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There are three basic tasks
that a port undertakes: first, the discharge of a ship, second, the handling and sorting
of goods on quays and wharves, and finally the despatch of goods to markets or storage
areas. With regard to discharge, machines designed to deal with unloading specific
materials such as grain or minerals could rarely be used for other commodities. Moreover,
before the container revolution of the 1960s, general cargo came in a wide variety of
packages of all shapes and sizes: bags of sugar, sacks of flour, carboys of chemicals,
hogsheads of tobacco, crates of fruit or bales of cotton and wool. All of these goods
required different skills and techniques in unloading and distribution. The merchant ships of the 1930s usually had their own cranes and derricks
which were able to unload the ship quite quickly but only if the ship was carrying a cargo
she was designed for which was quite often not the case in wartime. It was always
desirable to use the dockside cranes if the port was so equipped. In the inter-war period
there was a common dockside saying ‘the ship can always beat the quay,’ which
reflected the relative speed with which a ship could be unloaded and the rather slower
nature of the way goods were sorted for transit thereafter. Cargo sorting was often an
extremely complicated process for many goods needed careful processing that, in turn,
entailed the need for vast transit warehouses to hold the goods. Although the South Wales
ports were equipped with transit warehouses, they were, in many cases, inadequate to deal
with the vast amount of goods handled. In both Cardiff and Swansea, Luftwaffe aerial
reconnaissance photographs show large quantities of material being stacked and sorted in
the open air because the transit sheds were full of material. In fact, congestion on the
quays was one of the biggest problems that the South Wales ports had to face in the war.
In the crisis period of the winter of 1940-1, there was great
concern that merchant ships arriving at Swansea, Cardiff, and Barry were waiting for days
and even weeks for available quay space. Simply put, had the congestion at Swansea,
Cardiff and Barry and the other western ports lasted into 1941 in any substantial measure
then Britain would have lost the war through an inability to feed its population and
maintain and re-equip its armed forces. Throughout the war, the ports of South Wales were
as much a front line in the struggle as the confrontations in the western desert or Italy.
The Welsh ports in the frontline in 1941
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