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
Mighty stuff filmed by Seth Jones – just look at the huge rigs on those slender Chesapeake Bay log canoe hulls, the youngest of which are still old boats in anyone’s terms.
And the choice of music is so much preferable to the techy-synthy-guitary rock so often used to accompany these things. Surely old boats deserve something at least a little apt? Here we have a graceful old boat treated to a little graceful old music…
My thanks to Chris Brady for letting me know about this tremendous late 1940s herring fisheries documentary made by the government’s Central Office of Information available on YouTube. Don’t let that Orwellian-sounding organisation title put you off though – there’s some great footage here.
Here are a couple of Pathé News clips from long ago showing the famous sideways launch used by Faversham shipbuilders in action. My thanks to my old friend Ian Lawther!
PS While we’re on the subject of Pathé newsreels, reader Ed Maggs has let me know about another Pathé clip shot in 1954 that records the occasion when Lady and Lord Docker entertained some 45 miners on board their yacht, MY Shemara. I’m not at all sure about Lady Docker’s ‘sailor’s hornpipe’ by the way – I think it may owe a little more to ‘Naughty Norah’s’ background as a chorus girl than to that ancient tradition. Read about the scandalous Dockers here and here, though perhaps you might think reading about Shemara here and here might be more seemly. She’s just been done up and relaunched, and is described as a ‘classic superyacht’.
I gather MY Shemara had a distinguised career during WWII, when she was requisitioned and used as an anti-submarine training ship.
Thanks Ed!