The drawing by Roger Finch may be compared with the photo ofthe Loualf taken in 1902. Key: 1 Staysail, 2 Foresail, 3 Topsail , 4 Mainsail , 5 Mizzen, 6 Jib (furled) , 7 Bowsprit, 8 Sprit, 9 Mainmast, JO Topmast, ll Mizzen mast, 12 Mizzen gaff, 13 Mizzen boom, 14 Stayjall tackle, 15 Bow badge, 16 Windlass, 17 Fo'c'sle hatch , 18 Bow boards, 19 Mast case, 20 Jib-stay winch, 21 Main hatch , 22 Leeboard, 23 Main horse, 24 Cabin scuttle hatch , 25 Rudder, 26 Quarter boards, 27 Wheelhouse, 28 Main brail, 29 Main rigging, 30 Forestay, 31 Topmast backstay, 32 Bob or house flag, 33 Topmastforestay.
some are used for storage. Their longevity is legendary. Defiance, built in 1789 was still extant after the First World War. 'Favorite,' built in 1803, two years before the Battle of Trafalgar, was afloat as a houseboat on the Thames in the 1960s, and at that time several barges built before 1890 were still trading. And today, in a basin adjoining the Historic Ships Collection at St. Katharine's Dock, there are a dozen or more Thames spritsail barges, cared for and cherished by devoted owners and crews. So, even now, the breed refuses to die; or, perhaps, there are many individuals and groups who refuse to let it die. There are at least five virile organizations dedicated to prevent that happening; the Sailing Barge Association , the Society for Spritsail Barge Research, the Thames Barge Sailing Club, the East Coast Sail Trust and the Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum Trust. The Sailing Barge Association, established in January 1978, coordinates the various concerns of the sailing barge world, from negotiating bulk purchases of certain commodities peculiar to barge upkeep and operation, to arranging favorable insurance terms. The Society for Spritsail Barge Research includes in its membership a number of former skippers of working barges. Their recollections at talks and slide shows provide a unique link with the days of working sail for present-day devotees, and their quarterly newsletter Topsail provides news and information on spritsail barges and other indigenous English cargo-carrying craft-Norfolk Wherries, Humber Sloops and Keels, Mersey Flats, Severn Trows, Muddies, and a host of smaller sailing barges which at one time worked the rivers, estuaries and larger canals around the British Isles. The Thames Barge Sailing Club provides members with the opportunity to maintain and sail the two sailing barges, the 82-footersPudge, built in 1922, and Centaur built in 1895, on the rivers and estuaries of the East Coast counties of Kent and Essex. Pudge, by the way, is a veteran of the evacuation of Dunkirk. The &st Coast Sail Trust is a charitable organization with two prime objectives : to preserve some of the best of the few remaining Thames spritsail barges in sea-going condition, so that future generations may see how the sea-borne trade of the London River and its approaches was carried out in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and to use these historic and traditional craft in short educational cruises for boys and girls, drawn mainly from the urban areas, in the Thames Estuary. The Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum Trust is situated on a small inlet near Sittingbourne in Kent, on the site of a yard where sailing barges were once built and repaired . The yard is the last com22
plete example of its type, comprising a sail loft and carpenter's shop (both housed in a timber frame and weatherboard building built 70 years ago), a forge (the main supporting timbers of which are sailing barge tillers which went out of use in the 1880s), a steam chest, and barge repair blocks set in the entrance to the inlet with the original barge building shed and slipway close by. The Society for Spritsail Barge Research sponsored its establishment with the idea of restoring the yard as a live "folk" museum . Milton Creek has seen over 400 barges built along its banks and by the turn of the century commerce was so brisk in the area that it was said you could walk its entire length from barge to barge without ever putting foot ashore. Barge interest is not limited to those few who can afford the time and money to maintain one. The SSBR publishes a bibliography of no less than 34 separate books on the subject, ten of which have been reprinted; it circulates details of projected "Barge Matches ;" and a revised "Hulk List" is being prepared, detailing condition and location of those barges abandoned along the East Coast. "If It Looks Wrong.. !' The supreme functionalism of the barge is the culmination of evolution over the centuries of the unpretentious skill of the sailormeil. "If it looks wrong, it is wrong," they would say: and Sir Alan Herbert summed it up when he wrote of the barge Singing Swan, the mythical heroine of his novel of that title: "Everything about her was practical before it was beautiful , and was beautiful because it was right. Nothing on a barge, except some of the paint, is there for ornament or vanity, not even the flag, for the first purpose of that is to announce the shift of the wind and not the name of the owner or his club. The things about her which make her a delight to the eye are those which make her easy to handle and cheap to own, the sprit, the brailed sail, the leeboard , the graceful topmast. The sails are not dressed to please the eye but to resist the wind and water, and to keep down costs. The ropes coiled down on hatches, bass ropes, hemp ropes, cotton ropes, were not coiled to please the artist but to do their work readily." They say that ifthe men who had built HMS Victory at Chatham in Kent between 1759 and 1765 had come back 150 years later, they would not have felt out of place in any barge yard along Chatham's River Medway. They would have picked up a barge builder's woodworking tools and used them without a word of instruction. Like the shipwrights who fashioned the ships of Nelson's navy, the craftsmen who the Cambria in 1906 fashioned SEA HIS1DRY, WINTER 1984-85