Thursday 3 April 2014

LIGHTSHIP CORMORANT / LADY DIXON - Chapter 40



Just a couple of small items, finishing touches and odds and ends.  The skylight has been finished off nicely on the outside with metal cladding (Photo).

The inside has been packed, plaster-boarded and plastered. It just remains to add a bit of paint and that’s another project finished (Photo). 

The toughened, double-glazed glass came with integral venetian-type blind. I don’t think it functions when the glass is horizontal, but there is plenty of light coming through and on a hot summer’s day (we wish!) I think Simon will be glad it is not clear glass.

With a few hours to spare, Simon set about the entrance hatch to the forward companionway. This was very rusty and holed in places. Some time ago it was welded up and this week Simon stripped and painted it. It looks much better now, but shows up the door, which needs stripping and varnishing. (Photo)

So I am off to Belfast on Monday to see what the Public Records Office has to offer concerning the Lady Dixon from 1943 to 1956, when she was moored off Carrickfergus in the dual role of lightship and pilot station. Incidentally, I apologise for some careless writing in earlier blogs when I referred to Lady Dixon as the Harbour Master’s wife. The Cormorant was in fact renamed after a Harbour Commissioner’s wife - most probably Lady Edith Dixon, married to Sir Thomas James Dixon, whose names were given to one of Belfast’s best-known parks in 1959. Alternatively, the vessel may have been named after Sir Thomas’s mother, Lady Eliza.
David

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