New Local book "In Search of the Broadstairs Shipbuilding Industry" by Michael Hunt and a short ramble.

That ships of a considerable size were once built in Broadstairs is a claim that has been made in articles and guidebooks ever since the last vessels were launched in the early 19^th century, and one that continues to appear in tourist information to this day, most noticeably on the information board near the site of the town’s former shipyard.  Now, for the first time, local historian Michael Hunt has explored in detail the subject of the town’s shipbuilding past – when did it start?  How and why did it end? What ships were built, and for what owners and trades? 

     The family of White were prominent in the local industry and it was a Thomas White who, in the early 1800s, left Broadstairs to found what came to be the great shipbuilding firm of J. Samuel White & Co. Ltd; of Cowes, Isle of White.  The history of that company is well documented.  But the subject of White’s Broadstairs shipyard and its products, both before and after Thomas White’s departure, is a matter that has received only cursory attention up until now.

John White; hull lines

     In Search of the Broadstairs Shipbuilding Industry takes the form of an investigation into the yard, its personnel and the ships it produced.  Relying as much as possible on primary documentation the author acts the detective and picks his way through what little physical and literary evidence has survived whilst avoiding the descent into conjecture and supposition to which previous attempts at the subject have been prone.  

Both merchantmen and naval vessels were built in the Broadstairs yard;   but was their production merely an aspect of Thanet’s seasonal mixed economy? Or the product of a full-time viable industry?  Our detective pokes and peers into these and other questions; but whether he is successful in uncovering a coherent picture of this little known aspect of Thanet history is left to the reader to decide. 

Author Michael Hunt

     In Search of the Broadstairs Shipbuilding Industry is available price £6.99 from Michael’s Bookshop, 72 King Street, Ramsgate; Or from out website at  http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/in_search_of_the_broadstairs_shipbuilding_industry.htm (e-mail:michaelsbookshop@aol.com).  Open 9.30am – 5.30pm except Sundays & Thursdays.

Just a short bookshop ramble here as there is nothing much happening on the local news front, I did manage to get the new Ramsgate Tunnels maps printed, with five different Ramsgate historical maps in print now I thought I ought to do something about our stock of secondhand Ordnance Survey maps.

This mostly consists of a few hundred of the old and now out of print One inch series, demand for these is slowly increasing and we usually sell them for around £3 if they are in good condition.

Anyway I have now made a shop fitting to hold our stock and it will be out in the shop when I have priced them all, ‘fraid we used to rely on the, “have you got?” situation.

As the prices are printed on the maps it gives one some idea of the history of inflation.

Flat has been looking at John and Jennifer at the Circus

Nice to see a copy in an unclipped dust wrapper, this copy is a first edition 1949 7/6 equates to 37½p the average wage then being around £5 per week so a third of a days pay. The average wage now is around £500 per week, which is interesting to me as I can’t quite follow how this children’s book equates to £37.50. at the same time an ordinary Penguin paperback was 2½p or a fortieth of a days pay, so probably cheaper than it is new today.

These pictures are of books that have just been priced and are waiting to go away on the shelves, about a quarter of the ones we priced today, as it has been fairly quiet in the bookshop.

This is one of the more unusual titles that I priced today

And here something I had never heard of

Manston CPO decision on the 13th November and some other stuff on the airport + Flat fails to talk about sweets and sweetshops and I ramble on about collecting Shire Publications.

Frankly when Discovery Parks bought the Manston Airport site it was a major game changer, up to this point TDC were pursuing a cpo based on perceived public opinion as the result of a petition that hadn’t been properly validated and was signed before Discovery Parks announced that they had plans for the site, which would provide thousands of jobs for local people.

A very important factor here is that Thanet taxpayers money is being spent by Thanet council to investigate whether the council can remove a major brownfield site owner with a proven track record for producing UK jobs, in favour of a foreign company with no track record of having produced any UK jobs, of for that matter any aviation jobs. That they are doing this without any sort of public consultation seems ludicrous.

Make no mistake here I am not anti airport, when a plane flies over I am first out the door with a camera, but much more important than this is local jobs and when the council is engaged in hostile action towards a company with a good track record of investing in the UK and providing jobs, that says it intends to invest £1bn in a site it has just purchased in Thanet, with the intention of providing local jobs, then I become concerned.

