The National Maritime Museum confirmed that they held a range of Lloyds Surveys for Beta III and also some of the plans to do with the boat’s construction. They were able to bring them to their reading room but the only catch was they were shutting for a month for refurbishment. Gizzi and I whizzed over there on Friday to take a look.

It is probably easier to bust into the safes at the Bank of England than get into any library or archive. ID, bag emptying, confiscation of pens, and one dodgy dodgy photo later I was in.

Fortunately it all proved very worthwhile and made the frustrating cross-London journey while thick with flu all worthwhile.

The dossier I was given contained plans for Beta III’s construction dated from 1925. This is excellent news on two counts. Firstly, the first job for the architect would be to draw up some plans to work from, so if I already have these showing the exact dimensions, this is one less thing to pay for. Secondly, the deck has been lowered at some point. The plans show its original state and these dimensions thereby making it much easier to reinstate.

A lot of the plans had annotations in red in and seem to have been produced as different versions. The dates on the bottom corners gave some idea about their order. It will be another job to sit down and work out how the plans evolved over time.

(Excuse the pointy ET finger)These quick photos are slightly poor quality. However, the museum have this super scanning machine so I have much higher resolution copies as PDFs.