Kathleen & May: Appledore’s Working Schooner, Bideford’s Great Restoration

Built on the River Dee, named in Ireland and now lying at Gloucester, Kathleen & May nevertheless has a powerful claim upon North Devon’s maritime memory. Appledore gave her three decades of working life; Bideford gave her a second life when she seemed in danger of disappearing altogether.

There are ships which belong chiefly to the place where they were built, and others which come to belong to the waters and communities that shaped their working lives. Kathleen & May is one of the latter.

She came off the stocks at Connah’s Quay in North Wales in 1900, acquired her present name in Youghal in 1908 and is now berthed at Gloucester. Yet the River Torridge runs through much of her story. For nearly thirty years she was owned and worked by an Appledore family, registered at Bideford and employed in the demanding coastal trades of the Bristol Channel and Irish Sea. Decades later, when her future again appeared doubtful, it was at Bideford that she was rebuilt and returned to sail. Today she forms part of the National Historic Fleet and is recognised as the United Kingdom’s last wooden-hulled three-masted topsail schooner.

The version of her story sung by the Lynmouth Shanty Crew includes a particularly fitting line:

“Fair Bideford, your men have done their work.”

It is more than a piece of local pride. It is a fair summary of what happened on the banks of the Torridge.

Built to earn her keep

The schooner was built by Ferguson & Baird for the Chester shipowner Captain John Coppack and originally named Lizzie May, after his daughters. Her hull measured approximately 98 feet 4 inches in length and 23 feet 2 inches across the beam. Although only 136 gross tons, she was designed to carry as much as 226 tons of cargo: a strongly built wooden workhorse intended for repeated passages between the smaller ports of Britain and Ireland.

Her first commercial voyage took 226 tons of firebricks from Connah’s Quay to Rochester. Cement, pitch, coal and clay followed. During her first eight years she is recorded as having sailed nearly 40,000 miles and carried more than 24,000 tons of cargo. Her crew lived simply: four hands could be accommodated in the forecastle, while the master and mate had small cabins adjoining the saloon, which also served as the ship’s mess room.

These coasting schooners were the freight carriers of their day. Before dependable road transport reached every coastal settlement, vessels such as Lizzie May brought fuel, building materials, animal feed and manufactured goods into harbours too small or awkward for larger ships. They carried whatever would pay, often working to tides rather than convenient timetables and discharging cargo with little of the mechanical assistance available in a modern port.

There was already an Appledore connection hidden within the new ship. Kathleen & May incorporated what National Historic Ships describes as the first known example of Appledore roller reefing gear, fitted to all three booms. The system allowed the area of the great fore-and-aft sails to be reduced by rolling the canvas around its boom, making a powerful rig more manageable for the relatively small crews employed in coastal trade. The surviving gear was restored during her later conservation. Long before the Jewell family brought her to the Torridge, Appledore ingenuity was already part of the way she worked.

A new name and a familiar stretch of water

In 1908 the schooner was bought by M. J. Fleming of Youghal, County Cork. He renamed her Kathleen & May after his own daughters and placed her chiefly in the coal trade between Ireland and the Bristol Channel. Coal came west from ports including Lydney and Garston, while oats, timber and pit props could provide a return cargo.

It was an unglamorous but essential trade. Coal heated homes, powered workshops and served the industries of towns that often had no railway connection. The Bristol Channel, with its strong tides, exposed coastline and frequently difficult weather, was not an easy place in which to earn a living. Yet Kathleen & May became thoroughly familiar with its Welsh, English and Irish ports.

Then, in 1931, her relationship with North Devon changed completely.

The Jewells of Appledore

On St George’s Day 1931, Kathleen & May carried what is recorded as her final cargo under sail alone: 202 tons of coal from Cardiff. Later that year she was acquired by the Appledore mariners William Jewell and his son Tommy. She was fitted with a second-hand 80-horsepower Beardmore auxiliary engine, her topmasts were shortened and much of the square-topsail rig was removed. She remained a sailing cargo vessel, but one better equipped to maintain a passage when the wind failed or to work safely in confined waters.

