The Last of the Sailing Coasters by Edmund Eglinton, 1982, published by HMSO, London. Hardback, 131 pages
This vintage history hardback is in acceptable reading condition:
- it is an ex-library book with a sticker and price on the front flysheet, and a stamp on the page edges that can be seen when the book is shut
- it has a plastic cover
- inside, the title page is missing
- page 1 has a tiny tear on its edge
- there are some dog-ears and larger diagonal creases
22.5cm x 14cm x 2cm approx.
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Blurb reads:
Even though, before the First World War, new forms of transport and engine-powered vessels had dealt the sailing coasters a mortal blow, they continued to carry their miscellaneous cargoes - grain, salt, coal and stone among them - in British waters. For those who sailed in these vessels the work was hard, the hours long and the rewards meagre. However, a certain breed of men was not discouraged by the hardships of this life, their attachment to the modest little sailing coasters enduring long after the financial rewards had become totally inadequate.
Edmund Eglinton was born in 1902, less than a mile from the sea on the Somerset coast. Within a few years of leaving school, at the age of thirteen, he was sailing in the trows and ketches engaged in the local trade of the Severn and the Bristol Channel and continued to do so for the next fifteen years. A curious train of consequences led, in later life, to an acquaintance with the Director of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, who encouraged Mr Eglinton to record his experiences of these years on the last of the sailing coasters.
Mr Englinton's account is a tour-de-force of recall. Events, described with a native sense for narrative, have the clarity of new experience. There is no harping at sweated labour for a miserable pittance, no sentimental wallowing in an idealized past. There is, though, intense pleasure in the skills of shiphandling and in the intimate knowledge of local conditions. There is, too, a real pride in a job well done. His is a splendid and unique book of reminiscence of a part of the British coasting trade not previously recorded.