Harbour delights in Edwardians times (From York Press)

Harbour delights in Edwardians times

10:34am Monday 19th December 2011 in History articles By Stephen Lewis

MORE scenes of old Scarborough today, courtesy of Mike Hitches’ wonderful new book Scarborough Through Time – starting with the harbour.

According to Mike’s introduction, the town has had a harbour since 1225, when King Henry III “granted use of 40 royal oaks to be used for construction of a harbour here…”

Sadly, for fairly obvious reasons, we don’t have photographs of the king’s men building that original harbour. But, thanks to Mike, we do have some slightly more recent images, thought to have been taken in the 1890s and early 1900s, by which time Scarborough was an important fishing port.

The first shows fish being landed in the early 20th century. Women at this time were employed to clean and gut the catch before it went to auction, Mike writes.

In this particular photo, he says, “some can be seen packing cleaned fish into salt barrels, with more containers in the background ready to be filled. These operations are watched by visitors to the town”.

Our second harbour scene was taken even earlier, in the 1890s, Mike thinks. There are a number of fishing boats in the background.

“The harbour was once the commercial and industrial centre of the town and ships were built here at one time,” Mike writes. The two “fishermen” sitting on the wharf in the foreground look rather young, Mike notes.

Our other photos today, culled from more than 90 pages of photographs old and new in Mike’s book, show the town centre. One particularly poignant image shows a troop of soldiers waiting at Scarborough railway station to depart for foreign soil, watched by locals who crowd up against the railings.

“The soldiers were probably off to South Africa to fight in the Boer War,” Mike writes.

Our final two photographs show Westborough during the Edwardian period, with horse-drawn charabancs and trams taking centre-stage in the street.

Look carefully at the first image, of the shopping centre, and you can see that many of the products being advertised would be familiar to us today. There is a hairdresser, a boarding house…and a shopfront advertising Cadbury’s Chocolate.

We’re not so different from the Edwardians after all.

• Scarborough Through Time, by Mike Hitches, is published by Amberley, priced £14.99

Scarborough railway station with a tram