Blog at the Ballast

One for the start of the summer holidays this week! We uploaded this fab image of the Duke of Devonshire paddle steamer a couple of weeks ago to our flickr photostream. The ship was built by R & H Green, Blackwall, 1896.

There is more information about her on this website.



 Our image shows her at Lulworth Cove and I also realised this week via twitter that there are a few videos of her coming into the cove on youtube.

We're finishing up here at the Ballast Trust for the holidays this afternoon. For our final photo of 2012, I'm very happy to share this Christmas card that we found in amongst some of Bill's odds and sods of headed notepaper and supplies of blank stationery.

It was an official Christmas card for British Shipbuilders who were the nationalised company that owned and operated British shipyards from 1977 until the late 1980s.

You may have already seen the image on the Scottish Council on Archives website as part of their Christmas in the Archives feature.




We will be closed for the Christmas and New Year holidays from Friday 21st December 2012 to Monday 7th January 2013 (inclusive).

There are several handy services for identifying fonts, my favourite is what the font.  Which on my first run gave me 8 potential matches to investigate.

Rear Shelves

Side Shelves

Wrapped Plans

Image

As part of Celtic Connections there is a special commemorative concert being held to mark the 40th anniversary of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' work-in of 1971–2.

This commemorates the support that folk musicians gave to the work-in by holding benefit gigs.

The BBC has been reshowing a programme about Clyde Shipbuilding on BBC Four this week.
The Men Who Built the Liners is available to view on iplayer.  The programme is about:

Many of the most famous passenger liners in history were built in the British Isles, several in the shipyards along the banks of the Clyde. This series combines personal accounts and archive footage to evoke a vivid picture of the unique culture that grew up in the Clyde shipyards. Despite some of the harshest working conditions in industrial history and dire industrial relations, it was here that the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and the QE2 were built. Such was the Clyde shipbuilders' pride in their work, and the strength of public support, that in 1971 they were able to defy a government attempt to close them down and win the right to carry on shipbuilding.

It is available to watch on iplayer until Tuesday 17th January.

Johnstone Station (click to enlarge)

Johnstone Booking Office (click to enlarge)

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland have a very snazzy feature on the aerial section of their website that allows you to compare shipyards on the Clyde in 1947 with today.

Screenshot from here

There's an interesting blog post on the BBC arts blog view from the south bank about the Riverside Museum. Read it here.

Lots of snow across Scotland so thought it was time for the christmas snow widget to appear for the festive season.

Thanks to a tip, I discovered a new site today called Marine Traffic which has a live ships map that lets you see what ships are where, like so:

One of the more unusual collections that we have inherited from Bill Lind is a collection of letterheads from various businesses, mainly shipbuilders but lots of smaller assorted businesses are included.  Delaine has gone through and organised them all into alphabetical order by business name.  We now need to decide what to do with them, whether they will make a collection that an archive would want or if we should hold onto them and make a project out of them for flickr perhaps.

Some of the examples include this one from Babcock & Wilcox in 1928:



Lastly, this example from Slingsby in 1941 who are still on the go now supplying office equipment:


Perhaps some of our examples might even end up on this blog letterheady.  Update: we did, see here!

Flickr has had a new feature for while called galleries which allow you to "curate" a gallery of your own from other people's collection.


Archangel Mail Delivery
Originally uploaded by British Postal Museum & Archive

I've mentioned before that the National Maritime Museum had put some of its collections online.  Well, I discovered at the weekend that this website by Surface View also has images from the NMM available to order as large-scale wall murals, prints or blinds.

This means that you can have an images from the plans for the Mauretania (1907), HMS Fearless and even the Bounty amoung others on your wall.  They also offer images from other archive collections, museums and photography collections.