By the time of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, Bangor had begun its great period of growth into a premier residential town and seaside resort. The industrial facade of the cotton mills had long gone, and with improved rail and steamer connections, many now found it convenient to work in Belfast and live in one of the areas of new housing: Princetown Road, Bryansburn Road, Clifton Road - these and others were being developed as the town's population almost doubled from 3,006 in 1881 to 5,903 in 1901. The small town in which Robert Neill grew up, with its straggling streets and thatched cottages, had become substantially like the inner Bangor we know today.
In 'The Bangor Season - What's to be Seen and How to See it,' compiled and published by W. G. Lyttle in 1885, the author accords the resort the title 'The Northern Brighton', observes 'chastely designed, elegant villas overspreading the landscape' and recommends lady readers to visit Mr. James Crosbie's needlework establishment in Ballymagee Street. Mention is made that 'Messrs. Robert Neill and Sons and Mr. Charles Neill carryon a good business as shipowners, coal merchants and limeburners,' while James Neill of the former concern is listed as one of nine Town Commissioners under the chairmanship of James Bowman.
W. G. Lyttle - a writer most noted for his 'Betsy Gray or Hearts of Down: A Tale of '98' - did not, however, gloss over defects he found apparent in Bangor. Besides desiring 'military or other bands performing at stated times', he continues, 'The pier also could -be greatly improved, and this, indeed, is much needed, the present structure being not only altogether insufficient to meet the wants of the summer marine trade, but also, under certain conditions absolutely unapproachable and dangerous.' Matters came to a head after the 1889 season, when, in addition to the cargo vessels and Belfast steamers, a passenger service to the Isle of Man operated. James Neill was among a deputation of Town Commissioners who, in December 1889, approached Mr. R. E. Ward D.L. of Bangor Castle about the possibility of a new pier. James Neill favoured concrete construction with the emphasis on cargo handling, but ultimately the convenience of passengers prevailed and a wooden pier was built, with an under deck for accommodating vessels at low water, this, the 'New Pier' being completed in 1895 at a cost of £25,000 and demolished in 1980.
James Neill was a progressive character. He introduced the storage of coal, in a yard adjacent to his Sandy Row premises. This may not appear exactly startling, but in fact coal had previously been taken direct from the discharging vessel to customers and was not held by the importer as is the norm today. This, however, was a minor innovation compared with the contract James Neill signed in 1888 with the Paisley shipbuilding firm of John Fullerton and Company. An iron steamship was to be built, the first steamer that the family had ever purchased. Steam coasters were slow to develop, largely due to difficulties with efficient machinery, ballast and ventilation, and of course the greater capital outlay and crew required compared with sailing vessels. Although James Neill was investing in steam around the same time as the big Belfast merchants Barkley and Kelly, a small pioneer steamer had traded to Donaghadee some years previously. Robert Dunn, the erstwhile rival of the Neills, mentioned in Part One, moved his business to Newtownards in 1878 and in 1882 had the Ards built by MacIlwaine and Lewis of Belfast for a partnership that also included Newtownards mill owners George Walker and John Russell Sefton. She does not appear to have been a success, being sold after an eleven-month period that included a bizarre incident at Donaghadee when local coal 'fillers', threatened by the installation of a new steam crane on the quay, toppled it into her hold! Dunn (1815- 1906) never again invested in steam but continued to hold shares in sailing vessels until the turn of the century.
The failure of the Ards may have put off other local owners, but in the l880s steam coasters were being built in ever-increasing numbers. The two sailing colliers James Neill had received at the dissolution of the partnership in 1881, the Slaney and the Just, were both now very old and when the latter was condemned and sunk as a breakwater in Bangor harbour in 1888, James Neill decided to join the ranks of the steamer owners. The Amy, named after his eldest daughter, was completed at Paisley in May 1889, at a cost of £3365, paid in four equal instalments. Iron-built, she measured 150 gross tons, 95 net, and had a length of 105.2 feet, a beam of 19.1 and a depth of hold of 8.7. Steam at a boiler pressure of 80 lbs. per square inch was produced by a 35 nominal horse-power compound engine constructed by the Glasgow firm of Walker and Henderson.
