We managed and that was it. I think we had always been a pretty careful family. Of course Dad always had the garden going; he never wasted any bits of garden. He used to grow everything. His favourite was growing onions. He still had his little boat and eventually you could use it up the river, but first of all you couldn’t. The RASC had one of these boats anchored – just for living in – he used to go up round there and got in with them, and take them up onions and if he had any other veg. He got well in with them and eventually I think they let him go just out off the pier fishing. Phil Kelsey b 1920
Tag Archives: RASC
Nick Chandler: Boat Building at Fort Victoria 1960s
The chap in charge of RASC boatbuilding at Fort Vic was Major Wilkey. He used to live in Plevna at one time. I had been working over there for about a week when Nelson Simmonds turned up, and after that, two old boatbuilders from Whites. It was a bit short lived 18 months – two years and it all folded up.
Old Nelson, he was a boy! He was he was into everything. He had a harbour launch pulled up over there, had to be re-coppered. We stripped all the old copper off, fitted the new, and Nelson said,
‘We’ll make a bob or two out of this, mate. I’ll bring the van over one evening and spirit this lot away.’
One day we were having a cup of tea when the quartermaster came in, ‘ Ah, Mr Simmonds and Mr Chandler. Do you know where the copper went that you stripped off that harbour launch?’
‘No,’ we said. Nelson said, ‘Beachcombers, I expect,’
‘Yes, and I think I’m looking at them.’ said the quartermaster, with that he turned round and walked out.
When the fort was shut the stuff that was taken out to sea and dumped was terrible, harbour launches full of it for days, and the diesel from the tanks was pumped into the beach, pumped in to the shingle.
Towards the end of it, I was going to work one morning and I heard this lorry grinding up the hill. It was old Ball, the scrap merchant, and he was loaded with batteries. When I got down to the fort, Bill, the sergeant was there, and I said to him, ‘Someone has made a bob or two out of that load,’ and he said,
‘Well, you’ve got to, haven’t you.’ When it finally closed I was offered the same job at Gunwharf over Pompey, but I didn’t want to travel. Nick Chandler b 1937
Nick Chandler: Harbour 1960s, 1970s
We did have a real shocker; the Doctor, Doctor Brydon. He was such a shocker that when the Smith’s boatbuilding business was going, they kept a stock of bow sprits for him . He was always smashing his bow sprit up. I can’t remember the name of the boat, lost in the mists of time, she would have been somewhere in the 3 to 5 tonner size. He sailed her single handed.
When Charlie was working, if he saw Dr Brydon under full sail coming in, he would guide him straight on to the mud bank, so as he came to a stop. He would then be safely manoeuvred on to a mooring.
Harold Hayles went with him to Cowes one day, why I don’t know, but anyway Dr Brydon said to Harold, ‘I have a lobster on board. We’ll have that going to Cowes,’
so off they went with lobster on the boil. When the lobster was done, the water was tipped out of the pot and in the bottom of the pot were two spark plugs.
Harold said, ‘What are they for?’
‘Oh, I ‘m boiling them clean,’ said the Doctor, ‘They’ll do no harm, and I thought I would cook the lobster at the same time.’
The last I ever heard of Doctor Brydon was when I was working at Fort Vic. Nelson and I were sent down to inspect some damage to one of our boats (RASC). The Doctor had sailed into the harbour and driven his bowsprit straight through one of our boats, through a port hole, through the toilet door trapping someone in the toilet.
It was definitely an army boat, it was either the Foil or the Erme. I remember going to the store to draw a new port hole. You could draw a new port hole, but ask for sheet of glass paper and you were asking for the world. Nick Chandler b 1937