The River in Colour by Bernard Sharp – Part 1

Posted on by Loudhailer Music in A River Full Of Stories, Bridges, Photography, Vessels

The Launch of the Hoo Pride

We stumbled across the image of the launch being photographed on-line and became particularly interested as the photographer in the suit bears a striking resemblance to my Dad. He set up and ran an industrial and marine switchgear and controls company from Scale Lane in the 70’s and 80’s, so it’s possible he may have been working on a contract for the Hoo Pride. We contacted Bernard who kindly forwarded additional photographs not previously published with permission for us to publish here, on the Open Bridges website.

This is Part 1 of The River in Colour by Bernard Sharp: The launch of the Hoo Pride on Friday 31st August 1984.

Part 2 will cover Bernard’s fantastic images of the river in the 80’s and Part 3 will bring us more or less up to date from 1990. All of the images and accompanying text are copyright Bernard Sharp and used with permission and under licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0).

The ‘Hoo Pride’ is awaiting launch at the yard of the Yorkshire Dry Dock company on the east bank of the river Hull.
Sideways launch of the ‘Hoo Pride’ from the yard of the Yorkshire Dry Dock company on the east bank of the river Hull.

Thanks very much to Bernard for the permission to use both the images and text – all copyright Bernard Sharp and published under licence.

Rich and Lou Duffy-Howard

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