Vessels captured in oils before they were lost at sea
PAINTINGS OF HUMBER TRAWLERS TO GO UNDER THE HAMMER
ACLUTCH of paintings of Victorian Humber trawlers – all of the ships with astonishing stories attached to them – is to go under the hammer in Duggleby’s Autumn Fine Art Auction on Friday.
The stars of the show include paintings of the Pharos and the Seti, two Grimsby vessels that both ended up on the bottom just a few years after they were captured in oils by the Cleethorpes marine artist George Race (18771959).
Race painted the Pharos in 1902, the year after it was built at the Cook Welton & Gemmell shipyard in Hull for Grimsby trawler owners Roberts & Ruthven. She was named after the famous Pharos lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world that was created to keep sailors safe. Sadly Grimsby’s Pharos would not live up to the name.
In 1903 she was involved in a serious collision with the Dutch steamship Gelderland in heavy fog seventeen miles off Spurn Point. There were no casualties on that occasion although she was so badly damaged that she had to go into dry dock for repairs.
Much worse was to come: On Sunday, September 23, 1906, Pharos sailed for the Faroes fishing grounds – and was never heard from again. She was posted missing after two days and officially declared lost with all hands some weeks later.
The Seti was another vessel built in Cook Welton and Gemmell’s Hull shipyard for Roberts & Ruthven. George Race painted her in 1898, two years after her launch. The Seti had a slightly longer life than her sister ship but she was sent to the bottom in the first month of the First World War after she was captured by a torpedo boat, part of a German squadron that had been laying a minefield off the mouth of the Humber. The crew were made prisoners.
Another of the paintings depicts the one-time Hull trawler ‘Ellesmere,’ a vessel which famously once saved almost half the Irish ‘Navy’ – all eleven of them – when their ship was sinking under them!
Built on the Clyde in 1903 for the Great Northern Steamship Fishing Company of Hull, the Ellesmere fished out of the Humber until 1934 when she was sold to new owners at the Welsh fishing port of Milford Haven.
It was on a fishing trip out of Milford that she went to the aid of the ‘Muirchu’(Irish for Sea Hound), a renamed former Royal Navy ship that was one of the first vessels in the newly Independent Ireland’s tiny navy. She spent most of her life as a fisheries protection vessel.
On the night of Wednesday, May 7, 1947, Muirchu was on her way to the breaker’s yard when she began to founder off the South Coast of Wexford. Her distress signals were seen by the Ellesmere which rescued the Captain, the ten-man crew and three passengers before the Muirchu went down.
The engineer of the Ellesmere was later quoted in newspaper reports: “To think of all the times she’s chased us, and now we are picking up her ……. crew.”
The Ellesmere watercolour in the auction was painted in 1913 by Joseph Arnold, a Hull artist that it has been speculated may have been a fisherman himself
The trawler paintings are part of a large number of maritime pictures that was amassed by a private collector based in Scunthorpe. They are all expected to make in the £200-£500 range.
Viewing of the Autum Fine Art Sale is taking place at the Vine Street Salerooms in Scarborough throughout the week including Friday morning (20th) from 9am until the start of the auction at 11am. The catalogue is available on the firm’s website and the sale is to be webcast live.