Jesse Hartley was born near Pontefract, Yorkshire on the 21st of December 1780 and was a man of ruddy complexion, a powerful bodily frame and robust constitution, rough in manner and occasionally rude, one of the old school of practical Engineers. His father Hugh Hartley was Bridge-master for the West Riding of Yorkshire for whom Jesse worked in his early youth as a mason; but from the age of thirteen he was partly engaged in office duties and partly on the works at Ferry Bridge, then in the course of construction. Although he later expanded his skills into engineering and architecture, this was to influence his building style for the rest of his life.
A vacancy came about for a Deputy Dock Surveyor in 1823 as a result of the Dock Surveyor John Foster being embroiled in financial scandal. Within two weeks of his appointment on the 24th of March 1824 Foster was 'removed' and Hartley was selected by the Liverpool Dock Trustees at an annual salary of £1,000. His appointment was a risk taken by the Trustees as he had no experience in building docks, his experience limited to bridge design, and there were 13 rival applicants, several of whom were well-known engineers. He completed the Grosvenor Bridge over the River Dee, near Chester in 1832, which, with its fine stone arch of 200 feet span, was the largest single-span stone arch in existence at the time.
Possessing great natural sagacity, and imbued with an innate perception of the leading features of constructive design, he speedily acquired a profound, as well as an extensive knowledge, of the requirements of that branch of science to which he devoted himself. In the design and construction of the numerous docks of Liverpool, he has left monuments of his skill as an Engineer, which will endure as long as the fame and commercial prosperity of the port. Within eight months of his appointment he presented his plans for the dock works which included the construction of a river wall and works to the north of Princes Basin as well as schemes for the Dry Dock, the Salthouse Dock, the Brunswick Basin, the proposed Brunswick Dock, the South Basin and the Graving Dock.
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| Victoria 'Dockers' Six-Sided Clock |
The style of work introduced by Mr. Jesse Hartley was peculiarly his own and he showed meticulous attention to every detail of each project under his superintendence. The area of the Liverpool Dock Estate, at the time when he first entered the duties of Dock Surveyor, was 123 acres, including a water-space of 70 acres in wet docks and basins. At the time of his death the area of the water-space was 251 acres, and the entire area of the estate had been increased to 866 acres. The river frontage, which at the earlier period of 1824 was about 3,000 yards in length, had been increased by extension in opposite directions, north and south, to 10,000 yards. Not only did he create a significant dock network that put Liverpool on the commercial map but he was such a visionary that he also saw the importance of the railways. The lighthouses and telegraph stations along the coast, from Liverpool to Holyhead, were under the control of the Dock Surveyors; and most of the buildings connected with the system were also constructed by the Hartleys.
His most famous legacy is as the architect of the 1846 Albert Dock which was one of the first in the world to have warehouses right at the waters edge, allowing ships to berth at high tide, with hydraulic machinery to ease unloading straight into the warehouse. In addition, the warehouses were classed as 'bonded' warehouses, which meant that customs dues were not paid when cargo moved from between boat to quay. Instead they were paid when stock was moved out of the warehouse, so further decreasing the time a ship needed to wait in port.
However this was just one of his achievements as, during this period of thirty-seven years, the whole of the Liverpool Docks, with the exception of the Prince's Dock, had been built, rebuilt, deepened, or altered and it is to the Hartley family, father and son, that the entire honour is due of designing, superintending, and carrying out this vast amount of engineering work. With the exception of the excavations, nearly the whole of the dock-extensions were executed by workmen under their immediate direction. The Liverpool docks built under his direction were the Clarence, Brunswick, Waterloo, Victoria, Trafalgar, Albert, Canning Half-tide, Salisbury, Collingwood, Stanley, Nelson, Bramley-Moore, Wellington, Wellington Half-tide, Huskisson and Canada Docks. Canada Dock, opened in 1859, when Canada was Britain’s major source of timber, was the last dock designed and built by Jesse Hartley.
Having spent nearly half his life working in Liverpool, Jesse Hartley died at home in Bootle on the 24th of August 1860 and was buried under a plain granite headstone at St Mary's, Bootle.
see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/01/a-liverpool-exemplar-ethel-austin.html
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