In response to my comment about the horrible little gremlin he had written, 7th June 2024:-
Thanks for your comment.
The only way to resolve this, is for you to allow transfer to our hosting agency Kualo as previously requested.
No need to do anything else at this point.
Regards
Alec
He could only mean the transfer of nemaritimetrust.co.uk to his hosting agency Kualo where he had been creating a website devoted to the Henry Frederick Swan and there was no way I could allow him to totally overwrite a website that I had looked after for ten years. I had already copied what I could into a temporary site and was busy attempting the rebuild of the original when TSOHost contacted me about the two site I had maintained with their help for some years.
The sites were theharbourview.co.uk and nemaritimetrust.co.uk and they were letting me know that the upgrade of C-panel had been successful for the first but not for the second because it had been transferred to another provider. The main issue being that they had kept a copy of the second site:-
To ensure that your website remains active while you’re making these updates to your DNSrecords, we will use a proxy to redirect to your new hosting package.
Please note: this proxy will be removed after 30 days. If the server IP address hasn’t been updated within this time, your website will NOT be accessible.
By 7th June my temporary site had attracted nearly two hundred views and the ‘new’ NE Maritime Trust many more my and I had no wish to overwrite it with the remnants of the ‘old’ one which only contained the remnants had been left by Mr Renwick.
When Mr Renwick realised the full implication the removal of nemaritimetrust.co.uk from TSOHost, he first of all complained to Nominet about it and when they did not respond he broadcast a lie that it had been stolen:-
Dear All
As you will be aware the previously transferred to NEMT, owned and paid for
nemaritimetrust.co.uk Website has been stolen by Mick Dawson who appears to have taken
advantage of its unlocked status.
It had not been transferred to them. It may have been paid for by NEMT but as I have said before and will repeat, it was not owned by them but by myself and until the reappearance of Mr Renwick in 2019 the situation had been fine for both parties i.e. for both NEMT and Mr M Dawson for some years but in March 2024, things changed when control of the website was switched from Mr Dawson to Mr Renwick. In technical terms he became the thief when he persuaded TSOHost’s agent to switch the administrator from the owner of the domain to one who was not the owner.
The former was no position to take advantage at all from a website from which he had been excluded, and the latter was lying when he said that that the former appeared “to have taken advantage of its unlocked status”.
Read down his email and you will find that he has resorted to blackmail:-
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. Unfortunat(e)ly until that happens NEMT will not be in a position to discuss any future NFHT collaboration or plan vessel repairs on these premises.
The premises are the Fisherman’s Workshop, 2-3 Wapping Street, South Shields are they have the only suitable slipway between Hartlepool and the border with Scotland for the repair and he is denying access to it for all the vessels in the care of the NFHT and I say the domain called nemaritimetrust.co.uk will remain in my name until it expires in 2027.
I do not respond the blackmail and he then resorts to the Dispute Resolution Service claiming numerous falsehoods.
Dear Mr Michael Dawson,
A Dispute Resolution Service complaint has been made about nemaritimetrust.co.uk
This email/letter is to let you know that North East Maritime Trust is using Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) to complain about your registration or use of nemaritimetrust.co.uk.
Naturally I respond and while my response has the date of Mr A Renwick’s submission I actually sent it in on the 8th August saying, Please treat this letter as my response, and my point being:-
Please note he is the sole complainant, there are no legal proceedings in connection with the domain name and more importantly, he has provided no evidence to back his claim that that I have been making ‘personal defamatory attacks include malicious and incorrect information’ against him. He cannot provide any evidence because there is none.
I also promised to hold the peace until the deadline of the 19th and right on queue I get a copy Mr Renwick’s repost and an offer from Nominet of a Mediation service which is Private and Confidential and I will respect this. Instead I will produce a Commentary on Mr A Renwick’s repost to my observations about his use of the Dispute Resolution Service.
At the height of my dispute about the ownership of the domain name nemaritimetrust.co.uk in April 2024, he claimed to have written to Nominet on April 12th that I had stolen the domain name nemaritimetrust.co.uk from them:
For the attention of Nominet. After some considerable investigation it is now apparent that our nemaritimetrust.co.uk website has been stolen and transferred to Nominet from our hosting company
If Nominet had responded to the Mr Renwick’s email they would have told him that the domain name, nemaritimetrust.co.uk, did not belong to him but to a Mr M Dawson of Amble and what he did with it was entirely up to him and not anyone else.
