I discovered on the 15th March 2024, that I was no longer able to log into a website that had addressed the needs of two trusts for a good while, the trusts being the North East Maritime Trust and the Northumbrian Fishing Heritage Trust. The site was nemaritimetrust.co.uk and it was created by me about the time when members of NEMT began to populate NFHT which was about ten years ago. At that time it was hosted by Daily.co.uk.
Daily.co.uk were taken over by TSOHost and the change was so seamless that it would not be noticed by anyone except the person who had to administer the website, me again, and it took place before the two Trusts were forced apart by unequal division of a legacy in late 2019.
While I was no longer able to log into the site, I could still view it and discovered by reading the last post that I, as administrator, had been replaced by the Chairman of the North East Maritime Trust, Mr Alec Renwick and that could only have been done by someone at TSOHost. I also noticed that he had removed the history of the two trusts from 2005 to late 2019 and it was replaced almost exclusively, by the history of the restoration a life boat, the Henry Frederick Swan.
TSOHost could have easily reversed the switch of the editor of nemaritimetrust.co.uk back to me in April but told me that the argument about who owned the domain name should be resolved, between Mr Renwick and myself, before they would act. He had gained control of the domain by deceiving one of their agents and it appears that they were unwilling to reverse the action because it showed how easily it could be done and I decided that the only way of regaining control and preserving the integrity of nemaritimetrust.co.uk was to switch service providers.
At the height of my dispute about the ownership of the domain name nemaritimetrust.co.uk in April 2024, he claimed to have written to Nominet on April 12th and said that I had stolen the domain name nemaritimetrust.co.uk from them:
For the attention of Nominet. After some considerable investigation it is now apparent that our nemaritimetrust.co.uk website has been stolen and transferred to Nominet from our hosting company
If Nominet had responded to the Mr Renwick’s email they would have told him that the domain name, nemaritimetrust.co.uk, did not belong to him but to a Mr M Dawson of Amble and what he did with it was entirely up to him.
A day later, the 13th he forwarded the email with the claim that I had stolen the domain from NEMT, to the Trustees of NFHT of which I was one, and it was then that I was asked to stand down as one of their Trustees, which I did willingly on the 17th April. I was also asked to remove any links from NEMT to NFHT which was not a realistic request, given the circumstances.
The Chairman of NEMT appeared to have dropped the line the website had been stolen in his newsletter of June 5th and replaced it with the lie that the website was offline.
Due to unforeseen circumstances our Website is currently still offline. We apologise if you have been affected by this or for any inconvenience caused. But be assured that we are trying to sort this out, in the meantime please be patient. However, our new Website below will replace and be much better than the original which was very unreliable anyway.
Once this horrible little gremlin has been removed we hope to be back on-line very soon with our new improved Website address as follows – www.nemaritimetrust.org.uk Please also note our new email – info@nemaritimetrust.org.uk will soon be available on the website and we hope it will also be much more reliable than before.
When he claimed in his newsletter that ‘our’ website was currently offline he was lying because parts of it had been rescued from the detail found on other sites and been stored in a temporary location, https://theharbourview.co.uk/nemaritmetrust-co-uk/ while the main site was being reconstructed in its new home. By the time that the NEMT newsletter was published in June, nemaritimetrust.co.uk had become established in its new home with IONOS.
Once this horrible little gremlin has been removed is open to interpretation and I took it that he meant that I was the gremlin and this did not bode well for me as I had already been falsely accused of stealing the domain nemaritimetrust.co.uk. and I could not resist chiding Mr Renwick and wrote on 7th June knowing full well that he had removed most of the history of the two charities from the website for the five years from 2014:
Alec,
Thank you for the sight of the latest Newsletter and this is to let you know that the horrible little gremlin has been removed but he left such a mess behind that it will take me a while to recover nemaritimetrust.co.uk and any help you can give to cover the five years from 2014 to August 2019 would be appreciated.
Cheers
Michael
He is clutching at straws when he responds:- The only way to resolve this, is for you to allow transfer to our hosting agency Kualo as previously requested.
I had simply removed the horrible little gremlin by transferring the site to a provider where he would be unable to broadcast misinformation to those who had an interest in preserving the fleet acquired by the two trusts and that was, IONOS.
He still did not realise that by calling me for the theft of the website he was hiding the fact that he had gained control of nemaritimetrust.co.uk by lying to someone in TSOHost and I thought that when he started talking of gremlins he had dropped the charge that I had stolen the site from NEMT and that be the end of the row about stealing websites and I could progress peacefully with reconstruction of nemaritimetrust.co.uk but I was wrong – please see part 2 of AR v MD.
M Dawson
24-Jun-24