Ships’ Figureheads: Famous Carving Families & The Vanishing Age of Sail: The Illustrated Journals of Kelsick Wood

210 pages; 128 pages

David Childs

Many a semi-inebriated sailor, being rowed out to rejoin his ship anchored at Spithead, would have been relieved to recognise a familiar figurehead amongst the many ships of the fleet.  These carefully crafted images added nothing to a warship’s fighting strength but gave each vessel an individual identity visible from a distance and became, I’m sure, an object of pride for her company. Peters, focusing on the vicissitudes in the lives of two families of carvers as they competed for contracts to carve figureheads, provides an excellent account of economic life of civilian dockyard employees, but is rather sparse on the actual techniques of the design and production of these wonderful objects, which is a pity as he is the practising heir of these skilled carving families many of whose creations he has lovingly restored. He was also commissioned to carve a new figurehead for the Cutty Sark. What he does provide is an insight into the still much admired but unresearched world of the skilled ships’ carvers along with many and beautiful illustrations of their work. Their achievements provide us with the only surviving visual record of the thousands of wooden ships that made up both the royal and merchant fleets for several hundred years. Each figurehead that remains reminds us, as Peters says quoting Masefield, of “that sea beauty man has ceased to build” and that phrase brings us, I believe, to the deeper purpose of this book, the hope that it might inspire future generations to take up and experience the awe and wonder of mastering the techniques that the author describes.  Coming from a profession in which advancement is very evident one cannot but admire men such as Peters who decide that, rather than take up a potentially lucrative career, they will “live their dream” and in doing so keep alive skills that might otherwise be lost.  We owe such men a debt of gratitude.

Brown also takes the reader on a socio-economic journey, in this case that of a small Cumberland shipyard at Maryport and its Georgian owner, Kelsick Wood.  But it is not Wood’s production of wooden ships that is the fascination of this slim volume but the fact that, faced with a sheet of paper, he could not resist doodling or sketching upon it.  His journals, accounts, invoices and estimates are all covered with beautiful and curious watercolour pictures.  Some, indeed, are of proposed figureheads, but many are of men and women who have no links with the details on the page.  Ironically, it is these sketches that have ensured that his journals with their details about the vicissitudes of shipbuilding in a small northern yard, have survived.  They form the basis for Brown’s fascinating study of the Kelsick Wood shipyard. Together with Peters’s work these two books would give anyone interested in shipbuilding in the age of sail a most interesting insight.