A River’s Story

Human presence around the river Hamble dates back into pre•history. From its banks early man found a ready source of food in the form of fish, shellfish, wildfowl and game; forests in which to hide whenever danger threatened; timber to build dugout canoes; and ready access to a water highway for trade and contact with other communities. Unsurprisingly, this bountiful area was heavily populated in Neolithic times. Stone tools and other relics are still being found.

Little is known of its history from Roman times to the middle ages, when the village of Hamble•Le•Rice, better known as ‘Hamble’ was founded near the river’s mouth. A few centuries later, the village of Warsash was founded on the opposite bank to Hamble•Le•Rice, and the villages of Bursledon and Swanwick, again on opposite sides of the river, were founded two miles or so north of the river’s mouth, partly to serve the needs of travellers, mostly between Portsmouth and Southampton, who needed to be ferried across the river.

The river’s sheltered waters, forested banks and ready access to the sea created the ideal conditions for a shipbuilding industry, whose evidence can be seen throughout much of its length, but whose best known product was Nelson’s ship flagship at the battle of Copenhagen, HMS Elephant. The yard that built it now builds yachts; but is still known as the ‘Elephant’ boatyard and located next to a popular watering hole known as ‘The Jolly Sailor’, that enjoyed a brief period of fame as Tom Howard’s local during a BBC television series ‘Howard’s Way’. To return to our story, it is rumoured that two hundred years ago its drinkers had access to a secret passage through which they could escape the attentions of press gangs.

With the arrival of the steam age, there was a decline in demand for large sailing vessels and local yards began producing smaller commercial vessels. Steam also led to the arrival of rail connections between the South Coast and major cities, which led to new commercial opportunities to sell early strawberries that the area’s benign climate allowed smallholders to grow. The skilled, but under•utilised workforce of shipwrights, carpenters, riggers, sailmakers, and all the other trades that had created masterpieces of sailing ships, were now harnessed to exploit other opportunities; one of which was to develop novel ways of using steam for earth moving and brick making. Riggers’ skills in particular led to one of the first steam• powered overhead ropeways, to move buckets of clay from excavations to kilns. A museum describing their achievements is in Swanwick on the site of the former Bursledon Brickworks. Excavations from the brickworks have produced many neolithic artefacts that are held in Hampshire’s County Council’s Record Office near Winchester.

Moving on to the early twentieth century, the yards that had built wooden warships were now building wooden sailing yachts and selling them to a gentlemen society of sailors, that one time best selling author Neville Shute describes in his autobiography ‘Slide Rule’. When tipsy yachtsmen bumped into a moored craft, the custom was to leave a visiting card and letter offering to pay for the damage. The river Hamble features in a number of Neville Shute’s books such as ‘Requiem for a Wren’ and ‘Whatever Happened to the Corbetts’? The latter book was written before the second World War and was the prototype for his better known book (and later film) ‘On The Beach’; describing an apocalyptic vision of a dying world following a nuclear war. In the quiet years before the Second World War, the area became fashionable with screen celebrities such as Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson. Nowadays its best• known residents are sports personalities and football club managers.

Early in the twentieth century, an event happened that was to lead to a chain of unexpected consequences of world•shattering importance. Most of the locals are friendly, easy•going people, but a ‘mover and shaker’ by the name of Alliott Verdon Roe arrived around 1913. In 1908, he had built a triplane out of bamboo and brown paper, powered it with a nine horsepower J.A.P. engine, and made a series of short hops. His success led directly to the formation of the Avro Aircraft Company, later to Saunders Roe and to the development of an early aircraft industry in Hamble •• that had both a waterside location for seaplanes and could take advantage of the skills of shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers and other yacht• building trades to develop a nascent aircraft industry based on wood, fabric, bracing and rigging. Two famous Avro designers, Juan de la Cierva and Roy Chadwick worked in the village in the 1920’s. Juan de la Cierva developed the first autogyros and was on the point of powering their rotors to convert them to the first helicopters when he died in an air crash in 1938. His autogyros later played a little•known but vital wartime role, by being flown slowly at known heights around fixed positions, to calibrate early radar systems in preparation for the Battle of Britain. Roy Chadwick returned to his native Manchester and went on to design Lancaster and Vulcan bombers. He too died as a result of an air accident about ten years after Juan de la Cierva.

Another Hamble based company was Fairey Aviation. When the Royal Navy took the far•reaching decision to commission the world’s first purpose•built aircraft carrier, Fairey Aviation developed aircraft for it. Before the inventions of steam catapults and arrestor hooks, a torpedo strike aircraft was needed that could survive heavy landings, long exposure to a marine environment, take off and land at low speeds, carry a heavy load a long way, sustain vast amounts of damage (that could later be repaired on•board); and return to allow a badly shaken pilot to land on a pitching, heaving carrier deck. The supreme expression of the Hamble yacht•builders’ skills can probably be found in the Fairey Swordfish, which met all of these requirements, but was derogatorily called ‘stringbag’ by a public who were unaware of these skills and all they could achieve. A small flight of Swordfish aircraft took off in a force eight Atlantic Gale to disable the Bismark, allowing the Royal Navy to catch her to sink her. Twenty•one Hamble•built Swordfish aircraft were flown into anti•aircraft and anti•torpedo defences at Taranto, and sank or severely damaged most of the Italian fleet; the remnants of which were then moved up to Naples, where they no longer threatened Mediterranean convoys. Nineteen Swordfish returned from the raid. A Japanese naval officer who saw the damage then returned to Japan to become Admiral Yamamoto’s chief of staff. After reading his officer’s report on the Taranto raid, Admiral Yamamoto decided to use a similar tactic, with ten times the number of aircraft, against the US fleet in Pearl Harbour.

