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Blacktoft Jetty

Looking west along the north bank of the River Ouse near Pier House, Blacktoft.

The original 470ft long jetty was built between 1873 and 1881 by the Aire & Calder Navigation Company to provide a stopover for those vessels which required two high tides to travel from Hull to Goole. It was used by the paddle steamers of the Humber Steam Packet Service until about 1920, and later the local Hope & Anchor pub became well known to foreign sailors from as far away as Copenhagen and St Petersburg. During the second world war the infamous propagandist Lord Haw Haw announced that "Blacktoft docks have been bombed" when presumably he meant Hull, although Hull was in fact getting hit all the time as enemy aircraft frequently dropped unused payloads on the city when returning from raids further west.

In 1947 in his book "English Rivers", John Rogers described Blacktoft as follows: "The country on either side is remote and lonely. The expanse of flat fields is broken only by occasional hamlets, hardly touched by road or rail. The few cottages at Blacktoft are so sequestered that a stranger is stared at in astonishment. To laze at Blacktoft jetty, gazing across the wide expanse of river, with Trent Falls barely visible on the opposite side, is to feel strangely remote from men".

Part of the old wooden jetty was replaced by a more modern one in 1956. The remains of the "Old Blacktoft Pier" are still marked on O/S maps but have now gone.