Notes & Queries response: What are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations?

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The massive hull of The Nore Croft was fashioned from half-metre-thick glass that had been clouded with aqueous salt, rendering it opaque. It was named after a ramshackle navigational marker, formerly a small cottage, that once occupied a brackish peninsula at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. The heaped rubble of the smallholding, around which sheep had once grazed, with strands of green seaweed straggling their fleeces, was commonly lit as a beacon during inclement weather. By the end of 1918, it had been swamped by rising tide levels: “Displaced by the bodies of those fighting men whose lives were claimed by the sea,” according to Rose Kirtley – the writer of a hugely-popular, but now largely forgotten, volume of self-penned meditational verse, titled Tea Breaths: Poems for Secretaries.

I have, on my desk in front of me, copies of the notes for an unwritten autobiography that were made by the architect of The Nore Croft – one Leonard Shapland. He recalls that, during the procurement of the raw materials for the experimental ocean-going liner (fated to be pressed into service as a fast battleship) he wholesale requisitioned the sands of nine Devonshire beaches. Thereafter, it took decades of tidal push and pull to restore these shorelines to something approaching their former condition. Members of The Devon and Cornwall Coastal Reformation Society will ardently inform you that Mason Sands has never fully recovered, nor is it likely to given the topographical changes to the tidal zone that ensued following the removal of the beach. They cite the loss of the old shoreline as the tipping of the balance that pushed the small town over a financial precipice, plunging it into an economic downward spiral that continues to this day. I suppose these things must be relative: The last time that I passed through Mason Sands, the high-street played host to a thriving delicatessen/bakery, an independent bookshop, and two large art galleries. On the outskirts you will find, occupying a 16th century coaching inn, The Sherry Goose - a Michelin-starred fine dining experience that boasts an eight-hour tasting menu. The prices of the two local houses, that I saw advertised for sale, in the window of an estate agents, were significantly more than anything that I could realistically afford.

But I digress:

The unshaped hull of The Nore Croft was assembled from 10ft cross-sections. Incredibly, these substantial glass fabrications were hand-blown by a man named Stewart Artash, using a system of Brimson valves that compartmentalised his breaths under pressure, and directed this pent-up airflow to different sections of the piece, as they were required. The valve system also allowed for a mixture of aqueous salt and chalk powder to be added to the glass, giving it a glossy, opaque white colour that permeated through the entire structure.

The pieces were roughly fitted together on the Marguerite Ship Lathe, which was based at the Exmouth Yards, and was capable of accommodating vessels up to 800ft in length. The Nore Croft was a comparatively modest 560ft in its unfinished form. At this stage of its manufacture, the liner could only be said to resemble something that might one day float on water and carry passengers when regarded through the narrowest of myopic squints. The Marguerite Lathe had been finished in 1881 by George Dayer, who had named it after his wife – the woman around which, he claimed, his world turned. When she died in 1883, Dayer's world, for all intents and purposes, came to a standstill. He retreated to his home-town in Hastings and was seldom seen in public.

For the next four years and seven months, The Nore Croft was turned on it's long-axis, at a rate of one revolution every forty minutes. It would have turned there for seven years had the commencement of global hostilities, at the end of 1939, not required its hasty outfitting and subsequent deployment in the theatre of war.

Unlike a conventional lathe where the aim is to confer symmetry upon an object, the ships lathes incorporated arrangements of buffers and pads, that could be set to different to different depths, to produce a more complex shape. Turning a ship over a period of years served to toughen the hull and, in the case of iron and glass vessels, fuse any individual sections into a solid unit, wearing away any visible riveting in the process. Typically a hull would lose around 10% of its mass during the process.

In 1937, a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Mokodia, caused a minor stir when he began meditating, cross-legged, at the western end of the lathe. He claimed that the Nore Croft was a prayer wheel and that the cyclical glassy drone, that the ship made as it was turned, had called to him from across the sea. Moves to expel him from the premises were curtailed after it emerged that he was capable of detecting variations in the drone pattern indicating that parts of the lathe had been incorrectly calibrated. As a consequence of this ability, Mokodia was permitted to continue his meditation while fulfilling a dual role in quality control. He was eventually joined by others monks. Some of these men arrived on big ships from abroad, where they had discretely worked their passage to England, only to emerge with shaven heads, clad in orange robes as they descended the gangway. The majority were domestic converts. Eventually a temple to accommodate these men was constructed at the western tip of the lathe.

After the war, Mokodia was visited by a man named Leri who claimed to be his older brother, though this was relationship was strongly denied by the monk. Leri told a local reporter that the family resided in Georgia, in a fishing village on the coast of the Black Sea. Mokodia had left home at a young age. Leri had heard of his sibling's present location through a Georgian ship hand who had fetched-up in Exmouth. The family were Muslim. Leri had hoped to convince his brother to return to Islam but in the end was unsuccessful.

By this time, The Nore Croft had been diverted from its intended purpose as a luxury passenger vessel and had entered the war as a battleship. It was sunk in the English Channel, in 1941, by its glass-hulled German counterpart – the SMS Maltsberger. The spectacular five-hour sea battle ended in a collision that caused catastrophic damage to both ships. Neither the Norecroft nor the Maltsberger had use of their engines and their beleaguered crews were helpless to prevent the coming together of the two vessels. The glass hulls, that had once slipped so effortlessly through the waves, and provided firm resistance against gunfire, broke up into razor-sharp chunks that crowded the surface of the water, cutting to ribbons any unfortunate sailors who had failed to find a place in one of the lifeboats.

Even to this day, tide-worn fragments of The Nore Croft and The Maltsberger wash up on English and French beaches. Pieces of the former are a pearly white while those of the latter are smoky grey – a colour that was achieved by the introduction of oil smoke into the cast glass. The passage of the decades has removed their teeth and these shards are smooth and rounded to the touch.

A company called Kings of the Sea, based in Lowestoft, will authenticate these remnants. On request, they will arrange for them to be fashioned into 'Maltscroft' chess pieces that are hand-carved to resemble World War II ships. The king pieces on each side are replicas of The Norecroft and The Maltsberger. Many hobbiests have spent years combing beaches, and trading for fragments of sea glass, that will allow them to finish their set and also to form a chessboard upon which to play.

In the aftermath of the War, ship production was scaled down. The ship lathes slowly fell into disuse as faster building techniques and new materials gained in popularity. The Marguerite Ship Lathe was decommissioned in 1983, after standing derelict since 1979. The Buddhist temple at the western end of the lathe, was spared demolition and stands to this day. The area around it has been redeveloped as parkland and housing. Mokodia resided in the temple until his death in 1997, at the age of 109. People who knew him recall a kind, self-effacing man, with a perceptive eye for fine detail. A small population of monks continue to chant the prayer drone of the last ship to be turned on the lathe – an open water tug called The Everyman Bailey that was used to store part of the uprooted London castwall for several years.

While the ship lathes were certainly inefficient in terms of the time they took to finish a vessel, what was produced was of such high quality that their fall into obsolescence feels like a backwards step.

I hope this is of help.

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This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 28th May, 2023.

The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.