Disappointingly, the Amy had no longer a career with James Neill than had the Ards with her owners. Again, in less than a year the ship was sold. The only scraps of information that have survived on the Amy are the builders' account, with Fullertons' splendid embellished 'Iron Shipbuilders' Victorian letterhead, and a small but regrettable news item from the 'North Down Herald': in January 1890, the master of the Amy, Captain Charles McMeekan, was drowned in Workington harbour while his ship was berthed there. So, unfortunately, there is a dearth of material that might explain the unwillingness of James Neill to persevere with the new steamer. Fullertons were a yard of good reputation, so it is unlikely that the Amy herself was unsatisfactory. Certainly her subsequent career was an extremely lengthy one. Possibly finding and keeping a crew was a problem; sailing coasters offered a more stable passage than the small steamers, which tended to be rather wet in a seaway, and had to be driven on if at all possible to pay for the bunker coal and higher wage bill of the crew. A windbound steamer was a real loser of money. Or, simply, the Spaniard who bought the Amy, Senor Acha of Bilbao, may have made a very attractive offer for her!
While James Neill was taking delivery of the Amy in 1889, his brother Charles, more conservative, was buying an elderly brigantine, the James Stonard. Both were registered in Belfast within four weeks of each other - an interesting contrast between old and new. Since severing the connection with James, Charles, besides the barque Bebington, had run the coasting schooners Camel, Louisa and Bellewood. The Camel was lost in the Solway Firth in November 1882 and the Louisa was a very small vessel of under 50 feet, so with his business expanding as Bangor rapidly grew, Charles was doubtless pleased to secure a vessel, that, although 40 years old, was described as 'smart and tight', her purchase price being probably around £400, just a fraction of the cost of the Amy. However the James Stonard was doomed to meet the most violent and tragic end of any Neill sailing vessel.
The autumn of 1890 brought a protracted spell of dirty weather, and by the early days of November, Garston docks on the Mersey were crammed with vessels awaiting favourable conditions to leave. One was the James Stonard, another the schooner Edith of Newry, master Thomas Chambers of Kilkeel. Captain Chambers, who lived until 1941, always recalled the day that the fleet eventually sailed - except for him, as he had still to wait for money from home to buy stores. This error, though, he believed saved his life. His recollections, as published in 'Sailing Ships of Mourne', (Newcastle, 1971), continue:
'There was a strong southerly wind blowing … at 12 o'clock midnight there was a dead calm and all of a sudden a hurricane blew up from the north. It was surmised afterwards that many of the vessels were taken by surprise and foundered before they could get the sails off … nine vessels went ashore on the West Hoyle Bank alone, and only two lives were saved. They were seen from shore walking about on a sandbank when the tide ebbed'.
Captain Chambers does not name the vessel these castaways came from; it was the James Stonard.
Donaghadee was the destination of the James Stonard as she cleared the Mersey Bar that day, 5 November 1890. In command was Captain James Eddis, a well-known local mariner who had previously skippered the schooner Susan for James Montgomery of Bangor. Eddis had almost reached the Isle of Man when the northerly sprang up and the James Stonard was forced back southwards, losing canvas away into the night sky. Helpless, she finally drifted onto the West Hoyle Bank, a huge expanse of sand covered at high water, off the estuary of the River Dee. Captain Eddis and two seamen were drowned, but the mate George Taylor and the ship's boy, a Donaghadee lad, survived in the rigging all night until the tide receded, when they were able to land on the sand. Little remained of their vessel, but they managed to cling to the wreck as another tide flooded. At last their nightmarish plight was ended when they were rescued by a lifeboat at 10 a.m. on Saturday 8th., after more than 48 hours without food, water or shelter. Taylor and Eddis were both Bangor men, from Fisher Hill (now Victoria Road) and Union Street (now Holborn Avenue) respectively. That night Bangor had also witnessed a fatal wreck when the large yacht Urania was driven ashore beside Seacliff Road with the loss of her owner, the young aristocrat Viscount Cantelupe.