A day later, the 13th, he forwarded the email with the claim that I had stolen the domain from NEMT, to the Trustees of NFHT of which I was one, and it was then that I was asked to stand down as one of their Trustees, which I did willingly on the 17th April. I was also asked to remove any links from NEMT to NFHT, not a realistic request, given the circumstances.
The Chairman of NEMT appeared to have dropped the line the website had been stolen in his newsletter of June 5th and replaced it with the lie that the website was offline.
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 Please also note our new email – info@nemaritimetrust.org.uk will soon be available on the website and we hope it will also be much more reliable than before.
When he claimed in his newsletter that ‘our’ website was currently offline he was lying because parts of it had been rescued from the detail found on other sites and been stored in a temporary location, https://theharbourview.co.uk/nemaritmetrust-co-uk/ while the main site was being reconstructed in its new home. By the time that the NEMT newsletter was published in June, nemaritimetrust.co.uk had become established in its new home with IONOS.
Once this horrible little gremlin has been removed is open to interpretation and did not bode well for me as I had already been falsely accused of stealing the domain nemaritimetrust.co.uk. and I could not resist chiding Mr Renwick and wrote on 7th June knowing full well that he had removed most of the history of the two charities from the website for the five years from 2014:
Alec,
Thank you for the sight of the latest Newsletter and this is to let you know that the horrible little gremlin has been removed but he left such a mess behind that it will take me a while to recover nemaritimetrust.co.uk and any help you can give to cover the five years from 2014 to August 2019 would be appreciated.
Cheers
Michael
I had simply removed the horrible little gremlin by transferring the site to IONOS where he was not in charge but he still did not realise that in calling me for the theft of the website he was hiding the fact that he had gained control of the old site by lying to someone in TSOHost and I thought that would be the end of the row and I could progress peacefully with reconstruction of nemaritimetrust.co.uk but I was wrong.
In email from Mr Renwick on the 18th June to the Trustees of the NFHT and some members of NEMT, including myself he had reverted to calling me a thief:-
As you will be aware the previously transferred to NEMT, owned and paid for nemaritimetrust.co.uk Website has been stolen by Mick Dawson who appears to have taken advantage of its unlocked status.damage both NFHT and NEMT organisations. I have tried to speak to Mick recently, only to be told “I should know why”
Well, I don’t!
He had been told by me, when he interrupted my conversation about the damaged slipway with one of the NEMT members to say he wanted a word and I simply told him to put what he wanted to say in writing. The reason I asked him to put it in writing was in order to elevate any slander to libel but what is most disturbing is that he concludes his email with a threat:-
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.
What Mr Renwick did not know was that I had resigned my trusteeship of NFHT in April, and it had been accepted, expressly to dissociate the NFHT from any argument about the ownership of the domain name nemaritimetrust.co.uk. and also he would not have known that TSOHost had written to me, on the 13th June 2024, advising me about an upgrade of two websites of mine for which they had been providing service and support for many years and they were theharbourview.co.uk and nemaritimetrust.co.uk.
With regard to the latter of the two domains, TSOHost said:
To ensure that your website remains active while you’re making these updates to your DNS records, we will use a proxy to redirect to your new hosting package.
While I was negotiating with TSOHost about the safest way to view nemaritimetrust.co.uk as it was at the beginning of March 2024, I suggested that the Chairman of NEMT climbed down off his high horse, gave up his quest to steal the domain nemaritimetrust.co.uk from me and talk sensibly to the trustees of the Northumbrian Fisheries Heritage Trust about the best way to keep the fleet of vessels lovingly restored by members of both Trusts afloat.
He did not climb down, he wrote to the Dispute Resolution Service, DRS, in late July falsly claiming that that I had removed his rights to the domain, nemaritimetrust.co.uk when in fact, all I had done was to put a stop to him deleting all the references to NFHT from that site.
M Dawson
24-Jun-24
Revised 26-Sep-24, to include of the referral to the DRS.