A special exhibition at the Teign Heritage Centre is celebrating the people and work of the Morgan Giles shipyard from 1921 to 1968.
The exhibition will be held at the Teign Heritage Centre from Friday 8th March to Friday 5th April 10am to 4.30pm from Tuesdays to Saturdays.
On display will be some Morgan Giles plans including some from pre-1914 days, racing yachts in the ‘20s and‘30s, and luxury motor cruisers of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Other items will be specialist craftsmen’s tools, archive photographs, models and oral histories. There will be a featured display about the Lady Cable built in 1923, and other important boats, such as the Hispania yacht built for the King of Spain.
On Saturday 23rd March at 11am there will also be a free talk about the Lady Cable from Lyn Yeoman of the Lady Cable Trust. The Lady Cable is a pleasure boat that went to Dunkirk and was apparently the last small boat to leave the beaches.
Morgan Giles were internationally famous for the elegant design of their boats and very high quality of workmanship, having employed highly skilled craftsmen, shipwrights, engineers, joiners and riggers, many of whom are remembered in Teignmouth today.
For visitor details please see the Teign Heritage website www.teignheritage.org.uk or phone 01626 777041.
I’m grateful to the Boat Building Academy folks for letting me know this was going on. Never ones to miss an opportunity (good for them) they added that BBA student Benjamin Charny is currently building a Morgan Giles-designed clinker-built dinghy – there’s a photographic record of the boat going together here.
Benjamin’s project was recently mentioned by a piece in the Western Morning News: ‘In another corner Benjamin was making a tiny rowing boat: ”It’s eight foot long and I have taken it from a West country design by Morgan Giles. He built the original in the 1930s for his kids and I got the lines from the Falmouth Maritime Museum.
”This will be the only copy around. I have loved doing it.”
