The first dock opened in 1889 but the story goes back a lot further than that. The Taff Vale Railway and Cardiff Docks were becoming thoroughly congested by the 1870s. There are stories of trains not moving and a whole shift on the Taff Vale Railway.

So a number of the prominent Rhondda Valley coal owners, chief amongst whom of course was David Davies the Ocean, came together and proposed building a new dock and a new railway to connect this port to the Rhondda and after a lengthy parliamentary battle, of course it was strongly opposed by the Bute camp in the House of Lords, assent was eventually achieved in 1889, in 1884, and the dock then as I say opened in 1889.

The building of the new dock effectively broke the Bute's monopoly and it's obvious that trade was here because before the end of that year, 1889 Barry Docks had exported over a million tons of coal and shortly afterwards overtook Cardiff.

We often hear this story about Cardiff being the world's greatest coal exporting port but it actually wasn't Cardiff. It was here at Barry. It's just that Barry came within the Cardiff Customs Port so but actually in terms of the tonnage exported at the height of the coal trade in 1913 some ten million tons of coal were going out of Cardiff and just over eleven went out of Barry.

When when the first dock at Cardiff was opened in 1839 your typical merchant vessel was a wooden vessel of 200-300 tons. By 1900 your typical merchant vessel was a steel steam powered tram steamer which could load about 5000 tons of cargo and so that was part of the problem in Cardiff.

People think that the Butes made a lot of money out of the Docks but they didn't actually because the revolution that took place in the technology of the merchant ship during the nineteenth century - increase in size, new forms of propulsion - meant that the earlier docks that were built by the Butes at Cardiff rapidly became out of date.

Once they'd built up a pot of money they were having to spend it on a new dock whereas this dock here was purpose built in the 1880s for the steam ships of the period and you know continued, it shows that it continued to serve as a perfectly adequate commercial port until relatively recently so it shows the foresight of Davies and his fellow promoters.

If we'd have been standing here ninety years ago we'd have been smothered in coal dust. That would have been the the all embracing filth of the place. So much so that the South Wales ports could never develop as general cargo ports. You don't want oranges smothered in coal dust on on your table. The coal was arriving here.

There were marshalling yards at Cadoxton some four miles from here. There was a coal train arriving there every fifteen minutes from the valleys and that coal then would be marshalled then onto the tips and so on and then tipped into the ships holds, the tips stood on these stones and structures - the filth of the port would have been absolutely indescribable. It really would.

The main marshalling yard was at Cadoxton. There was a coal train arriving every fifteen minutes. It's difficult to imagine them today - about three or four coal trains moving in South Wales on a good day but every fifteen minutes there was a coal train coming in here.

Then the trains had to be marshalled properly so that the wagons had doors that opened at one end only so they had to be marshalled the right way round obviously, and then they'd be run out onto the tips which stood on the grid stone protrusions and then tipped into the ships hold.

Working on the ships was said to be a job even worse than mining. The trimmers would have been there with their huge shovels making sure that the coal was properly spread out in the holds of the ship to ensure the ship's stability.

The first world war was the turning point in the fortunes of Barry docks. Trade was obviously disrupted during the war and then after the war the Treaty of Versailles brought the war formally to an end. One of its signatories of course was the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, but the irony was the Germans were required to make reparations to the allies and one of the reparations payments was in coal.

So Lloyd George actually signed a treaty that undermined the Welsh coal industry because almost immediately many European markets - especially places like Italy which were taking about 5m tons of Welsh coal before the war, by the mid 1920s they're barely taking 2m tons because of this cheap German coal.

Also of course by then oil was becoming an increasing important maritime fuel. The Royal Navy built no capital coal fired ships after 1914. They were all oil fired and infinitely of course more convenient to bunker.

There are wonderful films of hundreds of men with baskets of coal and coaling up the great battleships of the time, and so the South Wales coal industry went into a terminal decline.

It was a worldwide premium fuel but a new world wide premium fuel was coming up, namely oil. And although it wasn't until 1957 that oil actually overtook coal as the main worldwide provider of energy, certainly in terms of South Wales the decline set in in the 1920s and never really recovered.

Perhaps the docks have a commercial future but not in shipping. As in disused dockland areas throughout the UK the water has now become a pleasant feature around which to provide housing and that I think is going to unfortunately going to be the future for these docks which David Davies intended for so different a business.

From Trevor Fishlock's Sea Stories - BBC Wales TV