By Tony Storey
This article was published in the August 2024 edition of Soul Search, the Journal of The Sole Society
Robert Sewell and Elizabeth Storey married in June 1831 in the bride’s home village of Stanwix, Cumberland. Once the site of a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall, the area became a suburb of Carlisle. The couple’s first child was born in December 1834 and named John, but he died in the same month. When their second son was born in April 1839 in Unthank he too was baptised John, but happily the child thrived.
Robert and Elizabeth had a small farm and would have expected their son to be involved in the work and perhaps one day inherit the business. In 1851 the family lived at Moor Dyke Farm, Unthank, Dalston. John was 12 years old and described as a farmer’s son, and he had two sisters, Jane and Ann. To young John the prospect of working on a farm seemed dull in comparison with the scientific advances he heard about. Engineers famed for roads, bridges, tunnels and railways became household names, not least Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunel’s latest wonder was the longest ship built to date. Great Eastern was made of iron, steam-powered with screw propellers and fitted with the largest ever paddle wheels. The young John Sewell was determined to make his mark in the world and knew he had to make a change.
By 1861 Robert Sewell had died and his widow and children were living at Gibbons Court, Carlisle, in the parish of St Mary Within. John was then aged 22 and although still living with his mother he was already an engineer, having served a six-year apprenticeship with a marine engineer in Carlisle. He had found work in Liverpool, Manchester, Hartlepool and Newcastle upon Tyne. Unable to manage the farm alone, Elizabeth had let it to a tenant farmer and was living on the rent she received. John’s sister, Jane, was a dressmaker and Ann, aged 13, was still at school.
In November 1862 John married at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Maidstone, Kent. His wife was Catherine Ward Harvey and their son, named Robert John after his grandfather, was born in Maidstone in 1863. A daughter, Catherine Harvey Sewell, was born in Gravesend, Kent, in 1865. The family appeared fairly prosperous and lived in a detached cottage in Gravesend at the mouth of the River Thames.
John Sewell had been appointed outdoor foreman at Jacobs Mennell and Company, ship builders of London. Unfortunately the Thames shipbuilding industry was in a precarious state and the collapse in May 1866 of the ‘bankers bank’, Overend, Gurney & Company, resulted in financial panic and the demise of many firms including Jacobs Mennell. At the time of its collapse the company had an outstanding order from Greymouth, New Zealand, for a powerful paddle steam tug designed to meet the stringent task of navigating the fast-flowing Grey River in New Zealand, infamous for its frequent shipwrecks. John had a plan to fulfil the order, but it would require great skill and courage. His idea was to convert an existing brigantine, a two-masted sailing ship, into a steam-powered tug with two large paddle wheels. As such a vessel could not carry enough coal for a voyage to the Southern hemisphere he proposed to sail the brigantine to Australia. Once there he would rebuild the sailing ship as a steam tug before delivering it to New Zealand. He had already manufactured the paddle wheels and he would carry them in the brigantine’s bilges. He calculated that their weight would increase the vessel’s stability for the long ocean voyage.
A Captain Deare was engaged to navigate, John Sewell and Charles Jefford would be the crew and once the rebuild was completed in Melbourne, Sewell and Jefford would be the engineer and stoker respectively of the steam tug Dispatch. Having prepared for the journey under sail, the three men left London on 24th June 1866. Their journey took 105 days and they arrived at the port of Melbourne, Colony of Victoria, on 11th October 1866. Sewell left the brigantine in Melbourne while he visited the West Coast goldfields of New Zealand, but soon returned to complete the conversion of the craft to a paddle steamer. It was 90 feet long, weighed 35 tons and was powered by two 40 horse power engines.
Captain Deare, Sewell and Jefford left Melbourne on 6 November 1866 on the newly classified paddle steam tug Dispatch. No longer a sailing ship, she had to complete the last and possibly the most hazardous part of their journey under steam, from Melbourne across the Southern Ocean’s Tasman Sea to Greymouth, where hopefully the ship’s sale would be completed. A violent storm arose and faced with a rapidly falling barometer, increasingly high southwesterly winds and rough seas, the tug also ran out of coal and towards the end of their journey the crew had to burn wooden furniture and fittings to maintain steam. Gales were driving the ship ever nearer to the treacherous coast, when they were sighted by the Hokitika tug, Challenge. The Hokitika tug had plenty of coal, which enabled Dispatch to raise steam and complete its journey to Greymouth. The Tasman crossing normally took seven days, but the adverse weather meant that Dispatch had been at sea for seventeen days, which explains the shortage of coal. The community of Greymouth and the newly formed Grey River Steam Tug Company were overjoyed and gave Dispatch the warmest of welcomes. She had arrived safely after the 1,240 nautical mile trip across the Tasman Sea and completed an epic 13,000 nautical mile delivery journey half way around the world.
By 1866 the New Zealand West Coast gold rush had made access to a safe port essential to the prosperity of a community in the region. Without their own tug, the town of Greymouth had little prospect of growth and would have lost a great deal of trade to their rivals in Hokitika. The pride of Hokitika was the steam tug Challenge, but now Dispatch had arrived in Greymouth it was possible for both towns to thrive. John Sewell liked the town and readily accepted the position of permanent engineer to the tug. John’s duties on Dispatch left him with some spare time in which he did engineering work on his own account, using a shed in the yard of his home in Mount Street and often assisted by his fireman on Dispatch, Charles Jefford.
