Blog at the Ballast

This week, we have a beautiful three-masted iron sailing ship from the Dan McDonald Collection, the 'Earl of Zetland'. Like most of the glass negatives in this collection, this particular ship was built on the Clyde, at Archibald McMillan & Sons yard in Dumbarton in 1875. She is recorded as carrying many immigrants to Australia and New Zealand, with one group of immigrants being 'without a single dissentient...fully satisfied' (although one went mad during the voyage...).

As an ocean-going 'windjammer', she and her crew would have had to endure the most treacherous seas, and it is very likely that she would have lost several crewmen over the course of her career in accidents. According to the South Australia Maritime Museum, most of the officers and crew apparently went mad during a voyage from Sourabaya to San Francisco, for reasons unexplained. She was wrecked in 1905 at Vang near Hasle, Bornholm while carrying a cargo of timber. It isn't known if the crew survived.

~ William Brown, Volunteer

Today a new exhibition opens at the National War Museum in Edinburgh - Arctic Convoys. I attended a preview of it yesterday evening as the Ballast Trust had worked with the National Museums Scotland (NMS) and Glasgow Museums to arrange for our model of the SS Rathlin to be included in the exhibition.

Glasgow Museums hold a large collection of ship models loaned to the Museum from the 1970s onwards by Bill Lind and since his death the Trustees of the Ballast Trust and Lind Foundation are responsible for them.

We were very pleased to be able to work with NMS to arrange for the loan and the model looks wonderful in its new display. The Rathlin served as a rescue ship during the Arctic Convoys but she had been built by Alexander Stephen & Sons Glasgow in 1936. We have a photograph of her from the Dan McDonald Collection below and there is some good information about her work as a rescue ship here.