nemaritimetrust.co.uk

The Post about the missing archives made on 12th September 2024, was about the alteration to the history of the North East Maritime Trust prior to December 2019, made by the deletion most of the posts made to the website nemaritimetrust.co.uk by NEMT’s Chair or one of his accomplices during the few years prior to the spring of 2024.

I had given him editorial rights to the website while it was being hosted by TSOHost but he had betrayed my trust by gaining total control of my website by misinforming one of their agents and lying about it to some of the Trustees of the two Trusts, NEMT and NFHT.

I discovered on March the 15th 2024 that I could no longer log into the website that I had maintained for about a decade and a half I had and when I asked for control to be passed back to myself I was sold by one of TSOHost’s administrators that I would have to talk with Mr Renwick to before they would resolve the and it was only when I regained control of my website by passing it to another provider that I was able to progress and start to fill the gaps made in the history of the NE Maritime Trust by Mr A Renwick or one of his accomplices.

In the post about about the missing posts made on September the 12th I only mentioned the 8 years from 2011 but there was an earlier period which dealt with the restoration of the traditional fishing vessels the Rachel Douglas, Favourite and Peggy in the years 2002-2008. The first two boats were mainly the concern of the NEMT Volunteers including myself, who had taken them over after they had finished commercial fishing and Peggy was acquired by me as a project for my retirement.

She had been in the care of two sea anglers from Hartlepool for some years and they were definitely not commercial fishermen and her first moorings on the Tyne were with the South Shields Boat Angling Club of which I was a member for a few years. It was just a hundred yards along the road from the slipway known a Fred’s shed before it was acquired by NEMT.

Mick Dawson
1st September 2026

Originally published on the 9th August, as Views of nemaritimetrust.co.uk pass 187,000 today, this update has been made to emphasise something that ought not to have been glossed over last week and that is the distance between what the Chairman of Trust was telling his readers about the North East Maritime Trust and the truth.

The post had began “Compiling some facts about the two websites, this one and a later site developed by the self appointed Chair of the NE Maritime Trust.

Of the six boats described on his site:
1 – the Friarage appears to have so much work needed to be done to make her seaworthy, that NEMT will not be able to return her to Hartlepool for few years.
2 – the Kernic is no longer in the workshop, it appears that she has been delivered to the Sea Cadets.
3 – the Viking was not restored by NEMT volunteers.
4 – Bedford is in storage, but the Tyne which was given a good tidy by the North East Maritime Trust a good few years ago.
5 – the Royal Diadem II was acquired by the Northumbrian Fisheries Heritage Trust and restored by NEMT volunteers in 2010.
6 – the Henry Frederick Swan is in such a sorry state that she will be occupying the slipway for a good number of years.

There was a commentary on six boats to be found on nemaritimetrust.org.uk but the original commentary of a week or so back has now been filled out with the pictures of the six vessels and what was said about them, as has the commentary made on the original Post.

1 – https://nemaritimetrust.org.uk/boats/the-friarage-hartlepool/
2 – https://nemaritimetrust.org.uk/boats/the-kernic-a-boat-building-project/
3 – https://nemaritimetrust.org.uk/boats/viking-c1908/
4 – https://nemaritimetrust.org.uk/boats/the-bedford-lifeboat-carriage/
5 – https://nemaritimetrust.org.uk/boats/royal-diadem-ii/
6 – https://nemaritimetrust.org.uk/boats/henry-frederick-swan/

I visited NEMT on the 25th July I saw that the Henry Frederick Swan was in a very sorry state but that Dave Parker must have been working on her and was rather upset to see, when space had been made in the main workshop by the Sea Cadet’s new boat apparently having been delivered, that the coble Golden Gleam had not been put back into the workshop to protect her from the sun.

I knew from experience that when I was not able to get the coble Peggy onto the slipway for well over a year, there were more lucrative jobs to be done on vessels like the Rachel D, Favourite and some none NEMT boats, that she dried out so much that there were so many gaping cracks in her planks timbers that she nearly sank when being moved less than 50 meters from South Shield Boat Angling Club onto the slipway.

On Saturday 25th, I had been hoping to see Dave Parker and was grumbling about the condition of the Hartlepool coble, Number 1, on the list above, to a NEMT Volunteer, when I was accosted by Mr Alec Renwick saying he wanted a word with me and I am rather ashamed to say I somewhat lost my temper with him and called him worse than a hypocrite.

While he deserves to be called a hypocrite by anyone’s standards, there was no way I could then raise any issue with him, especially that of the continued neglect of the coble Golden Gleam, and I was not in a reasonable mood to chat to Dave Parker about the Henry Frederick Swan so I made my exit.

