Southend Barge Match at Thorpe Bay Yacht Club
by Howard Warrington 3 Jun 07:49 BST
30 May 2026
Thorpe Bay Yacht Club were delighted to again host the annual Southend Barge Match last Saturday. The weather could not have been better. Beautiful sunshine and our famous easterly sea breeze building nicely in the early morning.
Five Thames Barges came over to race. The Marjorie, Ironsides, Niagara, Edith May, and Adieu. All these wonderful vessels lovingly looked after, sailed, raced and lived on, made an incredible spectacle drawing attention all along the sea front.
A little bit of history... The Thames Barges were common sights along the shores of the Thames Estuary since the 1800's. Used for carrying cargo, with their shallow draft and ability to sit happily on the mud, made them a very popular local haulage craft.
Barge owners would race from one job to the next to make sure they were first in line for the next cargo collection. To advertise their barges and who was the fastest, local races or regattas were held. The Southend Regatta has early records of barges racing as part of the regatta as long ago as 1873.
The Southend Barge Match, held only for the Thames Barges, first started officially in 1964. Most barges by then were in private hands and used for pleasure.
Thorpe Bay Yacht Club along with the team from the Southend Barge Match have returned the event to the Thames Estuary shores where it once was held. With a course starting at Thorpe Bay Yacht Club, running in close to the beach off the "golden mile", out and around the pier head and back into another mark set with the kind help of the Alexandra Yacht Club. Back out and around the Leigh Buoy, around the pier head to the West Shoebury buoy. Finaly, back into the first mark off the shore and a beat back up to the finish line.
The racing was incredibly close. 4 barges rounding the first mark together. These old girls are powerful, slow to turn, yet get up to some decent speeds and at 80 tonnes, it takes skilled and time-honoured seamanship to race these beautiful barges in the close quarters that we saw last weekend. A far cry from the old days when a barge was often operated by a man, a boy and a dog!
But I now hand you over to our honoured "Officer of the Day", Dick Durham. Famous in these parts for being one of the last bargemen to carry a proper cargo by barge. With his wonderful wit and humour, gave this speech at the prize-giving held after the match in Thorpe Bay Yacht Club. There was not a dry eye in the house.....
Because of the delay caused by half the race organisers abandoning the committee boat for the chance to sail on a barge just minutes before the start, I found myself short-handed, and rushing to help with anchoring buoys; raising flags and sounding hooters. I was, therefore, left with little time to write up a report.
So, encouraged by my wife, Cathy, who often chides me for not embracing new forms of information technology I took to asking Chat GPT for assistance.
It took less time than to drop a leeboard to come up with the following. But forgive me, fresh off the printer, I have not had the time to proof read it:
Welcome to the 55th Southend-on-Sea Sailing Barge Match which would have been denied to the city were it not for the good officers of the Thorpe Bay Yacht Club, the sailors of which stepped in when the councillors of the town threw up too many regulatory obstructions.
First barge over the line was the Edith & May named after two early twentieth century maiden aunts closely followed by Niagara named after a relative of a Harvard biologist, who while seeking a cure for Erectile Dysfunction and negotiating with Iroquois natives in the forests of Canada came across a huge waterfall which they were told was known as the Viagara Falls.
A sure-fire winner of the elegance d'concourse prize was Marjorie, owned by QC Simon Derbyshire*, and looking as splendid as ever thanks to the efforts of a Chechan-born painter** who while fleeing from Islamist gunmen from her native Grozny and rescued on the Sandettie from a gale-tossed Avon inflatable - has wielded her paintbrushes in gratitude ever since.
Adieu, Gallic for Ta Ta, was named by a relative of a Sorbonne lecturer who could not bear to be parted from his mistress who worked in an eel and pie shop on the Old Kent Road and whom he had met while on secondment to Goldsmiths College, SE London. Every time she cleared away his leftover jelly and elver bones she said: 'Ta,' which he mistook for the brush off. It became a standing joke between them.
Least but by no means last was Ironsides named after a TV programme starring Perry Mason a wheelchair-bound detective, crippled by slug from a county lines road man, while trying to apprehend him for distributing counterfeit Ecstasy tablets to schoolchildren.
The barge took on extra hands just before the start as she had only skipper Toby Jug and his pet XL Bully dog, Bodycount, who had become fractious in the Globally-warmed, record-breaking May temperatures because her owner had run out of worming pills.
The fleet enjoyed a thrilling convergence off Southend's Golden Mile, a centre of metropolitan leisure excellence which helped the settlement gain city status some three years ago after successfully reaching the required number of homeless, drug dependent and anxiety-ridden citizens.
Next came close proximity to Southend's Pier, at 3.5 miles the longest jetty in the world apart from the one now coming close to operation in the Gulf of Hormuz which has a discharge pipe on the Omani side.
All barges clipped in close necessitating semi-naked men fresh from the tattoo parlours of the town to wind in their angling lines and hail the jolly sailors with calls of;'All this bloody water and you've got to come this close,' or 'Look out it's the Pirates of the Caribbean gone adrift'.
A close-call came off the West Shoebury buoy - named after the Bata magnate who once lived further up river - when two barges had a stand-off.
The race is organised by David and Dilys Renouf, famous for their chain of artisan grazing eateries.
Well, it seems I'm not going to be made redundant after all.
Cathy.......! I need a word!
*He's a KC and his name is Simon Devonshire
**She's Czech
Well done Dick, another hilarious repartee. We will look forward to next year!
Southend Match Results:
Bowsprit Class
1st Marjorie
2nd Adieu
Staysail Class
1st Niagara
2nd Edith May
3rd Ironsides
The 2027 Southend match will take place on 5th June.
Thank you also to our photographer David Maynard, www.alleycatphotographer.com