Tag: Dick Durham

Dick Durham Podcasts

Dick Durham Podcast

Dick Durham Podcast

I think I have already mentioned these, but I am thoroughly enjoying the RSS feed from Yachting Monthly magazine, and in particular the periodic podcasts from our old mate (and Old Mate) Dick Durham. Try this link for starters – DD is now writing (and reading out; this is an audio podcast after all) his “Rough Guides” and this one ‘does’ the Essex coast.

http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcasts/dick-durham-podcast-the-essex-coast-is-the-subject-of-the-first-in-a-new-series-of-rough-guides-dick-durham-reveals-just-how-rough-it-is/

 

Having said that, either the RSS feed or my machine, is currently playing up and the fed items (podcasts, news, specials, boat reviews and blogs) all end up duplicated across all 5 receiving ‘baskets’ but it’s easy enough to delete the duplicates you don’t need.

Good Hunting.

 

 

Help our old Pal

Yachting Monthly (MQ)

Yachting Monthly (MQ)

Just in from the RSS feed (Yachting Monthly) a piece from Dick Durham saying that the rebuild of Medway Queen has “stalled” due to lack of funds.

http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/537466/medway-queen-rebuild-stalls

The Cambria Volunteers always felt as one with the ‘Medway Queen lot’ and members of their team were regularly dropping in on us as we rebuilt, comparing notes on their own steel hull re-vamp, which had to be done the old riveting way to secure their own Lottery Fund money.

The Dick Durham article tells that there is something we can all do to help, if so inclined. There is a book “co-authored by Bob Stokes (Project Manager) and Richard Halton. Cover price is £12-50. The book can be purchased from the Visitor Centre or MQPS event stands or can be ordered by post or through www.medwayqueen.co.uk Please send orders and your cheque to “MQPS (Sales)”, 46 Brockenhurst Close, Wigmore, Gillingham, Kent. ME8 0HG”.

Thanks for that, Dick. Maybe some of our readers will buy the book.

 

 

Restoration Video Now on Sale

Cambria's Hold during Restoration (Dec 2010)

Cambria’s Hold during Restoration (Dec 2010); Picture by Matt Care

Tonight I bring you news of a HUGE treat which you might like to avail yourselves of.  Thanks mainly to Mark Chapman you can now buy aboard, for the very attractive price of just £10 a DVD of the Restoration of Cambria. Throughout the build and before, Mark was frequently all over the barge armed with a video camera and has hours (probably days, even weeks!) of footage starting as the old hull was towed in her lighter from Sheerness to Faversham, of her poly tunnel cover being erected, of the dismantling stages and new framing. It continues through the finishing, painting, and then Flotation Day, rigging and then first charters and races back at sea.

 

I loved watching this for this review and it brought back so many memories of first frames, deadwoods, keelson, carlings, deck beams and all the other bits we saw coming together over the 3 and a bit years of the project. I am, however, in a bit of a compromised position about giving this a fair review as it is my voice on the commentary. Obviously, I think it’s good, but I know I was really only the ‘guinea pig’ used to get some kind of sensible commentary down on tape. The real intention was to get a choice of far more knowledgeable, experienced and expert voices on this job but (no names, no pack drill) in the end none of these folk could commit to the time, so Mark has gone with my comments. I have had some generous feedback since; it seems that folk like my non-technical, simplistic style because I explain things well to non-experts. I think that’s a compliment; it might mean I am a dunce!

 

Either way, you get for your £10, 54 minutes of lovely footage with plenty of skilled work and lovely baulks of wood to linger over. Mark got literally everywhere – in, under, between, over and round the ends. You see the pitiful state of the old structure and see it transformed into the gorgeous barge we know today.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!

Mark has added at the end a series of “Bonus Features” which are themselves, well worth a look and a lovely thing to have in your own private records and archives of barging.

