Put simply, the Northumbria Fishing Heritage Trust was set up to look after the assets such as the fishing vessels that have been rescued by people who are mostly members of the North East Maritime Trust and occasionally by those who shared a similar interest. Originally the NFHT was set up so that their vessels would not be sold off, or lost to other interests, should the North East Maritime Trust happen to lose its Charitable Status.
As late as August 2021 the Chair of NEMT was still speaking well of:- the Northumbria Fishing Heritage Trust when he published in the Newsletter:-
Organised by our partner organisation NFHT.
NEMT Members have been invited to take part in a trip to the Anstruther Harbour Festival 1st weekend in September with boats Favourite, Rachel Douglas and Henry Frederick Swan in attendance. So here’s wishing them all a great and safe trip both ways, with fair winds in fact.
Our next newsletter will describe how the Anstruther event and trip went!
The next newsletter failed completely to mention any of the activities of its partner as its Author appeared to be more interested in publishing misinformation about the former partner of NEMT.
Later in the same Newsletter he went on to say:-
However, we are now making good progress and ready to carry on with our restoration projects. We also have other historic boats urgently waiting for work to be done!
There’s also a lot of tidying up and rubbish from a replaced roof on the Boat-Shed to be disposed of too.
One of those historic boats was the Golden Gleam:-
She was one of the first traditionally built cobles on the North East Coast to be put back into sail and not to be confused with those sailing out of the Yorkshire harbours like Bridlington.
Turning back to the boats being preserved by NEMT, Taylor Maid appears to have gone the way of Cygnet and they now show little interest in restoring traditional fishing vessels and although he was aware that Golden Gleam has been on Tyneside for a year or so, on the quay at St Peter’s Basin, Byker, the Chair of NEMT has as good as said that she can stay there and rot:-
I simply ask all at NFHT to make Mick Dawson see sense and transfer our nemaritimetrust.co.uk website back to NEMT where it belongs.
As ever, I’m always available to talk in an attempt to end with a satisfactory conclusion.
Unfortunatly until that happens NEMT will not be in a position to discuss any future NFHT collaboration or plan vessel repairs on these premises.
The Website nemaritimetrust.co.uk has never belonged to either the Chair of NEMT or NEMT and it appears that an attempt to claim ownership was made to Nominet on April 13th:-
However, currently we must regard this action as theft including subsequent losses incurred.
If Michael is willing to complete transfer from Nominet back to TSO Host, which has already been initiated, all well and good.
If Mr Renwick had written to Nominet they would of told him politely that a Mr M Dawson of Amble owned the domain name and had it transferred to a new provider because it had become corrupted by Mr Renwick in its last days with the old provider TSOHost:-
The reason the provider was changed was that the Chairman, Mr A Renwick, was publishing misinformation and there was no way of it being correcting and as one could not view the proxy website it was safer to assume that any site modified by it, would contain not only the worst of Chairman’s fraudulent misrepresentations but leave him control to add to them.
While he had persuaded one of TSOHost’s Agents to switch the administrator from its rightful owner to himself, I was was able to view a sufficiency of nemaritimetrust.co.uk to be able to partially recreate a site that was up and running quite quickly with its new provider, INIOS but there was a large and important part, 2012-2019, that had been lost because it had been deleted by Mr Renwick.
If one looks at the site today one will see that some of it has been recovered but it still leaves a gap of three years from September 2011 to November 2014 and covers the work done by the NEMT volunteers on the coble the Royal Diadem II, the three fishing boats, Rachel Douglas, Favourite and Sovereign and the early work done on the life boat, the Henry Frederick Swan (HFS).
Some of this missing information is gradually being recovered and one can see how much, if one visits nemaritimetrust.co.uk.
Apart from the HFS, Joan the Foy-boat, the two life boats, Bedford and Tyne the boats that had been restored were generally passed to NFHT after they had left the shed/slipway for them to find safe moorings etc. It was a good example of the two Trust working together to preserve the historic fishing vessels. At some point some grants were given to restore the coble, Royal Diadem II and although she was originally gifted to NFHT, she now appears to belong to NEMT.
The was no date on the Restored to Glory article but it appears to have been written about five years after NEMT became a trust, i.e. some time during 2014 and its author appears to have been mislead when she was told the Royal Diadem was the first project that the trust was completed in those five years.
It was nothing of sort. Apart from the work done by the NEMT members on restoration of the four fishing vessels there was the ‘knitted boat’ produced for the Customs House Project and the hull was completed in 4 sections so that it could be carried up the stairs in the Customs House by three or four reasonably fit people.
The other restored coble was Peggy, and she was built on spec a hundred years ago and it is a shame that those in charge of the NEMT cared so little about her that she had to be rescued by NFHT and towed from South Shields to St Peter’s basin to be cleaned up:-
She is reputed to be the oldest coble still afloat and NEMT, should in my opinion, have been celebrating her hundredth birthday rather than ignoring the fact that she was one of the first boats to be restored by one of their members.
Mick Dawson
5-Dec-24