Traditional Thames Boats

0:00 One of the joys of being on the River Thames is the huge variety of boats you see here. Narrow boats are in a minority. It's a big waterway, so there are lots of wide beams and some beautiful Dutch barges. There are cruisers in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, some of them so tall they tower above you. But some of the prettiest and most historic boats are the small traditional ones. Slipper launches, wooden rowing boats, canoes and skiffs. So when I saw a little sign on a fence in Goring advertising Will Howard, a builder of traditional Thames boats, I got in touch and arranged to meet.

0:38 Welcome to this edition of the Water Road. I'm with Will Howard, and you very kindly brought me to your boatyard where you work on these traditional Thames boats. Now, for those of us who are canal people, we're used to steel boats, narrow boats, wide beams, that sort of thing. But we're talking completely different sorts of boats here, aren't they? So maybe you can just outline what these traditional Thames boats are? Originally we had wherries down in London for carrying passengers across the Thames.

1:15 They basically adapted over the years to skiffs for the upper Thames for the the leisure industry, which has got a flatter bottom than a a Thames gig, which glides over the water as opposed to a gig that cuts through the water for the choppier water of London. They were basically the campervan of their day in the sort of 1900s when families wanted to go out or a gentleman wants to romance his lady friend for the weekend and go camping, that sort of thing. They had lovely camping covers, made of beautiful canvas with quite heavy iron hoops and they were great fun to go camping.

1:50 You still get people camping in them to this day actually. You can cover a lot of miles in a Thames skiff. We did a charity row in a Messum's Thames skiff I owned and we were covering up to sort of 22-23 miles a day, depending if the pubs were open! And yeah, they're really you know, they're beautiful things to row. They're different to rowing a sliding seat boat, there's a different technique, but people get used to it as they use them. And there's a lovely sound as you go down the water, the water running underneath the boards and yeah, you hear the the leather on the thole pins clonking.

2:28 Hopefully in time. Later we had canoes as well like this one we've got here. We've got a Messum's canoe which was used as an Upper Thames sort of pleasure vessel for small families going out and enjoying the Thames back in the 1900s. But they're beautifully built boats with very traditional techniques. We move on to Thames dinghies, which were more in the 1920s I guess. They're beautiful, smaller, sort of 12 to 14 foot boats. We've got a 10 foot dinghy here with a flat bottom. So just tell me a bit about your background then, because this is all quite specialist work, isn't it?

3:04 It is, yeah. I mean I, I grew up on the Thames in Streatley and then moved to Cornwall to study boat building when I was 19. I did a two year boat building course there, a City and Guilds, which is a fairly old school style of course, which is well respected. And then I moved up, back up to the Thames because I missed the Thames boat and went on to work for a couple of boat yards on the Thames, which are very traditional, I'd say the best, best boat yards on the Thames in fact. So went on to build slipper launches there and dinghies and a skiff as well.

3:40 So yeah, it's a real, real honour to learn the trade. And I worked with some really well respected boat builders on the Thames. In fact, a guy, one of the chaps, John Cox, who started building the skiffs again in the 70s and he, I did an apprenticeship piece building a Thames skiff out of sustainable sweet chestnut timber, which was a beautiful timber to work. And then got an award for that from Prince Michael of Kent. And then decided to sort of go self-employed, which is a big, big gamble and quite a quite a nerve wracking time.

4:16 But it's, it's paid off. You know, I've been been busy, busy since then really. I also did a bit of contract work on the Gloriana for the Queen, the Queen's row barge, which is a real, another real honour to work on. She's a fantastic boat, some interesting projects I've worked on over the years. So you do restorations and completely new boats? I mainly restore nowadays. I'm going to be building a dinghy soon for myself. There's a lot of hours that go into them. It's very time consuming. It's a hell of a lot of cost involved in building a new boat, so I've been mainly restoring the traditional ones recently.

4:53 So let's have a look at this boat that we're standing right by, and this one is a dinghy. And just tell me a bit about the history of it. So it's an Arlett's dinghy which is built in Henley. It's got a beautiful sheer to it which is quite distinctive. She's built from Honduras mahogany with rock elm timbers and a pitch pine hog and kale. She's 10 foot 4 inches long. She's got a single rowing position and she'd take 1 passenger in the stern and possibly a child at the bow. But she's lovely and manoeuvrable, got a very flat bottom as you can see.

5:28 So she's obviously an Upper Thames boat, which the maker's plate proves. Yeah, she's she's got lovely lines to her and very finely built. And what you actually going to be doing then? So we're going to replace 7 planks on the bottom. The hog's going to have some work done to it too and some of the timbers are going to be removed and refastened and also a scrape and revarnish as well. So it's a hell of a lot of work but it's, it's too good to see go to waste. You know, it's, it's got some history to it.

5:57 It's got lovely lines. And we're also going to take, whilst we're restoring, we're going to take the lines off it and make some moulds like these ones over here in the corner there for building new boats with. So when you're replacing the wood, then I mean, are you putting brand new wood in or are you trying to use older wood and where does the wood come from? So mainly we use reclaimed timber, where we can. There are some sustainable timbers we put in as well to best match the material if we can.

6:27 But we got a small stock of old reclaimed timber which we use to repair the mahogany with. And then if it's below the waterline, for instance, and it's a painted bottom, we could use something like a utility, which is a sustainable sort of mahogany breed of timber. We best match it with original where we can. So just explain to me what this tool is that you're using here and. What it's doing, it's an ogee moulding plane. We use them on decorative bits on skiffs and dinghies. You can see the profile in there, it's a wooden moulding plane.