These are, in order

  1. (6 minutes) The early footage from Seven Seas film “When the Wind Blows” which features Cambria in the opening credits, has some stuff about London Docks in the old days and then commentator AP Herbert talks us around a working model of a sailing barge. This is in The Queen’s English as you’d expect but APH amusing drops into trying to ‘do the accents’ when talking about the “topsail, or torps’l as ‘they’ used to call it”
  2. (11 minutes) Of film shot by Mark on board the Cambria as she was making her way up the Thames for the Jubilee Pageant. As well as shots of Cambria from the decks, including a nice bit looking up through the rigging as they went under QE2 Bridge (Dartford), you see some of the other vessels making their way up river, including an MTB and a ‘Vic’ boat. We also go under Tower Bridge (towed, if I remember correctly, by the tug which then went on to pull the bell-ringer carillon vessel in the Parade of Ships) and there is nice footage of SB Cygnet crewed in period costume.
  3. (26 minutes) My absolute favourite bit of this whole DVD! There is a long section from Mark’s archive (which came to him from the late Chris Chipchase, former Cambria Volunteer) of Captain Bob Roberts chatting away to the camera and recordist as he and Dick Durham (then 18) sail Cambria in the Orwell, delivering cattle cake and then heading for Pin Mill for his daughter’s wedding. I regret that I cannot currently tell you where this film came from and I am checking with Mark, but when I do find out I will edit this post accordingly. Bob chats away for the whole time about barging and sailing generally as well as expressing his sadness at modern changes and the fading out of his days-of-sail lifestyle. He talks about Nelson and the naming of the Medusa Channel, of how he (Bob) won a Choristers’ Scholarship to Grammar School, and of how, when told to smear cold tallow on 700 eggs so that they would keep in the ship’s provisions store, he took a shortcut, heated the tallow and dipped the eggs in hot, cooking the eggs and making them go off. He talks of the variety of tasks a bargeman would need to be able to do and of his trips to the Americas during the Great Depression lay-ups. We see the barge being unloaded of the cattle cake. He talks proudly of the Orwell and its fame – of his daughter’s wedding to come, of the big houses on the river banks once owned by the likes of Admiral Vernon who introduced ‘grog’ to the Navy. He bemoans the appearance of slab-sided “ugly” container ships and recounts yarns about smugglers. In one pub a sign of a cat was put up to announce the all-clear (No Pussy, No Sail, he says). One old boy had his wife buried face down because she’d threatened to scrabble up out of the grave if he went with another woman after her death – he thought she’d scrabble down deeper by mistake and he’d avoid the haunting. There were also stories of smugglers using Shotley Church (Shotley Church without no steeple; Drunken Parson, wicked people!). At the end he is a bit rude about us, the new barging ‘amateurs’ (They need to earn their bread and butter under sail; then they’d know what life is about!) but I understand that is just Bob’s jaundiced style. All in all it is a brilliant film. Bob is talking most of the time while frequently looking away from camera at sea or sails and turning the wheel this way and that. We see Dick scrambling nimbly up the rigging at one stage, too.

That is about enough on that one – I seem to have got carried away! As I said, £10 very well spent, and currently available on board or through the shop.

Old Gaffers’ Ode

If I may, a quick thank you for those welcome comments from Oliver Boyle, Nozz’s brother, and from Bill Nance. We always welcome feedback – apart from anything else it re-assures me that someone is listening!

Kinvarra fishing trip-boat Skipper

Kinvarra fishing trip-boat Skipper

Meanwhile Dick Durham has found a superb poem as part of his Yachting Monthly writings, in this case coming to me through the RSS feed. “Yachting Monthly can reveal”, writes Dick, “one of the shanties which will be performed for the Old Gaffers Association’s 50th anniversary. It is written by cartoonist Mike Peyton, 92, who is an East Coast section member and the only original founder member of the OGA left alive. Performed by the Brandy Hole Shantymen, it is a poignant dirge of seven verses”.

Here is (part of) the The East Coast Old Gaffer: – you will have to go to the Yachting Monthly website or (gasp) buy the magazine to see the Ode in its full glory. I’m guessing from the structure and rhyming scan that it is sung to the tune of  that well know folk song “I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler, from Manchester Way….” It goes along the lines of ….

“I’ve sailed all over, from Orford to Dover, Boulogne and Breskens as well,
I’ve brought up in the Quarters, and Walton Backwaters, been sick as a dog with the swell.
My blankets have often been sodden, in the bunk where I rest my old head,
But rather than pack up my sailing, I think I would rather be dead!

(chorus)

“I’m a sailor, a sailor from Maldon Town way,
I get all my pleasure when I’m under way.
I may be commuting on Mondays, but I sail my old gaffer  on Sundays.”