A good parallel to this on a very small scale is, I think, the council buying up town centre shops in active and fully let parts of the local towns, with the intention of turning them into social housing.

Anyway here is the Isle of Thanet Gazette article about how much the council are spending on the cpo http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/pound-70k-earmarked-CPO-studies/story-23003354-detail/story.html

Part of the problem is that TDC are not really spending this money on a cpo, not even on discovering if a cpo is viable, they haven’t even really reached the point of considering whether an airport would have economically beneficial, environmentally viable, or socially beneficial. This doesn’t come until the draft local plan is published around Christmas, once they have this they can consider these things.

What they are doing is basically looking for a partner to fund them so the can chuck out the existing owners and their plans for local job, should the whim take them sometime in the future. 

Anyway as far as I can see we only have another couple of weeks of this nonsense.

This is a quote from TDC cabinet member David Green: “TDC at present are not considering the airport against economic, environmental and social criteria, that will come with the publication of the preferred options draft of the Local Plan, expected in Dec, and the subsequent consultation in the new year. They are not even considering the merits or otherwise of a CPO as that could only happen if TDC had a commercial partner willing to take all the financial risk and would depend upon the relative merits of the business case and many other factors. What we are doing is a soft market test under EU contract legislation as to whether such a partner exists. I have to tell you that at the moment none of the Councils prospective partners have forfilled the Councils requirements for such a partner. We have decided that this process must end with the Cabinet meeting on the 13th Nov. TDC Officers recommendations will be in the Cabinet papers for that meeting. It is possible that any decision we make could be called into Scrutiny Committee, who could ask Cabinet to think again. We will ensure that this process happens as rapidly as Councils procedures allow.”

Business wise I shall be pleased when the uncertainty about the airport is over, the airport itself has never done very much either way for business as there has never been enough activity there, but the uncertainty about its future has been very damaging.

On to Flat’s discussions about books, as you see he has chosen one today about sweets and sweetshops, he has gone off to look in the sweet jar and I can’t get any sort of comment from him, so will do my best.

The two Thanet sweetshops that stick in my mind are the one where Pete’s Fish Factory is now, where you could watch Ramsgate Rock being pulled and the one overlooking Margate beach that closed about seven years ago.

Anyway I suppose that one thing that all collectors of book series are on the lookout for is a series that is going to become collectable in terms of rare editions and so on, while all of the books in series are selling for pretty much one price an no one much knows what’s scarce. All the Shire books we have in stock are priced at £1.99 or less.

I think it is possible the Shire publications fall into this bracket, anyway I bought some more today, bottom left of the pile of books in the store waiting to be priced.

I have been gathering them up from around the shop with the view of putting them all together somewhere, viewed spine on our entire stock of Shire books doesn’t look very impressive and out in the various bookshop sections they pertain to, they vanish between larger books and get damaged.

Lay a few out and they look more interesting.

Anyway today I made a new bookcase in the bookshop to take them and a few other series.

The canal Shire book is a good example to explain what I am talking about, it was in the canal book section in the bookshop. To be honest our canal book section isn’t much use if you are planning a narrow boat holiday, you would need to look on the internet for that sort of information. My objective in the bookshop is to try to have books where the content either won’t be on the internet, or will only be available there more expensively than buying the book off the shelf.

Just a further point while I am on the subject of the internet, if you go to buy a secondhand book from a site like Amazon, you will find that a lot of the cheaper ones used to belong to public libraries. If you click on the picture of the books in the canal section to expand it you will see the tell tale signs of an ex-library book, top left with the accession number selotaped to the spine. 

The main thing to check if you buy an ex-library book is that it has the proper cancellation stamp on it, the Kent libraries one is the black round one, if not it is probably stolen.

The rule is something like this, a fine condition first edition of a specialist canal book about the history of an individual canal is going to cost about £10, with a reprint costing about £6. Take the fine first edition, write your name in it and it becomes worth about £6, clip the price off and it becomes worth about £7, lose the dust jacket and it becomes worth about £5, a cancelled ex-library copy with no jacket being worth about £2 to £3 and an uncancelled one being worth nothing at all.

