Portland Harbour
Much of the foul weather that besets the South Coast originates in the sun swept Caribbean. Depressions form and beat their way north eastwards to hurl their storms at the west coasts of Britain and northern France. Some pass through between the Isle of Ushant and Lands End and these drive head on to Chesil Beach and Portland, the graveyard of sailing ships.
However Chesil Bank and the Isle of Portland together form a breakwater sweeping far out into the English Channel partially enclosing, to the east, a deep bay - Portland Roads. From early times the Roads provided a shelter for Channel shipping from the prevailing westerly storms.
The bay that is now Portland Harbour has a long story to tell from the days when Roman and Saxon ships must have sheltered from the howling westerly gales to the present commercial and leisure activities. The Spanish Armada passed nearby and a great battle was fought off Portland Bill. Local vessels took part and captured galleons were towed across the bay to Weymouth. During the Civil War parliamentary warships lay in Portland Roads and, shortly after, Admiral Blake fought a battle with the Dutch Admiral Van Tromp
For centuries sailing ships had sheltered in Portland Roads from westerly gales in the lee of the great sweep of Chesil Beach and as early as 1794 thoughts were turned to enclosing the bay as a harbour of refuge. In 1844 the Government decided to partially enclose the bay and a scheme was devised for the defence of the new harbour to consist of a large citadel at the Verne, on top of Portland, batteries at East Wear and on the Inner Pierhead and forts on the Breakwater and the Nothe Headland with interlocking arcs of fire. In 1844 Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria, laid the first stone of the breakwaters in 1848.
All, bar the Breakwater Fort, were complete by 1872 when the Prince of Wales, later to become Edward VII, arrived with the Royal Yacht, Victoria and Albert, to lay the completion stone. The Breakwater Fort suffered problems with subsidence and was not finished until 1875 and did not become operational until 1895.
The early harbour had only two breakwater arms stretching out into mid bay. Later came the need to protect ships from more than just the weather and two further arms were added The advance in technology fuelled the development of the harbour. The days of sail were over and fossil fuels were to power modern warships, firstly coal and then oil. No longer could ships keep at sea indefinitely for as long as their victuals would last. Steamships had to refuel at short intervals and Portland, half-way up channel, with its "quick-in-and-out" facility, was an ideal place. Thus the harbour became a coaling and later oiling depot for the Royal Navy and a base with dockyard, hospital and shore training establishments.At the turn of the century Portland was the largest deep-water harbour in Europe.
With the development of the torpedo the Admiralty now recognised the vulnerability of its ships at anchor and decided to build two more breakwaters and complete the enclosure of the harbour. Each pierhead on the new breakwaters was built as a small fort with its own gun emplacements.
Torpedo development
The coming of the torpedo played a major part in the history of Portland Harbour and introduced the era of underwater warfare. Robert Whitehead, the first successful commercial manufacturer of torpedoes built his factory at Ferrybridge on the north side of the harbour in 1891 and soon special ranges to develop and test torpedoes became a feature. The advent of the weapon spurred the development of the submarine and then the technology to detect and destroy them. Thus the harbour became the centre for research into underwater warfare.
The automobile torpedo was the most deadly and feared naval weapon from its inception in 1866 until the explosion of the Atomic bomb in 1945. Had it not been invented, over 25 million tons of shipping would not lie rusting on the seabed and the submarine would not be the key deterrent it is today. Yet the historical development and complexities of this weapon are little understood outside of naval circles. Its British inventor, Robert Whitehead, was a brilliant Victorian engineer who, while honoured by many countries world-wide, received little or no recognition from the land of his birth. Even the administrators of the Royal Navy seemed to have had very little respect for the weapon. In the 1950's a superb collection of torpedoes on display at the Torpedo Experimental Establishment at HMS Vernon was scrapped despite the pleas of the engineers who had built up the collection.