Mick Dawson
14th August 2026

To those who follow the Website nemaritimetrust.co.uk, here is a criticism of the conduct of the current Chair of NEMT, Mr A Renwick.

Dear All

I received a copy of the NEMT Newsletter for the Autumn of 2024 but unfortunately filed it under Publication rather than Newsletter and discovered my error just a few weeks ago and anyone who has any concerns about the conduct of the Trust’s Chairman can now view a copy.

Before we look into any detail I maintain it was misfiled because it was seen by looking up the last newsletter posted in his website nemaritimetrust.org.uk.

One or two things one must bear in mind when reading this copy and the first was that Mr Renwick falsely claimed in a broken promise that the coble Golden Gleam lay rotting St Peters. In his words of the 15th February, 2024:-
“This inaction was repeated many times, especially regarding the hoped for restoration of your very historic coble Golden Gleam; now rotting away at St Peters. A very poor reflection on any so called Heritage Trust.

Four months later, acting as the Chair of NEMT, he accused me of stealing my own website, nemaritimetrust.co.uk, to drive a wedge between the trustees of NFHT and NEMT by threatening me on the 18th of June 2024 in an email which he had copied to six others besides myself:-

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 recovered Newsletter of August 2024 was the first newsletter to express a personal grudge against a fellow member of NE Maritime Trust and could be found in Mr A Renwick’s Newsletter of Summer 2024 which was published about the same time as the email of 18th June, in which he declared:-

Headline News – 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

‘Our Website’ was neither his nor offline by the time that Newsletter was published and to say it was unreliable was more than just an opinion, it was an outright lie. I discovered in March 2024 that my removal as the administrator of nemaritimetrust.co.uk was by Mr Renwick who had misinformed TSOHost, the website provider, in order to replace its actual owner, with himself.

Fortunately I had a copy of what remained of the Website on my PC after much of it had been removed by whom I now think of as the ‘True Gremlin’ and together with many of the records I had kept since about the time I had created the nemaritimetrust.co.uk so that the site one sees today much resembles the historical site with a few gaps. This reconstructed site was the one sent to another provider with myself as its administrator, by the end of April 2024.

A good while before the reconstruction of my old site and the reason it had to be done was that Mr Renwick had been given some editorial control of the original site but he abused the privilege to delete many of the posts that referred to the restoration by NEMT of what I consider to be the Northumbrian Fishing Fleet. It consisted the Rachel Douglas, the Favourite, the Sovereign and the Cobles Peggy and Royal Diadem. The Royal Diadem is included because when first restored, she was in the care of the Northumbrian Fishing Heritage Trust.

Dear NEMT Volunteer

From the Newsletter produced by Mr A Renwick in the Spring of 2025:

Headline News – As you may know, our original website has been
hijacked by a former member and is being used to disseminate
incorrect information sometimes bordering on slander.

The original website nemaritimetrust.co.uk was produced from 2011 by me with the agreement of Mr Renwick, as he was going to be away on other business for some time and in 2014 nemaritimetrust.co.uk was registered with Nominet and it still registered with them under my name. It was never used to disseminate incorrect information, slanderous or not and if one were to ask Mr A Renwick for an example of any wrong doing by me he would fail to produce one single example.

This member left under a cloud of rancour and suspicion many
years ago and his membership was rescinded.

I never left many years ago and was a member under the rules of the North East Maritime Trust until Mr Renwick decided my membership would be forfeited because I would not hand him the nemaritimetrust.co.uk so that he could broadcast misinformation on it such as shown in this post to a wider audience. For example – please see his 2024 Autumn Newsletter and note that while his newsletter had a circulation of a couple of hundred at the most the nemaritimetrust.co.uk had reached about 150 thousand by the turn of this year.

Our new official website can be found using the following link:
www.nemaritimetrust.org.uk.

As you can see the nemaritimetrust.org.uk was set up to replace mine and appears to be well out of date.

I’ll say no more for the time being.

Cheers
Mick Dawson

For the attention of the NEMT’s Chair and his supporters.
In August 2025, a comment was made by me about his use of a Gremlin to describe the goings on at meetings held in the workshop of the Maritime Trust and please bear in mind that it was not I who introduced us all to the Gremlin.

On Saturday, the second of August 2025, I decided to travel down from Amble to visit the North East Maritime Trust (NEMT) to see how their team of volunteers were progressing with the restoration of the Coble Golden Gleam and was disappointed to find both the workshop and slipway closed and discovered on my way home, the Rachel Douglas, looking like she had been abandoned in the so called ‘South Shields Marina’.

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