Falmouth Docks repair facility rededicated

Following the rededication ceremony, Prince Philip visited A&P’s engineering workshop where he met eight A&P apprentices, all of whom have just been awarded the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award.

He also met A&P’s longest serving employee, Geoffrey Evans, who has been with the company for 48 years, and the youngest employee, 19 year old apprentice Mark Heath.

Also attending were Percy Lobb, who was Mayor of Falmouth in 1958, along with Emlyn and Idwall Tidball, members of the original Queen Elizabeth Dock construction crew, and a current A&P manager and employee who were both 12-year old sea cadets at the time of the Duke’s last visit. As with the 1958 visit, Prince Philip attended a lunch held in his honour at the Falmouth Hotel with A&P management, customers and suppliers.

A&P managing director Peter Child said, ‘Queen Elizabeth Dock put Falmouth on the map for national and international ship repair work at a time when the industry was moving towards larger and larger vessels. Today it is still the largest dry dock on the UK South Coast and is operating at over 90% occupancy, which is excellent in the ship repair industry’.

Work on the Queen Elizabeth Dock began in August 1956 and it was officially opened by Prince Philip in May 1958. It was the biggest civil engineering project the port had ever known and anticipated the dawn of the super tanker era.

Work involved enlarging the old number two dry dock, which meant removing 250,000 cu/m of what is now the Castle Drive cliff face by moving the 40m high face back 50m.

The Queen Elizabeth Dock itself is 259m long and 40m wide, the size of 2 Wembley football pitches, with a 500 ton lock gate. The dock holds 28m gallons of water and can be pumped out in less than three hours. The dock itself was hewn from solid rock, involving the removal of 300,000 sq/m of material which was used to reclaim two acres of land behind the Duchy and County wharves. New roads and rail access were also created, and the navigable channel into the docks and basin were dredged.

Now 50 years on, the next critical development planned for the Falmouth Docks is to once again dredge the channel increasing from 5m to 8.3m depth so Falmouth and Cornwall can receive the worlds largest cruise ships with over 4,000 passengers, who would normally spend nearly £0.5m in the County on a day call.

Other benefits include Falmouth being able to support the marine renewable energy Wave Hub in Cornwall and continue to be able to support a new generation of large vessels such as LNG tankers alongside.