Blog at the Ballast

Interestingly the ship's website has a live webcam view from the bridge so you can see where she's going.

Two photos today of the same ship or are they?

These are both photographs of the Empress of Australia, except one has three funnels and one only has two. To complicate things further there are two Empress of Australia's built in a similar period working as passenger liners for the Canadian Pacific Line.

There is a 1919 ship built in 1913 as the SS Tirpitz by the Vulcan AG Yard in Stettin. This ship was taken as a war prize in 1919 and eventually purchased by the Canadian Pacific Railway company.

There is also a 1924 ship built by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. She was refitted for the Canadian Pacific Steamships in 1953 and also renamed the Empress of Australia.

I think that the two photographs below are both of the 1919 ship, which incidentally ended up being scrapped in 1952 and her interior oak panelling being used to decorate the ship's room at Glenfarclas Distillery.

The other week, we had a helpful comment appear for this image (shown below) on our flickr site.

It suggested that these four vessels were steam lighters rather than barges as I had described them. Not being a ship expert, I had taken the description from the back of the photo and my understanding of the difference between lighters and barges was that they were one and the same.

The MDA Waterways Object Name Thesaurus that I sometimes refer to for describing items states that a barge is "a craft with a boat shaped bow and with flat (transom) rounded or pointed sterns. Almost all 14 feet wide or wider, the length can vary considerably." The definition given for a lighter is "generally a boat for transferring cargo from a large boat to another craft or the bank" and it marks lighters as belonging to the broader class of barges.

These definitions don't really get to the what the main difference is between these two terms for similar looking vessels. Instead the follow up comment from a fellow flickr user helped to clarify things by saying "that if it was unpowered and never left the canal, then it's a barge but if it was powered and could leave the canal, then it's a lighter." This ties in with other definitions for barges that I found in the dictionary which state that a barge is a long, large, usually flatbottom boat for transporting freight that is generally unpowered and towed or pushed by other craft.

As the four vessels in the picture clearly have funnels and are steam powered that would seem to make them lighters after all and not barges.

Today's photo is of the Eddystone built by D & W Henderson in 1927 for the Clyde Shipping Co. Ltd.

Specification details are available here.

The BBC Archive site has a video of the programme originally shown in 1970 when the ship came home 'the great iron ship'.

The SS Great Britain has been preserved in Bristol as a maritime museum.

The University of the West of England has undertaken an oral history project to mark the occasion as well. The 'Visualising Voices' project is designed to preserve the story of the ship's rescue and is using animation to bring to life the oral testimonies of people involved in the rescue. The animated video can be viewed here.