Excellent, Mike Peyton and thank you Dick Durham for keeping us entertained. Fingers in ears, lads… and…. SINGING!

The picture, by the way is just a superbly bearded fishing trip-boat Skipper who caught my eye in Kinvarra (Co. Galway) whilst tracking hookers, so it is kind of Gaffer related even though it may have nothing to do with the OGA.

 

Of Calendars and MCZs

Out with the old and in with the new. Down comes the old (Westie dog pictures) calendar from 2012 and up in its place the proud new 2013 Cambria Calendar. All the family birthdays get transferred in and any other significant dates added. It occurs to me that I should also be making more use of the Calendar on this website (New Year’s Resolution?) so if any of you know any significant barging dates yet which could go on there, please let me know – race dates, meetings, lectures, conferences or anything else the barge world might like to know about.

 

Yachting Monthly RSS feed screen grab by Matt Care

Yachting Monthly RSS feed screen grab by Matt Care

Meanwhile I am, as you know, following our former Mate, Dick Durham writing in Yachting Monthly via the magazine’s RSS “feed” of blog and news snippets. Recently he has written an interesting piece on MCZ’s (Marine Conservation Zones). These are areas of coastal and off shore water which Environmentalists are pushing to establish to protect whales, dolphins and all manner of marine life from the ravages of over use by any other ‘lobby’, development by wind farm construction and so on; a nice little source of conflict as you can imagine. The sailing and yachting side of this argument has raised concerns that the MCZs are too big and restrictive and might clip their wings and stop them sailing and mooring where they like.

 

Dick Durham reports that some common sense has been brought into this debate. “The coalition Government (reports Dick) is taking ‘sensible’ steps towards a phased approach to the Marine Conservation Zones the RYA says. The controversial issues were highlighted in Yachting Monthly’s analysis special in the December issue.

Caroline Price RYA Planning and Environment Advisor, said: ‘The phased approach that Government is proposing appears on the face of it to be very sensible.

‘The RYA has been resolute in insisting that a MCZ should be no larger than required to protect the habitats and wildlife features which it is intended to protect and that the scientific basis for designating a particular feature for protection should be sound.

‘We are pleased therefore to see that Ministers have recognised that they need to have a strong evidence base when looking to designate sites, from both an ecological and socio-economic perspective”

I have to admit to being firmly on the Environmental side of this one, being a card-carrying “Whale and Dolphin Conservation” member but I am somewhere in the middle ground – we do need the conservation zones lest we end up with over used or abused chunks of environment just off shore, but yachtsmen and sailors also need their water to sail on.

If you are interested in this debate and would like to know more, then the site is on

http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/533305/government-taking-sensible-steps-over-mczs

Have fun.

Forgotten Sailors

Metal rigging blocks

Metal rigging blocks under repair; Picture by Nancy Brambleby

The work carries on behind the scenes. These are some of the metal rigging blocks which are being dismantled for cleaning, greasing up and painting, in this case by Boss of Volunteers, Basil.  There’s a lot of this goes on out of sight through the winter. Mark (Nozz) Boyle tells me that some folk even slacken off all the bolts they can get at on things like mast cases and deck winches, grease and re-tighten, just so that they do not seize up and rust over the years. I don’t know if we are being THAT diligent on Cambria but if you get bored over the winter, please do volunteer!

 

My RSS feed from Yachting Monthly has a nice item today written by Dick Durham about the tragic level of suicide (jumping over board) due to loneliness and feelings of being badly treated among modern merchant seamen. “Merchant seamen,” says Rev Andrew Wright, quoted in the article on

http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/533186/forgotten-sailors-jumping-overboard ,

” – once held in high regard – are now among the forgotten lost souls of the workplace”

The Rev is determined to raise their profile and has been working alongside the MCA (Maritime and Coastguard Agency) to that end.

The chaplain and director of operations at the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, and honorary chaplain to the Isle of Wight for The Mission to Seafarers, Rev Andrew Wright takes up a new post as Secretary General in February 2013.

 

I will let you read the full article if you are interested.

