Winter. Snow at Doña Casilda Park

Bilbao Newcastle

A NINETEENTH CENTURY STEAMSHIP. The Blyth was a british ship built in Sunderland by J. Blumer & Co. and delivered to Blyth Shipping Co.in 1874. Like the Rivas she made lots of journeys between England and Spain along the end of the XIXth Century and the beggining of the XXth Century. In 1881 she sunk at Santoña bay, was refloated and taken to Bilbao, were she was mended and sold to Ardanaz & Cia. Her name was changed to Ardanaz. In 1898 she was bought by Eduardo Aznar Tutor and added to the Olaveaga Steam Company with the name Olaveaga. In october 1900 she got stranded at the entrance of Liverpool port. Two years later she had another accident. After that she was again mended and sold. Her now propietor was J.M. Bustamente, from Bilbao, who owned the La Blanca Navigation Company. Her name was now Gomechu. Her northern life ended in 1907 when she was sold to Mr. G Goñalons, who called her Antonia. Her new registration port was Mahon, in the Balearic Islands. The photograph shows the vessel at the docks of Bilbao

Rivas was the name of a one thousand ton steam ship that came and went between Bilbao and Newcastle during the last years of the Nineteenth Century and the first years of the Twentieth Century. On the 4^th of december of 1904 this vessel left Bilbao carrying 3263 tons of iron and 1219 litres of wine. It had arrived the 24^th of september with 2537 tons of coal from Newcastle on board. It would be back on october bringing more coal from Newcastle. 

This we know because professor Manuel Montero tells us in one of his works. But if you want to know in turn how he has found out you will have to ask him, because he published all this information in the papers, it was adressed to the general public and he gave no bibliography there. Anyway though I can't tell you what sources he has taken his data from professor Manuel Montero is a historian and I bet they are pretty reliable.

From 1880 to 1920, he goes on, there was a continous traffic of vessels joining both ports, wich sometimes amounted to 25 or even 30 on a monthly basis.

 

Ybarra nº 4 was another steamship wich travelled intensively between the british industrial cities and Bilbao. This watercolour is kept at the Untzi Naval Museum of San Sebastian.

  If we make a list of British ports admiting mineral ore from Biscay in those days Newcastle would not stand in the first place. For example, take year 1904. Cardiff and Middlesborough were leaders followed by Rotterdam and Antwerp out of the UK. What makes so special the relationship between Newcastle and Bilbao is that ships would always transport an important cargo in both directions.

So if Newcastle was not the main destiny for Bilbao mineral ore albeit and important one the continous freight carry in either direction made it the main supplier for coal. Most frequently, more than 60% of all the coal that was imported into Bilbao was coming from Newcastle.

Moreover Consett, near Newcastle, not only was an industrial centre wich eagerly swallowed lots of iron ore from the Biscay mines, but it was the headquartes of one of the four societies wich were part of Orconera Iron Ore Co. Ltd., the most important mining company in Biscay (one fifth of the total ore extracted there belonged to them). These four societies were

Consett from Durhan, England

Dowlais from Wales

Friedrich Krupp from Essen, Germany

and Ibarra Hermanos from Biscay

A view of Bilbao with the swing bridge that was inaugurated in 1892 and destroyed in 1937 during the Spanish War

Other ports at the Tyne riverside or near it who also took mineral from Biscay belong today to the Greater Newcastle upong Tyne connurbation. Professor Montero mentions Janow, Tynemouth, Tyne Dock and Sunderland.

Chroniclers in the late 1800s and early 1900s underlined that Newcastle upon Tyne had an inner port very similar to the one Bilbao itself had on the banks of it's ria.

Englishmen in Bilbao, Britons in Biscay

There are some Englishmen in popular songs that were sung in Bilbao not long ago and are still remembered. The most famous is the one that goes something like this:

An Englishman came to Bilbao
to watch the estuary and the sea
but when he saw the local girls
he wouldn't go away.


(Un inglés vino a Bilbao
por ver la ría y el mar,
pero al ver las bilbainitas
ya no se quiso marchar)

People from all places think the girls in their town, city or whatever are the most beautiful in the world, and talking about local girls as of a sort of produce you can be proud of wasn't considered incorrect at the time the song appeared –and later.


We cannot be sure, anyway, if the man in the song was English, Welsh or Scot, because people here were not (and still are not) very skilled at distinguishing one from another, so they called them all “English”.

Looking on the web for something on this subject (Englishmen in Bilbao, Britons in Biscay) I came across an issue of History Today where Mike Thomas wrote about Bilbao's Britons: Mining in Biscay. 

Why was I looking for it? Because Britons played an important part in the industrialisation of Biscay, which relied on the importance of the iron mines.

Professor Manuel Montero, from the university of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) tells the story this way:
“Iron was mined in Biscay since the Middle Ages but it was halfway the Nineteenth Century when a new epoch opened. Iron from Biscay suddenly gained huge interest for the English steel industry after a new process was invented around 1950 in order to obtain steel. Bessemer converters were able to render a product of superior quality, better than usual until then, but it was necessary to employ a certain kind of mineral which was very scarce in England: non phosphoric iron ore. There were only two places in Europe where it was abundant: Sweden and Biscay. Iron ore from Biscay presented better conditions to be exploited for the English demand: it was very rich and easy to extract for it could be found near the surface. The mines war not far away from the coast, so it could be transported without great cost. And even mining was cheap because there was plenty of labour at the industry's disposal. Unlike the sweden ore, iron ore from Biscay could be extracted and shipped all the year through.”


The article on History Today has a subhead:
“Mike Thomas looks back to a period of economic buoyancy in the Basque region, when a special relationship flourished between the people of Biscay and Britain”

Then the author introduces William Gill, who far back in the mid-1880s was the British managing director of the Orconera Iron Ore Company, a conglomorate of British, Spanish and German enterprises in the Biscay region.
And so, through the Gill family we find ourselves right in the middle of that time when industrialisation was taking off in Bilbao and its surroundings and there was a British community of several hundreds settled in Abando (which disappeared as an independent town in 1890 being today the central district of Bilbao), Bilbao itself, Portugalete and Baracaldo.


Touch the photograph to go to Mike Thomas' article, but I advise you that to read it from beginning to end you must subscribe to History Today.

Town of Plentzia. Along the riverside

The town of Plencia or Plentzia (the lattest is the official basque name) is 25 kms north east from Bilbao. It grew in a bend of the river, which forms a beautiful  estuary in the proximity of the sea. Plentzia shares a bay with the nearby municipalities of Gorliz and Barrika. There are three beaches in the bay, namely Plencia, Gorliz and Astondo. In summer they get very crowded, so if you don't want to sunbath and you think walking by the sea is much better, autumn, spring or even late winter is the perfect time for it. Plentzia is one of the places we people from Bilbao visit very often, because it's so near and we can even go by underground, though of course the train comes up to the surface before leaving Bilbao which makes the trip far more interesting and definitely nicer (imagine going all the way through a 25 km tunnel).

These photographs were taken on July. It was'nt summer yet, but the light is very different from the one that fills the scenes in a set of photographs I took last week. This is autumn light, and you can see it HERE

In both cases, the walk along the riverside started more or less at the beggining of Zugaitz Bidea, leaving the bridge behind. It continued along Ibiltokia Ibilbidea, but in this series of photographs it stops at Arraun kalea after we reach the port.
In the photographs you can see in my other blog the walk still continues through Areatza Iribidea and Portu Kalea. There are also houses and views which do not appear in the images that follow. In the same way, though  the places are the same, different things and perspectives can be found here.

Go Up
The other set of photographs