The area of Weymouth Bay and Portland Harbour was found to be ideal for the Royal Navy to test torpedoes once the British Government decided to purchase the manufacturing rights for the weapon from the Whitehead Torpedo Company (based in Fiume, a part of Austria) in 1871. In 1895 the Whitehead Company set up its first manufacturing site, outside of Austria, in Wyke Regis, on the Weymouth side of Portland Harbour.
In 1898 the Bincleaves testing range was established in nearby Newtons Cove and many torpedoes were lost as a result of testing activities. In 1970 Ed Cumming, of Weymouth, discovered a 1936, 21 inch Mk VIII torpedo on Portland Harbour Wall and has since recovered from the seabed various other components from a further nine weapons. Divers have discovered more and some have been trawled up by local fishermen. Several are very rare - one 14" torpedo was manufactured by the Royal Laboratory in 1887. These items are to be added to the torpedoes and torpedo components currently in the Nothe Fort, soon to be the subject of a special gallery, one of the foremost collections in the UK.
Stukas over Portland
Great fleets came and went. For some time Portland was the base for the Channel and then the Home Fleets and a depot for submarines. Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI all reviewed their fleets here. Young seamen were trained in the old frigates anchored in the harbour, successively named HMS Boscawen. During both World War I and II the bay was filled with neutral ships at anchor waiting to be searched for materials that might be useful to the enemy. The ships were directed in by the local fleet of peacetime holiday paddle steamers requisitioned into the navy and painted grey, their crews enlisted into the RNVR.Violent action came in 1940 after the fall of France. Portland was now in the front line and the recipient of fierce German air attack. The anti-aircraft ship HMS Foylebank was sunk in the harbour in July after a mass attack by Stuka dive bombers, one of her crew, Leading Seaman Jack Mantle, receiving the Victoria Cross. The Stukas of Major Dinort´s 2nd Stuka Squadron sank five vessels and damaged a further nine. An additional e-boat attack sank another two ships.
Possibly the greatest event ever seen in Portland Harbour was the embarkation of American forces prior to D-Day in 1944. On the 6th June hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers landed on the coast of occupied France. In the leading wave were 2 British, 1 Canadian and 2 US Divisions. It was one of the latter, the US 1st Division (The Big Red One) that embarked at Portland and Weymouth harbours. Portland Harbour was crammed to capacity in the few days before with ships loading tanks, guns, trucks, amphibious vehicles and all the equipment that an army needs to fight a war. The infantry were loaded into small personnel landing craft at the quay by the Pavilion in Weymouth and ferried to transports lying at anchor in Weymouth Bay.
These had all spent days before hidden in wooded concentration areas in South Dorset not far from the harbours. The Big Red One was to be the assault division on "Omaha" beach, one of five code-named beaches that the allies were to cross on the Normandy coast. Here they were to meet fierce German opposition and received many casualties. In the days after the invasion the people of Weymouth and Portland were to witness the return of the wounded, such a contrast from the cheerful, confident young Americans who passed through on their way to war.
After the war Portland, with its quick in and out facility, became responsible for sea training for the navy. With the advent of the helicopter and its importance as an antisubmarine weapon an airfield was built at Chesil to work up ship's helicopter flights. It was also a preferred base for ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary who carried the supplies of the fleet.
With the reduction of the Royal Navy in the 1990s there was not enough money in the defence budget to maintain more than a few bases so the naval facilities at Portland were dispersed and the harbour became a civilian concern. "Portland Port", a commercial company, took over responsibility with the aim of developing the ship repair, leisure and tourism potential. One of the first arrivals at the new set up was a prison ship.
