer & Trinidad Ltd., with further enormous quantities of asphalt from the island of Trinidad. Lafarge Tarmac Ltd. was formed at the end of 2012 after some British assets were sold off to meet monopoly concerns of these merged giant companies.

Tarmac were using the asphalt carrier Tarmac I of 800 dwt from 1973 around the British coasts. Francis Marine Aggregates and Concrete Ltd. of Chichester was then purchased and renamed Tarmac Sand and Gravel Ltd. with three sand dredgers, followed by the purchase of Hoveringham Gravels in 1982 with six sand dredgers to form Tarmac Marine Ltd. in 1983. United Marine Aggregates Ltd. (UMA) was formed in September 1987 when Pioneer Aggregates Ltd. amalgamated with Tarmac Roadstone Holdings Ltd., the head office being Francis House in Chichester. The sea sand dredgers City of London and City of Westminster of 6,000 dwt were completed in 1989/90 to form a fleet of eight sand dredgers with City of Swansea (ex Hoveringham I), City of Bristol (ex Hoveringham IV), City of Southampton (ex Hoveringham V), City of Rochester (ex Hoveringham VI), City of Chichester (ex Chichester City), and City of Portsmouth (ex Chichester Star). A Thames terminal at Angerstein Wharf at Charlton on the south bank of the Thames received sand and gravel from east coast licensed areas.

Two new sisters City of Cardiff and City of Chichester of 2,730 dwt were completed in 1997 to give a fleet of four sea sand dredgers in Millennium year with the sisters City of London and City of Westminster of 1989/90. City of Westminster was in collision on 2nd April 2000 in the Thames with the ro-ro Dart 2 of Dart Line with services to the Continent, and the dredger had to be escorted by tugs to Chatham for repairs. United Marine Dredging Ltd. of Chichester operate these four sand and gravel dredgers today in licensed areas of the open sea around British and Continental coasts for delivery to British and European ports for major construction and coastline protection projects. In 2008, United Marine Holdings (UMH), the company which included United Marine Aggregates (UMA) and United Marine Dredging (UMD) became wholly owned subsidiaries of Tarmac Ltd. United Marine Dredging has now changed its name to Lafarge Tarmac Marine Ltd. at UMA House, Shopwhyke Road, Chichester. The funnel colours of the fleet are white with a blue ‘UMD’ logo.

Tarmac Lafarge Ltd. today own over one hundred British quarries, seventy dedicated asphalt and asphalt recycling plants, ninety ready mixed concrete facilities producing four million tonnes of cement per year, and also exports large quantities of lime to over thirty countries. Tarmac Lafarge Ltd. has over 6,600 British employees and makes major contributions to the quarrying, materials processing, and sea sand dredging industries of this country.

Westminster Gravels Ltd.
Westminster Dredging Ltd.
Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V.

The origins of the company go back to January 1910 when Gerrit Jan Bos and two of his close relatives founded a dredging company in Sliedrecht near Rotterdam. Their first work was to complete the dredging of a new 300 metre long breakwater to protect a new tug harbour. In 1930, Baggermaats Bos en Kalis N. V. was incorporated by Gerrit Jan Bos and E. D. Kalis, and the Westminster Dredging Company was founded a year later as their English subsidiary. The first work in England was the dredging of the new Bromborough Dock harbour on the Mersey for Lever Brothers.

A new generation of the Bos and Kalis families took over in 1948 in Willem Bos and Kobus Kalis after the destruction of Holland during World War II. The recovery of land on the island of Walcheren, which had been flooded by the Nazis on their retreat, together with the massive Delta project reconstruction of the Zuider Zee after the catastrophic flooding of 1953 kept the company busy. The Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier was another huge and expensive Boskalis engineering work. In 1960, Westminster Dredging Ltd. had a big fleet of suction dredgers, grab dredgers, tugs, barges, and other dredging and reclamation craft. Westminster Gravels Ltd. was set up in 1967, and five years later the fleet included the very large new suction dredger Deepstone, Bankstone ex collier Poole Island of 1949, Wightstone ex collier Brent Knoll of 1950, Norstone of 1964 ex Konsul Retzlaff in 1970, and two small antique sand dredgers, Rockstone and Seastone, built in 1907 for the Thames Conservancy Commission as hoppers.

