P and A Campbell
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P & A Campbell Ltd of Bristol with its White Funnel Fleet became the dominant excursion-steamer operator in the Bristol Channel by the 1890's.
The White Funnel Fleet of the Bristol-based company of P & A Campbell Ltd had its origins as a purely excursion-steamer business trading in the Bristol Channel without any particular railway interests or involvement. The Campbell brothers saw how their rival Cardiff-based company Edwards, Robertson developed valuable links between its Yellow Funnel Fleet and the powerful Taff Vale Railway for through ticketing between South Wales valleys towns and resorts in Devon and Somerset, via Cardiff and Penarth. But by the late 1890s the White Funnel Fleet of P & A Campbell Ltd had taken over the vessels of its Cardiff-based competitors, and the supremacy of the Bristol ships was clear to see.
The Barry Railway Company was very much a company created to serve a docks complex for the export of coal. Passenger train operations were secondary to the primary purpose of moving minerals traffic down from the valleys. The company had succeeded in gaining access to numerous valleys already served by other railways in order to tap the abundant minerals traffics of the South Wales coalfield for export through its large new Barry Docks.
Perhaps it was only natural that the Barry interests should seek to challenge those that were perceived as threatening. As Barry Docks complex had taken shape, it was a relatively straightforward matter to extend passenger railway operations from Barry across to Barry Island for leisure traffic, and then to push further through tunnel to what was to become Barry Pier station, immediately adjacent to the main entrance lock to Barry Docks.
Although the Barry Railway Company thought in terms of controlling its own steamship operations from the outset, it was realised that this would meet with opposition from Campbell's at Bristol with its large fleet, and so the Barry Company initially settled for an alliance where by the White Funnel Fleet of steamers served Barry Pier when it opened in 1899.
But it was to be an uneasy alliance, and so the point was soon reached where the Barry Company would feel obliged to go it alone. The struggle that followed was to be both litigious and complicated, as both companies fought from 1905 to 1910 to compete. In 1912, the Barry Railway Company sold it's remaining three Red Funnel Paddle Steamer's to P & A Campbell. The service continued under Campbell's control very well until post World War, as the motor car over took the Paddle Steamer service. The service finally ended in the 1970s, after services at Barry Pier had dwindled and were finally given up, and the pontoon dismantled
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