July 2025:
Consul Laid Up at Weymouth

I love trying to date pictures from their detail. So what about this one taken upstream of the Town Bridge at Weymouth? We know that Consul did not go back into service after the war until the summer of 1949 so this pic must have been taken after that. We know that Victoria, berthed ahead of Consul, was withdrawn after the 1952 season so it must be before that. This pic therefore dates from one of the winter lay ups 1949/50, 1950/51 or 1951/52.

I love looking at the detail too. Note the great deck house and captain’s cabin on the promenade deck plus the wheelhouse are all swaddled in tarpaulins to protect their varnish. Note the falls for the lifeboats have been removed for winter storage undercover. It was expected that smaller boats would moor outside the paddle steamers at Weymouth so Consul has her two wooden fenders, sometimes called dollies, down outside her paddle box. And she has her specially designed funnel hat on to keep the rain out but with its little ventilation chimney on top of it. We had one one of these made for KC in the early years running on the Medway but one year after being put in place and before it was fully made fast a gust of wind blew it off and it fell in. We ordered divers to take a look the next day but never found it.

Here is Consul in the same berth a few years later. She lost her great deck house on the promenade deck in 1957 so this pic was taken after that. And from 1960 the canvas around the rails beneath the bridge remained in place permanently so it must be before that. So this pic dates from the winters of either 1958/59 or 1959/60.

You can also see the anchor chain coming up over the forward bulwark to the anchor which was stowed on deck. In order to drop it the anchor had first to be lifted by the davit you can see over the bulwark which took a bit of time. But in regular service these paddle steamers never used their anchors if they could help it. They were there for an emergency. That was it.

Another view of Consul on the same day. In this pic you can see the buoyant apparatus which were laid out as seats at the aft end of the promenade deck when Consul was in service, piled up and covered by a tarpaulin for protection during the winter. On the promenade deck you can see the small wooden blocks which were used to keep the buoyant apparatus in place and also to lift them ever so slightly off the deck. Without that if the buoyant apparatus were just sitting on the wooden deck two wooden surfaces like that together are not good if they get and stay damp. That is the route to speed up rot.

Look in the aft well deck. On the starboard side you can see a steel door. This led down to extra crew accommodation on the lower deck aft which was ventilated by the two tall and thin ventilating cowls you can see.

Cosens used traditional hemp ropes. Lying on the decks damp they tended to start to rot over time so during the winter Cosens often hung them over the bulwarks as you can see back aft to try to keep them dry.

Note the H topped chimneys from the coal fired ranges in the tiny galleys on both side of the sponsons abaft the paddle boxes. We will come to them again later.

Here is Consul laid up at Weymouth downstream of the Town Bridge in the winter of 1962/63. We know that because for the 1962 season the bridge wings and front of the wheelhouse were painted white and for the 1963 season in private ownership the funnel was painted primrose and was without a black top.

One thing which stands out for me in this pic is the rust. Look at it around the paddle box. Look at it on the white paintwork elsewhere. Look at it on the green boot topping. There was plenty of it on the black too but that is harder to see. When I was a child I rather liked looking at rust. It made the paddle steamers look sort of lived in to my young eyes. But I don’t like it now. When you can see rust you can see a ship quietly dissolving away in front of you. True it is a slow process. It doesn’t happen overnight but given time if you do nothing to a ship it will corrode away to nothing. Take a look at what happened to Medway Queen. Take a look at what has happened to Ryde or John H Amos. In time the hulls and basic structure get to such a state that you just can’t do anything with them because what is left has become beyond repair as it is so very fragile.

If all that sounds a bit gloomy let’s move onto a more upbeat note. Here is Consul with her white bridge wings and buff funnel with a black top pictured alongside the Pleasure Pier at Weymouth in the summer of 1962 after her afternoon cruises and before her evening cruise which as you can see is advertised on the chalk board propped up against the captain’s cabin. The bright yellow steamer notice with the dayglow header is next to it. Doesn’t she look nice. Doesn’t this pic draw you in and make you want to go aboard. Under the command of Capt John Iliffe and with Arthur Drage as mate she is so beautifully turned out. Note the polished brass handrails up to the bridge. Note the polished brass ends to the rails around the gangway openings. Note the varnish work. Note the ropes nicely coiled in the lifeboats. She was a paddle steamer much loved and cherished by her local Weymouth crew.

That season my notes remind me that my eleven year old self took eighteen trips on Consul on my own. In those happy days children could just roll up, get their pocket money out, buy a ticket and away they went. No bother at all about having to be “accompanied”.

Other little details in the pic: Consul carried a medium frequency radio which was stowed in the tiny cabin beneath the wheelhouse with a speaker from it connected to the bridge so the captain and chief officer could hear what was being said. But if they wanted to transmit themselves they had to go down from the wheelhouse into the little radio room below. You can also see the aerial which is a long wire connected from the mast to the starboard side, aft end of the wheelhouse.

Note also the little green painted steam engine to turn the fan in the curved funnel casing to produce an induced draft up the funnel thereby sucking air through the boiler to improve firing. Forward of the funnel is a large brown painted tank containing two liquids, one either side within it which when combined would produce foam to flood the boiler room in the event of a fire.

And to slide back into gloominess note the galley chimney on the port side. Remember in the earlier pics this had an H shaped top. Well by 1962 this had disintegrated and been replaced with a much simpler (and cheaper) flat topped arrangement. And that was a little bit indicative of the basic structural state of Consul by 1962. She may have looked nice as this last lovely pic shows but beneath the surface she was subject to a lot of serious structural deterioration.

Prior to the 1962 season Board of Trade surveyor Len Mutton, who I got to know when involved with another vessel in 1982, had refused to issue Consul a Passenger Certificate to run outside Weymouth Bay unless all the cement wash in the bilges was stripped out first for a more detailed examination of her hull. Cosens had one booking for Consul from Bournemouth on an afternoon in June 1962 so Len issued a one off exemption for this. Otherwise Consul sailed only to Portland Harbour, the Shambles Lightship, Portland Bill and Lulworth Cove in 1962. It was not a great summer for weather. Revenue was poor so after the season and not wishing to remove the cement wash from her bilges fearing what they might find if they did Cosens put Consul up for sale.

And so started another saga which is another story for another day.

However before we go one last lovely pic of Consul. When was it taken? What can we see in this pic to give us a clue? Is there anything special to pick out? Well this one is easy. Turn the photograph over and the date it was taken is written in pencil on the back as 28th August 1960. Bingo! Never ignore the blindingly obvious.

This was a Sunday. According to the steamer notice Consul had the morning off and in the afternoon was rostered for a 2pm departure for the one hour trip round Portland Harbour. At 3pm there was a “Tea Cruise To the Shambles Lightship” due back 4.45pm. And at 7.30pm a “Special Jazz Jamboree Evening Cruise” due back 9.30pm.

These evening cruises came into Portland Harbour and usually tucked up towards the shore by Sandsfoot Castle particularly if the tide was up. Our house was next to the castle. From my bedroom window you could see Consul paddling by and hear the jazz band playing on deck abaft the funnel. Fast forward more than twenty years and we ran Jazz Jamborees on KC in the Medway years. And very popular they were too.

Pics courtesy of the PSPS and JHM Collections