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Photograph of John Marshall on the pilot cutter on the River Tyne with a ferry in the background

John Marshall

John belongs to: Souter Lighthouse

John was born in South Shields. He is the fifth generation of Tyne pilots in his family.

John was interviewed by Carl Greenwood on 12 April 2006. The interview took place at Discovery Museum and lasted 28 minutes and 26 seconds.

Photograph of John Marshall on the pilot cutter on the River Tyne with a ferry in the background
Photograph of John Marshall on the pilot cutter

The pilot cutter

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"Pilot cutters, now, when my grandfather was a pilot he used to go to sea in coble"

Pilot cutters, now, when my grandfather was a pilot he used to go to sea in coble which were open oats with sails and oars, and they used do what they called seeking, in other words looking, looking for ships. Pilots were self-employed in those days, so the first one that could get to a ship would get the, get the job and get the money. And the bigger the ship, the more money you got, so there was quite a lot of competition.

And this continued until the early part of the 20th century, when the pilotage authority decided that they would disband that system and they purchased a pilot cutter, which was like a small pilot ship which was stationed off the port, and then the pilots would board incoming ships on a rota system. Now, the system of, of the pilot ship, that last until the start of the Second World War, and then because it was too dangerous to have a pilot ship stationed off the port they resorted to using launches, which operated from the river.

Now, after the Second World War, they briefly reverted back to the pilot ships, but they found it wasn’t a success, quite as successful and they were expensive to run, so with their experiences of the pilot launches they continued with that. Now, when I was an apprentice, we had about four wooden 50 foot, 55 foot pilot launches and they eventually, they were superseded in the ‘70s by faster launches. So we started to get GRP, you know, 18-20 knot boats and at the moment we’ve got three boats on the river now and they’re all fast boats in keeping with the modern technology.

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