This was not the romantic destruction of a sailing ship by machinery. It was the practical decision of working seamen who needed their vessel to earn money. The engine extended her useful life by almost three decades. Under the Jewells she continued to carry coal from Wales, the Forest of Dean and Garston to Youghal and other Irish ports. When coal was not available, she took whatever trade could be found, including passages to South Devon and Cornwall and return cargoes of china clay from Par or Fowey to the Mersey. In 1947 she carried clay from Fremington, on the River Taw, to Crosshaven in County Cork.

Although associated closely with Appledore, she was registered at Bideford. The distinction matters, but it should not obscure the shared maritime life of the Torridge. Appledore was the home of her owners and crew; Bideford was her port of registry and a place where she loaded, discharged and was later rebuilt. Both communities belonged to the same working estuary.

William Jewell died in 1945, but Tommy continued to operate the schooner. A new 133-horsepower Crossley diesel was installed in 1952, another substantial investment in a ship already more than half a century old. Contemporary coaster captain Ken Shaw remembered Tommy not merely as a fellow master but as an exceptionally hospitable one, always ready to keep visitors aboard and feed them bacon and eggs. It is a small recollection, but an important one: behind every entry in a shipping register stood households, friendships and generations of coastal seafarers who met repeatedly in the same harbours.

By 1960, however, the trade that had sustained Kathleen & May was disappearing. Larger vessels carried bulk coal into the principal ports, while lorries distributed it onwards to smaller towns and villages. Her small hatches made mechanical loading increasingly difficult, and the scattered cargoes on which schooners depended could no longer provide enough work. Tommy Jewell finally left the trade, and the vessel was sold in 1961.

The end came not because the schooner had ceased to be seaworthy, but because the economy around her had changed.

A ship within a maritime landscape

To understand why Appledore was able to keep such a vessel working, it is necessary to look beyond the ship herself.

The Torridge is a demanding river. Its large tidal range and the shifting sands of Bideford Bar have always required local knowledge. Yet the estuary is also one of the few sheltered harbours along the exposed North Devon coast, and over the centuries a dense network of maritime trades developed around it. Richmond Dry Dock at Appledore was completed in 1856, accompanied by rigging lofts, sawmills, sail lofts and blacksmiths’ shops. It became one of the river’s principal centres for ship repair and maritime craftsmanship.

A schooner did not survive through the skill of her master alone. She needed pilots who understood the bar; shipwrights who could judge a timber by eye and sound; blacksmiths to make fastenings; riggers and sailmakers; merchants able to find cargo; and families prepared to live with the uncertainties of the tide, the market and the weather.

Kathleen & May belonged to that whole landscape. Her Appledore connection was not simply a name written beneath an owner’s address. It represented a community capable of keeping an ageing wooden sailing vessel commercially useful long after most of her contemporaries had vanished.

Coming home

After leaving trade, Kathleen & May passed through several hands. The Maritime Trust acquired her in 1970 and displayed her first at Plymouth and later in London. Although this secured her survival for a time, the eventual dispersal of the Trust’s collection left her future uncertain. By the 1990s she was lying under canvas at Gloucester, deteriorating and again in need of a champion.

That champion was Bideford businessman Steve Clarke.

According to the contemporary account published by Classic Boat, Clarke saw the name Bideford revealed beneath the flapping covering over her stern. As president of the local Chamber of Commerce, he immediately recognised the potential significance of bringing her back to the town—not only as a visitor attraction, but as a physical reminder of Bideford’s maritime past. He bought the schooner in 1998, had her patched sufficiently for the journey and brought her through the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, down the Severn and across the Bristol Channel to Bideford.

At East-the-Water she was lifted from the river and placed on Brunswick Wharf. The survey was undertaken by Alan Hinks, whose family had been building wooden vessels in Appledore for some 150 years. The connection could hardly have been more appropriate: a schooner once kept in trade by Appledore seamen was now being assessed through generations of Appledore shipbuilding knowledge.

