By the end of the 1960s, the Kent port of Folkestone had fallen well behind nearby Dover in both style and volume of cross-channel traffic. Folkestone still lacked a linkspan for use by the new car ferries, and clung solely to the age-old passenger-only operations. In the summer of 1970 however, the British Railways Board, owners of the port and operators of the ships which used it, placed an order for a pair of new ships with the naval dockyard in Brest, France. The ships were to be specifically built with Folkestone in mind, although they would also serve Dover, and the port of Folkestone itself would receive the much-awaited upgrading to car ferry service. The ships, scheduled for delivery in the summer of 1972, received the names Hengist and Horsa.
Whilst the Hengist and Horsa were built for the short-sea routes from Dover and Folkestone, they were also developed with possible alternative future use in mind. With the Channel Tunnel scheduled to be built within the first decade of their careers, British Rail wanted some flexibility to redeploy their new vessels when/if the ferries were displaced from Dover Strait traffic. The result was that the new ships were built with possible transfer to the Heysham-Belfast route in mind. They came equipped with a stern docking bridge, to enable the traditional stern-first navigation into Heysham harbour, and an unusual twin-funnel casing arrangement on their car decks. This latter feature (as explained in Don Ripley and Tony Rogan's book, Designing Ships for Sealink) was so that the upper car deck outside of the casings could be converted to passenger lounges in use out of Heysham, leaving space for just one level of cars below, whilst the centre section of the vessel remained full height for the continued transportation of lorries/coaches.
Almost inevitably, the Channel Tunnel did not materialise until well after the ships left Sealink service, but it cast a shadow over their entire UK careers, from planning to retirement. In between times, the vessels lost the stern bridge in a thorough post-privatisation refit in 1986 - since the bridge was little used, the area it occupied was opened up for passenger use. Elsewhere the forward motorists' lounge emerged as the Orient Express Lounge, with seating to match that on the train whose passengers used the ships en route to Paris and beyond. The waiter-service restaurant disappeared, with the space used for more shops; this reflected Sealink style at the time with self-service "free flow" restaurants the order of the day.
Hengist had a couple of notable incidents in her Sealink career. In April 1987, not long after the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, she sank a French trawler as she swung upon departure from Boulogne. Three members of the trawler crew were killed. Six months later, on the night of the 'Great Storm' that hit southern England, Hengist was forced to put to sea where the waves almost capsized her. Losing electrical power, the ship drifted helplessly onto the beach where she was badly damaged and holed. She remained beached for nearly a week, and repairs took well into the next January to complete.
Hengist remained on the Dover Strait, in later years specifically on Folkestone-Boulogne, right until the bitter end. After the sale of Sealink British Ferries to Stena Line in 1990, the ship gained the amended Stena Hengist name whilst the company became Sealink Stena Line. The Folkestone-Boulogne route finally succumbed in December 1991, with little prospect of further use for the ship within the Sealink Stena group. And whilst relief work at Holyhead, Fishguard and Stranraer followed, the inevitable sale to Greece eventually happened in March 1992. |
