The first scheduled steam packet service between West Wales and Ireland can be traced to back the year 1824. It was in that year that the Post Office replaced its sailing packets on the Milford Haven to Waterford run with steamships. The…

Pembroke Dock (Doc Penfro) and adjacent Milford Haven (Aberdaugleddau) both developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from small village settlements, Paterstown and Hubberstown, on the banks of the Cleddau river. The vast natural harbour…

The gun tower in Front Street, Pembroke Dock, is commonly referred to as the 'Martello tower'. However, when it was built it was known as a Cambridge Gun Tower. Emperor Louis Napoleon III was building a Second Empire of France in the 1840's, and was…

A cold dark night in December 1920 saw the most celebrated of the Fishguard’s many lifeboat rescues. The boat in question was Charterhouse, funded by the school of that name and presented to the RNLI station in 1908. The boat was built for rough…

'Pembroke Dock' is an abbreviation of 'Pembroke Dockyard', the new name given to the location in 1817. The Royal Navy had built the dockyard and adjacent town three years earlier in 1814, initially calling it 'Pater Yard'. The sole purpose of the…

A local story in Pembroke Dock concerns the launch of HMS Caesar, planned for July 21, 1853. The ship was a wooden two decker, screw propelled ship of ninety-one guns. As was the custom on launch days all the residents of Pembroke Dock would flock…

In 1857, Pembroke Dock was the setting for the remarkable climax of the haunting of the HMS Asp which, at the time, was used as a surveying vessel in the Royal Navy under the command of one Captain George Manley Alldridge (1815–1905). Over the…

Until the mid-nineteenth century, Japan was a feudal state governed by a network of powerful families and warlords led by its Shogun, isolated from the rest of the world. At that point, there was a growing realisation that China and Russia were…

A current ferry port and a former naval dockyard isn’t the first place you might think about visiting if you were interested in the history and heritage of flying. But Pembroke Dock possesses two important and related claims to fame when it comes to…