Next door to the old Dock Office that I showed a couple of days back sits this old shipyard belonging, at one time, to the Blaydes family. It's main (if not sole) claim to fame is that a merchant ship named Bethia was built here in 1784. 'Bethia?', I hear you say, 'never heard of it'. Well if I you told that the good ship Bethia was bought by the Royal Navy and renamed Bounty, a few bells might start ringing. Yes breadfruit, Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian, mutiny, Pitcairn Island, Charles Laughton and Clark Gable all that started here in this silted up dump. A more enterprising city with all that history lurking in its backyard might have made something of it, some tourist trap perhaps, but this sleepy back water prefers to leave it to silt up and rust away.
Here's Blaydes House, just along the road from the ship yard. It was the Blaydes family home but now houses a department of Hull University.
Thanks for the history lesson.
ReplyDeleteOh yes! For heaven's sake, this is begging to be a tourist trap. It doesn't have to be Disneyland (in fact history never attracts such crowds). But dress it up a little and folks like me will come to buy a souvenir.
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