Mayflower (tugboat)
steam tug (tugboat) built in Bristol in 1861
Mayflower is a steam tug built in Bristol in 1861 and now preserved by Bristol Museums Galleries & Archives. She is based in Bristol Harbour at M Shed (formerly Bristol Industrial Museum). She is the oldest Bristol-built ship afloat, and is believed to be the oldest surviving tug in the world.
Building
Mayflower was built by Stothert & Marten (later G.K. Stothert & Co), who were connected with the Bath-based engineering company best known as Stothert & Pitt. A branch of the Stothert family came to Bristol to start a company to build railway locomotives for the GWR during 1837 (this later became the Avonside Engine Company). This company started building ships in 1844, and by 1852 the shipbuilding part of the company became a separate entity based at Hotwells which survived in business until the 1930s.
Mayflower was built for the towage contractor Timothy Hadley to work on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and in the River Severn on behalf of the Canal Company. She was one of three tugs ordered shortly after trials by the Canal Company had shown they were much more efficient than horse-drawn boats. The other two tugs were Moss Rose (1860), which was very similar to Mayflower, and the smaller Violet (1862); together, they cost £3,000. All three were fitted with simple single cylinder vertical engines.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mayflower (tugboat)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.