Blog at the Ballast

This is a picture of Vehicle Ferryboat No. 4 outside A & J Inglis Ltd in Glasgow. I've not had much luck finding out any other information about this so comments welcome.

**Update** I've since discovered that this was built by Ferguson Brothers in Port Glasgow in 1938 for the Clyde Navigation Trust.  It was used on the route between Govan and Partick.  More information here.

As a recently qualified archivist, one of the things I like most about my job at the Ballast Trust is that I get to think about how the Trust should do everything. This is a great opportunity to start at the beginning and think about access policies, accession databases, forms and cataloguing procedures.

However, before I tackled the detail of documenting how we work and developing new procedures and systems, I needed to document the purpose of the Ballast Trust and provide some kind of operational statement. Most archives have a collections policy which would cover this but as we technically don't collect anything I needed a more general statement.

• Ballast Trust Policy Statement

I have put together the policy statement above, after looking at different examples of collection and access policies. It will be formally approved by the Board of Trustees at their next meeting in December.

This image shows the shipyard of Archibald McMillan & Son at Dumbarton.


The ship in the middle of the image is the Kana, built for the Moss Hutchison Line in 1929 to transport cargo.

The records of Archibald McMillan & Son are held by Glasgow City Archives. The company was established in 1834 by Archibald McMillan and his son, John, and stopped building ships in 1930. During this time they built nearly 560 vessels.

This image is taken from Bill Lind's collection of photographs and McMillan & Son were a company that he was interested in. An article about the company appeared in the 1976 journal of Scottish Industrial History.

These are two images from a ship called Uncle Ned. I chose these images mainly because I liked the look of the figurehead as I was going through potential images for today's post. He's quite a dapper chap.

However, when it came to finding out anything about the ship, it was tricky. There was no information on the back of the print except the name of the ship. Using the Plimsoll Ship Database I was able to find several entries in Lloyd's for the Uncle Ned.

This told me that it was built in 1867 by E. Robertson in Ipswich and was 188 tons and while originally a sailing vessel had had an oil engine fitted by at least 1930 (earliest date of Lloyd entries in the database).

This is a picture of the men unloading whisky from the Pibroch at Bunnahabhain Distillery on Islay in 1952.

This is a picture of the first Pibroch, which was built by Scotts of Bowling in 1923. She was commissioned by the Mackie brothers, owner of the White Horse Distillery of Lagavulin and served them and their successors, Scottish Malt Distillers carrying coal and barley to the island and whiskey out. A second Pibroch was launched in 1957 (more information here).

Image taken 8 July 1952