In
1855, John Ostle, a local farmer, wrote in his journal: “Silloth
Bay is a very wild place in dry and windy weather. The sand blows
very little short of the deserts of Arabia. There is now at present
four farm houses, that is all there is at Silloth”.
The farms can
be seen on this 18th Century map; little had changed in the
intervening years. Over the next ten years the scene was to change
completely. In 1856, the railway from Carlisle arrived and work began
on a deep-water dock. A new town was born.
Grandiose
plans were made for a port and a sea-side resort which would rival
Scarborough as a watering-place for the upper classes. The ‘Carlisle
Journal’ issued a special supplement to publicise these.Within just five years, the new town had begun to take shape, laid-out on a regular grid-iron pattern. The Ordnance Survey map of 1866 shows the first streets to be built. The original farms can still be seen in the top right-hand corner of the map, marked ‘Old Silloth’.
Christ
Church was still to be built but most of the town's principal
buildings were completed including the baths, The Queens and Solway
(Golf) Hotels, the gasworks, and the railway yards with connecting
lines to the convalescent home and the salt works.
In 1861, the
first census of the town was conducted. Ten years earlier, there had
been only four households in Silloth. Now there were 128. Most of the
residents came from the local area, the old parish of Holm Cultram
and the Aspatria and Wigton district. There were many from Carlisle,
West Cumberland and the Lake District. Around 20 per cent came from
Scotland. Almost all of the Scots were employed in shipping or on the
newly opened docks.
Taken
from a glass negative, this is perhaps the earliest surviving picture
of Silloth. It must have been taken around 1885. On the shoreline, in
the centre of the photograph, are two piles of railway sleepers.
These were shortly to be made up into Silloth's first seawall.
Silloth
baths opened in 1856. They provided an opportunity for visitors to
bathe in sea water without getting cold. Gallons of water were pumped
out of the sea at each high tide by a steam engine.
The salt
works also opened around this time. The raw materials were imported
from Northern Ireland but the venture does not seem to have been a
financial success. It closed in the early 1870s. The cottages, built
for the workers, had a much longer life; families continued to live
in them for almost another hundred years!Carrs opened their flour mill, on the edge of the new dock, in 1886. It quickly became Silloth's most recognisable landmark. Wheat was imported from North America and many other parts of the world. The flour was sent, by rail, to Carlisle where it was used to make the family's famous biscuits.
One of the
Scotsmen who came to Silloth in its early days was William Crabb who
was born in Kirriemuir. He set up a chemical works around 1868. The
main product was agricultural fertilizer for which Crabb imported
phosphate from North Africa and vast quantities of guano (bird
droppings) from South America.
A second
chemical factory was established in Silloth around 1878. This was
known as the Solway Chemical Manure Works and was owned by two
brothers, John and William Maxwell, who had previously run a similar
operation at Glasson Creek near Drumburgh.
William Crabb
retired in 1900 and sold his business to the Maxwells who continued
to operate both factories until 1940 when the works were taken over
by Fisons.
Christ
Church opened in 1870; before this time the Anglicans met in the
school. The spire was added a few years later. The building is faced
with Irish granite.
The Convalescent Home opened in 1862. It is situated to the west of the town centre near to the beach. Originally, it had its own railway branch and the platform, seen in the picture, enabled ambulance trains to draw right up to the door. It is still open.
In 1886,
Armstrong-Whitworth of Newcastle-on-Tyne built a weapon testing range
on the west beach, not far from the Convalescent Home. This was
always known locally as 'The Battery'. It seems somewhat incongruous
to have sited this in a holiday resort but the town guide for 1899
assured visitors that "the noise of explosions which, at first,
was rather dreaded in Silloth has not made itself inconveniently
heard, many people not being aware when gun practice is going on".
The new town,
briefly, had its own newspaper and, in 1892, Joseph Wood published
his first illustrated souvenir for the fashionable resort.
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