So with the internet it is buyer beware. 

   Finally half term at the moment and my children are old enough to do their own cooking producing some unusual items in preparation.  

Ramsgate Tunnels Maps and I fight with this new blog

This first one is a reproduction of the tunnel design plan and I have some already  printed and in tubes, so it will be available to buy form my bookshop on Monday, price £5.99. It measures 3 feet across.

This next one also 3 feet across, is an overlay of the tunnels on the 1939 Ordinance Survey map, I hope to print these on Monday providing the computer lets me – it’s a very big file, so it may be available on Monday. I have had to price this one at £6.99 as it uses considerably more ink, which is the expensive part.

Both maps should also soon be available from the tunnel shop as well.

Quality wise, I have used an HP printer with HP ink and HP paper, so the maps look pretty good and I hope they will be reasonably fade resistant.

I have been working on getting this blog sorted out, I think I have done the live links (the ones where the latest local blog to post goes to the top of the list on the right hand sidebar) I am sure I have missed some so please let me know which.

I have aimed mostly at local blogs that linked to the thanetonline blog and which I hope will link to this one.

I should point out here that I haven’t closed the thanetonline blog, but I won’t be adding posts to it or allowing comments on it. The main reason I have done this relates to our bonkers district council and the main reason I have moved blog sites is to protect the local history posts on thanetonline so that the people who use them will still have access to them.

Essentially the story, such as it is, is that the council wanted me to remove a link to a local paper article and a link to the Google cache of the same article. Instead of either emailing me or phoning me up and asking me to remove the links, something that I would have done and as the council knows that over the years I have been very careful not to publish restricted council information so they probably knew this. Instead of this the council went to the considerable extpense of getting their solicitor to write to me telling me that if I didn’t remove the links I risked a fine or imprisonment.

Essentially the council using a sledgehammer to crack a nut because they have a large amount of our money to waste in this way.

Anyway the problem here is that the thanetonline blog is hosted by Google and the only action that Google takes to restrict blogs with illegal content is to remove the whole blog. Obviously it occurred to me that with our council prepared to act in this sort of way it was quite probable that at some time in the future I may publish some content they don’t like and that the council, instead of asking me to remove it, would pay their solicitor to write to Google threatening legal action and that Google would delete the whole blog.

This cloud, which has wasted a considerable amount of my time, does have a silver lining, which is starting with a new blog I will hopefully have learnt from some of the mistakes I made with the last one.

One important aspect is that this Michaels Bookshop blog was set up in 2008 and because I only used it for testing purposes I never did any of the major updates which are irreversible, so it has a much simpler format.

We then come to Flat Eric’s reviews, Flat has chosen a couple of books from the bookshop to advertise, the first being one of surrealist poetry. Flat says: this is what nonsense poetry becomes when it grows up.

The next being an 1870s book on wallpapering: Flat says it shows you how to get it really flat.

He studied this one really carefully.

Here is his favourite illustration.    

An Excellent Meal at The Churchill Tavern in Ramsgate and a quick sketch

A busy day at work in my bookshop today, why the retail book business here in Ramsgate is improving is still a mystery to me, anyway by closing time I felt I had done enough for one day so we went for a meal at The Churchill Tavern.

So a pen and watercolour sketch of the inside of the pub, some of the colours are a bit strange as there isn’t really enough light to see what you are doing.

 The food there is consistently very good.

Anyway I would like you to meet the bookshops new book promotion manager Flat Eric, Flat is now running our advertising department and I handed him some of the more unusual books that I bought today.

 Flat says. Obviously metal is the wrong material to make railways out of and making thme out of trees would be better for the environment.

 Flat says. RiverOak and Discovery Parks have it all wrong and the future is airships.

 Flat has been looking at this one for some time and hasn't said anything

 Flat Says. I thoroughly support humane traps for small animals

Flat says. Eats shoots and leaves. Ed. note the subtitle should read, The Lass at "The Man and Scythe" 

A couple of sketches and a few photos of Canterbury today, the booksellers dilemma expressed through vernacular architecture, Poundland comes to Canters opposite the “noisy affair”, smoke over Manston, reflections on the moved blog, a ramble.

