# The Vellamy Society


## Bulletin


Number 212


· March 2026


## Spring lecture programme


Three lectures are arranged for the spring, all at the
Assembly Rooms on Vardenne Quay at half past seven.
On 11 March Dr Aileen Prosser will speak on the salt
industry of the upper estuary; on 8 April Mr Colm
Tarbert will describe the 1953 flood as it was recorded
at Kellow; and on 13 May the Society's archivist, Miss
Ruth Sandiman, will introduce the Harrowby field
books, which the Society acquired last autumn.


Members may bring one guest without charge. Tea is
served from seven o'clock, and the room is open from
half past six for those who wish to look at the exhibits.
Anyone needing a lift from the town should telephone
the honorary secretary, who keeps a list of members
willing to offer one.


## The Harrowby field books


The eleven field books kept by Thomas Harrowby
between 1871 and 1904 came to the Society in October,
the gift of his great-granddaughter, and are now with
the county record office for conservation. They are
working notebooks rather than journals: tide times,
wind, the state of the banks at Thrimby, the names of
the men who worked each reach, and here and there a
sketch of a channel that has since moved half a mile.
The eighth book, which covers the winter of 1889, is
the one most often asked for, because it records the
breach at Kellow in some detail and gives the height of
the water against the wall of the old lifeboat house.


The Society hopes to publish a transcript of the eighth
book, and would welcome help with it. What is wanted
is not palaeography - the hand is a clear one - but local
knowledge: field names, the older names for the
reaches, and the identification of men named only by a
surname and an initial. Members who could give an
evening a month to this should write to the archivist.


## The summer excursion


The summer excursion will be to Marnhead on Saturday
20 June, to see the salt pans and what is left of the
tramway on the north side of the harbour. Mr Tarbert
has agreed to lead the walk, which is about three miles
over rough ground and is not suitable for anyone who
cannot manage a stile. The coach leaves the Assembly


Founded 1898


Rooms at half past nine and is back by six. The cost,
including the coach and the entry to the harbour office,
is fourteen pounds, and members should book with the
excursion secretary before 1 June.


## New members and gifts


The Society welcomes seven new members since the
autumn bulletin: three from Vardenne, two from
Braithe, one from Kellow and one, to the committee's
particular pleasure, from Winnipeg. The library has
received the bound volumes of the Braithe Advertiser
for 1928 to 1934 from the estate of the late Mr E.
Lissamer, and an album of photographs of the 1947
regatta from Mrs Prosser of Thrimby. Both have been
accessioned and may be consulted on the usual notice.


## Notes and queries


A member asks whether anyone can identify the
building in the postcard reproduced in the autumn
bulletin. The committee's view is that it is the old ferry
office at Vardenne, pulled down about 1961, but the
roof line does not match the photograph in the Society's
own collection and the question is left open. Replies to
the archivist, please, and not to the editor, who is away
until April.


## Subscriptions


Subscriptions for the year beginning 1 April are
unchanged: eighteen pounds for a member, twenty-six
pounds for two members at one address, and six
pounds for members under twenty-five. Those who pay
by standing order need do nothing. The Society remains
grateful to the twenty-one members who add a
donation to their subscription.


## The old lifeboat house


The Society's letter to the district council about the
lifeboat house was answered in January. The building is
not listed and the council does not propose to seek
listing, but the officer who replied confirmed that any
application to demolish it would come before the
conservation panel, on which the Society has a seat. The
nineteen members who wrote in support of the letter
are thanked.


Correspondence to the Honorary Secretary, 4 Kellow Lane, Vardenne BR7 3AT · 01632 960377


Page 1




The Vellamy Society · Number 212 · March 2026


The committee's view remains that the interest of the
place is the winch house and the slipway rather than the
shed itself, which was re-roofed in the 1960s and has
lost its doors. A measured survey would settle what is
left of the original fabric, and the committee is asking
whether any member has the skill and the time to make
one.


## From the archive: the breach of 1889


The eighth Harrowby field book gives the night of 12
December 1889 in more detail than any other source
the Society holds. Harrowby was at Kellow from the
early evening and his entries are timed: the wall was
overtopping by nine, the first gap was made at about
half past ten, and by midnight he put it at sixty yards
and taking. He gives the height of the water against the
lifeboat house wall as four feet nine inches, which is
nine inches above the mark cut there after the flood of
1874.


What the book does not say is how the gap was closed,
and the parish records are no better. The rate book
shows a payment to a Marnhead contractor in the
spring of 1890 and nothing else at all. If any member
knows of a family paper that mentions the work, the
archivist would be glad to hear of it.


The Society intends to print the whole of the December
entries in the summer bulletin, with a note on the tide
and the wind of that week. The transcript is finished
and is being checked against the original at the record
office.


## The photograph collection


Cataloguing has reached the end of the Vardenne boxes:
eleven hundred prints and about four hundred
negatives, of which rather more than half are now
identified at least to a street or a reach. The catalogue is
a card index and will stay one until the Society can be
reasonably sure that whatever replaces it could be
maintained by whoever is doing the work in ten years'
time.


Copies can be supplied to members for a charge
covering the print and the postage. The Society does
not hold the copyright in every image and will say so
where that is the case; where the photographer is
unknown, prints are supplied on the usual undertaking.


