The ‘Liddesdale’, Nancy Astor’s Electric Canoe Restoration.

The ‘Liddesdale’ was built for Lady Nancy Astor, locally to the Cliveden Estate in Buckinghamshire where the Astors lived until 1967. It’s an electric canoe, 25’7 3/4″loa and clinker built of brazilian mahogany on rock elm timbers, with ash stems and a pitch pine keel. The National Trust now own the vessel and she is being restored by us in Cliveden’s boathouse, which was built for the Duke of Sutherland. The project is being conducted with full access to visiting public and is generating quite a lot of excitement.

Electric canoes were the very height of fashion on the Thames in the twenties but there are now only half a dozen or so from the era left of which this vessel is one. We intend to return her to the water by summer 2019 for trials, and the National Trust are hoping to offer visitors the chance to take river trips in the canoe from 2020 onwards.

Phase one of the works has included strongbacking and straightening the vessel as she was quite severely twisted at the bow. We have to replace all the steamed timbers as many are rotten or snapped, in order to do this we have rewound the boatbuilding process. With the vessel held in shape we have removed all the fit out, fore and aft decks and coamings, gunwales and inwales. We have stripped the varnish, antifoul and bilge paint, and cabinet scraped, sanded and five starred every single wooden piece. Right now we are starting to remove every other steamed timber in preparation for the rebuild next year.

Apart from steamed timber replacement, we intend to replace some planks below the waterline and repair cracks to extant planks on the topsides. The lower stems need replacement as they are rotten, and the vessel needs new stern gear as there is little left of the original due to corrosion. Incidentally the strongback and moulds will allow us to create a table of offsets and lines drawing as there are currently no plans in existence for the vessel.

The whole project is fantastically exciting and a chance to indulge in some extremely fine restoration techniques. I’m thrilled to have been selected to return the ‘Liddesdale’ to her element and by next summer our own humble boatbuilding history will be intertwined with some very famous history indeed. And the National Trust will have a brand new, old boat with which to illustrate this history, alive and well and on the water. She is going to look a million dollars!