Blog at the Ballast

As part of our continued social media campaign to celebrate and raise awareness of the Trust's 30th anniversary, throughout July and August on Twitter we have been sharing extracts from Bill Lind's diary and personal correspondence. Continuing on from #Ballast30 where we shared facts all about the Trust from our favourite object to understanding how we catalogue ship plans.



With #Onthisday we have been recalling what was happening at the Trust during 1988, the year the Trust formally began to carry out its objectives. Bill and his team initially began working at the temporary accommodation provided by Malcolms' of Brookfield, however it was the decision by Trafalgar House to liquidate its Scott Lithgow premises in Port Glasgow that would see the Trust begin a massive operation to rescue and list the huge volume of commercial and technical papers of Scott Lithgow's. The enormity of this task enabled the Trust to relocate to the Joiner's shop at the Kingston Yard in Port Glasgow, providing a base on site, this became the home of the Trust for the next 3 years, until March 1992.


It is important to reflect upon the number of collections both Bill and his team worked through. We will be sharing images of some of the highlights of these collections, similar to the one above, in the lead up to our publication later on in the year.


~ Jennifer Brunton
   Archives Assistant

~ Jennifer Brunton, archives assistant (graduate trainee).

The main workroom at Walkinshaw Street

Our Surveying Officer Chris looking over shipping plans.

Our Director Professor Tony Slaven and our Archivist Kiara looking through a ledger from Glasgow City Archives Clyde Navigation Trust collection.

via GIPHY

We hope you're just as excited as we are! Keep an eye out for this starting tomorrow over on Twitter!

As the weather today is lovely and sunny, this image seemed like an appropriate choice! 

Photo credit to Ian Muir. Coincidentally we have some of Ian Muir's slides at the Ballast Trust which are in the process of being listed and homes sought for them.

As the new Graduate Trainee, I've been tasked with carrying out some social media related activities as part of my role and for the blog I've decided to resurrect the regular Friday Photo slot. 

We actually have very few images of Ballast Trust staff and volunteers at work. I've pulled together some from the early years based in the Joiner's Shop in Port Glasgow along with a few we took of our Walkinshaw Street workroom last year.

I'm delighted to be able to share the official Ballast Trust history. This has been published by the Trustees to mark and celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Ballast Trust.

We are sending hard copies out in the post this week to organisations and individuals we have worked with over the last 25 years, our volunteers and other relevant organisations. But this online version also means that we can share our beautifully designed history* with other interested parties.

While December 2012 was the 25th anniversary of the official Trust deed being set up, the operations of the Ballast Trust really got going throughout 1988 when work begun on the huge job at Port Glasgow to process the Scott Lithgow records. So for this reason, throughout 2013, we'll be tweeting extracts from Bill's diaries to try and get a sense of what the Trust was doing in its first full year of operations (mainly sorting and rolling lots of plans!!).

*Our history was designed and printed by Resolve Creative.

The George Stewart & Co Ltd, Manufacturing Stationers Collection, has now been catalogued and will be sent to the Edinburgh City Archives (Reference number SL247).

Business records

George Stewart & Co Ltd were founded in 1879 by George Stewart, but it was his youngest son, Alastair M. Stewart (b. 1905), who steered the company through the 20th century. This collection represents all that has survived from the long history of this Edinburgh Company. The reasons for this are numerous, but possibly the serious fire in August of 1950 destroyed much of their corporate and historical records; but in the surviving material are still important archival and historical records. The business records include two minute books, two finance books, share information and profit and loss reports. There are are notebooks detailing costs of materials and basic job work.

Additional to the business records, the Collection also has material relating to the social activities of the workforce, identifying a camaraderie that was evident in many family-owned firms of the time. Minute and record books of the Company bowling, golf and rambling clubs demonstrate highly active groups and provide an important contribution to local sports history. 

Stewart Rambling Club 1889-1905 (SL247/3/1/1)

For example, The Bowling Club was a member of the Edinburgh and Leith Printing Establishments Bowling Club Association, and it competed in both League and Single-hand competitions, winning several. The Rambling Club book contains information on local excursions, including various events such as local Burns dinners with 
accompanying ephemera. 

Stewart Golf Club 1902-1903 (SL247/3/3/1

Though Stewart & Co. were manufacturing stationers, they were closely involved with the printing industry. The Chairman, Alastair M. Stewart, was an important figure within the printing trade and served in a number of important positions, including Vice-President (from 1965) and then as President of the Federation of Master Printers (1966-67). 

Printers’ Association Events 1965-66 (SL247/6/1)

The archive has interesting ephemera from this period from a number of British and international printing associations and newspapers, related to conferences and dinners, including photographs, that Alastair M. Stewart and his wife attended.

Nigel Willis will be giving a talk to the Lochwinnoch Historical Society in the church hall of the Parish Church in Church Street on Thursday 15th March at 7.30pm.


Non-members will need to pay £3.

This is a remarkable story of great entrepreneurial spirit involving what was the oldest shipbuilding business in the world covering not only the shipbuilding in Greenock but also their shipbuilding in Canada, France and Hong Kong as well as their involvement in blockade running during the American civil war plus other surprises!

While cataloguing the Edinburgh City Engineer’s Plans, I came across this plan of the Broughton feuing. The plan shows the feuing Contract between John Hope, Writer to the Signet and philanthropist, and the Governor of George Herriot’s Hospital, on 19 August 1867.

Plan of Broughton Feuing

John Hope (1807–1893), devoted much of his time and wealth to philanthropic works. One such project was in 1861. After seeing the dwellings for English working men in a visit to the north of England, Hope suggested that similar housing could be built for workers in Edinburgh. He proposed that the ground belonging to Heriot’s Hospital, behind East Claremont Street, off Leith Walk, could provide houses for working men. Not only was he determined to obtain sound housing for the working men, but that they should also have fresh water and air, and he brought the nearby Caledonian Distillery to task as being the main polluter of both. John Hope founded the Hope Trust in 1890, which continues today in helping people combat drug and alcohol addiction. The brown shading marks the areas of Hope’s land, and the red that of Heriot’s Hospital.

Detail of note to the right of the plan

The plan also outlines in red (at the top) the property of Waterston & Sons, stationers and printers, which, originally belonged to Hope. George Waterston (1838-1922) was third generation of Waterston’s stationers and printers. His private residence was 19 East Claremont Street. Contemporary to this period, was his niece, Jane Elizabeth Waterston (1866-1905), African missionary, who was one of the first women to train in medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women.

This plan is one of three duplicates drawn by the architect John Chessor (1819-1892), Superintendent of Works to Heriot's Hospital. The Contract was subscribed by William Chambers (1800–1883), Lord Provost of Edinburgh (elected 1865), and friend of John Hope. Ref: SL246/173 (Stephen Hall)

As part of the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland which is being launched tomorrow, the Ballast Trust has prepared a case study which you can read here.

This is the postcard version of the case study that has been created to give away at the launch (excuse the rubbish phone pictures):



There are seven other case studies featuring Tennent's, G. L. Watson & Co. Ltd, the Scottish Business Archive, Lloyds, Diageo, the Sir Basil Spence Archive at RCAHMS and the Capturing the Energy project. You can read them all here.

I've spent much of today reading through Bill's correspondence files from the late 1980s when the Ballast Trust was set up and had begun the mammoth task of processing the Scott Lithgow records on site in the Joiners' Shop at the Kingston Yard.

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 Ballast Trust: A Brief History has now been put up on our website here. To accompany this document, I thought that some visual representations would be helpful to give people reading the history a sense of the scale of operations, the working conditions (which I'm told were always very cold) and also the state that records were found in before being rescued and sorted.