Saving Old Seagulls

Another military reference to Seagulls
(I presume you know of this one, but I still think it's worth posting ...):

Many parts: the life and travels of a soldier, engineer and arbitrator in Africa and beyond. By Desmond FitzGerald (p89 et seq.)

In the new year of 1940 our field park company (the stores unit of the divisional RE) received its complement of Bailey bridge equipment and pontoons. This was brand new stuff and we were excited to be sent off to the River Somme. near Amiens, to train in it's use. [...]
Colin Browning was in his element as the honoured guest, also as a training officer, but he knew as little as the rest of us about how to put this floating bridge together, and we all learned as we went along. Colin was in charge with his megaphone. John Blomfield was on one of the rafts already put together, with sappers manning ropes and four of them trying (and failing) to start up the Seagull outboard motors which were supposed to manoeuvre the unweildy raft onto its position as part of the bridge. The Somme is a fast flowing river [...]

"Mr Fitzgerald, take four men, run downstream and catch the raft as it passes."

Shades of 'Dad's Army' methinks ...


And - lest anyone should doubt the Seagull's ability to move BIG boats, there's this - from Eric's de-mob days:

[...] after some searching I found Monarch, a 46ft Whitstable Oyster Dredger. She was lying at Teddington, and I bought her with my Gratuity for £200. In the Overseas League was a man called John Leggat, who worked at the Port of London Authority's Offices. He said, "Why don't you bring her down to South Dock, part of Surrey Docks, she should be safe there while you convert her." I took his advice. I had bought a second hand 4hp Seagull outboard and bolted together a wooden bracket to get it low enough for the propeller to reach the water. We made it down river but stopped off at Chelsea for a few days. I leant Monarch against the quay wall opposite to see her below the waterline. [...]

Monarch's underside was OK and we went down under Seagull to the docks and tied up in South Dock, noting that it was a dock where timber, amongst other things, was discharged.

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Did British Tommys get to play in this location in 1940?

Yes they did but they were gone by June.
There were not many Seagulls around then, the total number produced upto 1942 circa 2500.

Another little snippet which might be of interest to historians (sorry about the thread drift ...) is that at some point in history, Seagull crankshafts were being made by Willcox & Gibbs (sewing machine manufacturers), who did a lot of precision engineering for the MoD from castings - and one of their factories was in Poole, which may not be a coincidence.

Rumour has it that for the first 2 decades of existence Seagull's crankshafts were made by Villiers, during the 50's Seagull started buying their own specialised equipment for crankshaft manufacture & brought it all in house, then it's said to have been subcontracted all over the place often with Seagull supplying the grinders & lathes to the subcontractors when the demand reached it's peak in the 70's.

Charlesp is better qualified to comment on this, as it falls into his area of interest & research.

Hadn't heard of a Poole factory for these sewing machine manufacturers, but it doesn't surprise me.

As the other Charles says, all manner of stuff was farmed out in the early days, and it's amazing how much of a cottage industry it was. I've read somewhere recently that British Seagull had a factory and showroom in Poole before the war. At that time they didn't have a factory at all, they assembled motors in Wolverhampton from components largely made elsewhere - including the Villiers cranks - but there was no showroom, it was merely an ordinary house with a name plate at the door.

When the wartime orders came in the components were made all over the place - like so many British engineering projects of the time, such a Sten guns and Spitfires and the like. Local garages, anywhere with a lathe or a milling machine, all were pressed into service. In the forties Even British Seagull were hiring out their facilities t other manufacturers. Later on, towards the end the staff were assembling stuff that bore no relation to an outboard motor.

A thought strikes me - it's a couple of years since I spent any real time searching on the Internet; time marches on and more and more records are being digitised. The early projects made no attempt at text recognition or indexing, and some were scanned at a very low resolution that was just readable. Nowadays the stuff just whizzes though and like the reference to the Arctic expedition it's all readable.

I must make time for another trawl though, there's more out there than I thought.