Clootie

About 14 years ago I had heard that the North East Maritime Trust – NEMT, had been asked to think about making boat as a prop for a knitting group for an exhibition in the Customs House in South Shields but while the Trustees showed little interest, one or two of us did.
About a decade before, a friend who had heard that I had moved to South Shields, with the intention of taking up boating again, had persuaded me to buy a coble that that was for sale in Hartlepool. I had sailed one with him in Seahouses and was easily persuaded because I thought it would not to difficult to take the ‘Glad Tidings’ back into sail again.

“Dream on” I hear you say but I was told soon after I decided to bring her up from Hartlepool that she was originally built on spec and named ‘Peggy’ when she was bought from Harrison’s Boat Yard in 1924 and the first time she was repainted I asked for her name to be rewritten as Peggy and that is what she has been called since.

My original dream had been to build a small sailing boat, so that I could with careful planning sail down the Coast to Whitby or up it, to Blyth, Amble and Holy Island and I had in mind something a bit longer and faster than a Lysander. I had spent some time in the late 60’s helping my friends build one and was rather pleased when I saw her afloat on the Thames.

Those who have sailed a Coble will know that it would be more than foolish to attempt to sail it single handed so when I heard of the Customs House Project I thought back to the reason I had moved to South Shields in the first place and set about producing a design which would satisfy the Knitters and the Customs House needs and be easily modified to build the boat of my dreams.

One sunny afternoon while Peggy was on shore at the South Shields Boat Angling Club, my son and I with the aid of his girlfriend took her lines:-

While not drawn to to the same convention used by a professional yacht designer, any competent boatbuilder or model maker would be able to reproduce a copy of Peggy from those lines but fortunately I was passed some drawings of a 12 foot day sailer that another member of NEMT had acquired and the design was modified to produce the lines for the 6 or 7m boat required by the Knitters planning the Customs House Project:-

While developing the lines, which was an amalgamation of Peggy’s and the Selway Fisher Design for a 15’ Northumbrian Coble and not really drawn to a professional standard but that was not important because twenty or so detailed drawings were produced to enable the NEMT volunteers to complete the hull successfully. There are one or two photographs the finished parts before they were covered in fabric and some photographs of the hull being built and while I have none of the completed hull the before she was sawn into 4, I have one taken when she was about 70% complete.

By then I realised that there was no way that the design of the boat that could fulfil the demands of the Customs House Project and at the same time, be a practical design for a coastal cruising boat.

We also had news that the knitters had done much work toward giving the boat a coat and by then I taken to calling her clootie, a term used in parts of the North East for a clippy mat but more importantly we had to prove that the 4 sections could be carried to the first floor of the Customs House by hand.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy: the designer with four boat-wrights:-

We only needed three ‘porters’ for the bow and stern sections and four for two mid sections to carry them upstairs. They were soon back in the workshop to be cleaned up varnished and made ready to be returned to the Customs House but by then it had been agreed that she, Salma’s Dream, needed a platform to sit on:-

Mick Dawson
10-Dec-24