XVII. THE NEW CONSTITUTION.
The year 1861 brought about the third form of control under which the Port of Dover has been managed. From the earliest days down to 1606 the Town and Port, including the Harbour and the Passage, were controlled by the Corporation, subject only to the supreme authority of the sovereign. From 1606 it has been controlled by charter under the Warden and Assistants; and since 1861 by a representative Harbour Board constituted by Act of Parliament. These three forms of control differed widely. The democratic character of the first placed the harbour absolutely in the hands of the pe(jple except on rare occasions, when for grave reasons of State, the Sovereign had to intervene. The second control took the Harbour completely out of the hands of the people of Dover, with the exception that the Mayor during his year of office had a seat at the Board — a form of representation which never allowed a Dover man to be on the Board long enough to exercise effective influence. The third form of control now existing was given in response to a strong appeal for a representative Board that would be amenable to public opinion and more especially to Dover public opinion. The new constitution was a great cause of disappointment. The reconstruction was hastily carried out by the President of the Board of Trade in conference with two or three Dover men without the town's people being consulted. The new Harbour Board had the semblance of being representative, but it gave representation to those who ought not to have had it while those who ought to have been represented were ignored. The new Board con.sisted of seven members of which one was the Lord Warden, one nominated by the First Lord of the Admiralty, one nominated by the Board of Trade, two burgesses of Dover elected by the Dover Town Council, one member nominated by the South Eastern Railway Company, and one nominated by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company. This Board was immediately regarded with disapproval, the local feeling being that there ought to have been more members and some of them of a different character. The five first named were acceptable, but beyond those representations of public bodies it was felt that other members should have been elected by those who paid harbour dues and rents, and that the railways should only have had representation in proportion to their contribution in harbour dues. Since the settlement of 1 86 1 the balance of power at the Harbour Board has been altered. By Act of Parliament, the Lord Warden, who was a strong and steadying influence, has been removed, and an extra member has been given to ttie railway companies, and as those companies are under a working agreement they praciically control the Board. As far as the representation of the burgesses of Dover is concerned the last state of Harbour control is much worse than the first, and very little better than the second.
In 1886, the Town Council of Dover introduced a Bill in Parliament to restore the ancient union between the Town and Port, and to have the Harbour affairs entrusted to a Managing Committee of the Town Council with the representatives of other interests co-opted, but owing to concessions made to those who opposed on behalf of vested interests the Bill was found to be essentially different from the one that had been approved by the Town Council and the ratepayers, and according to standing orders it had to be withdrawn.
The Harbour Board formed in 1861 commenced operations with a largely reduced revenue, owing to the Passing Tolls, which had regularly provided ^^i 0,000 a year being then abolished. The remaining income, derived from harbour dues and ground rents, was barely sufficient to meet the annual repayment and interest on the debt that had been incurred during the last ten years of the Warden and Assistants administration. Expenses were cut down ; the property which Mr. Henry Matson had bequeathed for the upkeep of the Harbour in 1720, was sold, and by avoiding all new works in the course of a few years the finances were placed on a fairly satisfactory ba.sis. In the course of five years the Board re-built the bridge and dock-gate at Union Street, and it was called Palmerston Bridge after Lord Palmerston, the Lord Warden. They also built warehouses on the Clarence Quay and the short boundary jetty opposite Guilford Battery. The Pier Heads were repaired, groynes were re-constructed in the Bay, and more quay space was obtained by the removal of useless old buildings.