Unsurprisingly, the James Stanard was the last sailing vessel to be acquired by a member of the Neill family. Following the death of Charles Neill in October 1893, the Louisa and Bellewood passed to the legal ownership of Olivia Neill, his widow. The former was broken up in 1895, while the newer and larger Bellewood, 112 tons, continued to import coal until 1904 when she was sold to become a hulk on the Mersey.
When last we met the third brother, John, in the middle of the last chapter, he had moved back from Belfast to Kensington Villa, Princetown Road, Bangor, but continued to administer his coal business at the Queen's Quay. His fleet of colliers was much more significant than those of the Bangor duo; at the start of 1890 it numbered six, the Caroline, Cambridge, Timandra, Ocean Star, C. M. Reynolds and Lizette. None were under 100 tons, and the barquentine Lizette was the largest sailing collier employed trading to Belfast, with a net tonnage of 248. She had in fact been built as a barque for the African trade, but for John Neill's purposes, barquentine rig, with one less square-rigged mast, meant less work aloft and consequently a saving of a couple of crew members. The Timandra was lost in a collision on 2 April 1890. On a passage from Maryport to Belfast she was struck by the steamer Owl and went down off the Mull of Galloway. Happily, though, her four-man crew escaped.
Sailing colliers, however, were becoming increasingly obsolescent, and John Neill's rivals on the Queen's Quay such as Barkley, Kelly and Hinde had all acquired steamships by 1891. John Neill in turn ordered a steel steamer in 1893 from the Ailsa Shipbuilding Co. of Troon, yard number 44. At her launch on 7 March 1894 she was named Staghound and as completed was a graceful three-masted vessel of 496 gross tons, 152 net, with a compound engine built by Muir and Houston of Glasgow, which gave her a respectable trials speed of 10.5 knots. Coal consumption was about seven tons a day. Accommodation was provided for a crew of fourteen, and although she would not have carried quite that many, one can see how the owner's wage bill increased over a sailing vessel that could be managed by four or five men! The Staghound, which cost £6,000, entered the service for John Neill in 1894, but a mere six months later her owner died - almost exactly a year after his elder brother Charles. His son, Frank, inherited the sailing vessels - now four in number with the loss of the Caroline on the Ayrshire coast - but does not appear to have found it convenient to run the new steamer, and the Staghound was sold in March 1895 to the Glasgow owner John Hay. She continued to trade around the British Isles for another 45 years, except for a brief spell running to Bergen. As far in the future as July 1940 she returned to her first owner's home town, Bangor, with a load of coal.
Frank Neill, aged 32, thus took over his father's business and continued to trade at No. 3 and 4 Queen's Quay under the name of John Neill still. Some confusion might be experienced here with the Belfast estate agents John Neill and Sons - still operating in Belfast and Bangor - but there was no connection between the firm or families. Frank Neill lived in Belfast in the late 1890's, first at 1 Longford Villas, Duncairn Street, and then at 30 Cliftonville Avenue, before returning to Bangor to take up residence on the Donaghadee Road.
He soon sold the Cambridge to Paul Picken of Larne, the principal of the Larne Shipbuilding Co., and had the Ocean Star damaged beyond repair in a terrific gale off the Isle of Man, but the C. M. Reynolds and Lizette soldiered on into the twentieth century, being among the last of the colossal fleet of Belfast sailing colliers. They would accept other cargoes from time to time too and it was on such a trip that the C. M. Reynolds was dramatically wrecked on 16 February 1902. She had loaded flagstones at Kilrush in Co. Clare, destination Belfast, but was caught in a Force Ten south-westerly off the Donegal coast. Shore dwellers near Tramore Strand saw her come ashore in the surf about 4 p.m., but no-one was aboard and it was feared that the crew had been drowned. However, Captain Carlisle and his four men had already landed on the lonely strand of Maghera, near Ardara, with its black cliffs and eerie caves. One man went missing and was only found alive four days later.
This left the Lizette as the last of the John Neill ships. Years later the memory of seeing the old coal fleet from Queen's Bridge inspired a poet masking himself as 'Longshoreman':
'These were the hard case ships that cracked
On sail in the channel's roll;
From light to light and whose holds were packed
With smithy and kitchen coal.
