XI. THE GUILFORD ADMINISTRATION.
Lord North (who later succeeded his father as the Earl of Ciuilford), being a Kentisli nobleman, ought to have been specially fitted to handle the team of Kentish gentlemen who were the Harbour Commissioners when he held the office of Lord Warden. He started very well. Like most of his predecessors, he attempted to solve the problem of the Harbour bar ; and eventually the Board decided, as previous Boards had done, that they must call in some experienced engineer to give them advice. Mr. Nickalls, an engineer of some note, was asked to give his advice. He prepared a report, which he presented in 1783, pointing out that, apart from the bar, which occasionally obstructed the Harbour entrance, the Port, as a place for receiving large vessels and ships of war, was defective owing to there being but 10 feet 6 inches of water on the apron in front of the basin entrance at neap tides, and that, in effect, was reduced to nine feet l)y the sill of the basin gates being laid ci;,diteen inches higher than it should have been. This shallowness of the Harbour also rendered the quantity of backwater so small that, after allowing for much that leaked through the works, there was not enough to remove the bar and keep the entrance between the pierheads clear. He also said that the Pent was so narrow at the upper end and so .shallow that it did not contain, when fully charged, more than 47,100 tons of water, which, when united with that in the basin, was totally inadequate to remove the bar at neap tides. To remedy these defects, Mr. Nickalls proposed increasing the area of the Great Pent to thirteen and a half acres, adding about four feet to its depth, and deepening the basin, giving, in the latter, from seventeen feet to twenty-four feet of water. He proposed to extend the pier-heads two hundred feet further to sea, which he expected would prevent the shingle entering the Harbour ; but. to provide for the worst, he proposed to have canals and sluices in the South Pier-head to operate directly on the bar. as well as sluice-gates, and sluicing canals to cleanse every part of the Harbour, the Pent, the basin, and the tidal harbour, so as to avoid the very heavy expense that had to be occasionally iiuurred to remove by manual laljour the mud that was brought into the Harbour by the river. He was of opinion that if the various parts of the Harbour were deepened, as he suggested, the backwater would be sufficient to keep the Harbour clear at all times. This scheme, in its entirety, was estimated to cost £6o,ooo; but, although there was not suflicicnt money available to carry it out, Mr. Xirkalls was cmjjloyed to do some portion of the work. He re-faced the lower Cros.swall on both sides with stone, making stone sluices in it ; and he rebuilt about a hundred feet of the basin wharves with .stone, carrying the walls down eight feet below liie bottom with a view to deepening the basin as he proposed. He, however, was n(3t permitted to go so far as that, but he removed a great c|uantity of mud from the basin and wideiied the gates into the Pent as well as lowering the sill so as to admit larger vessels. He was not permitted to carry his improvements any further, because he is said to have always exi:eeded his estimates of the cost and of the time required to carry out works, for which reasons the Commissioners dispensed with his services after he had been employed about eight years.