## The estuary in 1926


A hundred years ago this spring the harbour board was
deciding whether to dredge the bar, and the papers of


the argument are worth reading. The board's engineer
wanted a channel of fourteen feet and got eleven; the
fishermen wanted the bar left alone and were not
consulted until the decision had been taken; and the
compromise was arrived at in a meeting of which no
minutes were kept at all. The channel silted again within
four years.


The Society holds copies of the engineer's two reports
and of the petition against them, which carries a
hundred and ninety-one signatures and is the best list
we have of the men working out of Vardenne in that
year. Members are welcome to consult it, and a
transcript of the signatures is being prepared.


## Mr E. Lissamer


Members will be sorry to learn of the death in
November of Mr Edward Lissamer, who joined the
Society in 1974 and served on the committee for eleven
years, five of them as honorary treasurer. He was a
patient and exact man who kept the accounts in a hand
nobody could misread, and he had a memory for the
estuary's boats that the Society will not replace. His
library has come to us under his will and will be listed in
the next bulletin.


## Visits and walks


Four walks are arranged for the summer, each of about
two hours and none of them strenuous. On 6 June, the
Vardenne quays with Mr Tarbert; on 4 July, the training
wall and the east bank, tide permitting, with Miss
Sandiman; on 1 August, the Kellow marshes, led jointly
with the county wildlife trust; and on 5 September, the
town's chapels. All start at half past ten from the
Assembly Rooms unless the programme card says
otherwise.


Members are asked to book for the marshes walk,
which is limited to twenty and needs boots. The others
need no booking and no charge is made, though the
collection at the end goes to the room fund.


## Committee news


The annual general meeting will be held at the Assembly
Rooms on Tuesday 19 May at seven o'clock. The
officers all offer themselves for re-election except the
honorary treasurer, who does not, and nominations for
that office should reach the secretary in writing a
fortnight before the meeting. The accounts to 31 March
will be circulated with the summer bulletin.


The committee has agreed to meet the increase in the


Correspondence to the Honorary Secretary, 4 Kellow Lane, Vardenne BR7 3AT · 01632 960377


Page 2




The Vellamy Society · Number 212 · March 2026


room hire from the reserve rather than from
subscriptions, and to review that at the annual general
meeting.


## Reviews


A History of the Marnhead Salt Trade , by J. Cavenshaw
(Vardenne, 2025, 214 pp). This is a careful book and a
slightly frustrating one. Cavenshaw has worked through
the harbour board's papers properly and his chapter on
the tramway is the best account we have. But he is not
much interested in the pans themselves, and a reader
who wants to know how salt was actually made at
Marnhead will have to go back to Sandiman.
Recommended, with that reservation.


## Letters


Sir - your correspondent's note in the autumn bulletin
on the naming of Croyde Gut may interest members
who know the Ordnance sheets of 1897 and 1923. The
name appears on neither, and the reach is called
Crowder's Gut on both. Whether Croyde is a correction
or a corruption I cannot say, but the older form is at
least the surveyed one. - R. Vale, Thrimby.


## Wanted: the Vardenne ferry


The Society is trying to establish when the Vardenne
ferry stopped running. The date usually given is 1961,
which is the year the ferry office was pulled down, but
the office may well have stood empty for some time
before that. A member recalls being taken across as a
child in the summer of 1958 and is sure the boat was
still working then; another remembers it ending just
after the war. A timetable, a ticket, or a photograph with
a date on the back would settle it.


The same member has given the Society a copy of the
1957 timetable for the Marnhead bus, which connected
with the ferry and may therefore date its last summer
more exactly than anything else we hold. It is on the
notice board at the Assembly Rooms for anyone who
wants to look at it.


## The chapels survey


The survey of the town's chapels, begun in 2019 and
interrupted twice, is now complete for the four
buildings still standing and for two of the three that are
not. What remains is the Bethel on Kellow Lane, of
which no plan and only one photograph have been
found. The survey will be printed as an occasional paper
in the autumn, and the members who took part are


asked to check their entries before then.
The Society is grateful to the trustees of two of the
chapels for access to their records, and to the county
archivist for the loan of a plan that had been catalogued
under the wrong parish for sixty years.


## Membership


Membership stood at two hundred and six at the end of
January, four more than a year ago and the first increase
since 2019. Twenty-two members live outside the
county and six outside the country; the Society posts the
bulletin to all of them and would rather do that than
lose them. Anyone who would prefer it by e-mail
should tell the secretary, who keeps a list and is happy
for it to grow.


## Notices


The Society's thanks go to the members who helped at
the December sale, which raised a hundred and twelve
pounds for the room fund, and to Mrs Tarbert for the
loan of the tables.


The room fund stood at three hundred and eighty
pounds at the end of January. The committee thanks
the members who have given to it, and reminds
everyone that the fund exists to keep the Assembly
Rooms available to the Society rather than to
accumulate.


Copy for the summer bulletin should reach the editor
by 15 May. Short notes are as welcome as articles, and a
query that has been in the back of a member's mind for
years is often the most useful thing in an issue.


Correspondence to the Honorary Secretary, 4 Kellow Lane, Vardenne BR7 3AT · 01632 960377


Page 3