Since the outbreak of the war, Churchill had been trying to manipulate the US into joining, but it was the attack on Pear Harbour, inspired by the success of a few Hamble•built Swordfish at Taranto, that brought America into the war against Japan. Even then, Roosevelt dithered about declaring war on Germany, but Hitler decided to declare war on America, saving Roosevelt the problem of having to explain himself to his nation. Churchill now had America in the war, greatly aided by a small number of bravely flown, but grossly underrated, Hamble•built Swordfish aircraft. The Germans were also interested in Hamble and its aircraft industry, and a Lutwaffe reconnaissance photo of Hamble from June 1940 is on display at the venue for NCAF’s social. Locally, the Luftwaffe’s main attention was directed towards Southampton, which had its worst raid on 30 November 1940, when over 500 were killed outright, many more severely injured and around 30,000 made homeless. In 1944, the US army ran a 24 hour a day operation for six weeks, to take bomb rubble from Southampton to build a quay at Hamble, which they used for their D• Day operations, and from which the NCAF boat trip is due to depart.

One of the boat yard/ marinas on the Hamble is now called Universal Shipyards. During the war it developed a novel midget submarine called ‘X’ craft. Unlike Italian frogmen•carrying underwater chariots, ‘X’ craft crew occupied a cramped but genuine submarine environment. Three of these craft attempted to blow up the Battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian Fjord. Two managed to slip through torpedo nets and discharge massive delayed•action explosives directly under the Tirpitz, which was later blown eight feet out of the water and disabled for six months while essential repairs were carried out. She was later moved to more southern Norwegian waters, within range of Avro Lancaster bombers, that finished her off with massive ‘Grand Slam’ bombs. In 1940, after Dunkirk, a secret Naval base, HMS Tormentor, was set up in Warsash. This was originally conceived as a Commando raiding base but soon acquired a major intelligence role. It was centred on what is now an Institute of Maritime Studies but billeted its personnel in a number of requisitioned large local houses and a pub called the ‘Rising Sun’. Its role involved covert operations of all kinds across the Channel. Most of these have never been publicised, but one that has involved Tormentor’s amphibious contribution to a particularly cheeky raid that acquired an enemy radar system from Bruneval on the occupied French coast. Tormentor also carried out extensive hydrographic surveys of potential invasion beaches, under the noses of the enemy, around the winter solstice of 1943. These established beach firmness, suitable approach routes for landing craft and locations for ‘Mulberry’ harbours. Subsequently, a total of three thousand five hundred Commandos of many nationalities left Warsash to form the spearhead of the Landings on 6 June 1944. These men were the toughest of the tough, knew the cause they were fighting for had to be won and suffered the heavy casualties they had quietly accepted before their embarkation. NCAF’s social is at the ‘Rising Sun’ next to their embarkation point. Pictures of their embarkation can be seen hanging on the walls of the pub, together with other D•Day mementoes. A memorial to these brave men stands on a quay just outside the pub.

After D•Day, the Hamble served as a rearward support area whose view of the conflict differed markedly from impressions likely to be culled from Holywood films. These included: badly•listing landing craft with bridges half blown off, courageously brought across the Channel and finally limping into the river for repairs; boats’ crew Wrens desperately trying to bring their crafts alongside quays as gently as possible so as not to worsen internal injuries of wounded they were carrying; and confused French civilians, evacuated to England to escape their previously quiet neighbourhoods that had become battlegrounds. In addition, intelligence work continued, particularly in respect of crossing the Rhine; new aircraft continued to be built at Fairey Aviation; and throughout the course of the war, over 2000 Hurricanes and locally designed Spitfires were repaired on Hamble’s airfield and returned to service. The coded radio message ‘going home to mother’ meant that an RAF fighter pilot was in the air with a damaged but flyable aircraft that he was taking directly to Hamble for repairs instead of returning to his unit.

From within sight of its mouth, the river has more stories to tell: of the construction of giant hollow concrete caissons that would be located off invasion beaches and flooded to form Mulberry harbours; of a pipeline under the ocean (PLUTO) that left an adjacent oil terminal to provide fuel for a Normandy invasion •• which proved so successful it was eventually extended all the way to the German frontier; of an RAF flying boat base at Calshot whose Catalina and Sunderland aircraft fought grim and lonely battles with U•boats and long•range enemy fighters. Those are stories for another day.

Thankfully, Europe and the Hamble are now at peace. The river’s visitors of all nationalities are both numerous and made welcome. Skills and experience that created an aircraft industry have been replaced by finite•element computer programs and specialist cast•metal billets; numerically milled into panels to form aircraft. Custom designed wooden yachts have given way to moulded plastic hulls built in far•away factories on an industrial scale. Tasteless early strawberries are now grown in southern latitudes, gassed with preservative and trucked to British supermarkets. Clay deposits that yielded bricks perfected for local coastal conditions have been largely worked out, the brickworks divided by a motorway, and a National Air Traffic Control Centre built over much of the site.

But, birds return to feed on mud flats every winter, the river is still beautiful, tipsy yachtsmen still have their bumps (but rarely leave letters or visiting cards); and I want you to enjoy the river as I do daily; so I leave you with the words of an old bearded fisherman who used to enjoy it by sitting on a dinghy on the foreshore at Hamble looking out over its waters: ‘sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits’. The River Hamble (from a map published in 1810)

Bursledon Brickworks

Elephant Boatyard & Jolly Sailor

Moody’s Boatyard & Marina

Universal Shipyards

Hamble Hard

Oil Terminal where ‘PLUTO’ started Rising Sun Site of Fairey Aviation HMS Tormentor

RAF Sunderland flying boat base

‘Mulberry’ Harbour construction site