‘Your best exhibition yet – you have made my year’ said one of the nearly 400 people who attended our annual archive Exhibition.
The event featured the Rowhedge Ironworks, a major shipbuilder which closed in the 1960s and which built over 900 ships and smaller vessels. These ships were built in our small village but distributed worldwide – one even being commissioned in New Zealand!
Trust Chairman Phil Marlow Mann said, ‘Committee members put in hours of work to put on this exhibition, and we are delighted with the numbers that attended and their responses’. We even managed to get one of the actual boats built at the Rowhedge Ironworks in the village hall as our feature display.
Firecrest, a 15ft clinker-built dinghy, designed and built by the Rowhedge Ironworks in 1950 and featured at the Birmingham Motor Show in the same year, is now owned by the Trust and sailed on the river Colne where it was built. We even had members of the Oxton family, descendants of Walter Oxton, founder of Rowhedge Ironworks, attending both days of the exhibition.
People attending were astonished to see this dinghy with its sails up and mast just scraping the tall ceiling. Comments overheard on the day included: ‘How on earth did you get that in here?’; ‘you do know the river is down there?!’