Vaughan

If I were to describe a trip down the Yare, with the falling tide, starting at first light on Surlingham Broad and going down river through the bustle of Reedham Bridge and then on to the windswept expanse of the Breydon marshes, I would think of something on the lines of Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey, from Wagner's opera Gotterdammerung. The French horn solo could almost be imagined as a bittern, booming in the reeds. I invite members to look it up on Youtube, and see what you think.

This has to do with EC regulations, which require a manual bilge pump for certain categories. On the waterways in France, we have negotiated an exclusion from this.

But not in the driver's own sandwich lunch, Surely?? It was dairy products as well, it seems, as the driver had spread some butter on his bread.

So this is the first real week of work for truckers after the holidays and I see that the petty nonsense has started already. Truckers coming into Holland are having their sandwich lunches confiscated, as they are bringing cooked meat into the EU. I was once held up by a customs officer in Ramsgate, as I had brought back a packet of 5 Dutch Schimmelpenick cigarillos, for a friend of mine in Norfolk. The officer claimed they were cigars and not cigarillos. He actually drove away in his car and came back with a little set of balance weights, with which he weighed them and then wanted to charge me 3 times what I had paid, in duty. And all this at one o'clock in the morning. I suggested that either he could smoke them himself or he could always just throw them in the harbour, and drove off. As I had declared them, there was nothing he could do to me. I am afraid it looks like we are going have to put up with all this sort of stupid nonsense, all over again.

I blame Len Funnel!

Here is the engine in the King of Hearts and you can just see the steering shaft, running along just in front of the chine. That tank in the corner, by the way, is an early homemade version of heat exchange cooling.

I think it is but not quite certain. If so, it has been converted, with a coil and distributor instead of the magneto.

I think I may be wrong there! I have been having another look and I think the boat (with a Y registration no) shown at 4mins 50s is a Jenners "Amethst" class, which were named after the WW2 Black Swan class RN Frigates. I was there at the big ceremony in Thorpe when Amethst was launched by Cmdr J.S.Kerans, who commanded the original H.M.S. Amethyst during the famous "Yangtse Incident". I also notice that the film was produced by G.L. Ward and the opening shots look to me, very much like the grounds of the Old Hall in Thorpe, where Alf Ward and his family used to live. The first shots in the film are of a Wards cruiser. At 9:23 the launching of the cruiser Pauline shows the "greasy ways" used on the slipways and the the pin through the "snore hole" for the winch wire. I think one of the men shown there, may be a young Mike Fuller! At 11:35 we see the great design of the folding wheelhouse canopy, which came down in stages, but all operated by one man! Most interesting for me is at 12:08 where they lift the engine hatch and we get a good view of a Morris Navigator petrol engine. You don't often see photos of these, but they were the engine that was most used in Broads hire boats after the War. This one has been modernised with a dynamo, and a starter motor. Before that, they were hand cranked and the only electrics in the whole boat came from the magneto, which fed the spark plugs. Lighting was by gimballed oil lamps, cooking was gas or Primus stove and water came from a hand pump in the galley. If you look carefully, there is a spare oil can and a funnel, with a large handfull of standard Admiralty "cotton waste" to mop up any spillage. Lying underneath it is the starting handle, in case "all else fails"!

I think Royal Tudor got a look in there as well!

This has the other big advantage that the rudder will stay wherever you have put it, even when going astern. It also means that the rudder itself needs no stops on the hull as the mechanism is a "stop" in itself. Hearts cruisers had a similar system, except that the chain on the wheel ran to another pulley at the chine, where the connection to the aft end was made by a long shaft, running in bearings. On the later boats they used the steering gearbox from a Land Rover but the King of Hearts, built 1952, had the original steering box out of the old gunboat "Morning Flight". Eight turns on the wheel, which could all be done with one finger!

Is that the original wire cable steering that I see there?

I think it is up to us, really. I am not saying I am against any of these new laws at the moment but they are still supposed to be "temporary" restrictions. It is up to the Nation, with one voice when the time comes, to ensure that "health and safety" doesn't turn them into tablets of stone.

Yes. That jogs my memory. I think that was Ray and Celia Bondon's house.

Maybe. But hardly historical fact!

I am only going on memory here, as I gave my old and well thumbed BMC workshop manual to our chairman, in the fond hope that his replacement engine would last longer than the previous one!

I know it's off the subject but look what journalism did in the Falklands War. It could very easily have lost it for us!

I am assuming that someone found the pressure relief valve? In the main oil gallery near the filter housing. They can tend to get bunged up after a while.

I also wonder if the "high majority" on this forum have as much spare time to spend dissecting every nuance of the detail of the thing. I am quite happy playing trains in my garage. Please do not assume that your opinion - freely and often expressed at length - is that of the high majority of this forum.

No 1 might be Chumley and Hawkes in Horning and No 2 might be the Broadsedge Chalet Park in Stalham.

It seems that a "double banked" pulling boat with two oarsmen on each thwart pulling a single oar each, was called a cutter. A single banked boat with one oarsman on each thwart pulling one oar, was called a whaler. Your designs are single banked but smaller, and would have been called gigs. My Admiralty manual is a fairly new one, revised 1979, so it doesn't have all the designs of the old type pulling boats, which were not much changed since General Wolfe's siege of Quebec in 1759! I wish I had not lost my old copy, from when I was at college!

Whilst I agree with Marshman in the way that boats were built "by eye" I would say that these are plans made to meet Admiralty specifications for "pulling boats" and "gigs" which served as ship's lifeboats but were also used for going ashore from a warship moored to a buoy, in harbours such as Scapa Flow. I learned how to row and sail boats like this when I was at naval college and they look like a small version of the standard Admiralty whaler, which was longer and with two masts. I would guess they are sometime in the early 1900s just before WW one, although Underhill may have used the design in his later line drawings.

It says on e-bay that this product is not delivered to France. So that lets me out then!

Try lemon juice and salt, for a start.

I am afraid this is all have of that, as the page was cut off underneath. But in compensation, here are the ice girls!

I didn't know where to post this, but I came across it whilst sorting out some boxes in the loft. Sorry about the quality but it is an old cutting from the EDP, during the hard winter of 1963. The dredger is interesting as it seems to be steam powered. I like the winch on the foredeck as it is exactly like the one we had at Hearts Cruisers for hauling boats up the slipways. It actually had 3 gears. Two men, on handles either side, and up she came! The big white house in front of the church was then owned by Peter Mills, who until his retirement, in the days of Empire, had been chief of police in Kenya. He had a lot of land on both sides of the broad and the water in front of the house now, is an extensive marina mooring. Nowadays, we would at once ask why Mr Bugden, of May Gurneys, is not wearing a life jacket. Especially as he is setting about smashing up the very ice he is standing on, in the middle of the broad! At the bottom of the caption it says (See also "ice girls" on back page) but I won't post that as one of them was a girlfriend of mine at the time.