Blog at the Ballast

Another liner for you this week, the Empress of Britain. Built by John Brown & Co, Glasgow in 1930 for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company.Further information about the ship's build and career can be found here, including the fact that her launch by the Prince of Wales was a civic holiday for the people of Glasgow.Incidentally, Clydebuilt, my usually reference source the specifics...

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The Cunard liner the Queen Victoria arrived in Greenock yesterday. She was joined by the Waverley and the Scotsman had a good picture today of the two of them showing the difference in sizes. The Queen Victoria is four times longer than the Waverley (pictured below)Interestingly the ship's website has a live webcam view from the bridge so you can see where she's...

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Two photos today of the same ship or are they?These are both photographs of the Empress of Australia, except one has three funnels and one only has two. To complicate things further there are two Empress of Australia's built in a similar period working as passenger liners for the Canadian Pacific Line.There is a 1919 ship built in 1913 as the SS Tirpitz...

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The other week, we had a helpful comment appear for this image (shown below) on our flickr site.It suggested that these four vessels were steam lighters rather than barges as I had described them. Not being a ship expert, I had taken the description from the back of the photo and my understanding of the difference between lighters and barges was that they...

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Today's photo is of the Eddystone built by D & W Henderson in 1927 for the Clyde Shipping Co. Ltd.Specification details are available here.During the second world war, she was used as a convoy rescue ship from June 1943 and she sailed with 24 convoys and rescued 64 survivors.* The picture below shows her fitted out and repainted for this service.* Figures taken...

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Glasgow Life is the new website for museums, libraries, archives and sport in Glasgow. The Archive pages have some lovely pictures on them and information about their collections, several of which have passed through the Ballast Trust at some point, for example:The Clyde Navigation Trust (inc Clyde Pilotage Authority which was recently returned)Shipbuilding Collections (inc Barclay, Curle & Co Ltd, Langmuir Collection, Fairfield...

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of the rescue and return of the SS Great Britain from the Falklands to the UK. The BBC is showing a programme tonight (only in on BBC One West) called 'when Brunel's ship came home' but it will be available on the iplayer for the rest of the country to watch.The BBC Archive site has a video...

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More supplies we received this week!This time it was some wonderful moo cards to replenish our stock of business cards and allow us to include all our links on them this time now the website, blog and flickr pages are up and running.I also ordered some postcards with a blurb about what we do and who we are on the back to give...

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Built by Napier & Miller in Old Kilpatrick, the Eagle III was a paddle steamer launched in 1910 and originally owned by Buchanan Steamers.In the First World War she was used as a minesweeper by Admiralty and in the Second World War took part in the Dunkirk evacuation as HMS Oriole. When interestingly she was deliberately ran aground by her skipper to allow...

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On Wednesday our new shelves for the workroom arrived from BiGDUG, I had ordered 18 bays and was expecting them to take up quite a lot of room while we assembled them and cleared some space for them but when they arrived they were all on one pallet like this: From Blog at the Ballast And now thanks to someone more expert than...

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Today's photo is of the Duchess of Fife, a paddle steamer built by Barclay Curle & Co. Ltd in 1903.She worked the Gourock to Kyles run for the Caledonian Steam Packet Company.Specification details can be found here. ...

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This week we've filled another skip with the last of the dump pile and as you can see several metal filing cabinets which we seem to have stashed everywhere.There's definitely at least another skip's worth of rubbish to go but there's also quite a few items that we can't use but it would be a shame to throw them out so we'll be...

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