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I was surprised to learn from my mother when I eventually met her, that one of my uncles was a bodger making spindles for chairs…

Anyone looking at the Cutty Sark or HMS Victory or anyone of the numerous old square rigger ships can’t help to notice the vast number of ropes and pulleys, called blocks.
The Royal Navy used large numbers of blocks, which were all hand-made by contractors. Their quality was not consistent, the supply problematic and they were expensive. A typical ship of the line needed about 1000 blocks of different sizes, and in the course of the year the Navy required over 100,000.

One of the first steps in the industrial revolution was the building of the Portsmouth Block Mills
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Block_Mills  this could also account for the decline of the wood turner and or bodger.

I sailed on many ships as either mate, engineer or mate/engineer… and I sailed on a couple where the owner was the engineer… he said anyone can stand up there and drive the b***dy thing… but I wouldn’t trust anyone to keep her heart beating… but having said that… he bought another ship and stuck me on it as chief engineer… I was not happy.

Many thanks to the kind person that’s just informed me to unlock this thread for I had no idea it was locked… I must say I’ve never seen that facility before, and would have thought it part of a moderator’s tool kit. Anyway… it’s open/unlocked now… thanks again.

I’m trying to persuade a friend of mine to register on RC… to do his family tree etc. he sent me this to see if I could find any info about this small ship… I can’t, so I asked his permission to post it here and ask for help…


My g.g.grandfather was master of a small steamship in the last quarter of the 19th century. This ship, the “Bob and Harry”, was too small to appear in Lloyd’s Register, but I have found her in the Mercantile Shipping Lists. She was a wooden steamship, built in 1870 in Newcastle upon Tyne: length 64 feet; breadth 19 feet; depth of hold 7 feet; net tonnage 25; gross tonnage 50; engine 14 hp, screw propelled.

Her home port was Newcastle (where gggfather lived). In the 1881 census she is recorded as being in port at Pittenweem, Scotland, with a crew of three: gggfather as “master”, his son as “engineer”, and an 18 year old lad as “fireman” ie stoker. From various sources her routes were from Newcastle to the ports of Fife, ie: Burtisland, Kirkaldy, Pittenweem, Crail... occasionally as far as Dundee. She seems to have been on long term charter (or a similar arrangement) to a merchant shipping firm based in central Newcastle who, from trade directories, seem to have dealt in such commodities as bagged coal, salt, pig iron, and lumber, while at the same time acting as approved shipping agents for Armstrong and Whitworth’s massive Tyneside shipbuilding and armaments business.

My questions are:

What sort of vessel was she? What did she probably look like? From her size and the trade she seems to have served, I have assumed she was something like an earlier version of a Clyde Puffer operating a bit in the style of Para Handy… albeit some 50 years earlier and in a different setting – would this be roughly correct ?

Also as I have stated above, the records suggest she may have carried coal, salt, iron… but all these commodities were, at the time, produced both in Newcastle and in Fife, while lumber was required equally at both destinations. So I’m a bit confused as to what her cargoes actually were. Any guesses anyone?

And finally gggfather’s occupation is always given as “master mariner” which I took to be owner/captain. But in the mercantile lists it is the Newcastle shipping agent who is given in the box labelled: “Sole Registered Owner or Managing Owner where there are more Owners than One”. So is a ship’s master not necessarily her owner?

Thanks for any suggestions and apologies if this posting is inappropriate for the forum.

While I try to get him to register here… I know his internet connections are extremely susceptible to his local weather conditions living way up in the Pyrenees…
Can anyone get their teeth into this.?

try this... could be a good start.

http://www.tomcc.org/ProfilePage.aspx?id=4