In reply to
Anna's post about Crewkerne's claim to the Victory's sails being made there, I thought the Navy's sails were made up in the sail lofts of the Royal Dockyards. See for example
HMS-Victory.com:
Quote:
...Initially made in the Sail Loft at Chatham when HMS Victory was completing her repair in 1803, the sail remained on board the ship until it was removed to the sail loft when the ship returned to Chatham for repairs in January 1806 after the battle...
... It appears that the sail cloth was manufactured by Baxter's [Dundee] who contracted various local weavers such as Souter and Thomson to produce the cloth. Each bolt of canvas (a bolt measures 24 inches wide and 38 yards long) was found to be painted with blue wavy lines depicting that it was government property: these lines would have been added on receipt at the dockyard. Other marks on the sail relate to dates 1803 and 1805.
In
'The Trade Winds', edited by C. Northcote Parkinson, Basil Lubbock provides some information on Crewkerne's flax and sailmaking, and also some comments on Lord Cochrane's advocay of flatter sails relevant to my post in the
Sailing Speeds thread:
Quote:
In the Middle Ages the flax for weaving sail cloth was grown chiefly in Somerset, and the great weavers of early days were mostly Flemish and Huguenot settled in that county. The sail-making tradition continued but there was a great improvement made in sail canvas by Richard Hayward, at Crewkerne who founded the modern firm of Richard Hayward & Co. about the year 1790. About that same date a sail-maker of Cowes, called George Rogers Ratsey, started making sails out of the Hayward canvas, these sails being very much better cut and less baggy than was usual at that date. The great advocate in the Navy of flatter sails was Lord Cochrane, but he was one of those sailors who was in advance of his time in every way.
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