Blog at the Ballast

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.

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.

On Friday 7th December, the Ballast Trust had a visit from MSP Annabel Goldie.

She met with our Director, Professor Tony Slaven, members of staff and some of our volunteers. We had laid out some examples of the different types of business records that the Trust specialising in working with. There were some beautiful examples of 19th century technical drawings in the form of locomotive manufacturing drawings and plans of station buildings constructed by the Caledonian Railway Association.

We also had lovely examples of the social history contained in business records through the minute books of the rambling and bowling clubs of George Stewart & Co. (which we have blogged about before).

It was a very welcome opportunity to get across the message that business archives matter and explain our role in the implementation of the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland.

Annabel said in a press release of the visit:

I was delighted to be able to visit the Ballast Trust and meet Director Professor Slaven, staff and volunteers. Visiting the Ballast Trust in Johnstone was for me discovering an unexplored delight. I had no idea that such important processing of industrial and business archive information was being carried out right here on our own doorstep. The Trust is a hugely important contributor to Scotland’s archive records. The dedication and skill of the Director, trustees, staff and volunteers ensure that detailed information from technical drawings of the 19th and 20th century to workforce journals describing the activities of staff rambling clubs and bowling clubs is captured. Business archives provide a fascinating perspective not just on the technical skills of that period but of the social activity of employees and the wider community.

Since her visit, Annabel has submitted the following Motion to the Scottish Parliament:

That the Parliament notes the work of the Ballast Trust, which is a Renfrewshire-based charitable foundation that provides a rescue, sorting and cataloguing service for business archives with an emphasis on technical records such as shipbuilding, railway and engineering plans, drawings and photographs; understands that, since its establishment in 1987, it has processed technical records on behalf of national and local archive repositories and museums; believes that this has resulted in the trust, in conjunction with National Records of Scotland, carrying out the vital processing of a huge range of industrial and business archive material; commends its continuing referencing and retention of what it considers a diverse base of historic material that chronicles both industrial and business and social and community activity; applauds what it sees as the dedicated and committed efforts of the trust’s director, trustees, staff and volunteers, and praises it on its determined efforts to educate business and professional communities to be mindful of the archive treasures that might be found throughout business premises the length and breadth of Scotland.

The plan is stamped A & J Inglis, Glasgow with a date in 1897, the ship number given is no. 246 and this turns out to have been the SS Magpie built for G & J Burns Ltd to run across the Irish sea.

She was renamed as the Lairdsgrove in 1929 and ended her days as such.  The image below is from our flickr and part of the Dan McDonald collection.

In December 2012 the Ballast Trust will be celebrating 25 years since its formal establishment.  There are plans for a history of the Ballast Trust to be published and this will be available online and shared here.  In the run up to the anniversary I am also tweeting extracts from Bill's diary that year starting with the entry for Thursday 3rd September 1987:

We have a new logo for the Ballast Trust which we are starting to use on everything.

It has been designed to be a simpler, cleaner version of the original logo which was put together very quickly when I started in 2009.

The first logo was created using wordle and was intended to get across all the different things that the Ballast Trust does.  However, three years later it seemed very busy and didn't include the tagline that we had started using 'understanding technical archives'.  So we have stripped it back and put together the logo above with a bit more thought, including choosing colours and a font.

The font is called 'British Rail Alphabet' and is based on the Rail Alphabet font developed by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir in the 1960s and adopted by British Rail in 1965 as part of its corporate rebranding. The colours used are Battleship grey, Cunard red and a navy used by Glasgow University.

Today I'm giving a talk on the value of Twitter for Archives and Archivists as part of the ARA Scotland Born (Digital) Identity conference in Stirling.

I've previously thought that there was no point to the Ballast Trust being on Twitter mainly because we don't have our own collections to highlight.  However, while I was preparing my talk I realised that there are loads of other reasons and benefits to using Twitter would apply to us so we have officially joined!

Find us here.

Here at the Ballast Trust we have a processed a collection which belongs to Glasgow City Archives.  It is the papers of R McAlister & Sons, Yachtbuilders based in Dumbarton.

It is a lovely collection, a great example of the work of a smaller firm of boat and yachtbuilders founded in 1857 to build small boats, including racing boats, gigs, canoes and other oared craft which were the main output of the firm. By 1886, expansion of the business meant that McAlister now built sailing yachts, lifeboats, steam yachts and launches. In May 1911 McAlister entered into an arrangement with Mr Valdemar Engelhardt (a Danish captain) to build his collapsible lifeboats and make the McAlister yard his British headquarters. By February 1912 they had delivered the 4 Engelhardt lifeboats that the Titanic carried which they built.

This image on the right of Order Book no. 4 (ref TD1347/10/14) that contains the order for the four lifeboats.  You can see some images of the boats at the end of the pages here (fig 5 and 6) which discuss the development of the Englehardt Collapsible Lifeboat.

