The world’s last seagoing paddle steamer put in an appearance off Eastbourne on a clear September evening, and a small family made sure they were on the pier in good time to catch her. The PS Waverley pulled alongside the pierhead, took on her passengers, and set off west along the coast for a two-and-a-half-hour run past the Seven Sisters and back — timed, deliberately or not, to catch the sunset on the way home.
The Waverley carries more history than most things still afloat. Built on the Clyde in 1946 to replace an earlier ship of the same name lost at Dunkirk, she spent decades ferrying day-trippers between Glasgow and the Scottish coastal resorts before being sold to the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society for the princely sum of £1 in 1974. She sank at her moorings in a storm three years later, was raised and rebuilt, and has been quietly setting the standard for how a 1940s steamer should look ever since. These days she’s the only seagoing paddle steamer left in the world, and every summer she leaves the Clyde behind to spend a season touring the English coast, calling in at piers like Eastbourne’s for an evening or two before moving on.
None of which mattered much to the youngest passenger aboard, who was far more interested in the two vast red-and-black funnels and the general commotion of a few hundred fellow travellers. The family took a window table in the saloon for fish and chips — chips, peas, a pint of London Pride, the full seaside works — before heading back out on deck as the light began to turn gold over the water.
That golden light did most of the work for the rest of the trip. The chalk of the Seven Sisters caught the low sun properly by the time Waverley rounded Beachy Head, its lighthouse standing red and white against cliffs that had turned almost the colour of the setting sun itself. Somewhere around there the family found a spot at the rail for a photo that summed up the whole evening — sunlit smiles, a squinting baby strapped in between them, the last of the daylight going soft behind. By the time the paddles brought her back past Eastbourne pier the sky had gone properly pink, passengers were filing down the gangway into the dusk, and the smell of the day’s fish and chips was still very much in evidence.
