NEMT: Review of 30th April Meeting

Nearly a year ago I wrote to the Chair of former Charity, NORTHUMBRIAN FISHING HERITAGE TRUST * on Saturday, November 30, 2024 18:05 about my membership of NEMT.

Dear Peter,

Please excuse the formality and take a look down to the forwarded email of the 13th November from Mr Renwick and note that it has not been answered. It is now well over two weeks since it was sent and I can confirm that I have not received a registered delivery since I received his email of that date. It is also likely that he does know my address in Amble as it was known to Martin Wilson over 5 years ago when he wrote to me when I was the treasurer of NFHT.

From what I can gather the decision to remove me from the membership of NEMT was taken at, what appears to be a secret meeting of a very select few on the 30th April and it occurs to me that Mr Wilson’s membership was taken away by a similar process five years ago. I am led to believe that apart from Mr Renwick himself, there was Mr Lund, the NEMT treasurer Dr Sue Griffiths and possibly Mr Barnard.

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October 23rd – A reminder

Dear NEMT Member

October the 23rd, 2024 was a significant date in the dispute between your Chairman, Mr Renwick and myself about ownership of domain nemaritimetrust.co.uk which began in 2020 when I allowed him some editorial control of the site and he abused my trust 1, by deleting many of the posts that referred to the work done by NEMT on restoring the vessels of North East’s fishing fleet that were owned by the membership from its early days in 2005.

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NEMT – Sea Cadets’ Boat

Image taken from the NEMT Spring Newsletter which was circulated amongst its members in April 2025 and it does not matter whether Dave is asleep or not because he gives it scale which indicates that the boat that they are building for the South Shields Sea Cadets is about eighteen foot long with a beam of six feet(5.5m x 1.8m) and we were told:-

The boats are jointly designed by the combined efforts of NEMT, SSSC and Marine Architect Francois Vivier, with boat parts supplied by Jordan Boats in Cumbria.

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Post Views Update

A month ago the counter for nemaritimetrust.co.uk passed 110,000 late on the 27th and this morning read 116,040 at 12:30 i.e. about 6000 a month while in March it was 8,500 which represents a drop of 30% interest in the website over the last six months. Hopefully it is a seasonal thing but I think it is because there has been very little reported on the progress made on the restoration of the Golden Gleam since February or on the boat they are making for the Sea Cadets who are based on on the same quay, about a hundred yards upstream, as reported in the publication of the Newsletter in April 2025.

The article about the about Sea Cadets boats appeared on the third page but what I found rather unsettling was the personal attack on my integrity delivered in its headlines.

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Commentary on the Gremlin’s Tale

It was a rather tongue in cheek message made in response to his Headline News of his newsletter published mid 2024:-

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.

At the same time, I realised that he had deliberately removed the history of NEMT with regard to the vessels they restored and the NFHT looking after the same once they had been restored, from the website, nemaritimetrust.co.uk and had not replaced any of it, on the ‘new improved Website’.

By the time the Newsletter was published, I had got nemaritimetrust.co.uk back online, it was never his to call ours, and started to recover much of the missing history of the North East Maritime Trust. His ‘Headline News’ reminded me that some of his lies, after he took command of the North East Maritime Trust in 2020 were often of a fraudulent nature.*

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Disappointing visit to NEMT: 02-Aug- 25

Alec Renwick alec.renwick@gmail.com, 5/8/2025 22:42
Re: Disappointing visit to NEMT 02-Aug- 25
To Mick Dawson mick.dawson@nemaritimetrust.co.uk
Copy: zoe.mcphail@planninginspectorate.gov.uk”
kevin.lund@nemaritimetrust.org.uk,
Sue Griffiths, Peter Weightman, Richard Branson

Below follows a commentary on his response to my complaint made on the morning of the 2nd August, 2025 and recently updated.

Mr Dawson 

Please be aware that the email address you have used for me is for private use only. 
He says “Do not use it again but provides no alternative email address. When he re-wrote the history ot the North East Maritime Trust under the cover of the nemaritimetrust.org.uk he began to use alec.renwick@nemaritimetrust.org.uk, however, if one takes a look at his website one will see he advertises the email address info@nemaritimetrust.org.uk. Take your pick.

The one you are using for yourself belongs to North East Maritime Trust.
It never belonged to the North East Maritime Trust. It belonged to me, Mick Dawson, for over two decades – please see first post from November 2002.

