Echoes of Victorian Mumbles
by Carol Powell
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In the 1870s, unnamed Mumbles people, a man, two women and some children gathered on a sandbank off Southend to pose for the comparatively new invention of photography, exposures for which were lengthy and required the position to be held while the photo was taken. Hence the images of three boys are blurred as they obviously moved! The man was gathering cockles with a rake, the women wearing pinafores and hats, the boys in jerseys and trousers and one poor lad sporting a sling on his injured arm.
Ready to gather cockles on the sandbank at Southend
The limitations of photography at the time, has blurred the boys who moved
Notice in the background, working oyster skiffs, two in full sail; the quarried hill, which had taken the coastline back a hundred yards or so over the years and was now devoid of vegetation and the new partly-made road reaching a dead-end.
But what is also fascinating is what is not in the photo — the old lifeboat house, the ‘Cutting,’ the Pier, the track of the Mumbles railway and the Bristol Channel Yacht Club (BCYC) which would become part of the future. The Lifeboat House would open in 1883, the Cutting in 1888, the Pier and railway extension in 1898 and the new home of the BCYC in 1904.
More changes would occur later in the twentieth century, as the railway was destined to disappear from the scene in 1960 and in the 1980s, the Knab Rock development, with its car and boat park and Verdi’s restaurant, would alter the shore line once more.
What was once an area of working oyster skiffs, fishing and limestone-carrying boats has today been transformed into a haven for leisure craft and a place of relaxation for locals and tourists.
The beach at Southend,1876
Carol Powell is a regular contributor to Mumbles Times and Oystermouth Radio
More: Victorian Voices