In 1962, my Mother imported her recently-acquired husband from Australia to England.  She had gone out a few years earlier on the ”£10 ticket” that so many took back then.  They had met in Melbourne, both working for International Harvester: he as a draughtsman/engineer; she in personnel/accounts.  Dad was living in Geelong, just outside Melbourne, with his parents, two brothers and one sister.

Like many Aussie rural lads of that time, he and his brothers had grown up hunting, shooting and fishing, as they explored the outback on their doorstep.  A love of guns and mechanics was inevitable, but it was only after Dad’s death in 2015 that I discovered he had been a licensed gunsmith.

In the autumn of 1962, my parents travelled by ship from Australia to England.   Mum was pregnant – carrying me – and I was born in the winter of 1962 … in what is still probably the worst winter in living memory.  Dad must have wondered what on earth he had come to: months on end spent thawing frozen pipes!

Apparently, the ship’s crew had been bewildered by the amount of crates that had been loaded aboard in their name.  Dad was not leaving without his tools, so his metal lathe and numerous tools and several gunsmithing books crossed the oceans with them. Fifty-three years later, I inherited a huge collection of tools and machinery, some of which, such as the metal lathe, he had brought to England in 1962.  With no expected use for that particular item, I passed it on, with a milling machine, to the Gosport Shed. (Ironically, the Shed Movement started in Australia – no surprise then that we had five sheds to clear out when my Father passed away!)

Now, as I ready myself for my new life in boatbuilding, I have started to bring order to the boxes of tools that I have inherited.  They will have an extra special place at my workbench, now that they are to be put to use in earnest.