Thomas H is a Sheffield Class Humber Keel Barge.

She was built in 1940 by Richard Dunston Ltd., Thorne, Yorkshire.

She was one of two sister ships commissioned by the Hodgsons Tannery at Beverley Beck on the Humber, where she worked for many years. Her sister ship was called Richard after the other Hodgson bother.

She was never under sail, at the time she was built the government was subsidising the building of motor driven barges.

She is extra wide beam at 15.5 feet and she is 62.5 feet long.

We bought her in early 2006 through Alan Pease in Goole and roped him into emptying the various tanks and debris she had in her at the time, decking over her open hold, replacing the unusable Lister engine and generally get her onto working order for the trip down from Goole around the coast to the Thames. Then, we got him to pilot her down too.

This is a belated attempt to diary the ups and downs of our journey so far.

Friday, 25 April 2008

Thomas pics 7 - January 2007. Our first few weeks in Chertsey.

Tuesday 20th January
Been at the marina for a few weeks now and it's all
starting to look and feel a bit more like a home now.

Simon's been fantastic. My back's been playing up and
he's been doing almost all the work. I've sorted out
the wiring, but he's been chipping and painting the
walls, which is a huge, laborious, time consuming and
really quite disgusting job.

He's painted part of the floor and created tarpaulin
walls now to divide the hold into rooms after a
fashion. We've got a lounge / bedroom area (which
includes the old crew cabin and woodburner) with a
sofabed and TV, a bathroom (chemical toilet in a
tarpaulin tunnel), the main room (which holds all the
kitchen stuff and a tent full of bedding and clothes)
and down the back a final space where we keep all the
dirty nasty detritus of the DIY process. The crew
cabin still has it's bunks, but Simon and I are
sleeping on the sofa bed. The kids use the bunks when
they come over, until we can sort out the big
woodburner, at which point we can start to organise
rooms for them to sleep in.

The cold snap's suddenly arrived. We'd been very lucky
with the weather for people living in an un-insulated
steel bucket, but now it's snowy and pretty nasty.
We've put up some loft lagging and polystyrene in the
last couple of days to try to keep in some of the heat
that our little woodburner generates. It seems to be
making a difference. Also, I have Eastenders
(hurrah!). It's very bad reception at the moment but
I'll get a better aerial sorted out and maybe some sky
eventually.

To us it all seems quite homely, well in comparison,
but damn... it's cold.


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