Bideford’s great rebuild

What followed between 1999 and 2002 was not a cosmetic refurbishment. It was a major reconstruction.

Approximately 85 per cent of the hull planking and 60 per cent of the frames were replaced, along with the deck. Around 3,500 feet of new larch planking was fastened with treenails and galvanised spikes in the traditional manner. Much of the keel, lower framing, floors, internal timberwork and fittings remained original. When a pronounced hogging of the keel was discovered—an upward curvature of roughly 16 inches—Appledore Shipbuilders fabricated a false steel channel keel to strengthen and straighten the vessel.

The scale of renewal sometimes raises an understandable question: how much of a rebuilt wooden ship remains “original”? Working wooden vessels have always survived through replacement. Planks wear, frames decay, decks leak and rigging reaches the end of its safe life. Authenticity does not reside solely in untouched timber. In Kathleen & May, it also lies in her surviving structure and fittings, her recorded form, her Appledore reefing gear and the traditional techniques used to reconstruct what could no longer be saved.

Most importantly, this was not the work of one wealthy owner in isolation. Bideford businesses donated scaffolding, materials and services. Appledore Shipbuilders supplied expertise and tools. The quay on which the schooner stood was reportedly made available for a nominal rent of £1. Volunteers worked alongside professional shipwrights. The project became a demonstration that maritime skills had not entirely vanished from the Torridge.

Her rig was restored to its 1900 specification, and in 2001 she was relaunched. Following successful trials, she was provisioned at Appledore before sailing once again for Youghal, reconnecting the three places which had shaped so much of her life: the Irish port that gave her a name, the North Devon village that had worked her, and the town that had restored her.

A second life under sail

Once restored, Kathleen & May did more than remain alongside as a static exhibit. She crossed the Irish Sea and Bristol Channel, returned to Youghal and attended maritime festivals around Britain and Ireland. In 2008 she was chartered to carry 30,000 bottles of French wine to Dublin, demonstrating once again the form and purpose of a sailing cargo vessel. She also crossed the Bay of Biscay to Bilbao and took part in the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant in 2012.

Her importance was recognised nationally in 2012, when the Government placed a temporary export bar on the vessel following advice from the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest. The committee judged her to be of outstanding significance for the study of British maritime history and naval architecture, describing her as the sole surviving wooden three-masted topsail schooner and the last surviving Welsh-built merchant sailing vessel.

The Bideford restoration had therefore achieved something larger than the rescue of an attractive old ship. It had preserved the last substantial surviving representative of a fleet that once kept Britain’s coastal communities supplied.

Laid up once more

By 2014, Kathleen & May was berthed at Liverpool’s Albert Dock. After sustaining damage to her bowsprit and part of her hull, she travelled under engine to Gloucester in June 2021 for repairs by T. Nielsen & Co. Those works were completed in 2022, her masts were taken down and a protective frame and cover erected over the vessel. She has since remained alongside in Gloucester, maintained by volunteers and occasionally opened to visitors.

The repairs did not, however, amount to the comprehensive restoration needed to return her to active sailing. The latest campaign describes serious leakage through the hull and the use of sawdust as a temporary means of slowing the ingress of water. Once again, the future of Kathleen & May depends upon whether sufficient money, expertise and public support can be assembled in time.

Restoration, research and the next chapter

(Current position as of August 2026.)

The Kathleen & May Community Interest Company was incorporated in July 2024 and remains an active CIC registered for cultural education. Its purpose is to acquire and preserve the schooner and develop a new public role for her.

In September 2025 the organisation launched an appeal seeking £258,678 for urgent work at T. Nielsen & Co. The stated arrangement was that, if the target were achieved, custodianship would transfer from the Clarke family of Bideford to the CIC, followed by emergency dry-docking and repairs. The Clarke family publicly supported the proposed transfer and the continuation of the work begun by the late Steve Clarke OBE.

