11 Aug 09 Bridport & West Bay

I was reading Rob Sellen’s Snippets over on Posterous, and he mentioned Weymouth and Bridport. That lead me to recall my own travels to that part of the world, and my family connections with the area.

It is a most beautiful part of the English coastline, and parts of it have World Heritage Status. Located on the south coast of the United Kingdom, the nominated site comprises approximately 155km of undeveloped coastline and countryside. The cliff exposures along the Dorset and East Devon coast provide an almost continuous sequence of rock formations spanning the Mesozoic Era, or some 185 million years of the Earth’s history.

Anyway, I digress. My grandmother, who lived in Kent, headed south west to Bridport in 1928, at the tender age of 16 to become a nurse, and is pictured here at that time.

It wasn’t a life-long career for her, as she met and married my grandfather six years later, and he was always proud to tell you that grandmother never worked another day in her life after they married. Different standards from a different era indeed.

The depression years didn’t affect the UK as much as it did the US, and my grandfather was in a safe job as a boilermaker in His Majesty’s Dockyard, Chatham. He remained employed there, having had just this one employer for life, until he retired in 1968.

Bridport’s beach, if you like, is at West Bay. Bridport is a few miles inland up the River Brit. In fact, West Bay was named Bridport Harbour until the Great Western Railway decided to rename it around 1884, when there was an attempt to relaunch the area as a vacation resort, after the local shipbuilding had declined. The photograph to the right is of my late grandfather at West Bay sometime in the 1970’s.

The railway no longer runs to West Bay, passenger service finally ceasing in 1930, although freight traffic hung on until 1962. There have been proposals to build a two foot narrow gauge line along the former GWR Route.