7:09 You're more likely to see in decoration in a pub nowadays. But we still use them. You can't really use a router for this sort of job. You see that moulding slowly forming two curves in the timber, going along longitudinally on a sheet on a boat or some planking in the bilge. They look lovely decoration. And then this other boat behind us. Now this one looks extraordinary. Just tell me a bit about this one. Yeah, So she's a Messum's canoe built around about 1900. She's very wide board. So she's very unusual.

8:11 Built from Honduran cedar. Generally the the boards are about an inch and a quarter wide and they're cedar stripped. But she's a wide board one. So she's unusual, which is also very unusual because she's a very original boat. She's got the original horse hair, velvet cushions, the planking's all in original order. She's got some tingles on her, but they're, they're well done tingles, you know, repairs to the bottom. But she's just a lovely boat. She's 17 foot long and she's just very unusual. So we're looking forward to finishing off the scraping we've started on the side there.

8:48 So Tony, you're doing the scraping and this is quite a long boat and it must be a very, very time consuming process. It's very time consuming, but it's a job that you've got to get right. There's lots of varnish on here. The key to a job like this is just taking it nice and steady because if you do get gouges in the wood with your scraper, that takes a lot of fixing, a lot of sorting out. So the more time you spend on this process, the scraping process, the better. So once all the scraping's done, it's a case of getting the colour back into it.

9:26 So I've scraped patch here, which you see there's still some varnish left on there. This is further along here, will be scraped back to colour. That's the sort of colour we're looking to get back to. So once it's all scraped, we'll sand it, get the colour back into it, and then the varnishing process begins, which once again is quite a long process, but not as long as the scraping process that that does take a long, long time. So what's your history with Thames boats then? So my history is I went more or less straight from school into a big boatyard and it was called Andrews Boathouses at Bourne End and they're famous for the slipper launches.

10:09 So it's a 25 foot open launch with a sloping back. So they made them in 25 foot lengths, 30 foot lengths and then made two in 50 foot length, One still survives and one was burnt in a boathouse fire. So the Baby Greyhound, which is the last remaining 50 foot, still remains. The La Belle Helaine burnt in a boathouse fire, unfortunately. But yeah, so, so my background is I went into a big boatyard as a lad to do every sort of job possible when you work in a boatyard. So it was scraping, it was, you know, helping lay decks on boats, driving launches, driving hire boats, everything you could possibly think of a young lad of 17, 18 would do, including cleaning the toilets and stuff.

10:59 So it was, it was I took the good and the bad, you know, it was a great place to work and if they hadn't closed down I'd probably still be there because I loved everyday. I just loved working with old boats. And when I was made redundant from the boatyard, I applied for a job with the then Thames Water Authority to drive these lovely patrol launches I used to see on the river and they used to come into the boatyard quite a lot and got the job. And nearly 40 years later I've just retired from working on the river doing boats.

11:29 Then I met Will and Will said, you know, do you want to come along and keep your hand in and do a do a couple of hours on a sort of voluntary basis? And I said, Oh yeah, yeah, I'll do that. So it's like stepping back in time for me really, you know, going back to, to working with wooden boats, which was great. And that's how it all turned out. I mean, there can't be that many people with these skills around, can they? No, not really. Although on saying that the people that work in boatyards, there's still quite a few that come through the various training academies.

11:59 There's one down in Lyme Regis to learn boat building and lots of younger people now are getting into boat building. So they're either going abroad to work or they're working in the boatyards. We have now lots of wooden boat builders on the Thames, people from that boat building a canopy. Hopefully you know there will be younger people still working with boats. And on the bit that you've scraped, I can see that you've sort of revealed the nails. So are they copper? They look copperish. They are indeed copper, Yes.

12:36 They're 18 gauge copper nails so they're quite fine grade. They're not that easy to get hold of, but I've got old stock of fine copper nails. So it sounds as though you've got quite a few challenges when you come to these boats. You've got to actually have the skills to do it. But then getting all the materials is is another one. It is, yes. There's fairly fairly local timber merchants we can go to. Old stock teak and stuff like that can be tricky. And old Brazilian mahogany bits and pieces kicking about that people reclaim from old buildings and stuff like that.

13:10 So yeah, it's it's it's good to get hold of. But it's an important tradition to keep going, you think? Oh, definitely, yeah. These boats we'll be, I mean, mainly the custodians of them. We don't really own them. They need to be well looked after, so stored away nicely in the winter. You know, they need to be well covered up in the summer if they're, if they're near the river or indeed on the water, which we do get occasionally with skiffs, they're put on the water in boathouses. But yeah, they need to be well loved.

13:40 So, and we're lucky with the owners we have that they they understand that they need to be well kept and and looked after well. So we're always busy. Well, thank you to Will for a fascinating glimpse into the world of traditional wooden Thames boats. If you want to see what the boats look like, his website and Instagram details are in the episode description. And we'll hear more from Tony about his 40 years working on the river in the next episode, when we also discover what it's like to work as a Thames lot keeper.

14:18 It's one of those jobs where 95% of it is is is dealing with the public and the people, which brings its challenges, but it's also where the variety comes from. And aside from that, you're in a lovely environment outside all the time, so you get to appreciate the change of the seasons and the way the river behaves along with it. So it's all good stuff. If you've already followed or subscribed to The Water Rd, thank you. If not, click that button because it means you'll be alerted when episodes are published.

14:45 And if you enjoy the series, please leave us a nice review or star rating because it really does help other people find us. Thank you for listening to The Water Road.