Lighter (1928/05/20)

Princess Royal Harbour

This lighter was one of the four large lighters prefabricated from 6 mm iron plates in England and shipped, along with the necessary tools to assemble them, on the P&O sailing ship Haddington (1 459 tons, Captain Browne). It arrived at Albany from Southampton on 4 December 1862. During 1863-64 the lighters were assembled under the supervision of Captain Charles Loius van Zuilecom on a flat rock near the company’s jetty. Although described by the company as barges, they appear to in fact have been yawls, possibly capable of long sea voyages. On 4 May 1863 a Perth newspaper’s Albany correspondent reported:
The first of the P&O Company’s new lighters under construction has been launched and named Albany. I learn that the second is to be called Fremantle. Though these vessels are reckoned barges by the Company, they are really fine coasters of 140 tons each, length 76 feet, beam 18 feet, hold 10 feet, and masts of 45 and 20 feet, yawl rigged, and it was originally intended to sail them out from England (Inquirer, 13 May 1863: 2f).

This lighter, like that sunk in Frenchman Bay (see entry), most probably had a counter stern.

The second lighter was launched on 29 August 1863 by ‘Miss Symers’ (most probably one of the daughters of Captain Thomas Symers of Albany) and named Fremantle. The last was launched in April 1864.

The lighters were used by P&O to carry water, coal and stores out to ships anchored in Princess Royal Harbour. There is some evidence that at least in later years they were towed to the waiting vessels by tugs or launches. In his reminiscences Captain Ernie Donohue states that one of his jobs was towing three lighters ‘of 130 tons each from Frenchman’s Bay outside Albany to the Town jetty full of water for shipping callers’ (Marshall, 2001: 277). The lighters were divided by bulkheads into five or six separate holds, and were capable of carrying 500 tons of water. After the withdrawal of P&O from Albany, the lighters were used by the Douglas family and the Armstrong and Waters Lighterage Company.

This particular lighter, which had been lying abandoned on the beach near the Town Jetty, was purchased by Nobbie Pannet during 1925, and used by him to pull up the piles as the old public baths were demolished. Pannet claimed that when he obtained the lighter it had a number of holes in the hull, but he had patched these with old kerosene tins.

THE LOSS
In May 1928, having outlived its usefulness the lighter was sunk by explosives near Whale Rock, between that rock and Middleton Beach. According to reports, the bottom of the hull proved to be sound, and the explosives failed to make holes in it.

Another of the lighters was abandoned, probably about 1890, near the water supply at Whalers Beach in Frenchman Bay (see entry). The wreck of a third iron lighter is shown on two sketch maps, one by Howard Hartman and the other by Les Douglas, published in Marshall, 2001. The wreck is shown just to the east of the base of the P&O coaling jetty.