History – Page 157 – intheboatshed.net

Your chance to object to the developers’ plans for Standard Quay – there are just a few days left

This is reposted because the deadline for objecting to the plans to gentrify Standard Quay has been put back – there is still time for intheboatshed.net readers to make a difference!

How would you feel, if I told you someone wants to plonk a restaurant right in the middle of the site shown in this photo – and that this would likely be the first step in a redevelopment of the area that could include more restos and cafes, and maybe housing?

Wherever this happens, working boats, sailing barges and the people who work on them come under pressure and generally have to leave. It’s been a blight all round our coast, and most of the boaty working folk have felt driven to leave Faversham’s Standard Quay already.

If like me you feel the planning authorities should take steps to save this historic old quay and return it to its old use as a boatyard and busy wharf, we have just a few days to place our objections to the restaurant plan. Read the background here.

To do so, go to the website www.ukplanning.com, search for Swale Borough Council, then go to the applications and use the search box to hunt down applications applying to Standard Quay. There are just a few days left to lodge your reasons for objecting to the proposed development.

I guess we’ll all have our own objections, and that they will become obvious from reading the documentation. My guess is that some intheboatshed readers might include the planned changes to Building no 1 itself, and perhaps the undeniable fact that establishing a restaurant at this site will be the end of hopes that Standard Quay will again be bustling with traditional craft – which it was until not long ago, before established marine businesses left in a hurry.

Rare Broads One Design ‘Brown Boat’ for sale

Original 100-year old Broads One Design (or Brown Boat) Heron (number 13) is for sale after her owner suffered an accident that limits his mobility.

She is gaff rigged and is 23ft long with a 5ft beam, with a fixed keel and requires one metre depth of water. She was fully refurbished a few years ago, and has been very recently re-varnished and anti-fouled, and has recent sails made by made by Jeckells.

There’s a history of the class here, and I gather there’s a video showing Heron sailing somewhere on the Internet, although I haven’t found it.

The asking price of £8,500.00 includes a recently overhauled four wheeled road trailer. For information email me at gmatkin@gmail.com and I will forward the message.

The Northfleet disaster – who drowned and who was saved, and who was Mr Braud?

The portraits at the bottom of this page are the Captain of the Northfleet and his wife, who are both mentioned in the song. I don’t yet know the significance of Mr Braud (or ‘Brand’ – see comments) pictured at the top

I’ve been interested in the story of the loss of the emigrant ship Northfleet off Dungeness ever since I first heard Sussex fisherman Johnny Doughty sing his song The Wreck of the Northfleet way back in the early 1980s. Here’s the song as I learned it from him.

It was an event that lodged in the minds of the people of Kent, partly because of its horror so close to shore, partly because of the mystery surrounding the identify of the ‘big and foreign vessel that crashed into her timbered sides’ and partly because of the stories survivors had to tell about the Captain shooting a man who tried to save himself ahead of the women and children, and about how the Master’s lovely young wife chose to go down with her husband.

Or are those stories made up by some hack in order to sell the printed ballad on the streets?

This account tells the story:

‘On the 22nd January 1873, the emigrant ship Northfleet, while riding at anchor in Dungeness Roads, was run down by a large steamer which proceeded on her way. Panic broke out on board, the night was pitch black and only two boats got away in the fight to get aboard. Mary [a fishing lugger] was anchored off Dungeness and her master, George Pout, saw the distress rockets, hove up and bore away, narrowly missing one of the lifeboats, deep laden with 34 people and sinking, no one had thought of putting in the plug. After taking all on board the lugger went on, but found nothing. Northfleet had sunk with the loss of 327 lives. Later the Spanish [ship] Murillo was identified as the guilty steamship.’

For more on the Northfleet story including a much fuller account and the song, click here and page back through the previous posts.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: