Blog at the Ballast

Inspired by the beautiful weather we have been having, this week's Friday photo is of Lossiemouth fish quay. This coloured glass negative (Ref: DC188/1/13/31) is part of our Dan McDonald collection.

National Library of Scotland's Moving Image Archive have a lovely film of Lossiemouth's fishing industry, detailing the preparations before, during and after a catch.

This week, we have a beautiful three-masted iron sailing ship from the Dan McDonald Collection, the 'Earl of Zetland'. Like most of the glass negatives in this collection, this particular ship was built on the Clyde, at Archibald McMillan & Sons yard in Dumbarton in 1875. She is recorded as carrying many immigrants to Australia and New Zealand, with one group of immigrants being 'without a single dissentient...fully satisfied' (although one went mad during the voyage...).

As an ocean-going 'windjammer', she and her crew would have had to endure the most treacherous seas, and it is very likely that she would have lost several crewmen over the course of her career in accidents. According to the South Australia Maritime Museum, most of the officers and crew apparently went mad during a voyage from Sourabaya to San Francisco, for reasons unexplained. She was wrecked in 1905 at Vang near Hasle, Bornholm while carrying a cargo of timber. It isn't known if the crew survived.

~ William Brown, Volunteer

This weekend marks the traditional start of the Glasgow Fair Fortnight and an appropriate time to share some of the wonderful images of paddlesteamers and later ships that were used by holiday makers to get away down the Clyde to the coast.

New merchant navy and warship images have been added to our Dan McDonald collection on Flickr, including this image, which shows the S.S. Melita being re-fueled with coal in 1924.

Throughout the 1800s the Firth of Clyde was populated by steamers. These ships  were praised for their speed and would sail as far as Largs, Campbeltown and Inverary, taking holidaymakers to resorts and providing a commuter service for those travelling from holiday homes. They provided an integrated transport system, allowing for fast connections with the new railheads along the coast. The ships were often run by railway companies themselves and the vessels remained especially popular for leisure journeys until the 1960s. However, there were also smaller steamers that ran ferry services along the river, such as Clutha No 10.


Clutha No 10 was a steel screw steamer built by the Murray Brothers of Dumbarton in 1891. Together with No 9, the steamer was certified to hold up to 360 passengers, making them the largest capacity ferries in the fleet. Here we can see No 10 coming into dock at one of the eleven stops that were located either side of the Clyde.

 Although the Cluthas began as a service of only six vessels in 1884, they quickly grew to be a fleet of twelve passenger ferries operated by the Clyde Navigation Trust. They ran a round trip service of about three miles from Victoria Bridge to Whiteinch and passengers were charged one penny per journey. The ladies’ cabin was available for an extra penny, and there was also smoking room.The small passenger steamers remained popular for nearly two decades, but were deemed unnecessary with the introduction of the subway in 1896 and the trams in 1901. The service was discontinued in 1903 and little is known about what happened to the Cluthas after this. No 10 was purchased by the Admiralty and transferred to the River Medway.

Thanks to this site, which provided much of the information for this post. New steamer images have been added to our Dan McDonald collection on Flickr.

Olivia Howarth, archives trainee.

Today and tomorrow at the Skipper Expo in Aberdeen, there are several images from our Dan McDonald collection on display as part of their fishing nostalgia and heritage area.

This has been organised by Lachie Paterson who has researched the fishing images previously and knew we had some nice material in the Dan McDonald collection that would be of interest to attendees.

For the first time some of the images we scanned for this event have included the coloured glass plate negatives that Dan also took. These images are particularly lovely and you can see them all in the following Flickr album.

This photograph from our Dan McDonald collection was used by the Scottish Council on Archives as the front cover for their August edition of Broadsheet.

When we provided the image, I was only about to tell SCA that our description for it was 'Man on Hopper 7' and that we knew that Hopper no. 7 had been built by Lobnitz and Co., Renfrew in 1911.

Since then and in response to an enquiry that the SCA got about the man.  We have looked at our photocopies of Dan's original negative registers (held by Glasgow City Council Archives) which had more information about the photo.  So I can reveal that the man in question is Captain Duncan MacLeod and the photograph was taken on the 24th May 1948.

As we're in the middle of having our offices painted, I still can't scan any new photos so here is an image Dan McDonald took of  a windmill in August 1930 from the set of pictures I put up this week.



**UPDATE** thanks to the power of twitter I found out on Friday that this windmill is called Oranjemolen and was a grain mill built in 1699.  Find out more about it on the Dutch Windmill Database.  Thanks to @MichielBaltusse for the information and @UKwindmills for retweeting our picture.

We are at the start of being redecorated so I'm unable to continue with the images of yards and workshops as planned because our scanner has been packed away.  Instead here are some images from the Dan McDonald collection taken in either Holland or Belgium in August 1930.



Although Dan McDonald's collection is best known for his images of ships.  There is also a series of views of places and we have been uploaded some of these images to our historypin channel.

Recently we have been adding some images from the Dan McDonald collection onto our page at HistoryPin. The website is a great opportunity to look to our past, by pinning pictures from years gone by on a map identifying the location. It's even more fascinating when we can locate a building on Google street view, which allows you to view the street as it is now, and how it was when the picture was taken!

However, some of the images from our collection are unidentified. A couple of distinctive images from the Dan McDonald collection have no location identified; so we would appreciate your help to add these images to HistoryPin. Pictured below is a town/city centre setting, and what appears to be a ruined castle. Recognise either of these? Then let us know!

Today's Friday photo is of one of the lifeboats from the steel sailing ship the Olivebank.  Built by Mackie & Thomson of Govan in 1892, she was known as an unlucky ship and was built for Andrew Weir & Co.

There is a fab picture of her in full sail from the Australian National Maritime Museum on flickr here.

Specification details available here and an article about the Olivebank is also available on the Clydebuilt site here.

Today's Friday photo is an image of the Mairi Bhan a fishing vessel built in Fraserburgh in 1933 and registered in Wick as vessel WK176.

This is one of the negatives that our volunteer Helen has recently finished added to the excel catalogue we have for our Dan McDonald collection.  For some reason the fishing vessels and ports weren't on the original excel spreadsheet.  This has now been remedied and you can download or view the catalogue from our collections page on the website.



It is a lovely collection of images of boats and ports like the fishing port of Pennan near Fraserburgh.

Today's photograph is of an unknown yacht found in the Dan McDonald collection.