📢TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW for SAILINK Shoreham Port to Fécamp crossing📢 Click here for more information
Written by 19 August 2026
The Shoreham voyages of the Neilly, whose anchor will be displayed at the Port soon, began with corn, coal and shipping merchant Robert Horne Penney of Southwick.
Penney (1822-1902) bought his business as a going concern from Edward Lucas, who in the 1850s was quitting the area to work for a bank in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.
The enterprise flourished, and Penney married Edward Lucas’s daughter in 1853. He built and ran Penney’s Wharf at Shoreham, and set up a head office in Brighton, eventually going into business with one of his sons.
The Neilly was built as a sailing ship in Charlotte, New Brunswick, Canada, in 1853. We don’t know how she spent her first eight years of service, but she was registered at Shoreham in 1861.
The Neilly sailed with an average crew of 12, including five or six apprentices, aged 15-20. The Neilly’s first captain or Master, once she started sailing out of Shoreham, was Thomas Boyling, born in Sussex in 1826.Â
John Barnard, who came from Littlehampton, became Master of the Neilly for her later voyages.
Most of the crew and apprentices were local, from Southwick, Shoreham and Lancing. But one sailor, John Patherson, was recorded as coming from Gothenburg, Sweden.
Life on board could be hazardous. In 1870, apprentice Thomas Upperton, aged 16, fell into the hold and died. In 1872 apprentice William Daley decided a life at sea was not for him, and absconded.
Coal for industrial and domestic use was the Neilly’s main cargo, carried from the collieries of South Wales (Swansea, Cardiff) and the north east (Sunderland, Newcastle and Hartlepool), back to Shoreham.
Delivered to the goods station at Kingston Buci, the coal was carried onward by train. The Neilly also sailed to Dieppe, other ports in Europe, and the Baltic. It took three months or more to sail to the Baltic and back.
Newspapers in the mid 1800s were keen to record the most mundane details of ships’ voyages. The Neilly’s arrivals and departures from Hartlepool and other north east ports were reported in the Shields Daily Gazette, the Sunderland Daily Echo and the Shipping Gazette.
There was more than one vessel called Neilly, but the fact that the newspapers cited the original port as Shoreham makes it more likely to be the ship owned by Penney.
The Neilly was condemned at Cardiff in 1878 and ordered to be broken up. In the log there is a record of her taking in water, so her end was probably related to that.
