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.?
