Vaughan

Last May?? Nothing current to worry about then? Regarding all girl groups on boats I remember my mother saying they were always by far the worst, since they would meet up with all boy groups on other boats as soon as they got to Yarmouth Yacht Station and by the time they brought the boat back at the end of the week, there would be hardly any of the bed-linen left on their boat (having been transferred to the boys' boat) and not very much of the crockery and cutlery either! All girl groups are very well known in the business as far more irresponsible than all male groups. Remember Peter Sellers : "Now tell me, headmaster, how do you segregate the sexes?" " Well if you must know, I go round with a crowbar and I prise them apart." Can't we enjoy this holiday season, with what few customers the Broads has still managed to attract, in what clearly appears to be the start of a recession, without raising the "issue" of something that happened last May?

More like partridge, I would think.

That became the new name for N.H.Banham of Horning, before Percivals bought the yard. I would guess that list at sometime in the late 50s. Some yards got an awful lot bigger after that.

Jimmy Gedge, on the yard at Womack.

It was called Womack Boats and owned by a Mrs Golling, who ran the shop on the front. We changed the trading name to Womack Cruisers, so as to make a fresh business start. We ran the shop for a couple of years but it became far too much trouble for pretty well no profit. If you run a small shop you have to be there, behind the counter, all day and you can't do that if you are trying to run a boatyard as well. I believe the Gedge family had connections with the yard as it had originally been a wherry yard. The slipway was very long and shallow angled, designed for hauling out wherries and there was the remains of a wherry sticking up out of the grass in a small cut beside the bungalow. Jimmy Gedge said his family had built her but I forget her name, now. Jimmy was a lovely man; a real old wherryman who came to help out on the yard on Saturdays if we had had any damage done. At the end of the day I would always ask him to come and join us for a drink in the bungalow before he went home and he would reply : "You're a gentleman, sir and so's your wife!"

They were indeed Welles, with two e's and they did funerals as well. Their yard was on Chapelfield Rd (before they dualled it) close to St Stephens roundabout and opposite the big Rountree Mackintosh factory, which has now become the Chapelfield Mall.

While I was negotiating to start up my yard at Womack, in 1976, I took a temporary job driving traditional "black cabs" for Welles Taxis in Norwich. Did that for 6 months and thoroughly enjoyed it. At that time there was still a City bye-law which had not been repealed, which said that "cabs plying for hire" had to carry a bale of hay and a bucket of water for the horse.

This is great stuff Dave and I certainly agree about lamination! I would also imagine that big lumps of oak may not be as well seasoned now, as they used to be. I also remember that one of the worst, but most important jobs, was drilling the hole through the keel for the prop shaft tube. This was done with a big hand auger with a shaft about 8ft long. Everyone took turns to stand there and wind it in for hours until it came through. After this, a length of string was passed up the middle of the tube and tensioned in place, so that the boatbuilders knew exactly where to fit the engine beds amidships. There was also a plumb line that hung down from the stem head to about an inch off the ground, as a regular check that everything was still upright! An awful lot of it was done "by eye" in those days. Perhaps it still is now?

Hearts had a regular customer who took a week's winter holiday in a guest house in Thorpe, so that he could join us in the boat sheds and paint the boat that he had already booked for the next season. Usually one of the 4 berths - the Five or Six of Hearts. He did this every year for about six or seven years. I think he must have been our only customer to be given a discount, in those days! We also had regular groups of Sea Scouts, hiring 4 or 5 boats for a week in the late season. They went off armed with paint and varnish and were always proud to bring the boats back looking better than they did before.

I haven't got any more I am afraid. In fact, that photo was posed specially for an article in the Motor Boat and Yachting magazine. Building would start after Whitsun, when the hire fleet were out and stop in October, when the fleet was hauled up into the sheds for maintenance. The finished boat would normally be offered for hire to Blakes in June the following year. The next, and last wooden hull, that they built was Heart-Throb in 1959 and I remember my father saying that she cost £7000 to build, which he said was far too much and would take 9 years on hire to recover the cost. These were the days long before the word "inflation" was invented, but it was having its effect, all the same!

So they really are Shite-hawks, after all?

This question has just been raised in The House by Norman Baker, MP for North Norfolk, during PMQs. He questioned how the safety of seagulls could be given priority over those on holiday on the Broads who, when in some distress, may find themselves out of contact with emergency services. As I imagine this new mast is probably sited somewhere in the region of the old RAF early warning radar station at Neatishead, I wonder what the reaction would have been, during the Cold War, if a nest of seagulls had threatened our ability to defend the country against incoming ballistic missiles. I imagine the standard NATO long round .762 self-loading army rifle would have proved effective. If not, even a .22 gamekeeper's rook rifle? And another question : If seagulls are now nesting so far inland as Horning, presumably this will now be blamed on Climate Change?