Jibbooms high over the quay-side wall
In fancy I see them yet;
The only two I now recall Gartsherrie and trim Lizette.
They've long since finished their final sail
The hour has struck for them.
Have they gone below while a thundering gale
Was sounding their requiem?'
In reality the fate of the Lizette was more mundane. Her registry was closed on 28 January 1904 with the entry 'Sold as a hulk.' Frank Neill did not venture into shipowning again but relied on chartered vessels to carry his coal.
W. G. Lyttle - a writer most noted for his 'Betsy Gray or Hearts of Down: A Tale of '98' - did not, however, gloss over defects he found apparent in Bangor. Besides desiring 'military or other bands performing at stated times', he continues, 'The pier also could -be greatly improved, and this, indeed, is much needed, the present structure being not only altogether insufficient to meet the wants of the summer marine trade, but also, under certain conditions absolutely unapproachable and dangerous.' Matters came to a head after the 1889 season, when, in addition to the cargo vessels and Belfast steamers, a passenger service to the Isle of Man operated. James Neill was among a deputation of Town Commissioners who, in December 1889, approached Mr. R. E. Ward D.L. of Bangor Castle about the possibility of a new pier. James Neill favoured concrete construction with the emphasis on cargo handling, but ultimately the convenience of passengers prevailed and a wooden pier was built, with an under deck for accommodating vessels at low water, this, the 'New Pier' being completed in 1895 at a cost of £25,000 and demolished in 1980.
James Neill was a progressive character. He introduced the storage of coal, in a yard adjacent to his Sandy Row premises. This may not appear exactly startling, but in fact coal had previously been taken direct from the discharging vessel to customers and was not held by the importer as is the norm today. This, however, was a minor innovation compared with the contract James Neill signed in 1888 with the Paisley shipbuilding firm of John Fullerton and Company. An iron steamship was to be built, the first steamer that the family had ever purchased. Steam coasters were slow to develop, largely due to difficulties with efficient machinery, ballast and ventilation, and of course the greater capital outlay and crew required compared with sailing vessels. Although James Neill was investing in steam around the same time as the big Belfast merchants Barkley and Kelly, a small pioneer steamer had traded to Donaghadee some years previously. Robert Dunn, the erstwhile rival of the Neills, mentioned in Part One, moved his business to Newtownards in 1878 and in 1882 had the Ards built by MacIlwaine and Lewis of Belfast for a partnership that also included Newtownards mill owners George Walker and John Russell Sefton. She does not appear to have been a success, being sold after an eleven-month period that included a bizarre incident at Donaghadee when local coal 'fillers', threatened by the installation of a new steam crane on the quay, toppled it into her hold! Dunn (1815- 1906) never again invested in steam but continued to hold shares in sailing vessels until the turn of the century.
The failure of the Ards may have put off other local owners, but in the l880s steam coasters were being built in ever-increasing numbers. The two sailing colliers James Neill had received at the dissolution of the partnership in 1881, the Slaney and the Just, were both now very old and when the latter was condemned and sunk as a breakwater in Bangor harbour in 1888, James Neill decided to join the ranks of the steamer owners. The Amy, named after his eldest daughter, was completed at Paisley in May 1889, at a cost of £3365, paid in four equal instalments. Iron-built, she measured 150 gross tons, 95 net, and had a length of 105.2 feet, a beam of 19.1 and a depth of hold of 8.7. Steam at a boiler pressure of 80 lbs. per square inch was produced by a 35 nominal horse-power compound engine constructed by the Glasgow firm of Walker and Henderson.
