Blog at the Ballast

The Lighthouse in Glasgow is running an exhibition in partnership with Scottish Screen Archive about the River Clyde and films (both documentary and amateur) made about it in the period 1912 to 1971.

The exhibition is called the Clyde: Films of the River 1912 - 1971 and features films and images from the Scottish Screen Archive.

The exhibition starts this Saturday 20 June and will run until September. There are lots of other events planned and more information about them can be found on the the Lighthouse website.

This image is of one of the boats that covered the Govan ferry crossing leaving from the ferry terminal at Govan graving docks. There are several pictures on Scran that show these types of boats and the entrance steps which have helped me to confirm that my guess-timation is correct.
The style of boat suggests that this was taken in the late 1970s when the ferry was reinstated whilst the underground was being renovated.

Its International Archives Day today and Glasgow University have developed a new online collections map to show the international nature of their collections.

Transcribing diary entries as blog posts is an excellent way of re-purposing the information in diaries into an online format and there are lots of good examples of this about:

• Diary of Samuel Pepys
• George Orwell's Diaries
• Harry Lamin's WWI letters

Unfortunately, the Ballast Trust doesn't have any diaries or log books in its collections but the Voyage of the Vampire is a great ship related example from the people at the Heritage Hub in the Scottish Borders. I particularly like their categorisation of posts (drunk, feeling seedy and destruction of wildlife to name a few!)

Finally a picture of the type of boat that Dan McDonald was famous for, a puffer. This one is the Pibroch built in 1923 by Scots and Sons, Bowling.

The Lord of the Isles II was a paddle steamer built by D & W Henderson, Partick in 1891. She was owned by the Glasgow & Inverary Steamboat Company and put on the Glasgow to Inverary route to replace the Lord of the Isles I.



She was scrapped in 1928 after serving on the following routes: Glasgow to Lochgoilhead, Glasgow to Bute cruises and finally ran on charter for Caledonian MacBrayne's to Ardrishaig and Arrochar.

This image is a glass plate negative taken on 23 June 1923 when Dan would've been 24.