Bizarre.

A great project and I congratulate you for taking it on. It will be very interesting for us all to see how it progresses. If it's any help, here is the cruiser "Heartbeat" being built in the sheds in Thorpe in 1957. Believe it or not, the whole affair is held up straight by the wooden battens screwed to the boatshed roof beams. I remember the keel and stem post being dressed out by hand on the floor, with an adze, and all the sets of hardboard templates, so that more boats could be built of the same class. In fact, she was the second one. On the floor at left is one of the formers for steaming the mainframes. She turned out like this :

Thanks very much for posting. Most interesting.

I don't know how to transfer posts from one thread to another, so I offer this one in support of the discussion on the "BA or RSPB?" thread about living on Broads boats and the persecution that they nowadays suffer. It was written by me on Christmas morning in 2015, shortly after I joined the forum and was re-posted by my late good friend JillR, who, we might remember, was also chairman of the Residential Boat Owners' National Federation. This was at the time when she and and I, among many other protesters, had successfully won a 10 year battle against the BA persecution of those who lived on boats moored on the old Hearts boatyard on the island in Thorpe. We won that battle but were sadly later unable to do the same for those in Jenners Basin, at the other end of the island. I offer it here for what it may be worth, in the light of the apparent continued persecution, by the BA and other institutions, of those who carry on a way of life that has been traditional and commonplace here for hundreds of years.

I think they prefer to call it "working with partners".

Well nobody if they dont follow instructions I guess. In reply to SwanR's defence of day boat hirers, I accept and applaud her pleasure in the responsible hire of a boat for a day's cruise. Many others do the same and I have done myself. All the same I think OldBerkshireBoys's comment above is a lot nearer to the ""norm". Day trip hirers of day launches are not famous for doing what they are told.

If you are accusing me of stabbing a boatyard in the back, most especially on the southern rivers, I shall not report your post as was done to me yesterday but I will take the opportunity to reply: The boat hire agencies have been making very serious attempts to encourage a "levelling up" to the south rivers ever since the late 50s and Martin Broom was one of the strongest exponents of it. My father (as chairman of Blakes) was one of those who strongly supported the Jenners development on Thorpe island which, especially with its connections to Herbert Woods and Southgates, was designed to do exactly that. Desmond Truman of Oulton Broad (as chairman of the River Commissioners) was also totally in favour. If it were not for initial problems of finance and cash flow, that operation could well be still there and still successful today. Imagine a week's one-way cruise between Potter Heigham and Thorpe, both of which had railway stations in those days. Excuse me but I do not need to be lectured in this fashion about the need to promote the south rivers. We are not talking just about day boats but electric day boats. In other words, the maritime equivalent of a golf course caddy cart. If you seriously think it is a good idea to let electric boats out on the tidal Yare with what we all know (by definition of a day boat) are totally ignorant and amateur crews, then your experience of the subject, whatever that may be, is telling you something very different from mine.

I am told that a remark I made about these electric day boats has perhaps been mis-understood. I have spent my entire career in the management of hire fleets with the responsibility for the safety of our customers hanging over me like the Sword of Damocles. If these boats are indeed equipped to safely navigate from Brundall to Reedham and back against adverse conditions of tide and wind - all very well. In which case they will be at least twice as powerful as anything I have seen on hire so far, both on the Broads and many other waterways. I have seen them being towed home, with their disconsolate clients sitting in them, on very many occasions. They are all very well in the quiet waters of Wroxham or Potter but the Yare is a different matter.

I thoroughly agree. I also had no idea that the RSPB are claiming some sort of control over Sutton Broad. Their ever increasing influence in the Broads area is becoming rather sinister.

It is an awfully long, lonely struggle home, up Train Reach from Strumshaw Pump. The tide getting stronger and the battery getting lower, with every minute that passes. In the end you are not going forwards any more and just have to hang on to a tree on the bank, in what seems like the middle of nowhere. Anyone who has been in the Yare Navigation Race knows what it is like but they are all experienced yachtsmen, not innocent day trippers just off a train from Gt Yarmouth.

Who's going to stop them? I having a feeling their tow boat will be busy. Is there a phone signal at Hardley Cross, by the way?

I recognise your reference to France as a "Crie de Coeur" but I would suggest something from the Bible, such as The Acts, 26 : 14. And when we were all fallen to the earth I heard a voice speaking unto me and saying . . . . . . why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

Time will tell if they can make it back from Cantley or Reedham against the ebb tide.