Within weeks of his arrival in Greymouth, John Sewell had a timely reminder that the local waters could be treacherous. The steam tug Dispatch left Greymouth towing the hulk of an old sailing ship Ballerat with 100 tons of coal on board. As they reached the open sea the tow rope snapped. A second tow rope was attached but that too broke, leaving both vessels at the mercy of a strong wind and huge broadside waves. The two ships became entangled and Ballerat split in half. Challenge was called to assist and a whale boat from the harbour board with a crew of five attempted to run a line from Dispatch to pull her clear, while salvage agents for the wrecked Ballerat hacked at their now doomed hulk in an attempt to free Dispatch. The whale boat was caught broadside on to a huge wave and capsized, flinging the crew into the sea. Her coxswain was struck by the steering oar and drowned. The other four crew tried to cling onto the half- submerged boat, but one succumbed to the freezing water before he could be picked up by Challenge. The rising tide slowly released Dispatch with some assistance from Challenge and the two tugs returned to port, flags lowered to half mast. The town’s flags were then lowered to respect the two men who had lost their lives.
Despite the dangers, a new life in the colony seemed full of promise and opportunity for the family, so in August 1867 John’s wife Catherine and their two children left Gravesend in England, facing an initial voyage of 140 days to Port Philip, Victoria.
John and Catherine’s third child, Andrew Hughes Sewell, was born in Greymouth in September 1868. At that time John was 29 and Catherine was 31. Over the next few years they had four more children, including another son, John, who died when just a year old. They had three daughters, Florence Gertrude, Annie Edith, and finally Elizabeth Teresa in April 1877. John’s wife Catherine died in July 1877, aged 40.
Before he left England, John Sewell and Andrew Barrett Hughes, a friend and witness at his wedding, agreed that one day they might meet in the colonies and start their own business. Hughes was a pattern maker and in 1872 Sewell wrote to his friend and told him of his plan to start an iron and brass foundry in Greymouth. Sewell’s share of the proceeds from the sale of the tug may have provided him with the seed capital to establish the foundry which he named after the vessel. Hughes arrived in Greymouth the following year and with the assistance of William Rae, who held the leasehold of the land chosen as the site for the foundry, the venture began. Dispatch Iron Works opened in August 1873 and in July 1875 it became The Dispatch Foundry Company Limited with a starting capital of £12,000 to invest in the required machines and facilities. The quartz mining boom around Reefton and the coal mines in Brunnerton resulted in a full order book almost from the start. Hughes decided to sell his share, which was bought by Sewell and Rae. So began one of New Zealand’s early attempts at a cooperative. The owners offered shares in the company to all its workers as a condition of employment. It specialised in gold mining hardware, forestry equipment, stationary steam engines, log haulers and more. Marine engineering also made up a large proportion of their work. New Zealand’s oldest railway engine Opossum was built in 1867 in Greymouth, probably at what became the Dispatch Foundry. The steam locomotives built for the mining industry were often very complex with bevel and spur gears transmitting the torque to the axles. This tended to shorten their working life so Dispatch Foundry developed rail tractors, with which it became the market leader in the industry.
In July 1884 John Sewell married for the second time. His bride was Charlotte Maria Walker.
In about 1894 John Sewell sold his share in the foundry and moved to Aramaho on the Wanganui river. He became the chief engineer of the New Zealand Railway workshops in both Wanganui and Petone. He successfully established health and welfare schemes for the workshop workers. He served on the Wanganui education board and had a lifelong interest in education. He was an active and dedicated Freemason and held high office in the New Zealand Masonic and Rose Croix lodges.
At the end of his life John Sewell would have described himself as a farmer. He died of heart failure on 24th August 1918 at his farm in Wanganui and was buried in the local cemetery. He was 78 years old and had spent his last fifty years in New Zealand. He was survived by his widow Charlotte and his two sons and four daughters from his first marriage.
The business that John Sewell established decades earlier continued to develop. An advertisement from 1940 describes the Dispatch Foundry Co. Limited of Lord Street, Greymouth as engineers, boilermakers, blacksmiths, iron and brass founders, electric and gas welders. Below a depiction of an eight-wheeled petrol locomotive it adds ‘Manufacturers of all types of gold mining, coal mining and saw-milling machinery.’ Finally the document mentions that repairs are promptly and efficiently carried out and all kinds of engineers’ requisites are stocked.
In 1975, the company changed its name to Dispatch Engineering Ltd which specialized in timber winches, pressure vessels and gold screens as well as general engineering and foundry work. The 1990s saw the rapid growth of the dairy industry in New Zealand and R A Garlick Ltd bought the buildings and facilities of Dispatch Engineering Ltd in 1995 to produce dairy machines. A new company, Dispatch & Garlick Ltd, was formed. It remains in Greymouth as a mechanical engineering company, but specialises in dairy, water and wastewater systems.
Any commercial enterprise has to evolve to keep pace with change and the Dispatch business today is a good example. John Sewell might have difficulty relating the current business model to his arrival in Greymouth with a steam tug, but what has been achieved is a tribute to his talent, courage, ambition and work ethic.
He was a true pioneer. Not bad for a farmer’s lad from Cumberland!