When I acquired the Coble, Peggy in 2007, I lived in Greens Place with good views over the river Tyne to North Shields and Tynemouth and it was not long before I joined NEMT but by 2014 I had fallen out of favour, not with NEMT but with South Tyneside Council and decided to settle in Amble. My first attempt failed because I had trouble selling my house in Greens Place.
I had first put it on the market in 2014 but various estate agents had failed me and when I returned to South Shields in 2015, they failed me again so I sold it privately with two of NEMT’s volunteers as witnesses and for that I was extremely grateful because I was then able to afford to make a home in Amble in the late Summer of 2017. It did however, take a legal firm in Newcastle to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and the sale was officially said to have been completed in 2019.
From: Paul Nicholson Sent: 02 October 2019 17:01 To: Mick Dawson <daw50nmdj@hotmail.co.uk> Subject: NEMT web site etc., – Confidential
Hi Mick,
I hope you are well and keeping warm in this sudden drop in temperature.
As Peter may have told you, we trustees of NEMT are under attack by Paul Gray (failed treasurer,) Phil Smith (voted off the board last year) and Martin Wilson, who wrote the 8 page official complaint letter after losing a vote of No Confidence. We have taken legal advice. Other things are now coming to light, for instance Paul Gray, after walking out three years ago giving up his NEMT membership, still has editorial control over NEMT Facebook pages. He even had the gall to edit a very recent entry of Jerry’s to remove pictures and put his name to a note that he had done it.
We are working hard to close all opportunities this gang of three are using to destabilise the trust for their own purposes, which are not those of the Trust as we know it.
It is also vital that we, that is you, me and Peter being directors of NFHT, remain apart from the troubles as far as possible to avoid cross contamination. As this is so, would you please agree to let me have a note of the web site password and admin authority so that Alec can make some subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) amendments to prevent their access and potential meddling. It is still intended to work up a new web site as soon as funds permit.
Hopefully, (Mr Chairman,) once the NEMT AGM is done and dusted we can have another NFHT meeting when we can discuss the future and the legacy benefit due to us from NEMT.
From Part 1 of the divide, it would appear that a chairman, Mr A Renwick, of a charity, NEMT, is running it as a private group, and apart from 2 different versions of the NEMT AGM of 2023, that I recieved from another of NFHT’s Trustees for discussion, I have not seen the Minutes of any of their AGMs since the one held in 2018.
At that meeting it was noted that: Our close association with the NFHT, was referred to with Martin Wilson suggesting a long-term amalgamation might be a good idea. Amalgamation was not practical but it appears that he was unaware that the two trusts had been working as one since at least 2015. More importantly Phil Smith was replaced as a Trustee of NEMT by Mr Renwick.
The minutes of the 2019 AGM do not appear to have been broadcast but by 2023 the Trustees were himself, Sue Griffiths, Keith Barnard, Alex Finnegan and Guy Linkleter and of the minutes of 2022 AGM, he wrote on the 6th of January 2023 he wrote:-
In reference to you request for the November minutes.There is currently a concern about the accuracy of the transcript. As is usual minutes cannot be made public until agreed and approved by the board of directors
What he did not know was that I had blind copied my objection to the intended fraud made on January the 6th, to the Trustees of NEMT and they let me know that Mr Renwick had given a different response to them and the Trustees of NEMT than he had given me.
On the 6th of January 2023, he added to his note about the missing minutes from the November meeting:- Further to your slanderous accusations. Please supply the evidence you use to form these beliefs. Please be aware that should any more deflamatory allegations be made we will take advice with aview to legal action. There were no slanderous accusations and definitely no defamatory allegation as all the evidence was contained in the Objection-to-the-proposal-by-the-charity-NEMT.