Disappointingly, the Amy had no longer a career with James Neill than had the Ards with her owners. Again, in less than a year the ship was sold. The only scraps of information that have survived on the Amy are the builders' account, with Fullertons' splendid embellished 'Iron Shipbuilders' Victorian letterhead, and a small but regrettable news item from the 'North Down Herald': in January 1890, the master of the Amy, Captain Charles McMeekan, was drowned in Workington harbour while his ship was berthed there. So, unfortunately, there is a dearth of material that might explain the unwillingness of James Neill to persevere with the new steamer. Fullertons were a yard of good reputation, so it is unlikely that the Amy herself was unsatisfactory. Certainly her subsequent career was an extremely lengthy one. Possibly finding and keeping a crew was a problem; sailing coasters offered a more stable passage than the small steamers, which tended to be rather wet in a seaway, and had to be driven on if at all possible to pay for the bunker coal and higher wage bill of the crew. A windbound steamer was a real loser of money. Or, simply, the Spaniard who bought the Amy, Senor Acha of Bilbao, may have made a very attractive offer for her!
While James Neill was taking delivery of the Amy in 1889, his brother Charles, more conservative, was buying an elderly brigantine, the James Stonard. Both were registered in Belfast within four weeks of each other - an interesting contrast between old and new. Since severing the connection with James, Charles, besides the barque Bebington, had run the coasting schooners Camel, Louisa and Bellewood. The Camel was lost in the Solway Firth in November 1882 and the Louisa was a very small vessel of under 50 feet, so with his business expanding as Bangor rapidly grew, Charles was doubtless pleased to secure a vessel, that, although 40 years old, was described as 'smart and tight', her purchase price being probably around £400, just a fraction of the cost of the Amy. However the James Stonard was doomed to meet the most violent and tragic end of any Neill sailing vessel.
The autumn of 1890 brought a protracted spell of dirty weather, and by the early days of November, Garston docks on the Mersey were crammed with vessels awaiting favourable conditions to leave. One was the James Stonard, another the schooner Edith of Newry, master Thomas Chambers of Kilkeel. Captain Chambers, who lived until 1941, always recalled the day that the fleet eventually sailed - except for him, as he had still to wait for money from home to buy stores. This error, though, he believed saved his life. His recollections, as published in 'Sailing Ships of Mourne', (Newcastle, 1971), continue:
'There was a strong southerly wind blowing … at 12 o'clock midnight there was a dead calm and all of a sudden a hurricane blew up from the north. It was surmised afterwards that many of the vessels were taken by surprise and foundered before they could get the sails off … nine vessels went ashore on the West Hoyle Bank alone, and only two lives were saved. They were seen from shore walking about on a sandbank when the tide ebbed'.
Captain Chambers does not name the vessel these castaways came from; it was the James Stonard.
Donaghadee was the destination of the James Stonard as she cleared the Mersey Bar that day, 5 November 1890. In command was Captain James Eddis, a well-known local mariner who had previously skippered the schooner Susan for James Montgomery of Bangor. Eddis had almost reached the Isle of Man when the northerly sprang up and the James Stonard was forced back southwards, losing canvas away into the night sky. Helpless, she finally drifted onto the West Hoyle Bank, a huge expanse of sand covered at high water, off the estuary of the River Dee. Captain Eddis and two seamen were drowned, but the mate George Taylor and the ship's boy, a Donaghadee lad, survived in the rigging all night until the tide receded, when they were able to land on the sand. Little remained of their vessel, but they managed to cling to the wreck as another tide flooded. At last their nightmarish plight was ended when they were rescued by a lifeboat at 10 a.m. on Saturday 8th., after more than 48 hours without food, water or shelter. Taylor and Eddis were both Bangor men, from Fisher Hill (now Victoria Road) and Union Street (now Holborn Avenue) respectively. That night Bangor had also witnessed a fatal wreck when the large yacht Urania was driven ashore beside Seacliff Road with the loss of her owner, the young aristocrat Viscount Cantelupe.
Unsurprisingly, the James Stanard was the last sailing vessel to be acquired by a member of the Neill family. Following the death of Charles Neill in October 1893, the Louisa and Bellewood passed to the legal ownership of Olivia Neill, his widow. The former was broken up in 1895, while the newer and larger Bellewood, 112 tons, continued to import coal until 1904 when she was sold to become a hulk on the Mersey.
