On the 16th December 1987 the Trust deed which created the Ballast Trust was executed. To celebrate this, in 2012 we prepared a history of the Ballast Trust which is currently at the printers and will be distributed early this year.

However, the real practical work of the official Ballast Trust started in 1988 as Bill and his team processed records from their  base in Brookfields before the move to Port Glasgow in July. To mark this 25th year of operations, we'll be tweeting from Bill's diaries snippets related to the work of the Trust and the collections it handled under the hashtag #LindDiaries

We have Bill's collection of diaries from 1964 to 2007. Until 1988 they are small A5 sized and contain his business and personal notes. These are usually single lines about a meeting or phonecall with an individual about a certain subject.

In 1988, he begins the large A4 sized diary (in fact for 1988 he maintained two diaries consecutively). The larger one records the work of the Ballast Trust. It notes down what collections staff and volunteers were working on, the pickup and return of collections and enquiries that Bill answered.