The Reeves Family and the Industrial Side of Totnes

The tourists who lean on the rail at Steamer Quay watching swans drift past the boatyards may not realise that they are looking at what was, for most of the 20th century, the busiest industrial corner of Totnes. The buildings along the east bank of the Dart between the town bridge and the Steam Packet inn were the Reeves timber yard, the largest single employer in the town and the reason Totnes appeared in the shipping registers of Helsinki and Riga as a regular destination.

A family business begins

The firm of F J Reeves was founded around 1890 by Frederick John Reeves as a small builders’ merchants and timber importing business. The choice of Totnes was deliberate. The Dart could carry seagoing vessels up to the town quay, the railway from Newton Abbot ran into Totnes station within walking distance, and the South Hams was full of building work waiting for cheap sawn timber. The first shipload of imported timber, brought directly from Russia, was offloaded at Totnes in 1897.

Within a decade the business was the largest of its kind on the river. By 1891 the firm employed around 200 staff and was importing timber from Sweden, Latvia, Poland, Finland and Russia. The choice of trading partners was unusual for a small Devon town. Most local builders bought through Plymouth or Bristol. Reeves cut out the middleman by chartering its own ships.

The next generation

The founder’s two eldest sons joined the firm in the post-war years, Arthur Reeves in 1917 straight from school and George Reeves in 1923. Both became partners within a few years. The shift in management style was visible on the river. The brothers expanded the wharves downstream of the Steam Packet inn, installed cranes and steam-powered saws, and laid down storage yards capable of seasoning timber on a scale that local mills could not match.

The Bres Line connection

One of the long-running shipping arrangements that made the business viable was with the Bres Line, a Danish company specialising in Baltic timber traffic. Bres Line vessels were built with reinforced hulls to operate in pack ice off the Finnish coast, and the same strong construction allowed them to handle the Dart’s awkward tides and shifting sandbanks. For decades the Bres flag was a familiar sight at the Totnes wharves.

The war years

The Second World War transformed the yard. Reeves diversified into the supply of English-grown timber for war work, and the wharves became a small but significant centre for minesweeper construction. Around 23 wooden minesweepers were built on the Dart during the war, drawing on Reeves’s stockpiles of seasoned timber and its skilled workforce. At the peak of wartime production some 1,000 people worked at the yard, on the wharves, or in the satellite sawmills the firm operated up the river.

Wooden minesweepers were a specialist craft. Iron and steel hulls triggered magnetic mines. The Royal Navy needed shallow-draught wooden vessels capable of pulling acoustic and magnetic sweeps, and the Dart yards turned out a steady stream of them. The work was hard and the timetable unforgiving. Crews of shipwrights, many of them women drafted in after 1941, worked in open sheds in all weathers.

Baltic Wharf and the post-war years

After the war the imports resumed and the business reorganised. In the early 1960s the firm developed the wood yards downstream of the Steam Packet into a new facility called Baltic Wharf. The name was both a tribute to the trading partners and a statement of intent. Baltic timber was now arriving in larger cargoes on bigger ships, and the upgraded wharves had to handle them.

For three decades Reeves remained the largest employer in Totnes. The yard had its own sirens, its own football team and its own social club. The smell of fresh-sawn pine drifted up Fore Street on a westerly wind. Children growing up in the town in the 1970s remember the rumble of the cranes and the boom of unloading timber as part of the soundtrack of the place.

The closure

The end came in 1995. The company merged with a larger group, and the new owners decided that the operation needed a deeper-water wharf to accept the larger vessels then becoming standard in Baltic trade. The Dart, with its rising and falling tides and limited draft, could no longer compete. The yard closed, the cranes came down, and the site was sold for redevelopment.

What remains

Today Baltic Wharf is a marina and boatyard, with houses, workshops and a yard for yacht refits where the timber sheds once stood. Look closely at the older buildings beside the river and you can still see the steel ties, the reinforced thresholds and the wide doorways that once handled tree-length timber. Kirsten Lavine’s book From Baltic Sea to Baltic Wharf, published locally in the 1990s, is the standard account of the firm and is still available in Totnes Museum’s shop.

It is easy to think of Totnes as a market town that has always been gentle and slow. The Reeves story is a useful corrective. For a hundred years this was a working river that smelled of resin and creosote, with a small Devon town quietly handling cargoes that originated in the forests around the Gulf of Riga.