Blog at the Ballast

The Dan McDonald collection that the Ballast Trust owns comprises of over 5,000 of Dan McDonald's negatives. It contains images of puffers, steamers, fishing vessels, yachts and also several views of coastal towns and harbours.

The catalogue is available online from our website here.

The catalogue has been arranged as follows:
Section 1. Miscellaneous Vessels 1930-1980. Comprises a list of all types of vessels for which a basic index and reference system was used.
Section 2. Miscellaneous Steam and Motor Vessels. 1920-1950 which were not indexed or identified.
Section 3. Clyde steamers and other passenger vessels trading on the river.
Section 4. Sea going sailing vessels.
Section 5. Coastal sailing vessels.
Section 6. "Views” of scenery, buildings, boatyards etc.
Section 7. Exposures taken during voyages on puffers 1949-1972.
Section 8. Negatives of the yacht AILIE and other miscellaneous yachts, 1925-1930.
Section 9. Fishing negatives.

The first photograph in our weekly series is of the Robert the Bruce a paddle driven ferry operating between North and South Queensferry from the 1930s to 1964.

This was one of four ferries which operated the route and had been built by Denny's shipyard in 1934. The ferry crossing became redundant with the opening of the Forth Road Bridge in 1964.

The Ballast Trust has a collection of photographs and negatives taken by Dan McDonald and bought by Bill Lind.

Dan McDonald was a puffer enthusiast who took photographs of puffers along with other boats and harbours across Scotland but mainly on the West Coast.

To share the collection more widely I plan to do a weekly post about one of the photographs with a little bit of information about the photo and its background (if I can find it out!)

The Ballast Trust is a charitable foundation that was established in 1988 by Dr William Lind to provide 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.

More information about the Trust can be found on our website (here).

The Ballast Trust was set up carry out appraisal, listing, cataloguing and provide temporary storage of large accumulations of technical records from engineering and other businesses in Scotland.

The Trust has given archive repositories access to specialist skills and knowledge in technical records which allows those collections that require (or at least benefit) from specialist knowledge to be processed. With a focus on records of industry and business this has meant that the Trust has mainly processed shipbuilding, railway and engineering records. In the past the Trust has catalogued records of Scott Lithgows, British Rail, Hunslet-Barclay among others.

At the moment staff and volunteers are working on the following collections:

• British Rail negatives
• Montague Smith collection of railway drawings and plans
• British Rail drawings
• Clyde Pilotage collection

This blog is designed to provide updates about the cataloguing of collections, give us a space to share interesting items we discover, and also provide information about how to access the collections and volunteering opportunities with the Trust.

This blog will primarily be written by Kiara King, the Ballast Trust archivist, but will also feature contributions from other members of the team and our volunteers. We welcome comments or suggestions.