As I have said before, drawing is not like riding a bicycle, leave it off for a few days and it gets significantly worse.

Having slunk outside the cathedral after being overwhelmed by the complexity of the shapes and confused by students with tape measures, I was once again confronted by the artistic problem that there really isn’t anywhere within the cathedral grounds where you can get a decent view of the cathedral to sketch it.

Mainly it is just too big and one is too close to it, close up it is a bit too complicated for my liking,, or at least for my skill.

So here is a not very good sketch of Canterbury Cathedral.

I went and skulked around in the cloisters for a bit and inevitably wound up in The Chapter House, before the dissolution a chapter of the Benedictine rule would have been read innit, hence the name.

There was a reasonably good art exhibition in there mostly work by teachers at wot wos the tec, difficult place to exhibit because of the architecture, or is it the craft? The ceiling really, I guess speaking as one who is oft metaphorically lost in life’s maze, standing under this one produces juxtaposition inductive of inverted vertigo. It's just too much to compete with.

Anyway the words are getting complicated and I am getting to the point when I don’t really know what I am saying.

Here is my attempt at a quick sketch of the thing called the ceiling.

And here is a photo of it.

I went an skulked outside what Newman ibid Pevsner describes as “a noisy affair with plenty of half-timbering 1897-9 by A.H. Campbell” this was probably some sort of soothsaying related to removing the “silence” signs in public libraries, we all call it The Beaney.

Over the road the building, ghastly in my mind is quite deservedly to become Poundland.      

I am still trying to sort out what I would loosely describe as the arts and crafts book section in my bookshop and am continually being faced by dilemma.

Here is an example, books about thatch, do they go in the craft section or the architecture section? I have, as U C put one in each and gawn orf for a fink.

Smoke over Manston today, black though and not white, so no decision.

On the blog front things are much easier with the one thread of comment on one post situation here, comment moderation is so much easier when all the new comment falls at the bottom of the thread.

I am taking a much tougher line on deleting comment that doesn’t conform to the comment guidelines published here, I would say I have deleted about a third of the comment submitted.

Most of which is what I would describe as non commercial spam, mostly from individuals who don’t have the confidence in what they say to publish it themselves online and hope to publish here either under a pseudonym or anonymously.

Frankly writing and moderating this blog is something like what one of the Canterbury buskers was doing today, playing the violin while balancing on one leg on a tightrope. 

I may ramble on here    

Plane Tales from the bookshop, the Manston Airport Endgame, The Throw-up or Hoosh and the blog problems.

I have been interested in crafts and engineering for as long as I can remember, I was – in that other country that goes under the name of “the past – the small boy who took the clock apart. Not as it were looking for the tick but to see how it worked.

This means that my bookshop has a fairly extensive craft section covering most aspects of most crafts from the social history through to “how to do it books” but. What does this mean? An example – if you want to know how our society developed through charcoal burning and early iron smelting, I will probably have a book on it. On the other hand if you want to make your own charcoal, smelt your own iron ore and learn to be a blacksmith then I can probably provide the literature. 

I am not obsessive about this in a bookshop with about a 1000 shelves perhaps 40 are devoted to craft.

Anyway I was put in mind of misunderstandings about planes and particularly Manston today by the customer who wanted to look at a book in my section of rarer books. He was under the misapprehension that various editions of British Planemakers from 1700 were aviation books.

As you can see from the pictures of the books surrounding the plane books, were. What? Stanley not Wright and I had to do some mental gear changing to deal with this one.

We do have a fairly substantial aviation section but there are surprisingly few aviation books that go in the rare book section, perhaps the print runs are about the same with most aviation books, but for the most part even early aviation books are not rare books.

Now to some people this may seem like, I am delving into anorak land, but you and I are. What? A long time dead. Perhaps. This may have something to do with the enthusiasm of the Manston supporters who are. What? Plane spotters perhaps.

I take the view that someone who has reached the third decade of life without developing any serious interests to the point of having a collection of books about their interest – apart from the universal interests of sex and death which to some extent don’t count – is going to be a person that I will find. What? Dull perhaps.

