Blog at the Ballast

Today's photo is of the Clutha No.5, a passenger ferry built by TB Seath & Sons of Rutherglen for the Clyde Navigation Trust. The no. 5 came into service in 1884 and worked until 1903.


The Glasgow Story website has information about the history of these passenger ferries and an article written by Andrew McQueen is available online at Scribd which gives a fuller history of these "waterbuses".

Specification details available from the Clydebuilt site along with this interesting information provided by Stuart Cameron, about what you can see in the photo:

"In the background the spire of the University of Glasgow can be seen in the background on Gilmorehill. The ship on the left is berthed at D&W Henderson's fitting out quay on the west bank of the River Kelvin. The two ship's under construction are in the Pointhouse shipyard of A & J Inglis. To the right of them is the north bank slipway of the Govan ferry the the Partick Steamboat Wharf."

I have uploaded the Catalogue for the Dan McDonald collection to our website.  It is in spreadsheet format which although not as easily searchable as a database you can still perform a search across all the sheets using the find function CTRL+F.

Information about Dan McDonald himself can be found here and the catalogue has been arranged into sections as follows:
Section 1. Miscellaneous Vessels 1930-1980. Comprises a list of all types of vessels for which a basic index and reference system was used.

Section 2. Miscellaneous Steam and Motor Vessels. 1920-1950 which were not indexed or identified.

Section 3. Clyde steamers and other passenger vessels trading on the river.

Section 4. Sea going sailing vessels.

Section 5. Coastal sailing vessels.

Section 6. "Views” of scenery, buildings, boatyards etc.

Section 7. Exposures taken during voyages on puffers 1949-1972.

Section 8. Negatives of the yacht AILIE and other miscellaneous yachts, 1925-1930.

Section 9. Fishing negatives. TO BE ADDED

And its done:

After several phone calls to skip companies and estimates of the size of our courtyard and the amount of rubbish we have to get rid of last week our skip arrived this morning.

I forgot to take a picture of it looking all empty so instead here's the skip 3/4 full.

Everything we are throwing away is either rubbish, duplicates or items that didn't pass the appraisal process.

So it took us all afternoon to fill it up which was pretty good going considering there was only 4 of us working on it.

We still have about half of the dump pile* left to get rid of so at least 1 more skip is going to be required, possibly 2 if we also want to clear out some space for more shelves and fewer dyeline machines.

*Dump pile - the art of constructing the dump pile is a post for another day, once I've been trained in it but it looks a little bit like this:

Best name for a warship ever? This week's photo is of the HMS Candytuft which was built in Grangemouth by the Grangemouth Dry Dock Co. in 1940.


HMS Candytuft
Originally uploaded by ballasttrust

It served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1945 as the USS Tenacity before ending its life as a merchant ship Maw Hwa.

Thanks to a tip, I discovered a new site today called Marine Traffic which has a live ships map that lets you see what ships are where, like so:

Specification details about the tug are available on the Clydebuilt database here.

Aside from the Dan McDonald collection, the only other collection the Ballast Trust owns is Bill Lind's own personal collections some of which were stored here and we have inherited.  This collection contains several smaller collections which will in time be catalogued and donated to an appropriate archive or museum such as:

• British Corporation plans
• Business letterheads from 19th and 20th century
• Ships postcard and photographs collection
• Assorted items from companies (eg Staff sports medals, embossing seals)
• Ship plans (rolled and folded)
• Bill Lind correspondence files

Specification details available from Clydesite here