Baltic House

Catering for Volunteers

I have today had a chance to publish a new page on this site, the subject of which comes largely from Nancy Brambleby and Cathy Chapman. If you slide your cursor over the ‘ABOUT’ option on the black menu bar at the top of the home page, then open the ‘Restoration’ tab you will now find, as well as the Restoration Volunteers (our list of paint brush wielders, shipwrights, sparks and chippies) there is now a tab entitled “Servicing and Shore Based Volunteers’. Here we have tried to recognise all those who have worked and helped the Cambria in ways other than physical construction or painting – the ladies who run the Visitor Centre or staff the barge to show the public round, Cathy herself in the Shop, The Management Team, our helpers who turn out when we are moored in Gravesend, folk who do catering or organise bed linen for the Trainee Sailing students, or clean and service the barge between outings.

Cathy and Mark run the Cambria Shop at a flea market

This is as yet a page under construction. Nancy and Cathy have raked through their memories and presumably photo albums and filing systems and have put together the most complete list we could provide but there will almost certainly be other people out there with many more suggestions both for peoples names and tasks. Please if you can think of anyone please let us know. We do not want to leave anybody out and the last thing we want is to cause offence by a sin of omission.

Email any suggestions to markandcathychapman@yahoo.co.uk

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the barge front at present and your blogger is fast running out of stories about the real barge to witter on about so, as I know that many of the readers dabble in a bit of modelling in the ‘close’ season, I thought it would be rather fun to relate a tale of an attempt to recreate SB Westmoreland in miniature, by Dave Brooks and his father, Tony B. Dave has offered to diarise his exploits. Here is the first section of that diary (for which thank you Dave and Tony). I will be interested to see how they got on, mainly because I also started and failed to complete a nice model (which was taken off my hands by a chum who has also got nowhere with it despite best intentions). I take my hat off to anyone who perseveres and finishes up with a display-able model, and I’ve seen some superb ones. Do please add your comments to these posts if you have any similar stories of failure or success.

Model which may come to resemble SB Westmoreland; photo by Dave Brooks

Dave writes, ” Whilst working as a volunteer for the Cambria Trust during the Cambria’s rebuild at Faversham we would take our lunch time upstairs in Baltic House Standard Quay aka. The Cambria Visitor Centre. It was then that I noticed an unfinished barge model, which was a hull and some brass leeboards and mainmast and topmast. Every time I passed that unfinished model I thought it was sad that it never got finished. I enquired as to its origin and found that the model had been made by Boss of Volunteers Basil Brambleby for his kids to mess around with. The model sat on the shelf for three years until we had to vacate the visitor centre and Basil very kindly donated the hull to me. Of course I had grand notions to finish it and rig it so I brought it home and stuck it in the attic for a year whilst I contemplated just how I was going to achieve it.

Knowing my woodworking skills are non existent I knew I would have to enlist some help. So I asked my dad Tony Brooks who had already made a beautiful scale model of the Glenmore my Great Grandfathers barge if he fancied a project. Thankfully he agreed and asked me to bring the model over to him to have a look at. Dad liked the model but then threw me as he decided that if he was going to do this project he wanted to work to a plan. Off he went to his book shelf and after thumbing through several books he found a plan of the Westmoreland. “We can use this to give us an idea about general sizes etc.” So the plan was scanned into his pc and dimensions taken from the model to produce a scale drawing of our hull.”

To be continued.

Tag: Baltic House

Servicing and Shore Based Team

Model Making