Anyway on the Manston front the following post has been doing the rounds on the SMA FaceBook page, I have published it here small and in red; assuming that everyone interested has already read it anyway:

A post from this morning from R. John Pritchard that I think needs reading.

I had a long chat with an experienced TDC Councillor this morning about Manston and RiverOak. This Councillor speaks with the benefit of having had years of experience in the City of London and feels sure that everything would have gone smoothly if RO had registered a company in the City of London and put it in funds. My informant believes that may have been a fatal mistake, and that it is what firms like Pfizers, Roche, etc., have always done when investing in the UK.

All of this, the Councillor feels, has taken far too long, Councillors are no longer reading stuff that comes in on Manston, and that the steam is just going to fizzle out of the campaign. On the doorstep, people are responding to questions on things like street lamps, bins collections, above all immigration issues and NHS services, job opportunities, but Manston is now regarded as yesterday's issue and people are fed up with it.

The Councillor suggests that only a miracle or perhaps central Government intervention or some dramatic development affecting the existing owners will save the situation now.

Point-scoring in relation to different pro-Manston groups, I am informed by every Councillor I speak to, is regarded as totally counter-productive and something to be resisted absolutely and with great determination. They tell me that the great schism was perhaps fatal to our campaign, but that at the very least we mustn't keep on sniping about each other's campaigns.

I do not share all of this assessment but there is much there to take to heart.

If the Councillor whom I spoke to this morning is right, RiverOak really need to listen, not dictate. If RiverOak are right, the converse is true. Both sides need to cite their authorities, and to go the extra mile to listen so that in their attempts to find common ground, policies and decisions taken jointly are evidence-based.

We know that RiverOak is prepared to put the Council in funds to secure INDEPENDENT legal advice of the highest calibre that RiverOak believes will convince Councillors and persuade Officers that in times of financial stringency, Councils up and down the country are successfully obtaining Compulsory Purchase Orders in partnership with private investors in the manner that RiverOak is convinced Thanet District Council should appreciate is now regarded as best practice. We know that ministers and officials in London are reported as having despaired at the advice Thanet District Council officers are giving to our Councillors in relation to that process.

We also believe that Thanet District Council officers really do need to share with RiverOak the advice that they've received from their own legal advisers (because there has been little or NO direct contact from the Council's legal team about what external advice they've received). Without sitting down at a conference table and working out an agreement, we are going to lose our struggle to preserve OUR airport.

God help those who fail to rise to that challenge. This campaign still has overwhelming public support. The negativity around is a product of despair, not a change in the outcome that the overwhelming majority of people who live and work in Thanet truly want.

I can perhaps add to this that talking to some of the people involved, two major factors in making the situation impossible to progress have been that the RiverOak site use has been too similar to the Discovery Parks site use for Manston to make a cpo in any sense viable and that RiverOak have set up a “Delaware LLC” to deal with TDC. I guess this is something like an American district administration starting dealing with a small British finance company that suddenly finds that they are dealing with a small British Virgin Islands finance company. I am not going to labour the point here, google “Delaware LLC”  if you don’t follow what I am talking about.

Back to Mill for me another confusion that occasionally occurs in the craft world of bookselling is the one between the mill and the mill.

Earlier today I was collating a 1930 first edition of D. W. Pinkney’s book “Rope Spinning” all 96 pages of it, which culminates in the reader developing the ability to launch a lasso with their foot, when I noticed it has a chapter entitled, The Throw-up or Hoosh.

So on to moving this blog. An interesting thing about paranoia is that occasionally someone may actually be following you. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Recently the council have bought the large shop opposite mine, which is in an otherwise fully let shopping parade, and have very recently granted themselves planning permission to turn it into social housing. Then in the last week I have had two letters from the council’s solicitor threatening me with prison if I didn’t remove items from thanetonline blog. It has dawned on me that the council may not like me very much and it further occurred to me that if the council backed by a high court judge were to ask Google to remove thanetonline blog then they probably would.

Personally it wouldn’t worry me much but over past few years it has over a million and a half visits and many of these relate to local history posts there, so I have moved my blog here.

I will endeavour to sort out links and so on here as I get the time, I will also try restoring anonymous comment, although I will leave comment moderation on.