A daylater he delivered a highly personal attack on myself to the Trustees of both NEMT and NFHT. He did not include me as the author of the Objection who was at that time a Trustee of NFHT. Dear NEMT Trustee’s, Please find the following attached by Mick Dawson an NFHT director, most of you will not know him. However apart from more aggressive, personalised emails to me, which I find objectionable. This is the only communication by anyone relative to the ‘Proposal’ to NFHT received so far (in response to replies requested within 7 days prior to the next NEMT meeting)
Re the email of the 6th:- the evidence was the Objection and re the Email of the 7th, the first statement was doubtful but to tell the Trustees that I had sent him aggressive, personal emails was an outright lie and thankfully the Trustees of NFHT diplomatically overlooked this when they began to make arrangements for the monies owing started to be made within a few days with the Transcript of the 9th of January.
The owner MD of nemaritimetrust.co.uk discovers that he has been locked out of it by the actions of the Chair of NEMT and one of the agents for TSOHost. AR to NEMT and NFHT 15-Mar-24.pdf Keith Barnard Director NEMT to PW 15-Mar-24.pdf Both emails reinforcing the split between NEMT (AR, KB, KL and SG) and apparently many others.
The email below explained that I had not stolen the Website because the Chair of NEMT as good as demanded on the 9th of June 2024, that I transfer the website nemaritimetrust.co.uk that I had registered with Nominet in May 2014 under the .co.uk domain name, to one he had created under a different domain name, nemaritimetrust.org.uk, that he had registered with Nominet on the 10th October 2022.
Between the Trustees of NEMT and one of its long standing Members.
At the beginning of 2023 it was becoming clear the Chairman of the North East Maritime Trust with the help of people like Keith Barnard was deliberately withholding monies owing to the Northumbrian Fisheries Heritage Trust. One of the tactics employed by them to delay the payment was to accuse me of making slanderous accusations and sending aggressive personal emails but they were lying, found out, and the debt of £13,000 was paid in May 2023.
It took four months to go through the legal wrangles before the debt of £13,000 was paid and I can confirm that I have never recieved an apology from either Mr Renwick or Mr Barnard.
Mr Barnard and Mr Renwick parted compay before the failed attempt at a relaunch of the Henry Frederick Swan in 2024
‘.co.uk’ or ‘.uk’ mean much the same thing and they are ideal for any business or individual who is solely UK-based and really wants to let people know that they operate within the UK.
‘.org.uk’ is extension designed for ‘organisations’ – which can be a slightly grey area when trying to figure out what exactly defines an ‘organisation’ – but for the purpose of domain extensions it simply means ‘non-profit organisations’ and includes charities.
In 2007 when I was looking for a domain name for the North East Maritime Trust, ‘nemt.org.uk’ was not available because it in use by the North East Mountain Trust which had been going since 1980 but ‘.co.uk’ was and while nemt.co.uk fitted the bill, it had been taken by Alec Renwick who was one of NEMT’s founder members and a combination of events led me to use nemaritimetrust.co.uk for my website without much thought behind the choice between ‘name.co.uk’ and ‘name.org.uk’ having been made.
The Coble just inside the NEMT Shed. She lay in the corner of St Peters Marina for a few years, photo mislaid, and it took quite a few years to get her under cover.
She laid well wrapped up at St Peters because NFHT boats were barred from the Wapping St Workshop and Slipway while Chair of NEMT tried to seize control of this website, nemaritimetrust.co.uk, from its owner who had maintained it and its predecessor since about 2008.
Called ‘Broken Promise’ on Facebook, 2022-24.
One will have to ask the current Chair of NEMT, info@nemaritimetrust.org.uk, why he relented in the case of the Golden Gleam while the Rachel Douglas, Favourite and the Sovereign remain excluded from the slipway off Wapping Street, South Shields.
Her restoration by NEMT began in 2019 and took about two years. She was built by Lancelot Lambert at the Lawe and was launched from the Lawe Building Yard, Dec 21st 1886. Miss Bedford, who lived in the South of England, bequeathed £1,000 to the Lifeboat Society Trustees for the lifeboat to be named Bedford in memory of her brother who was an engineer with the Tyne Improvement Commission.
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.
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.
