Bleak house.

Living, working and sailing in the north west of England

I still remember my first day in Preston at the school of nursing where I’d ridden my old motorbike around from north wales for an interview to become a student nurse – this was back in 1981 mind you when it was seen as a very strange thing for a man to do. I first had to find the large and imposing but somewhat bleak and run down late Victorian house owned by the hospital and used to house the various male staff and once I found it the first person I met was the elderly housekeeper who showed me my room and the next morning even made me a cooked breakfast before I had to walk the short distance to the old hospital where the school of nursing was based.

Here’s a little thing…..Betty, was the name of the housekeeper and she not only made me a good breakfast before my interview but fussed over my interview clothes and wasn’t happy until she’d ironed my shirt from having been rolled up yachting style with my best blazer. Betty did tend to fuss over her ‘boys’ as she thought of us so I was shocked one day when one of the lads found her dead and cold in her favorite chair in that huge and darkly panelled living room like something out of a Gothic horror movie.

Today, the house has been sold , the school of nursing no longer exists and even the modern flats of the nurses home have all been knocked down.

Back then….my first half hour in the hospital was waiting in the school’s library while others on the interview list that day were called for and disappeared. I remember that it was a wet and windy day and the shape of the buildings such that the wind actually moaned in an eerie and mournful way, The whole place had a peculiar smell too and that certain look chipped and faded look that hard used institutional buildings like hospitals and certain older prisons have. After my interview one of the older staff running the panel that day took me for a quick walk around the wards that were still being used ; most of the place having been closed and shipped out to the modern tower block of the new hospital just up the road so my first experience of a hospital ward was the genuine real old fashioned affair of a ‘Nightingale’ ward – a row of beds down both sides, a long table in the center where mobile patients would be served dinner and a desk at the end where Sister sat, worked and surveyed her staff from.

That’s gone too of course but it was said that that wing of the hospital was haunted by the figure of an old nurse who apparently only appeared from the waist up….something to do with the floor levels having been changed at some time.

The even older Infirmary near to town was an even stranger place in the early 1980’s when I did a placement there – positively ‘gothic’ in appearance except that high-end brain surgery was carried out there and modern trauma intensive care was basically born in the back room (the bat cave) of one of the wards there to deal with the new problem of high speed trauma on England’s first motorway…..the M6 or Preston bypass as it was first known.

A Nightingale ward at the old infirmary….hard beds, smart looking nurses, flowers which were taken out at night…..

You might not believe it but I didn’t start this piece with the intention of talking about my strange life as a student nurse but while i’m here……lets talk about sailing on the Lancashire coast.

When I started this blog over 5 years ago I kinda-sorta made a decision not to talk about my early sailing experiences in north Wales and then this coast because there isn’t much to say and secondly because it’s so long ago it feels like looking backwards from the event horizon of a black hole. Many of the racing skippers whom I crewed for are now dead and several of the boats broken up or rotting away at the back of boatyards somewhere – the OOD34 that I regularly crewed on moved out of reach to the south coast, was sold and then accidentally run onto the Owers bank where it was dismasted and it’s keel came off too.

I couldn’t afford either the train fares or the travelling time to get down to Southampton and then across to Cowes just for a day race in the Solent so I looked for local solutions to getting some sailing in. For sure, Preston has a dock and a ‘marina’ but it’s a grimly bleak industrial place half full of sad and semi abandoned boats and it leads into the Ribble which, having seen it I renamed the ‘Dribble’. Up the coast a ways there was a small racing fleet at Lytham St Annes where I crewed a couple of races but didn’t really feel welcome there although that winter I got invited to crew on an older IOR half tonner out of Skippool creek. That boat’s owner then sold the Shamrock and went on to buy an old Ed Dubois (Dubious Ed) three quarter tonner so for one winter season I regularly my old motorbike in freezing conditions to go sail in a muddy creek but only after scraping ice off the decks…..I must have been desperate in fact I mostly gave up sailing as I was skint at that point.

Inspiration for thinking about that coast again comes from the unusual source of recently following the new Youtube channel that I enthused about in my last post….our man Terry and his 55 year old Contessa 26. Terry hails from Fleetwood on that coast and in my distant memory Fleetwood counts as one of the bleakest and nastiest of the group of towns that has Blackpool as it’s finest (worst) example. It might be a decent place, I really don’t know, but my memory of it was the rank smell of rotting shellfish on the dock there.

Skippool creek is a bit like many creeks on the east coast in that it’s narrow, muddy and tidal – the badly chosen, to my mind, offshore race boats that berth there basically settle their keels into the thick mud and lean against rotting pilings. In terms of sailing there it was basically a wait for the tide to be high enough, a quick race around one of the channel marks and thence back to the mud berth. In terms of cruising there, there was quite simply ‘nowhere to go’ as not only are there no nice anchorages like this coast and the east coast but also that that whole Lancashire coast is also the lee coast of the Irish sea for most of the time.

To go cruising there really needs an offshore-capable yacht and to escape north to Scotland, west to the Isle of Man or Irelend or south to Anglesey – in a way the Irish sea breeds tough sailors – but maybe i’m missing something.

Skippool creek, I think, but not my photograph.

End-point.

Rather than dwell on this bleak house of memory i’d like to finish on a positive note about the north west coast of England and it’s boats, to do that I need to talk about the once common regional sailing boat – the Morecambe bay Prawner or ‘Nobby’ as they are called locally. This is already a too long post though so i’m going to take an actual break now and go tinker with my own little boat sitting on it’s trailer down in the yard ; the post that i’m now working on, on the back of this post and my previous one about our man Terry will be the one iv’e wanted to write for at least a couple of years and that’s to take a look at ‘Nobby’.

The sail number FD31 mus make that one a Fleetwood boat.

This week’s video post segment….questions and answers.