Blog at the Ballast

These are some pictures of a ship called the 'Alert', it has been tricky to find information about it. According to the Lloyds Registers that Southampton have digitised there are 9 entries for ships named 'Alert' and the Clydebuilt database has 10. Without knowing the tonnage or date of build its impossible for me to decide which of these entries this images relate to. So I can only offer some pictures and hope that someone out there might care to fill in the blanks?

The National Maritime Museum has put online its Admiralty collection of sailing warship plans, commonly known as the 'Sailing Navy collection'.  This means that 711 plans are available to look at online covering the period from 1700 to the 1900s. The collection can be viewed here.

You can browse through the entire collection or by maker or century if you wish to narrow it down.  Once you've found an image you like, you can enlarge it so that the detail on the plan can be clearly read and images can also be emailed to friends or ordered up as prints.

Fairfield Shipyard Offices will be open this weekend as part of the Glasgow doors open day range of events.  Details about when they are open and how to get there are available here.

Another building that is open as part of the weekend is Maxwell Park Station (information here), something for the Caledonian Railway fans out there.

There were two Baron Vernons built on the clyde (see Clydebuilt database here and here), but these pictures are of a ship which was launch as the Dunmore Head in Belfast. She was bought by Hugh Hogarth & Sons and renamed the Baron Vernon.

In May 1923 she was involved in a collision with the ss Metagama on the Clyde and she was towed to a beach near dumbarton. These pictures are from 1924 when she was raised to be sent to the Netherlands to be rebuilt and lengthened.

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The collision led to an interesting legal case about the concept of remote damages (information

In 1929 she was wrecked as the Hawkinge near Cape Finisterre.

Today's image is of a paddle steamer, the Columba.


Built in 1878 by J & G Thomson of Clydebank, she was owned by David MacBrayne and was the first of the David Hutchison & Co. company's ships to be built in steel. She was eventually scrapped in 1936.

There are several references to the Columba being one of the most graceful paddlers on the Clyde and she worked the Tarbert and Ardrishaig route for her whole career. She even had the first floating post office in the UK on board.

More information about her on the Clydebuilt database here and also on the Paddle Steamer picture gallery here and on this site. The paddle steamer gallery even has pictures of the interior from a 1902 guidebook here.

As I wrote about last week, I attended an information session for the Archives Pace Setter Scheme in Edinburgh.

I had been attending so I could report back to University of Glasgow colleagues and wasn't sure if there was any scope for the Ballast Trust to participate in the scheme. After finding out more though, I think that there in facts lots of things that we are doing or planning to do that could be more formally planned as projects and count as an innovative archive project.

One of the key things about the scheme is that the project only has to be innovative for your service and not innovative across the whole archive sector! This means that the introduction of an electronic database for cataloguing (which is fairly standard across most archives) would count as it is new for the Ballast Trust.

So, I'm off to think up projects and start planning.