Ownership
It was customary with a coble to put the name of the owner on the port stern quarter and while this was particularly true of those fishing off the Northumberland Coast it appears that with a good many boats to be found in Filey and harbours on the Yorkshire Coast, they followed the same tradition.
About a year or so after Peggy was brought back from Hartlepool she was lifted out and given a coat of paint and while I was confident burning off the old paint and repainting her I was no use at sign writing. She was called the Glad Tidings and I had been told that she was called Peggy by the first owners so she was renamed to avoid confusion with all the other vessels named Glad Tidings to be found in the North East. Her home port written as South Shields and the owner as myself:-
When we came to give her, her home port, Paul Robinson who was doing the signwriting for me, remembered that he had not long before put BK7 on the side of a similar coble and as I had a Port of Tyne registration number for her of 479, I asked him to put that on, that rather than that of Berwick, so that anyone who needed to know could check with them that Peggy had not been put back into use as a commercial fishing boat.
Not long after, the North East Maritime Trust came into being with the acquisition of the Rachel Douglas and Favourite and naturally I joined them but we were competing for the same resources, and it was a while before I could put Peggy into Fred Crowell’s for an extensive refit and I spent many happy hours of my early retirement, in his shed learning how to repair traditional fishing vessels. In those days, I was still fairly agile and spent a lot of time painting antifouling on boats undersides, not one of the easiest things to do but as it was one of the last things to do before a ‘launch’, it was a thing I did not mind doing.
About 8 years later Peggy was back on the slipway for an extensive overhaul:-
As I had returned to live in Amble I can confirm that I was not party to any antifouling.
Of more concern is the fact the sign writer appear to have been persuaded that Charlie had been the previous owner of Peggy which was not strictly true:-
By the time I saw the post made by David Parker it had attracted 47 likes/loves and it seemed rather churlish to point out this piece of misinformation to David and fellow conspirators but the fact remains that anyone joining NEMT after 2019, would not know that I was among the first of their members to use the facilities provided on Wapping Street to restore one of the Heritage Fishing Fleet boats in her first major refit made in 2009.
Some of the timber used in her first refit had not been well seasoned and they had rotted and the top planks had to be replaced when she was taken onto the slipway again. One of my last jobs on the second of Peggy’s refits, before I moved back to Amble, was to help mark her waterline.
Mick Dawson
17th December 2024
When I look back after the trouble I had in getting some honesty out the Trustees in March 2024, it appears that this was the first attempt to airbrush me from its history the North East Maritime Trust was made as long ago as 2017, i.e. when the name of Peggy’s owner was changed from mine to Charlie Lowden.