Category: Sailing ships

Southwold’s Sailor’s Reading Room

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southwold, sailors, reading room, models, photos, fishermen, coastguards, museum, boats, ships, beach boats, harbour

southwold, sailors, reading room, models, photos, fishermen, coastguards, museum, boats, ships, beach boats, harbour southwold, sailors, reading room, models, photos, fishermen, coastguards, museum, boats, ships, beach boats, harbour

southwold, sailors, reading room, models, photos, fishermen, coastguards, museum, boats, ships, beach boats, harbour southwold, sailors, reading room, models, photos, fishermen, coastguards, museum, boats, ships, beach boats, harbour

southwold, sailors, reading room, models, photos, fishermen, coastguards, museum, boats, ships, beach boats, harbour

Southwold’s famous Sailor’s Reading Room was built in 1864 in memory of a Captain Rayley, who had been an officer at the Battle of Trafalgar, and had died the previous year.

I knew the building as a boy and remember thinking it was as fabulous then as I think it is now. It really hasn’t changed in close to 50 years, and the only sadness is that photography is forbidden and I can’t show you how splendid it really is.

What I can say without fear of contradiction is that the old reading room is packed with a huge variety of treasures, including photos, models and other memorabilia of the local fishermen, sailors and coastguards of years gone by.

Often generations of brothers, fathers, sons and cousins worked at these trades at the same time, and because they so often bore the same name they were often given colourful nicknames – I particularly like the name of one bearded old salt whose photo appears on the Reading Room’s walls.  He must have gloried in his handle of ‘Crikey’ Rogers!

Of course, many of them were also lifeboatmen, and since we’ve been to the old town recently in a day or two thanks to some great local friends I’ll add some photos of the restored local lifeboat now on show in a new home near the beach, and some shots from the harbour – including the wonderful Leila. Make sure you come back!

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More photographs from Hastings: statues and portraits of historical celebrities

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francis drake, nelson, cloudesley, shovell, admiral, hastings, photographs, monuments, house

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The house that once belonged to Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s mum

Also in Hastings we found this extraordinary house. Perhaps the last time I walked along this road I failed to make the obvious connection, but this time I didn’t fail to make it and took the shots that duty required.

The story of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell is that he happened to be in charge when a large but off-course portion of the British Navy hit the Scilly Isles instead of sailing safely up the English Channel, as had been expected.

It was a miserable end to what must previously been a glittering career full of successful heroics – but it wasn’t in vain because the historians say that the renewed interest in navigation that followed led to the development of the chronometer.

Sir Cloudesley’s body was found washed up on a Scilly Isles beach, and he is now commemorated in Westminster Abbey by a monument made by the legendary Grinling Gibbons, no less.

Hastings seems to be keen on its big-name maritime heroes; within a quarter of a mile of the Shovell house, we came upon these reminders of Sir Francis Drake and Admiral Lord Nelson.

francis drake, nelson, cloudesley, shovell, admiral, hastings, photographs, monuments, house francis drake, nelson, cloudesley, shovell, admiral, hastings, photographs, monuments, house

Stan Hugill describes Sailortown

Sailortown, Stan Hugill, Shanties, sailors, sailing ships, sea songs, sex, religion, drink, cape horn, paradise street, ratcliffe highway, sex, religion, drink

Sailortown is Stan Hugill’s book describing the sailor’s life when on land. A great shanty scholar, he felt driven to write it following publication of his important work Shanties from the Seven Seas; his motive was to explain how it comes to be that while the shore sea song writer uses many ‘bounding billows’ , ‘flowing seas’ and ‘raging mains’, genuine sailors’ songs concentrate instead on the delights and often dangers of being a sailor ashore.

These two quotations from come from the preface to Sailortown. The first answer’s Hugill’s purpose in writing the book:

‘The shantyman, being by nature somewhat of a philosopher, realized that the arduous labour of ship-board work and the terrors of the inclement weather were things too real and monotonous to be sung about. He preferred to conjure up the shore delights of chasing a bit o’skirt, with stuns’ls flying alow and aloft, down Liverpool’s Paradise Street, or those of knocking back the hard stuff in a tippling house, in tow with dubious frilly company, somewhere along the Ratcliffe Highway. that was sure-fired  stuff guaranteed to appeal to a half-frozen, underfed, and sex-starved bunch of foremast hands… “Give us the one about Madame Gashee!” would be the shout, and the shantyman would, in a hurricane stanza, take them to the dives and delights of Callao.‘

The second describes a place more like a kind of hell than a heaven:

‘Sailortown was a world in, but not of, that of the landsman. It was a world of sordid pleasure, unlimited vice and lashings of booze, but a dangerous place too. The pseudo-sailor songs singing of the sailor being ‘snug and safe ashore’ or ‘safe at last, the bar is past’ were wrong, you know. A sailor ashore was anything but safe. He was far safer at sea, hanging on by his eyebrows and toenails to an upper tops’l yard, reefing sail in a Cape Horn snifter, than he was in Sailortown, where every boarding-house master, harpy, pub hanger-on, and wharf-rat was awaiting to skin or slug him, and where his useless corpse was often to be found, knife between the shoulder-blades, lying sprawled in some dark, dank alley, or coiled obscenely around a tide-washed barnacled pile.

‘Sailors in the old days were of an adventurous disposition. Foot-loose men, bachelors by choice, shore likers, women-likers, booze-likers, they were wonderful men at sea, who often deteriorated ashore. And, strangely enough, as Alan Villiers has pointed out, they were God-fearing men. On my first voyage as a boy I sat down to eat my hash with my hat on. An aged, hawk-faced, slightly hump-backed Horn-toughened Irish shellback sent my hat a-flying, following its removal with a hefty clout around my earhole, and remarking at the same time, ‘Doff your hat sonny an’ ‘onour yer Maker!’ And expression I have never forgotten.‘