In 1869 the Board once more approached the task of deepening the tidal harbour, and Mr. Hawkshaw, who was consulted, presented a report and plan for deepening the Pent, the Basin and the Tidal Harbour at a total cost of ^166,000. Mr. R. S. France, Railway Contractor, of Shrewsbury, who was to have deepened the tidal harbour by means of his patent explosives under water, made a successful trial, but it was eventually decided to postpone the deepening of the tidal harbour " until there was a corresponding improvement in the French harbours on the opposite coast." The deepening of the Basin was commenced in March, 1871, a depth of five feet of solid chalk was removed from the bottom and, at the west corner near Trinity Church, where there was a slope up to the quay level, the deepening was more. Quay walls of great strength and thickness were built, and on the side next the Pent a continuous quay wall was built in place of the opening which had up to that time been spanned by the Palmerstone Bridge, \.hich now, although it had existed but a dozen years, was deeuied to be no longer necessary. More room was provided on the Crosswall Quay by the removal of the clock and compass towers erected there in 1830 by Mr. Moon. A new clock tower was built at the bottom of the Esplanade, and the clock from the Crosswall was erected there in May, 1877. In the Crosswall opening, immediately facing the harbour mouth, were placed a pair of new gates, the sill being lowered to admit vessels drawing twenty feet at spring tides and sixteen feet at neap tides. The basin, which was then named the Granville Dock, was re-opened on July 6th, 1874, by the Lord Warden, Earl Granville. The whole of the works which formed a continuous series from 1871 to 1879 cost ;£74,4i6. In 1888 the Wellington Dock gates were widened ten feet to accommodate the new Channel steamers the " Victoria " the " Empress " and others of that class which then came on the station, and new coal stores for the convenience of local coal-merchants were built on the Northampton Quay. When these improvements were completed in 1889, the present Harbour Board had been in existence 28 years and their annual revenue had increased from ;^5,225 to ;^i6,ooo. For the next twenty-five years nothing further was done in connection with the interior of the Harbour with the exception of placing railway lines round some of the quays.
In 1890 the question was again raised of providing a deep water harbour outside the old pier-heads. The docks within those heads could offer room for a greater number of fair-sized ships, and the existing quays would have been sufficiently spacious to deal with their cargoes, but accommodation for larger vessels, more especially for cross-Channel and liner passenger traffic, was needed. It was argued that a port that could not afford such accommodation by admitting such vessels at all states of the tide was virtually closed to the commerce of the world. For a long time the Government had been dallying with the question of building a harbour for the Navy in Dover Bay, but for some years before 1S90 the subject had dropped, so the Dover Harbour Board decided to obtain Parliamentary powers to enable them to construct a new harbour out.side the old piers, enclosing a net area of 56 acres, with a depth varying from 40 feet to 15 feet at low water spring tides. This harbour, as at first designed by Messrs. Coode, Son and Matthews, was to be bounded on the western side by the existing Admiralty Pier with an addition to it of 560 feet; on the eastern side it was decided to build an arm 2,760 feet seaward, starting in a southerly direction and curving towards the south-west, giving an entrance 450 feet wide towards the east, sheltered by an overlap of the extended Western Arm. The estimate for the work was ;,f^6oo,ooo to raise which Parliament granted power to the Harbour Board to levy a tax of one shilling each on Channel passengers. Thus empowered, the work was commenced in the Autumn of 1892, and the memorial stone was laid by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales (the late King Edward VII.) on the 20th July, 189^, and the work then commenced was called the " Prince of Wales Pier." By an agreement with the Government, the Admiralty Pier had been leased to the Dover Harbour Board for 99 years, to form a part of the new deep water harbour; but in May, 1895, when the Prince of Wales Pier of this new local harbour had been advanced to about threequarters of its length by Sir John Jackson, the contractor, news came that the Government had decided to build a great Admiralty Harbour at Dover, enclosing the whole Bay. To adapt the local harbour to the greater Naval work, the extremity of the Prince of Wales Pier was turned less to the south-west than had been at first intended, and carried forward further than the original contract. As finished, the Pier is 2.910 feet long. The other two parts of this local harbour — the extension of the Admiralty Pier and the construction of proposed landing jetties — have not been undertaken, because the Admiralty Pier was extended still further as a part of the Admiralty Harbour, and the plan for the Continental landing-place was altered. It was proposed to make a railway communication to the Prince of Wales Pier, and to have the landing stage for Continental passengers on the west side ; while there was on the eastern side a landing stage which was used for Atlantic liner pas.sengers. The railway communication was made, but it was subsequently agreed to surrender the Prince of Wales Pier for the use of the Admiralty Harbour and to widen the Admiralty Pier and build thereon a Marine Station for the Continental packets, as well as a landing place for liner passengers. The widening carried out by ^Iessrs. Pearson and Son for the Harbour Board was completed in April, 1 913, and the South Eastern and London Chatham Railway Companies, who had obtained a lease of the widened pier at a nominal rent of ^"10 a year for 99 years, built the New Marine Station thereon.