SB MIROSA

Launched on 28 June 1892 as the READY for John Gutteridge, of Vauxhall, London, she was a stackie – carrying hay and straw from Essex and Suffolk to London for the city’s horses, and often returning with horse manure for the farms. After the First World War this trade declined and she probably went into timber, which was stacked high on deck like the hay had been. Her ownership passed to W W Keeble and then in the 1930s to Francis and Gilders, of Colchester, for whom she carried general cargoes, working from Maldon and Colchester, skippered by ‘Billy’ Austin. After the Second World War the Brightlingsea sailmaker Jim Lawrence was her skipper. In 1947 the owners sold her original name to Trinity House for use on a new lightship tender and she was renamed Mirosa. In 1954 she won the Thames and Medway barge matches, in the staysail class, possibly the first races she had ever entered.

She continued trading until 1955 when he was sold to Brown and Son, of Chelmsford, and de-rigged for use as a timber lighter in the Heybridge Basin, near Maldon – carrying timber to there from ships anchored off Osea Island.

In 1964 Clarence Deval had MIROSA rigged by Dilberry Clark and Bill Percy to go racing. He kept her for three years and then sold her to Alan Walker when she came to Kent as a ‘live-aboard’. Then Carrie Spender bought her and started racing her again in 1970. Jimmy Diddams, a legendary barge skipper, rigged her out and sailed her.  In 1976 her present owners, Peter & Sally Dodds, bought her and based her at Iron Wharf, Faversham, where they lived aboard the vessel for 20 years. She has been slowly rebuilt by working the winter months only and sailing in the summer.