When last we met the third brother, John, in the middle of the last chapter, he had moved back from Belfast to Kensington Villa, Princetown Road, Bangor, but continued to administer his coal business at the Queen's Quay. His fleet of colliers was much more significant than those of the Bangor duo; at the start of 1890 it numbered six, the Caroline, Cambridge, Timandra, Ocean Star, C. M. Reynolds and Lizette. None were under 100 tons, and the barquentine Lizette was the largest sailing collier employed trading to Belfast, with a net tonnage of 248. She had in fact been built as a barque for the African trade, but for John Neill's purposes, barquentine rig, with one less square-rigged mast, meant less work aloft and consequently a saving of a couple of crew members. The Timandra was lost in a collision on 2 April 1890. On a passage from Maryport to Belfast she was struck by the steamer Owl and went down off the Mull of Galloway. Happily, though, her four-man crew escaped.
Sailing colliers, however, were becoming increasingly obsolescent, and John Neill's rivals on the Queen's Quay such as Barkley, Kelly and Hinde had all acquired steamships by 1891. John Neill in turn ordered a steel steamer in 1893 from the Ailsa Shipbuilding Co. of Troon, yard number 44. At her launch on 7 March 1894 she was named Staghound and as completed was a graceful three-masted vessel of 496 gross tons, 152 net, with a compound engine built by Muir and Houston of Glasgow, which gave her a respectable trials speed of 10.5 knots. Coal consumption was about seven tons a day. Accommodation was provided for a crew of fourteen, and although she would not have carried quite that many, one can see how the owner's wage bill increased over a sailing vessel that could be managed by four or five men! The Staghound, which cost £6,000, entered the service for John Neill in 1894, but a mere six months later her owner died - almost exactly a year after his elder brother Charles. His son, Frank, inherited the sailing vessels - now four in number with the loss of the Caroline on the Ayrshire coast - but does not appear to have found it convenient to run the new steamer, and the Staghound was sold in March 1895 to the Glasgow owner John Hay. She continued to trade around the British Isles for another 45 years, except for a brief spell running to Bergen. As far in the future as July 1940 she returned to her first owner's home town, Bangor, with a load of coal.
Frank Neill, aged 32, thus took over his father's business and continued to trade at No. 3 and 4 Queen's Quay under the name of John Neill still. Some confusion might be experienced here with the Belfast estate agents John Neill and Sons - still operating in Belfast and Bangor - but there was no connection between the firm or families. Frank Neill lived in Belfast in the late 1890's, first at 1 Longford Villas, Duncairn Street, and then at 30 Cliftonville Avenue, before returning to Bangor to take up residence on the Donaghadee Road.
He soon sold the Cambridge to Paul Picken of Larne, the principal of the Larne Shipbuilding Co., and had the Ocean Star damaged beyond repair in a terrific gale off the Isle of Man, but the C. M. Reynolds and Lizette soldiered on into the twentieth century, being among the last of the colossal fleet of Belfast sailing colliers. They would accept other cargoes from time to time too and it was on such a trip that the C. M. Reynolds was dramatically wrecked on 16 February 1902. She had loaded flagstones at Kilrush in Co. Clare, destination Belfast, but was caught in a Force Ten south-westerly off the Donegal coast. Shore dwellers near Tramore Strand saw her come ashore in the surf about 4 p.m., but no-one was aboard and it was feared that the crew had been drowned. However, Captain Carlisle and his four men had already landed on the lonely strand of Maghera, near Ardara, with its black cliffs and eerie caves. One man went missing and was only found alive four days later.
This left the Lizette as the last of the John Neill ships. Years later the memory of seeing the old coal fleet from Queen's Bridge inspired a poet masking himself as 'Longshoreman':
'These were the hard case ships that cracked
On sail in the channel's roll;
From light to light and whose holds were packed
With smithy and kitchen coal.
Jibbooms high over the quay-side wall
In fancy I see them yet;
The only two I now recall Gartsherrie and trim Lizette.
They've long since finished their final sail
The hour has struck for them.
Have they gone below while a thundering gale
Was sounding their requiem?'
In reality the fate of the Lizette was more mundane. Her registry was closed on 28 January 1904 with the entry 'Sold as a hulk.' Frank Neill did not venture into shipowning again but relied on chartered vessels to carry his coal.