The longer-term plan is far more ambitious than simply making the hull watertight. The CIC envisages a restored Kathleen & May, registered at the Port of Gloucester, sailing during the summer months around Britain and Ireland for as long as twenty years. She would operate as a travelling educational, research and exhibition centre devoted to the coastal trade. Surveys, repairs and refitting would be documented as a practical record of traditional wooden-ship construction and maintenance. The historical project would work with archives, museums, libraries and family-history societies to identify the seafarers, shipbuilders, owners, merchants, suppliers and families who made coastal commerce possible.

Some of that work of interpretation has already begun. During Gloucester’s A Weekend by Water in April 2026, visitors were invited aboard to discover the life of a working cargo schooner through the stories told by volunteers. A further open-deck event scheduled for 29 August offers access to the crew quarters and cargo hold, with volunteer-led interpretation and activities intended to engage younger visitors. Even while the ship remains unable to sail, she is already being used to raise awareness of maritime working life.

There is also a continuing North Devon ambition. Bideford and the River Torridge were recognised as one of Britain’s twelve Heritage Harbours in January 2024, with the purpose of promoting awareness of the area’s maritime inheritance. Its published prospectus specifically identifies the potential return of Kathleen & May, or another historic vessel, in connection with future opportunities at Bideford Quay, Brunswick Wharf and the east bank of the river. This should be understood as a local aspiration rather than a confirmed agreement: the present CIC proposal is centred upon Gloucester and a future travelling role.

The two ambitions need not be in opposition. A restored schooner intended to visit the ports of Britain and Ireland could return to the Torridge and tell the story of Appledore and Bideford where much of it actually happened. Gloucester may provide her present berth and the specialist yard required for her conservation, but no account of her history would be complete if North Devon were reduced to a passing footnote.

Kathleen & May was born beside the Dee and named beside the Blackwater at Youghal. Appledore gave her owners, crew, practical ingenuity and three further decades of work. Bideford gave her a registered home and, many years later, the great reconstruction that allowed her to spread canvas once more.

Her future will be measured not only by whether she floats or sails again, but by whether she continues to carry the memory of the ordinary people behind Britain’s coastal trade: the masters and deckhands, the merchants and families, and the North Devon shipwrights and volunteers whose work ensured that the last of the wooden three-masted trading schooners did not disappear.

Principal bibliography

Bideford Town Council. “Bideford and Torridge Achieve Heritage Harbour Status.” 5 February 2024.

Companies House. The Kathleen & May CIC. Company no. 15845473. Company overview and filing information. Accessed 19 August 2026.

Conway-Jones, Hugh. “Schooner Kathleen & May.” Gloucester Docks and the Sharpness Canal. Includes recollections attributed to Captain Ken Shaw and references to Gloucester shipping records.

Department for Culture, Media and Sport. “Culture Minister Defers Export of Last Surviving Wooden Three-Masted Topsail Schooner.” GOV.UK, 20 December 2012.

Garcia, Carmelo. “Bid to Save Historic Tall Ship in Gloucestershire Launched.” Greatest Hits Radio/Rayo, 1 October 2025.

Gloucester BID. “A Weekend by Water 2026.” Event programme, April 2026.

Kathleen & May Community Interest Company. “Save Tall Ship the Kathleen & May, a National Treasure.” Public fundraising campaign, launched 29 September 2025. Accessed 19 August 2026.

Lynmouth Shanty Crew. AAA – Andy’s LSC Song Book. “Kathleen and May”, p. 38.

National Historic Ships UK. “Kathleen and May.” National Historic Fleet registration no. 146. Original register entry dated 9 July 2015; revised and updated by Karen Taylor, June 2025. Accessed 19 August 2026.

Rolt, Peter. “Trading Stories: Kathleen and May Restored.” Classic Boat, April 2003, pp. 36–39.

Visit Gloucester. “K&M Goes Retro.” Event listing for 29 August 2026. Accessed 19 August 2026.

Way of the Wharves and Bideford and River Torridge Heritage Harbour. Prospectus: Bideford and River Torridge Heritage Harbour. October 2024.