Not so very many years ago the City of Manchester was home to the Nation's fourth biggest port. This great port was once crammed full of ships that sailed to and from every far corner of the globe. This was made possible by the construction of the Mancester Ship Canal, which was completed in 1894 to enable these ships to sail right into the very heart of industrial Britain.
Back in those days this whole area of country was just a fiery mass of great industries, billowing endless clouds of greying smoke into our once industrial skies. Today, where once stood those dark fortresses of industry, now graze herds of cows and sheep, in green, flowery meadows that bear little trace of the power that once ruled that domain.
The Manchester Shlp Canal stretches 36 miles all the way from the open sea at Eastham on the banks of the River Mersey right into the centre of Manchester and industry throughout the land relied on this busy waterway to bring in vital raw materials and then to export our manufactured goods to every corner of the world. Sadly, if you stand on the banks of the canal today there is little to remind you of the days when hundreds of ships used it every week as they sailed in and out of the Great Port of Manchester.
This amazing old film allows us to magically step back almost a hundred years in time to those wonderful maritime days. We look at the City of Manchester as it was then, and remarkable scenes of the docks in those days in an age long before computers and mechanisation; an age when hundreds of dockside workers unloaded and loaded every cargo by hand.
The rare film then takes us to the same scenes in the 1940's, 1950's and the late 1906's showing how the port went through many changes, even to become the nation's leader in the development of containerisation. Sadly, like so much of our glorious past, the curtain finally fell on the once great Port of Manchester, leaving us with only memories of the once golden age of shipping.
This prdouction is a wealth of maritime nostalgia, so if you like ships for whatever reason, this DVD is an absolute must!