I’m therefore asking you again to stop this rather annoying keyboard game you have continued to play over recent years . . . He calls it an annoying keyboard game but when he says that, he was obscuring the fact that he has difficulty of telling the truth when he was attempting to re-write the history of both NEMT and NFHT, centring on a row about costs in general and when he continues … return both the nemaritimetrust.co.uk website along with its email address to NEMT where they belong” it became clear to me that he wanted to write off NFHT’s contribution to the survival of the restored fishing vessels in its entirety.

For progress, that route continues to be left open for you to use.
That route leads to a website set up by Mr Renwick in opposition to the nemaritimetrust.co.uk in 2022 and please note that it fails to mention any of the fishing vessels that were restored by NEMT with the exception of the Royal Diadem II and also note that she was first restored with the experience gained with the restoration of the much older coble, called Peggy.

No more discussion can take place until that happens.

A threat and I now regret giving him control of the nemaritimetrust.co.uk because he took the opportunity to remove much of its history prior to 2022. Fortunately I caught him before he completed his self appointed task and the some of earliest posts were preserved, the latest of them being one made by the BBC in 2014.

As you know, because of your actions your membership was removed by the board of Trustees along with all access to this organisation.
My membership and access to the NE Maritime Trust was removed because I caught him with his hands in the till, so to speak. Members of the Trust had heard nothing from him for seven years, i.e. until he became aware that Gordon Brown was to leave his estate to both NEMT and NFHT.

I ask you to simply honour that decision. There was no way his decision to split the gift of a pair of Tyneside Flats unfairly between the two trusts was acceptable to who knew the truth behind the way it was done.

Finally, your comments here make it obvious that you don’t have any idea about what NEMT is actually doing. This is a diversion to avoid the truth. Under his control NEMT continued to hide the fact that the division of Gordon’s Legacy was made almost entirely for the benefit of the rebuild of the HFS and there was no way his decision, to split the gift of a pair of Tyneside Flats that was Gordon Brown’s Legacy unfairly between the trusts would have been acceptable to anyone, had he been honest about about it.

Alec Renwick

Mick Dawson
26-Jan-2026

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Disappointing Visit to NEMT: 02-Aug- 25

On Tue, 5 Aug 2025, 17:39 Mick Dawson, <mick.dawson@nemaritimetrust.co.uk> wrote:

Dear Alec,

I was most upset to find after I had travelled all the South Shields last Saturday to see how your volunteers were getting on with the restoration of the Golden Gleam only to find both the shed and the slipway locked up and it appeared that everyone had taken a break for the summer. It was only when I noticed the Rachel Douglas poorly moored in the river end of an old dock that I realised that something was wrong and I have taken the trouble to put the detail behind my disappointment in the Gremlin’s Tale – attached.

Regards
Mick Dawson

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Gremlin’s Tale

For the attention of the Chairman of NEMT

On Saturday, the second of August, 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’.

One might argue that to say abandoned is a bit strong but I cannot imagine that she was sent down from St Peters Basin, last weekend, other than to be given some care and attention on the slipway owned by the charity of which you are currently the Chairman and it would appear that someone associated with NEMT, if not an actual member, holds a key to the gate shutting off the path by which the Rachel Douglas was moored by tying her to a couple of railing posts.

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Notes on the Legacy References

1. NEMT, were given and still have a flat from which they get an income of about £10k per annum as part of the Legacy but contrary to Gordon’s wishes, NFHT, now known as Northumbria Fishing Heritage get none at all. All they received from the sale of the other flat was £13,000 and that was only after a second legal wrangle which settled in May 2023.

2. Mr Dudman implied, on behalf of the NEMT Trustees that the proposal to divide the Legacy inequitably was made by the NFHT, when he said “As this confirms NFHT’s proposal to us, I trust that you will find it a satisfactory way forward, cleverly shifting the blame for the outcome of the settlement away from NEMT’s board meeting of the 16th May 2018 onto NFHT.

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The Legacy

In 2016 a pair of flats in the Heaton/Jesmond area of Newcastle were bequeathed and to be shared equally between both NEMT and NFHT, by Gordon Brown who passed away in May that year. At that time the pair would have fetched something around £150k if they were both in a good state of repair but it seems that they were not and one had to be sold to pay for the cost of renovating the pair of them.1
I was the secretary of NFHT at that time and received an email, from the secretary of NEMT, dated 22nd May 2018, saying:

Mick,
Please find the attached letter of intent from the NEMT board. with Gordon Brown’s bequest of the flats at Dinsdale Road.
I hope that you find it useful.
Best regards
Jerry

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