The sand and aggregates company Oosterwijk N.V. was acquired in 1969 as well as Land & Marine Ltd. in England, and in the following year the company was renamed Boskalis Westminster Dredging N.V. and was listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. In 1973, Westminster Dredging Ltd. had a big fleet of thirty vessels, including the suction dredgers W. D. Fairway, W. D. Gateway, W. D. Seaway, W. D. Tideway and W. D. Waterway, and many hoppers with ‘James’ prefixes that had come from the takeover of James Dredging Ltd. The Westminster Gravels Ltd. of Southampton fleet later included Marinestone ex Marinex VI of Marinex Gravels Ltd. in 1977, Nabstone ex Chichester Gem, and Sand Wyvern, but was taken over by ARC Marine Ltd. in 1986, and the Royal Boskalis Westminster Group returned to their core business of dredging.

A fleet of thirty suction dredgers and hoppers in 1990 included W. D. Gateway, Barent Zanen, Cornelius Zanen and Prins der Nederlanden of up to 12,000 dwt. They worked on big new international dredging contracts e.g. Chek Lap Kok island for the new Hong Kong international airport, the expansion of Changi airport in Singapore, and a $500 million contract for the dredging of the Geelong Bay channels into Melbourne. A $2.02 billion merger with the Dutch salvage company Smit Internationale N.V. in 2009 took a year to negotiate and the merged company then had a turnover of $3.88 billion with over 14,000 employees worldwide. Westminster Dredging Co. Ltd. of Fareham in Hampshire is the British member of the Royal Boskalis Westminster Dredging N.V. Group of Holland, with Group suction dredgers currently including large dredgers of up to 59,200 dwt with hopper capacities up to 35,500 cubic metres in Queen of the Netherlands, Prins den Nederlanden, Fairway, Coastway, Gateway, Shoreway and Waterway, all working internationally.

Northwood (Fareham) Ltd. belongs to the Royal Boskalis Westminster Group, and is a joint venture between Westminster Dredging and Redland, the latter later taken over by Lafarge Tarmac Ltd. They operate from Westminster House in Fareham, and previously owned sand dredgers included Norleader built in 1967 by the Charles Hill & Sons Ltd. yard in Bristol for the Holms Sand Gravel Company of Bristol. Until recently they operated the Norstone ex Sand Skua of 1971 working from Shoreham and Southampton, and Donald Redford of 681 grt and 964 dwt completed in 1981 by the Ferguson Brothers yard at Port Glasgow as a grab dredger and lengthened in 1990 and converted to a suction dredger. The latter vessel was the assailant of the Hythe Pier in Southampton Water on 1st November 2003 in fog while outward bound in ballast from the Itchen river. She continued across the navigation channels and hit the pier head-on, seriously damaging the pier and putting the ‘Hotspur’ passenger service to Southampton Town Quay out of action for some time. The pier has been repaired in a very functional way to resume this valuable link for commuters to Southampton from the New Forest, but in my opinion is less than satisfactory. The Donald Redford was broken up in 2011 and the Norstone went to the breakers at Swansea in March 2014.

Postscript

One British manned and operated sand and gravel dredger that does not belong to the above five groups is the twin funnelled, engines aft, bridge forward configuration of Britannia Beaver. She is owned by Britannia Aggregates Ltd., a company that was formed in 1990 as a joint venture between the Brett Group and Volker Dredging of Holland, and Britannia Beaver operates mainly from the Thames estuary. She is of 5,786 dwt on dimensions of length of exactly one hundred metres, beam of 17.4 metres and draft to dredging mark of 6.3 metres, and was completed at Appledore in North Devon in 1991.

Twelve million tonnes and more of sea dredged aggregates are meeting the huge demand for ready mixed concrete in Britain each year. This is only part of the huge total of aggregates needed to meet the U.K. demand, the remainder coming from inland quarries. There are six licensed sites in the Bristol Channel and others around the coastline, with the Bristol Channel contributing a large part of this total. The Nash Bank is the main source, supplying a million tonnes of aggregates each year, but will eventually be phased out with sea dredging in the Bristol Channel steered westwards. Commercial licences are issued by the Crown Estate as owner of the seabed out to the twelve mile territorial limit. The twenty five British operated and manned sea dredgers working today around our coasts and on near Continental sandbanks thus have an assured future.