Of RSS feeds

Dick Durham in Cambria's aft cabin

Dick Durham in Cambria’s aft cabin, picture by Matt Care

I am currently very much enjoying the RSS feed I have set up from Yachting Monthly magazine (for non-techies, it is yet another form of publishing; the magazine decides what snippets of news to ‘feed’ into this system and you sit there waiting for it to arrive). I have Yachting Monthly in my feeds partly so that I never miss a Dick Durham blog. Dick is, of course the last Mate on the Cambria in Captain Bob’s last trading days and is now a sailing writer among other things. One of his outputs is the blog in Yachting Monthly which is always short, pithy and generally able to raise a smile.

This month’s one has him bemoaning the fall from grace of a the West Mersea Yacht Club Bar as follows;

“The children were kicking crabs along the pontoon, the last time I came ashore at West Mersea. Legs missing and nippers raised they fell back into the ebbing tide, not to be fooled again by easy meat on a string.

The yacht club bar – long my favourite on any coast – and one which has a painted board declaring Visiting Yachtsmen Welcome, was staffed by a plump, unfriendly young woman who asked my companion, Martyn Mackrill, dressed in reefer jacket, pink trousers and sailing boots, if he was a yachtsman. He is. ‘Which club do you belong to?’she asked.

The level of beer poured, hung by the thread of its meniscus to the imperial measure…

Something is rotten at the heart of Mersea City and environs these days and so we walk instead, across the Strood, to the excellent Peldon Rose.”

The feed also brings snippets of yachting related news, most recently about an attempt to raise money to fund a UK branded boat in the next Clipper race, some guys getting injured crashing their yacht into a wind turbine, and a love-lorn Turkish guy who sailed 2500 miles from Turkey and “turned up off the north Devon coast in his effort to become reunited with Courtney Murray from Liverpool who once served him a kebab in Cyprus seven years before”. (http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/533121/yachting-stalker-arrested-by-ukba).

It’s a nice lively magazine and , if you are interested in RSS feeds, then I should look it up. Good hunting.

 

Archive Video Southend Match 1964

Frequent contributor, Friend and barge/sailing book author Nick Ardley emails me this superb link saying “Just thought I’d email you this. There is a section of film of the 1964 Southend barge match on following web site:www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/500 It can be found on the webs search facility if this doesn’t work.
What is interesting is all the ‘baggy’ sails, un-stretched stay sail luffs and hotch potch of repairs (May Flower – especially) and a sprinkling of new sails. Edith May doesn’t yet have her ‘Veronica’ spars: that came later – see, May Flower A Barging Childhood – her cross trees are in ‘correct’ place! The other thing is: Marjorie, May and Edith May are the only barges still sailing from that fleet. The May Flower was referred to as the May of 1888 in the intro! The stuff about May Flower taking time to get round first mark is all guff too: my father retired after being run down by the Venture … just prior to the start!
Enjoy.”
Today’s picture is a nice one of Dick Durham at the wheel of Cambria taken by Dave Brooks.
Dick Durham

Dick Durham, last mate of Cambria in trade, at the wheel. Picture by Dave Brooks.

Dick Durham casts off

We have a ‘celeb’ aboard Cambria for the first part of her current historic trip to reproduce the barge’s final cargo-carrying run, Tilbury to Ipswich. None other than Dick Durham, her last Mate and now writer for  Sailing mag “Yachting Monthly”. Dave Brooks reports, “Today the Cambria and her Sea Change crew left Gravesend with a certain Mr Dick Durham aboard bound for Tilbury Dock to load  token cargo. Tomorrow she will leave Tilbury around 7.00am bound for Ipswich in a rerun of her last ever cargo passage in 1970 under Bob Roberts with Dick Durham as mate. I am pleased to say he looked quite at home on the old girl as he helped throw off the mooring lines. Unfortunately Dick can’t make the full trip due to other commitments but will sail down river with them for a while.”

Nice to have you aboard, DD – it always feels a bit weird inviting Dick aboard; almost as if we should be asking his permission to be there! Incidentally, Dick writes a very nice blog from under the wing of the mag, at http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/blogs/1/dick-durham but it is web-fed, so you will need to add it to Google Chrome (or whatever web browser you use). I added it as an RSS feed, if that means anything to you.

Dick Durham casts off

Dick Durham casts off the stern warps as Cambria departs Gravesend. Photo by Dave Brooks.

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