Restoration and repair – Page 79

The effort to take Victorian racing cutter Leila back to sea needs money and help

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Leila needs more repair work than expected

A group caring for a rare National Historic Ships Register-listed 42ft Victorian racing cutter at Southwold are urgently appealing for more manpower and financial help.

Leila was built at Charlton, London in 1892. She’s a striking and unusual yacht: above the waterline she looks very much like a smack, but below the waterline she’s clearly a racing yacht with an impressive 8ft deep keel.

In her early years sailed with the Royal Temple Yacht Club at Ramsgate, and won the Round Britain Race in 1904. From 1961 until a few years ago she was kept at Fisher’s Quay, Great Yarmouth.

When restored and brought up to the relevant Coastguard standards, she will be used for sail training local youngsters, and will again operate from Fisher’s Quay. I hope to visit this weekend and take some more photos.

The Leila Trust has so far raised £50,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, £2000 from the National Maritime Museum and £40,000 from private donations – but are now having to appeal for an extra £30,000 after finding unexpected areas of rot in the hull that have been caused by leaks around iron fittings around the forward beam shelves.

To find out more, and to offer help etc, contact the Leila Trust via their website: http://leila2c.org.

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Turk’s auction – are you missing the small wooden boat bargains of the year?

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These photos come from a viewing of the items being auctioned at Turk’s Boatyard at Chatham on Saturday.

Julie and I went over in the company of a clutch of other boating enthusiasts, and a pleasant, sociable and productive time we had, as you may gather from Chris Partridge’s post about the outing at his Rowing for Pleasure weblog. And yes I did manage to snap up a nice pair of oars and a sign from a hire boat business – as Chris observes, Turk’s are disposing of generations-worth of old-style hardware, models, rigs and who knows what else.

By now, I’d hope that most trad boat enthusiasts who use the Internet regularly are probably aware of the astonishing auction of equipment and craft belonging to the Turk’s business. If not, I’d advise you to quickly take a look at this earlier intheboatshed.net post about the sale, which closes on the 14th April.

Jolly outing though it was, however, I was a little saddened and surprised by how few other people were looking at the lots on Saturday. If this was close to indicating the level of interest in the auction, I thought, the sad end to all this could be that a number of interesting, even historic, craft will be disposed of in some other way, possibly even burned for all I know. But looking at the prices at least some of the boats are attracting that doesn’t now seem so likely – though after seeing the lots I can say for certain that there are still some real bargains to be had.

More old photos of Scoter

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Doug Grierson has sent in some more old photographs that will no doubt delight the large numbers of people who have been following the Scoter story. Thanks Doug!

For more on this famous old bawley-derived yacht that was so admired by Maurice Griffiths and which passed through a long line of owners including artist Colin Grierson and son Doug, click here.

The first image is from a postcard sent by an earlier owner of Scoter to a recipient in Essex in 1907; Doug doesn’t know how or when it was passed to his mother.

The two photos of Scoter from 1994-5 at Woodbridge and Maldon show later coach roof and original windlass and circular fore-hatch; the final item is a scanned image of a water-colour by Colin Grierson dated 1932 showing the rig she had when he bought her in late 1930.

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