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Thames skiffs have a far more interesting history than one might imagine from their current pigeonholing as the former preserve of the idle rich of the Victorian age - they now tend to surface as part of the competitive sporting world, or as a relic to be trotted out once a year for social occasions such as Henley Royal Regatta. They are actually a current day manifestation of one northern european boatbuilding tradition, which may be a couple of thousand years old. Another strand of this tradition, represented by the Thames punt in its various guises, and many other craft besides, is possibly older still ...
Improving communications led to a great surge in popularity in pleasure boating on the upper Thames from the eighteen sixties onwards, but the role and home of the unpowered boat on the tidal river has to a great extent been swept away by later development and refashioning of the Thames' banks. Only the surviving stairs to the waterside remain, witness to the vanished transport system supported by the Thames Wherry, and eased by the weir-like London Bridge, which greatly mitigated the effects of the tide on the river upstream. The Thames Wherry acted as the city's taxi for upwards of a thousand years - ferries for hire - staffed by regulated watermen - to carry the traveller across the Thames, or many miles along it. At one time these boats would have been able to work up some of the many tributaries, such as the Fleet, now buried beneath London's streets, bringing yet more of the cities of Westminster and London within their reach. While the wherry was the tool of the professional, the skiff may have evolved late as a boat small and handy enough to be handled by the amateur, the sternpost of the wherry replaced by the rather more vulnerable wineglass transom of the skiff. Many thousands were built to order for private buyers, from the mid-eighteen hundreds until the years of the first world war and after, at first by builders on the tidal Thames but later increasingly by upstream yards and countless operators away from the Thames - the spread of the Thames skiff across the UK is little researched, but many provincial rivers and city park boating ponds hosted fleets of skiffs of surprising delicacy. Back on the Thames, many, privately owned, were discarded after a single season's use, returned against the cost of a new built boat while last seasons was deployed in the skiff hire fleet. Skiff hire enjoyed a final fling in the years following the second world war with people in need of any distraction that was available, but maintenance, and materials for new builds, had dried up and in any case the world was moving on: today, fewer boats but of larger size choke the Thames locks and ruffle its waters, and boats for hire an exception rather than the rule: in a more affluent world the Thames has in some ways become more exclusive.
The skiff, though, has not departed the river entirely: the boat that gave the world one of the enduring comic novels in Jerome's 'Three men in a boat' as well as contributing to the striking fantasy of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice', has pulled through the lowest point in its fortunes to enjoy a modest revival, in a skiff one can still enjoy working with the stream, with ones eye close to the water's surface, in a boat with a freeboard of a few inches ...
'Rowena', built possibly near Cookham on Thames circa 100 years ago, was bought as a derelict at Oxford and restored in 1984 by Mark Annand and others (you know who you are), at Constables Boathouse, Hampton. In addition to camping hire use, she participated in the first of London's 'Great river races' acquitting herself well. She has visited the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich - by water - and Berlin's 750th anniversary - which involved road transport through the then East Germany. In 1989 she put in an appearance deputising as the skiff for the Jerome K. Jerome 'Three Men in a Boat' centenary celebration. Her most recent major outing was to the International Festival of the Sea at Bristol.
Rowena's construction is common or garden northern european clinker and she has the usual six strakes and a saxboard construction shared by the majority of skiffs. The materials from which she is built are unusual however - while her timbers are the usual oak with a pitch pine keel, the stempost and former sternpost are ash - most unwise as it's a timber with little resistance to decay. The sternpost was replaced when she was restored, using sweet chestnut, a very versatile timber. Her planking took some time to identify but is probably an Australian tropical rainforest species known as Queensland Red Cedar, of which there is pitiably little left in the wild: a component tree of only three percent of the the world's dwindling rainforests at best. A light and easily worked timber rather too prone to splitting to put to use in the quarter inch thick planking of a Thames skiff, Rowena was saved by the invention of epoxy wood adhesives ...
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