Shipping

Christmas Eve at the Front

An interesting letter has just been received by Mrs Packer, of Broadclyst, from her husband, Corpl Packer of A Company, 1st Battalion Devonshire Regiment, who is serving with the Expeditionary Force in Northern France. In the course of a letter he describes a remarkable incident which occurred on Christmas Eve between the British and German trenches.

May not be all that unusual, but copper sails and silver-plated hulls make those constructed by Mr Ronald Grose of Appledore something special.

Mr Grose is a perfectionist, his models not only being made almost exactly to scale but in every part, all of which he makes himself, he employs the original boat building construction method. If the hull of an original vessel was planked and riveted, for instance, then so is the hull of Mr Grose’s replica. One of his recent silver/copper models is a magnificent one of the Cutty Sark under full sail. Another is a wooden model of the liner Edinburgh Castle afloat on a blue sea with the moon and stars behind it – and just to make this model different, it lights up. Mr Grose estimates that each model takes him between 600 and 800 hours to complete and waiting to have the finishing touches added to it this winter is a wooden model of Scott’s Endeavour.

It is 12 years now since Mr Grose, a Bideford man, retired to Appledore and although he has been making models – cars, planes and steam engines as well as boats – ever since he was a boy, it is now very much his retirement hobby. The RNLI are among those who have commissioned work from him, including several replicas of lifeboats. He does not recall his first model, but he does remember that the now derelict folly at the bottom of Torridge Hill, Bideford, was his first workshop. It stands in what was the garden of the surgery of his father, the late Dr J S Grose.

Although he has never had an exhibition, word of Mr Grose’s skill has travelled. ‘People from all over the country and even abroad come knocking on the door looking for the boat man’ he said.

Gazette article dated 6 October 1978

Locally-Built Launches For HM Customs

Bideford Shipyard Ltd have just completed a vessel for HM Customs.

Successful trials of the ML Guardwell were completed last week and she is to be delivered within the next few days to the Customs authorities at Plymouth. Sixty feet long, she has a speed of 11 knots and is extremely manoeuvrable, being capable of turning round at nearly full power in 1½ times her length.
She will be delivered under the command of Captain T Jewell, who for many years skippered the Kathleen and May, now owned by the Maritime Trust and which this week was moored in Sutton Harbour, Plymouth, where she will be on public display.
Capt. Jewell is at present engaged on delivering another Customs launch from Messrs J Hinks and Sons’ yard, Appledore, to Gravesend.
In addition to work on the replica of the Golden Hind, Hinks’ yard is also engaged on building a 47 foot patrol launch for Cornwall Sea Fisheries Committee.
The full Gazette article is dated 24 March 1972

M W Blackmore and Sons Ltd to go into liquidation

After weeks of uncertainty the Bideford boatbuilding firm of M W Blackmore and Sons Ltd is to go into liquidation, a meeting of shareholders has decided.

A liquidator has been appointed.
The managing director, Mr Harold Blackmore, said that at a meeting of creditors on Friday no one had any alternative to put forward.
The family business, which was founded at Appledore in 1870, has been Bideford’s biggest employer of labour.
The full Gazette article is dated 4 January 1963