Voices of the Yard – John Raymond-Barker

John is a traditional wooden boat-builder, specialising in the building of pilot cutters. John worked from the Lean-to workshop, next-door to the Big Shed. This workshop was one of several that were lost in a devastating fire in May 2023. Since then, John has continued to work in boatbuilding and restoration around the Floating Harbour.

The Build – John describes the process of building a pilot cutter.

Pilot cutters are sailboats, designed originally for pilots to travel between ships. At sea, a pilot is a mariner who safely guides a ship in or out of port. From the early 19th century, the employment of a pilot was required by most trading companies to prevent ships’ goods being damaged at particularly busy or dangerous ports, such as Bristol Channel with its high tidal range.

Pilots were expected to know the port well and make their own trade, i.e. whoever reaches the ship first wins the job! Therefore, pilot cutters were designed for speed, small crews and endurance in rough weather.

The Workshop – John recalls the weekly tradition of “Friday sandwiches” and describes the interior of his workshop at Underfall Yard.

 

This interview was recorded in 2015 as part of the Oral History Project, coordinated by Underfall Yard Trust. Our thanks to John, as well as the volunteers who supported the project and “Voices of the Yard”. 

Read more about Underfall Yard’s Recovery and Reinstatement Project…

TRANSCRIPT – The Build

John: …the boats we’re building now we’re putting a ballast keel on and they were similar to the last of the pilot cutters, were built much more sort of like racing yachts, and they’d have external ballast and internal but but, so we tend to try and do about 50/50 external and internal and so we get all the wood in, the oak for the centre line and frames and the lark for planking and then we get a, the keel we cast up in a wood local to here, and so we make up a steel mould and then melt the lead – we get a load of scrap lead – and melt the lead in this keel, in this keel mould, let that cool, that gets brought back down to the Yard, and then we start making the centre line so we cut out the oak – when you think, we put the centre line which is like the spine I suppose of the boat – and then we make all the ribs in section and then plonk the ribs on top of the centre line and then we wrap the planks round and steam them in into place, and it sort of goes on from that bit by bit we sort of build the boat up and finish off in the water. It takes about 18 months from start to finish

Interviewer: And what’s it like that that, can you describe that that experience of when it first goes in the water?

J: It’s usually a bit tense because you’re always worrying that you’ve forgotten something; that the displacement isn’t quite right, where’s she going to float and this sort of thing, but it’s it’s it’s lovely when the boat’s in there and she’s floating where you think she would’ve floated and then you’ve got to ballast her down a bit usually, yeah it’s good. It’s lovely going out for the first sail as well and seeing how the boats, boats perform, and it’s interesting so we’ve got probably yeah one of the worst places to to test the boats out on the Bristol Channel where they would originally have been, and then we can get a feel of what it would have been like sailing these pilot cutters out there

TRANSCRIPT – The Workshop

Interviewer: And somebody else that we interviewed mentioned is it Friday sandwiches, how did that come about?

John: Oh yeah. I don’t know just on a Friday our local café and they just make the sandwiches so we all order, I don’t know, egg, sausage, some people go bacon, it’s all these sort of different sandwiches you can have and that’s all delivered on a Friday and we have, so we have something nice on a Friday rather than the usual sort of cheese sandwiches the rest of the week.

I: And is that everybody in the Yard?

J: That’s most people do, yeah most people do as a bit of a treat. There used to be, there also used to be pub on Friday after work but for some of us with kids and that sort of thing, that’s sort of gone out the window now we don’t really have time for that anymore, but that will probably come back in, I mean some people do go to the pub on a Friday after work, but yeah….

I: And for anybody who might never have seen the inside of your workshop, can you describe the set up and kind of how it works and what you do in there?

J: Well it’s usually a bit of a mess, lots of wood, lots of dust. There’s a, and we’ve got the planer thicknesser, which I don’t know how old it is it’s an old Sagar machine, so this is now 2015 and I’ve got a picture of a similar machine from the 1870s, so whether it was built that long ago but it’s it’s the same sort of design, it’s a big sort of ten horse power electric motor, and and I love that machine, it’s like an old steam engine it just keeps going chunking through wood. It’s not particularly fine finished when the boards come out of there but it’s completely adequate for the sorts of boats we build with the framing and the planking where you’ve got to take quite a lot of wood off to get them down to a fair, to a fair board. And we’ve got a band saw in there, which it’s got written on the side of the band saw I wrote ‘count fingers after use’ because really the reason is that that safety notices don’t work most of the time, people don’t look at safety notices and with the band saw it’s a it’s a quiet machine and doesn’t make a lot of noise and it’s quite easy to get distracted and lose your fingers, so it happens quite a lot with band saws so that’s why I wrote ‘count fingers after use’ on that machine. And then we’ve got a a a saw bench that gets a lot of use, and in the middle of the workshop we’ve got this great big steel cradle which we build the boats on, and then to get the boats out of the shed we have to winch them out, so winching sort of 17-27 tonnes usually of boat…