Donald Young on Boatbuilding
Lisa: So, when you and your father was very busy, 12 boats a year, where were you based then, where was your workshop?
Well, we had an old hall at Wootton, called Unity Hall but it’s been built on since when we sold it 30 years ago.
And it was a big old corrugated shed that … we bought it the same year that we was married.
It came on the market. It was a Liberal Hall. Apparently the story went that … oh the builder, what was the builder that was opposite us at Red Road?
He had the job of building a Liberal Hall and of course the Conservatives got to hear about it, and they built the Hall up opposite the shops, up Wootton High Street. It’s now used as a … what would you call it? Got lots of little littler shops in it.
And that was much superior to what the Liberals could do so poor old whatever his name was had to get the corrugated iron where he could and when we bought it in the year we was married, 1960. We bought it quite cheap or we thought it was.
We found out that it leaked a lot. We found out that a lot of the corrugated iron was very poor gauge and it had rotted away but the rest was heavy gauge. When they built it they’d got hold of corrugated iron second-hand corrugated iron from anywhere. Some of it was very thick … You could shoot peas through it.
Lisa But it was big enough for you to then convert it to for what you needed.
Oh yeah. Of course when it was a Liberal Hall, they finished up having three billiard tables in there and then when we bought it, they’d moved one billiard table up onto the stage and the rest was just open, so the billiard part was used a bit by a few locals and we didn’t want to upset locals, I mean we was locals ourselves.
We’d lived in Wootton … it was after we moved that we bought it, we was living down here then wasn’t we?
But we didn’t want to upset the locals, so we sort of blocked off the stage bit and made another entrance the other end and they still went on using it. They were supposed to put money in a box to pay for the electric, but they were very often a bit short.
Who was it recommended me? Sheila Cawes. Her husband used to make sails and he wanted somewhere to make sails, so we split the Hall in two and he used half of it to do his sail making in. I don’t know how long that went on for but quite a few years and that’s how we got by ‘cos he could help pay the expenses.
I think we … you had what was called rates, but it wasn’t like household rates, it was trade rates.