Fort Nothe
The construction of the Nothe Fort was begun in 1860 by a civilian contractor who soon ran out of money. The job was then given to 26 Company of the Royal Engineers, forerunners of 26 Armoured Assault Squadron. Some fifty sappers completed the task, using a myriad of great twelve-inch-square oak scaffold poles carrying steam gantries and cranes. The original intention was to build an open battery of five 64-pounder guns but a threat developed from the old enemy, the French, who had laid down the world's first purpose built ironclad warship, La Gloire and built a new naval base at Cherbourg. So the plan was revised to provide a fortress mounting seventeen heavy guns in two tiers. At an early stage in the construction it was decided that twelve of the big new rifled guns would suffice and the basement gunports were filled in and earth embanked up to them.
The Fort was completed and commissioned in 1872 at a final cost of £120,000. Meanwhile, progress was being made on the construction of the southern arms of the Breakwater, the Verne Citadel and the Breakwater Fort, all of which were completed by 1875.
The first soldiers to garrison the Fort were No 2 Battery Royal Artillery (Tatton-Brown's), a specialist gun emplacement unit trained in the handling of ordnance up to 18 tons, using vast sheerlegs. They were responsible for hauling and heaving two 64-pounder, four 9-inch and six 10-inch guns into the fort. These were rifled muzzled loaders (RMLs) with spiral grooves cut into the barrel to engage lugs on the shells and impart rotation and thus accuracy in flight. Seven of these guns were replaced in the 1890s by massive 12.5-inch RMLs weighing 38 tons each and capable of firing 800-pound shells over a range of three and a half miles. These shells were propelled by new smokeless powder and they were fitted with soft metal rings at the base instead of lugs to engage the rifling, which eliminated wasteful escape of gas around the sides of the shells. All this was to meet the ever-increasing thickness of armour with which warships were being fitted.
The changing of the guns
As Portland Harbour grew in importance and became the main base of the Channel and later the Atlantic Fleets, so the Nothe remained an important link in the defences of the base. With the advent of breech loading (BL) the RMLs were removed and 6-inch BL guns were emplaced on the ramparts. Rapid advances in technology had produced a situation where two or three of these guns could do the same job as the twelve massive RMLs. Their armour- piercing shells, weighing only 100 pounds, could be fired at a much faster rate to a range of some ten miles.
The Nothe Fort did not see action against the enemy until World War 2, when the main threat came from the air. Until then the big guns had mainly been fired in training and in competitive events. However, in July 1940 two mystery ships failed to identify themselves and were fired on. They quickly turned on all their lights to reveal themselves as refugees from the Channel Islands.
In 1938 it had been decided to use the fort as a central anti-aircraft ammunition depot and some of the casemates and magazines on the south side were converted for storage. An electrically operated hoist was installed and a loading platform built alongside. Guns as far away as Coventry were supplied from here. The Nothe was also given its own AA guns. A Vickers Pom-pom was placed on a platform built on the north-west corner of the fort: (later to be replaced by a 40mm Bofors), and a battery of four 3.7-inch guns were emplaced on the glacis/gardens (now part of the car park). As that which goes up must come down, the Fort was supplied with large concrete and iron flak shields to protect the gun crews from spent shrapnel.
Coastal Defence was abandoned in 1956 and the Fort was temporarily used to house naval stores and degaussing equipment. In 1961 it was purchased by Weymouth and Melcombe Regis Council who, at the time, were interested mainly in the military land available and were unable to advance any viable scheme for the use of the Fort. Much more decisive were the hippies and vandals who took over the buildings and who, by 1979, had done immense damage using most of the woodwork for firewood, selling the metal fittings for scrap, mutilating the stonework and using it as a canvas for graffiti . In 1979 the Weymouth Civic Society obtained a licence to restore the fort and to open it to the public. In this the Civic Society received extensive assistance both from the Council and from various government community programmes. Today, the fully restored fort is visited by some fifty or sixty thousand people a year who come to see the impressive architecture and masonry of the Royal Engineers, real and replica guns of the ages, views of the Dorset coastline, and over seventy rooms, many filled with displays of the history of the site, military life in the Fort and wartime life in Weymouth./Portland and Fort Nothe
