I was wandering around in the BBC Art site Your Paintings which is a project which aims to show all of the artworks which are in public ownership, when I found this painting which isn’t all that old, having been painted in 1971 by A.C. Stewart. For me it’s of historical interest because it shows the River Clyde just a few miles from where I was brought up in Dumbarton.
In 1971 the Erskine Bridge was new and it is a lovely elegant suspension bridge, but it tolled the death knell for the car ferry. The ferry was one of those chain link ones with the chains being strung across the river and an engine fed the chainlinks through cogs on the ferry. It chugged and clanked along with foot passengers and some cars on board, luckily the River Clyde is narrow at that point and in those days you didn’t have to wait too long for each ferry journey. I seems incredible to think that there was no bridge there before that date.
I also found a painting of the SS Uganda when it was converted to being a hospital ship during the Falklands War.
I can’t believe how teeny she looks. This is the cruise ship which I sailed on in 1970 when I went on a school cruise to Norway and Denmark. Way back then educational cruises were common events, fairly heavily subsidised I suppose but they were still quite expensive so not everybody was lucky enough to be able to go. A few years earlier my brother had gone to Sweden and Poland I think and Jack went on a couple of cruises, one to Sweden, Denmark and the USSR, that always boggles my mind because it was the 1960s and the height of the Cold War and we knew that they we were a target for a nuclear missile due to living near a Polaris submarine base, but schoolkids from Scotland could still visit The Hermitage in what Jack will always call Leningrad (now St Petersburg again) as that was what it was called when he went there.
Anyway, I found the SS Uganda painting because I was looking to see what sort of artwork there was of Portsmouth dockyard because someone on Question Time said that the area will probably have houses built on it in the future and there will only be the paintings left as evidence of what was once there, such is life I suppose.
My dad died on board the SS Uganda back in 1975, after my parents had been to Nord Kapp, Norway, to see the midnight sun. He suffered a heart attack. Mum decided he should be buried at sea so his funeral took place above the Arctic Circle, near enough off the Lofoten Islands, outside Norwegian waters I believe.
Evee,
That’s really sad, what a shock for you all. I find it strange that your mother had him buried at sea, unless that was something that he wanted. It must have been very weird for you not even to be able to go to his funeral.