'which human hands have made' - PD and the fitting out season

 

Peter Duck in winter
acrylic on board by Anna Mortimer

There’s a phrase I like in the C of E communion service when we give thanks for bread ‘which earth has given and human hands have made’.  It’s one of the many phrases that can’t be taken literally. What one actually gets, in most churches, is a tasteless white wafer made of wheat flour and water, then stamped out by machine and packaged hygienically. Minimal intervention by human hands, it would seem (though I’ve now watched a couple of You Tube videos which show labouring nuns, smiling and thinking holy thoughts as they work some basic machinery.) The usual communion wafer is nothing like real, crumbly, hand-made bread. Even if one never makes it oneself (I don’t) homemade bread seems to retain some tactile evidence of fingers mixing; palms and wrists and upper arms kneading; a baker’s bodyweight leaning into the dough, lifting and turning and rolling. No doubt it’s tiring work for people who have to make it all the time, to earn their living, not just for pleasure.

My human hands do shockingly little these days, except tap on a keyboard, turn a page or stroke a dog. Apart from this month, when it’s the annual fitting-out season on Peter Duck. When I made my first brief foray to the Woodbridge Boatyard last week, it was mainly to write lists. PD was looking grubby and depressed. I needed to do something to cheer her up. There’s a varnished rim around the coach roof that was looking particularly uncared for. I didn't have my extension lead and electric sander from last year, so I found a shave hook and some sandpaper and set to work by hand.

It was a slow job. After a while I started to puff a bit; my fingers stiffened and the muscles in my upper arm began to ache. I enjoyed the slight warmth generated by the friction between the rough paper and the wood and the indescribably different sensations that came when I was rubbing with or against the grain. I wouldn’t have got either of those feelings with my Black & Decker, though I’d have covered a much greater area in the time. It was a small, unimportant job -- but very satisfying.

For a desk-worker, like me, the fitting out season is exhausting. My family will tell you how bad-tempered I am when I come home dirty and tired after a day spent exercising unfamiliar muscles and contorting myself into awkward positions. I wouldn’t willingly miss it however. There's the camaraderie of the boatyard as we creep out from under our tarpaulins and dare to think of spring. Although I only do the most menial tasks (and don’t do them very well) it’s also the time I feel closest to Peter Duck’s fabric and experience most admiration for the people who built her. 

PD is absolutely the work of human hands. When she was being built in Suffolk in 1945-1946, access to electricity was by no means universal in boat-building yards. There was none at Harry King’s yard in Pin Mill. Every inch of sawing and planning, chiselling and sanding, riveting and caulking had direct human effort behind it. There were no power tools. There was no crane, no yard tractor, no metal boat cradles. Components such as PD's 3 ½ ton cast iron keel had to be manoeuvred into position beneath her using levers, rollers, ad hoc pulley systems and as many hands as could be found. When all 8 tons of completed yacht left the shed to make the ¼ mile migration to the river, greased logs, a makeshift cradle and a hand-cranked windlass were the only additional props to raw human effort.

Harry King's yard by the River Orwell
There were no travel hoists in 1946

This is not Stonehenge or the Pyramids. It is possible to understand how this journey from the shed to the river was achieved.  Partly because Peter Duck’s first owner, Arthur Ransome, had been there seven years earlier with his camera when his previous yacht, Selina King, was launched. This had been a thrilling moment for him, the culmination of many months of emotional involvement and un-grudged expenditure. He described every detail of the launch but afterwards regretted that he hadn’t taken more photographs of the workers. He wished he had a record ‘other than memory’ of all the people whose work he had been obsessively watching and checking over the many months it had taken for Selina to come into being.

I, too, wish he’d taken more photos of those people. Some of them will have been the same workers and the craftsmen who built Peter Duck. But if a customer with a camera wasn’t there, no one thought to photograph, or to describe, what were the normal, taken-for-granted, activities of  a boatyard then. Harry King, the small, wiry, much-respected owner worked long hours with his two sons and didn’t spend much time at his desk. Sarah Curtis, manager of the yard today -- and its historian --  has spent a considerable amount of time collating what paperwork there is and listening to the last members of that hard-working generation. Kings of Pin Mill, her forthcoming history of the yard will tell a human story as well as the development of a business.

I wish I knew what the men who built Peter Duck were paid, for their muscle-straining labour. I haven’t yet asked Sarah that question and it’s probably one she may find difficult to answer for each individual. Norman King, Harry’s older son, would bicycle the 7 miles to Ipswich each week to collect the yard wages – no one had a car – and would often bring back sweets for the children. But these were still rationed in 1945-46. How much did the workers get? Evidently not enough, says Sarah, as too many of them eventually left for the building trade.

An agricultural worker in late 1945- early 1946 might have been expected to work from 48 to 51 hours in winter and been paid a minimum rate of 70/-. Did workers in a small, family-run boatyard earn more or less? I think I must accept that the people whose sweat and muscle turned my lovely boat from a set of lines on a naval architect’s drawing board, to a robust and treasurable family yacht, received very little for their handiwork. It's not a comfortable realisation.

Whether the boatyard itself broke even, I don’t know. Sarah Curtis reveals that they often didn’t. I’ve just been re-reading A Taste for Sailing by John Lewis which details the building -- at Wivenhoe -- of a charming wooden gaff cutter, Patient Griselda, designed by my uncle Jack Jones with John Lewis, her first owner. Lewis records a somewhat tetchy exchange with Guy Harding, the boatyard owner about costs:

‘I’ve told you what I can pay for this boat and that’s all I can pay!’

‘Who is asking you to pay any more?’ he replied somewhat hotly, ‘all I’m telling you is that it’s costing me more!’  P185

John Lewis remembers that he stomped off in something of a huff, grumbling to himself about the untidiness of the yard and the fact there were always dirty dishes in the ink, the quayside needed dredging and the yard boat should have been pumped. Then 'reason returned' to him and he looked at the quality of their workmanship. 'I wandered back into the yard, past the pretty little racing sloop and up to my boat. I put my hand on her warm pitch pine planks and looked at her massive stem. She was beautifully planked. Pride of possession swept over me. I began to love her. ' 

I also remember Patient Griselda with affection, She was ‘a bonny little boat’ and lived on the River Deben for many years. Now I hear she is for sale by The Dart Harbour Authorities for £200 'due to non-payment of fees'. That price means they are trying to get rid of her to avoid the greater cost of breaking her up and send her to landfill. https://www.dartharbour.org/about-dart-harbour/dart-harbour-staff/staff/patient-griselda/  I hope someone decides to take her on.

Now, I’d better lift my fingers from the keyboard and go and find the extension lead and check that I’ve sufficient sander pads to avoid PD falling into such a sad state.

 

Fitting out is not all tasteful varnish work. 
Today I was cleaning rusty ballast.
I've not yet discovered a machine to take that job off my hands