THE LARCH TREE- from some memories of growing up in Kintyre
from
Willie Pursell
“This one will do just fine”, said our
father, peering up at the soaring larch tree through his rimless pince-nez
glasses. “It’s not too bad and there are very few knots.” As far as my brother
and I were concerned, both in our early ‘teens, this was high praise indeed from
someone not given to accolades. With the impatience of youth, we were just
anxious to get on with the winter project.
You see, an important decision had been made. We were going
to build a boat—a fishing boat no less! This was to be our project for the
winter of 1942/43.With war-time scarcity of food, and fortunate to be living in
the Kintyre countryside by the sea, this seemed to our father to be the sensible
thing to do. Moreover, he had come across a little booklet entitled ‘How to
Build a Flat-bottomed Outboard Run-about’. This was to be our bible.
With the shortage of wood, and of money, I doubt that our
father gave any thought to buying the required materials. We started from
scratch—in this case, the larch tree. But first we needed permission to take a
tree down in the wooded hillside behind our property. The hillside was part of
the estate of Sir Philip Dundas, our next-door neighbour. This permission was
duly forthcoming, given the nature of the project.
And so this particular larch tree was selected, not far from
the large corrugated-iron potting-shed butted against the inside back corner of
the wall surrounding our property. “Now boys,” our father said, “would you bring
the cross-cut saw, the sledgehammer and the coal chisels.” The project was under
way and the education of two ‘teen-agers was about to be enriched. In
retrospect, I like to think that our father (a local headmaster) had the wisdom
to appreciate the learning experience his sons were about to undergo.
In due course, the larch was felled, with the judicious use
of saw and chisels keeping it away from the potting-shed. It was then cut into
fourteen-foot lengths as required by the booklet specifications. The next job
was to get the cut lengths to the local sawmill some three miles away. This was
done with the help of the next-door tractor and a farm wagon. Eventually the
tree was returned to our house neatly sawn and planed to a reasonable finish.
The fact that the wood was not seasoned was of little concern to our father who
said that larch-tree wood could be used in ‘green’ form without fear of
splitting. He was proven wrong when, a couple of years later, one of the planks
split end- to-end about a mile off-shore, fortunately without serious
consequence due to some very vigorous bailing!
The larch side-planking was, however, only the beginning.
According to the booklet, we needed tongue-and -groove strips for the flat
bottom, a one-piece slab of wood for the vertical stern where the outboard
engine would be clamped, and a very tough bow-post on to which the side planks
would be nailed. Ingenious as always, our father produced tongue-and-groove pine
from an old school-room floor; a yellow pine desk-top for the stern, and a post
of beech-wood from the branch of a tree. All, of course, at very low cost!
The decision was made to build the boat in the
carriage-house, sheltered against the ten-foot west wall of the property. It was
called the carriage-house because that was its function when the main house was
built in 1851 by Alexander Bryce, a reportedly blind wine merchant from Glasgow.
It was purchased in 1868 by Miss Isabella MacKinnon, daughter of Peter MacKinnon
of Ronachan and niece of Sir William MacKinnon (a native of Kintyre) who founded
the British East-India Shipping Company. Miss MacKinnon lived there to a great
age until the early 1930s and is, I believe, buried in Kilkerran. The
carriage-house had wide doors and strong beams across the roof, very suitable
for our boat-building project.
And so building began in the early weeks of 1943. It was
‘clinker’ type design where adjacent planks were over-lapped and copper
nail-rivets were hammered and clinched every inch or so, using hollow punches.
This planking method required relatively few internal strengthening ribs,
whereas the ‘carvel’ method, where the planks were butted against each other,
required strong and frequent ribbing. This was part of our education process.
The shaping of the clinker-built planks was, of course, very tricky,
particularly for amateurs. It was all done free-hand and, with the odd mistake,
eventually completed successfully. None of the rivets ever failed. Other than
copper nails and washers, the most liberally used jointing material was white
lead. It was used as caulking in every possible location.
With the planking completed, the big remaining jobs were the
gunwales running along the top of the side planks to give strength and rigidity;
the side-stringers running along the middle of the ribs to give extra strength
and a place on to which the seats would be fastened; and a one-third deck which
was to be canvas-covered. Only the gunwale presented a major problem. It was
some two inches in cross-section and had to be twisted from an outer camber at
the bow of the boat to an inner camber where it was fixed to the stern.
The only answer was steaming. Both the gunwales and the
stringers had to be steamed until they were pliable enough to be twisted into
opposing cambers and quickly nailed into place. This was done by removing a
cast-iron down-spout from the house, slipping individual lengths of wood inside,
plugging up the ends with rags, boiling a watering can over an open fire and
directing the steam into the pipe. It worked! After that, the completion of a
plywood deck, canvas-covered and painted white, was no bother. With a few coats
of marine varnish, the winter project of the flat-bottomed outboard run-about
was completed. Successfully, or so we thought!
With the coming of spring, all of us were impatient to get
our handiwork in the water—even although it was really quite ugly to look at—and
try out the powerful Seagull outboard engine(all of 41/2hp) which our father had
obtained. We trundled it proudly down the drive on pit-prop rollers, across the
rocky shore and into the sea. Within fifteen minutes it had sunk to the bottom,
leaking like a sieve!
My brother and I were devastated and the rest of the family
thought it was funny. But our father was in no way disturbed. “We’ll leave it
there for a few days,” he said, “and then we’ll see….” He was right, of course.
When we re-floated the little boat a few days later, the wood planking had
swelled and all the leaks were gone. It stayed that way throughout its life.
In due course, the run-about was registered as a fishing
boat, with an official number CN 131, and was assigned some of the precious
war-time red petrol for its engine to enable us to catch fish with hand-lines
and to spear flounders with the help of a glass-bottomed box (which was also
home-made). It more than paid its way in providing fish for many tables and in
endless hours of lazy enjoyment over several decades. And what an education and
pride it gave to two ‘teenaged boys!
I had the occasion to return to the scene of the project a
few years ago. The potting shed and the carriage-house have both gone, destroyed
by winter gales. My parents and older brother have passed away and the little
boat was wrecked in a storm in the 1970s. It was snatched off the shore by a
howling westerly gale and finished up drifting into Girvan harbour on the coast
of Ayrshire the next day. The harbour-master traced the ownership through the
CN131 number but my father apparently decided that it would be too much trouble
and cost to have it returned.
But in behind the potting-shed wall, on the wooded hillside,
is the stump of a larch tree covered with moss…. and thereby hangs a tale!
William A. Pursell