TC Lethbridge | The Sons of TC-Lethbridge | Tekh's Anthological Review

Short Splices

Some Notes on Ships and Boats

Self-published, 1936

The following Christmas (1936) he delighted his friends and colleagues with a short volume entitled Short Splices - Some Notes on Ships and Boats. Here he took the opportunity to report what a disastrous year it had been for older sea-going vessels, reporting the loss of Parma to the breakers yard and the grounding of the Herzogin Cecile who had come ashore in Sewer Mill Cove near Salcombe, a notorious blackspot for sea-going vessels. However the pessimistic introduction is soon rectified by his description of a number of vessels spotted on a sunny April day at the lighthouse at Bull Point. Lethbridge paints an idyllic picture of a day spent in the sun with field glasses and a cine camera watching the vessels navigate the Bristol Channel.

The work is concluded by some thoughts on cobles and currachs, spotted off the Northumbrian coast. He dismisses the notion that cobles are of a Viking derivation and suggests that they may have had a Celtic origin and that their true ancestor was the currach. He comments upon the remarkable coincidence of the abundance of cobles on the Northumbrian coast with that of the distribution of monasteries. He cites the Northumbrian monastic sites of Coldingham, Lindisfarne, Jarrow, Wearmouth, Hartlepool and Whitby as examples and suggests that it was Irish priests who introduced the currach to the area.

The tome contains five pages of text and four dedicated to Lethbridge’s illustrations relating to his observations at Bull Point:

Plate #1: Off Bull Point; Penryn, Ceres and Bretonne
Plate #2: Haldon of Bideford
Plate #3: Ceres built in 1811 - lost in 1936
Plate #4: Concorde of L’Orient’ (schooner)

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