A quiet day in Aberdovey.  The history of the wharf and Jetty are described in Hugh M. Lewis’s booklet A Riverside Story, and in C.C. Green’s excellent The Coast Lines of the Cambrian Railways, volume 2 (1996).  Today’s jetty dates to 1970, but Aberdovey’s original pier and jetty were built with double railway tracks and turnable and completed in 1885 at the same time as the new wharf and storage buildings, enabling the unloading and loading of steamers directly from and into railway trucks.  Slate was the primary export, whilst coal, limestone, livestock (cattle, pigs and horses), wheat and potatoes were major imports.  During the First World War the wharf was used as a coal dump and the jetty went out of use.  Both continued to deteriorate after the war.  Beginning in 1962 British Rail entered negotiations to surrender the wharf and jetty to the Crown Estate Commissioners and Tywyn Urban District Council, together with a sum to enable the Council to carry out repairs, but there were numerous delays.  In 1965 Mr James Griffiths, the Secretary of State for Wales, intervened and the Council at last acquired the property and began to initiate a number of improvement schemes.  The first work was completed in 1968 and included a new sewage station, underground holding tanks, a sea outfall and public toilets.  The wharf was resurrected with new steel pilings and a wall with concrete coping with ladders and bollards.  A new slipway was added at the western end of the wharf area.  The jetty was found to have been attacked by Teredo worm, the bane of sea-going ships for centuries, and was riddled with holes, meaning that the existing jetty could not be repaired and had to be replaced with a shorter and narrower structure.  Funding was a difficulty, but the Outward Bound Sea School, for whom the jetty was of considerable value, provided 47% of the total cost.  The balance was paid by British Rail Board and the Aberdovey Advertising and Improvements Committee. At the same time the buildings that they used on the wharf were renovated.   The big seafront car park replaced the old rail track that led in to the wharf and on to the jetty, and was completed in 1970.  In 1971 the information centre for the Snowdonia National Park was built on the wharf, paid for by a grant from the National Parks Commission and a new clubhouse was built for the Dovey Sailing Club , which also opened in 1971.

Thanks to Sierd Jan Tuistra for the information that the photograph, as opposed to the postcard, probably dates to before 1923.  He points out that the low wagon on the wharf has the livery of the Cambrian Railways: CAM [logo] RYS and that Cambrian Railways was acquired by the Great Western Railway in 1923, after which all rolling stock was quickly painted over in GWR livery.

The promenade looks brand new in this photograph, but I have been unable to find out when it was actually created.  The road is empty except for three men with bicycles and a couple of pedestrians.  The road was metalled sometime during or after 1895, when the Council Surveyor purchased a cargo of broken limestone for metalling the streets.   Up against the jetty are sailing boats together with a steamer with smoke issuing from its funnel, giving the peaceful village scene a slightly industrial air.  Beneath the Pen Y Bryn shelter, erected in 1897, a large building looms over the houses of Seaview Terrace, just visible at far right of my recent photograph.  This was a school, the subject of vintage postcard #24, now converted to residential use.

The above photograph shows the view from a similar viewpoint on November 29th 2019.  The most obvious difference is the presence of parked vehicles, and lots of them.  On the day I took the photo there were fishing vessels in the bay, but of a very different order from the ones in the postcard:

Fishing boats in the bay at Aberdovey

The postcard, numbered A0105 was produced by E.T.W. Dennis and Sons Ltd of Scarborough and is unused.  The printing and publishing company was established in 1870 and began to mass-produce postcards in 1894.  Sadly, the company’s pre-war records were destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941.  From 1955 all postcards beginning with the letter A and the number 01 had Aberdovey as their subject matter, but many of the images used predate this time, and this particular photograph certainly predates the 1950s. The firm closed in 2000.