The page from the order book is shown below.  It notes that the order is for Messrs Harland & Wolff Ltd Belfast for vessel no. 401 for four Englehardt boats measuring 28' x 8'6" x 3'1" to be delivered February 1912.  The opposite page then records the dates that the four boats were delivered from Greenock by G & J Burns Ltd.

[click to enlarge]

There is obviously a wealth of information online about the Titanic.  One of the advantages of this is that we can see how the four collapsible lifeboats were used.  This website records the names of each of the passengers the different lifeboats held and you can click through on their names to find some biographical information about them and details of their journey plans.  For example, collapsible lifeboat C rescued Joseph Bruce Ismay, the President of the White Star Line.

• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat A
• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat B
• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat C
• Englehardt collapsible lifeboat D

The McAlister collection is at present located at the Ballast Trust but once is it returned to Glasgow City Archives will be available for research and access.

The is a larger version of the order image available on our Flickr page.  Please contact us if you have any questions about the order book.

The Ballast Trust gets a name check in an article by Alisdair Northrop about the value of business archives in the March 2012 issue of Scottish Business Insider.

It looks at why business history is relevant for today’s companies and discusses the strong position that business archives in Scotland hold and mentions the role that Bill Lind played in this and the work that we carry out today.

You can read the article online here or view a pdf version here.

Christmas greetings from all of us here at the Ballast Trust!



Our Christmas E-card above shows the Empress of Britain sailing past a faint iceberg in 1922 from our Dan McDonald collection.  She was built in 1906 by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company.  Specification details are available from the Clydebuilt site.

We are going to be closing on the afternoon of Wednesday 21st and will be open again after the holidays on Wednesday 4th January 2012.

Slightly delayed by all the doors open day preparations, I've spent this afternoon scanning and uploading the next batch of Dan McDonald photographs - the 'Ss'.

There are 22 new photos, including this one which was the oldest ship uploaded - an 1866 paddle tug called SAMSON

 

Enjoy!

We had a wonderful 53 people battle through the miserable weather in Johnstone yesterday to visit us.  Thank you to everyone who came to see our display.

We had over 60 items out on display which have all been put back now so we've got about 50 metres of table space to work on again.  It was a lot quicker putting it away then setting it up!

It was really nice to have people in to get a preview of some of the collections that we work on and it got us all enthusiastic about processing some of the ones further down our list - particularly the British Corporation ship plans which are a complete mish-mash of vessel types but full of interesting things.

We're open Sunday 11 September from 10am to 4pm and we hope to see lots of people there.

The full programme for Renfrewshire's doors open days weekend is now available to download from the doors open days website here.

This is a screenshot of our entry in the programme:


The eagled eyed among you will note that we are said to provide a resume service for business archives!  This  looks to be another example of the pesky autocorrect at work and should of course read rescue service.

We are preparing our own leaflet to circulate locally and hope to welcome many people into our offices on the 11th.

The steamer Queen Mary is up for sale today in an online auction by Capital Boats, sale details here.  She was built by William Denny & Brothers, Dumbarton in 1933.



There's a news article on STV about it here and in the evening times here.

The National Archives announced today that the records of railway workers are now available online via Ancestry.  At the Ballast Trust the railway records we are working on tend to be the production drawings and often all you get of the person who drew them is a set of initials in the title box.

The information now online has come from the TNA's Railway Employment Records, 1833-1963.  This is a collection of over 2 millions employement records from a number of historic railway companies in England, Scotland, and Wales.

All of the railways included in this database were once private companies that later came under authority of the British Transport Commission with the 1947 Transport Act. The collection features selected records from the following companies:
RAIL226: Great Central Railway Company
RAIL264: Great Western Railway Company
RAIL397: London and North Eastern Railway Company
RAIL410: London and North Western Railway Company
RAIL411: London and South Western Railway Company
RAIL414: London, Brighton and South Coast Railway
RAIL415: London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company (formerly the East Kent Railway)
RAIL426: London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company
RAIL463: Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company
RAIL491: Midland Railway Company
RAIL1156: Special Collections: Retired Railway Officers' Society

Approximately 50% of the books cover the Great Western Railway, while the books covering the London and North Western Railway are more dense with records. Most records are prior to 1949, though some date later.

The most common record type in the database is a staff register. Others include station transfers, pension and accident records (which can include death date), apprentice records (which can include father's name), caution books, and memos.

Read more about it here on the TNA site or start searching here with Ancestry.

It is Annual Report time of year and I have attempted to make it look a bit snazzier with some pictures.  You can read all about our past year (April 2010 to March 2011)

• Annual Report 2010/11 (large file, may take time to download)
• Annual Report 2010/11 (smaller file, poorer image quality)