Gavin Atkin's weblog for the sort of people who like looking inside boat sheds. It's about old boats, traditional boats, boat building, restoration, the sea and the North Kent Coast
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Norfolk’s local ITV station has an interesting scrap of film shot at Horning regatta in 1908. One striking point is that the scene is very different from the one we know today – not least because it’s so devoid of trees.
Dig the steam-powered pleasure boat, elegant racers and smart standing-lug rigged sailing boats, not to mention cruising boats very like the types still sailed in the area today.
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Photo courtesy of the Beale Park Thames Boat Show organisers
Contrasting boats on the water at the Beale Park Thames Boat
Show – an elderly motor cruiser and a Wharram catamaran.
Thanks to boatbuilder Fabian Bush for the photo
A newly discovered Percy Dalton drawing of a Falmouth quay punt
found by the folks at boating booksellers Dalton Young
Earlier today I found myself reflecting that quite a few of the people who contribute to intheboatshed.net are likely to be at the Beale Park Thames Boat Show this weekend. Naturally we’re planning to be there on Saturday and looking forward to meeting as many of them as possible.
I’d encourage any reader who can get there to make the trip as well. For boat building and boat restoration enthusiasts, part of the success of Beale Park is that it’s a show that works on many levels.
Those who admire exquisite craftsmanship will find it, while those who need to be encouraged to build their first simple plywood boat will find that as well.
There are also stalls selling recycled bits of boats and old books, cut-price chandlery, smart bronze bits and pieces, top-quality hardwoods and plywood, sophisticated glues and resins. And then there are the sociable membership organisations. The Eventide Owners, the Dinghy Cruising Association and the rest, are all there to talk with show visitors, and they’re easily interesting enough to make for an interesting conversation.
But on second thoughts perhaps I won’t be able to stand and talk for too long – after all, I’ll be making sure my camera is full of photographs to keep this weblog going through the winter months!
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Gunning punts at the Museum of the Broads. The smaller boat is styled after
a gun punt but is too small for the purpose.
Intending to pick up on another recent theme from Chris Partridge’s Rowing for Pleasure weblog, I took some photos of gunning punts at another of my favourite small boating museums, the splendid Museum of the Broads at Stalham.
So imagine my surprise when I found he has only today put up a series of photos virtually identical to mine. Ah well… Great minds and all that. I trust he won’t be offended if I put mine up also.
The folklorist, antiquarian and scholar Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould lived at Mersea in Essex for ten years, and Hervey Benham quotes Baring-Gould describing the business of gunning like this:
‘At a former period wild-fowl shooting was largely practised by the [Mersea] islanders, who had their punts painted grey… In these shallow boats they lay for many hours at night and contracted both ague and rheumatism. My impression was that generations afflicted with these complaints acquired in the marshes had lowered the physique and mental development of the islanders. When the east wind blew the wild ducks and geese came in flocks near the coast where they were surrounded and shot.’
Call me a pessimist, but I can’t help thinking this tactic of surrounding and shooting the birds must have led to some nasty incidents in which some of the boatmen must also have been injured.
In a way, gunning punts are still used in Norfolk on a regular basis – for they were adopted for racing and developed into the scary Norfolk Punt, a high-powered sailing racing machine still sailed regularly on Barton Broad. But that’s another story that I’d like to tell one day.
PS There’s an interesting postscript to Chris’s Rowing for Pleasure post on gunning here.
