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Maritime memories of old Lyme Regis

For the Year of Maritime Lyme, Lyme Regis Museum organised a special local history exhibition at the Town Mill Malthouse entitled ‘Maritime Memories'.

The exhibition brought together a wide variety of historic material relating to Lyme’s maritime past. Anyone interested in the town’s social history, the sea, and boats of all kinds will find something fascinating in the exhibition.  It ran from Saturday 22nd to Sunday 30th.

The centrepiece of the exhibition will be two historic Dorset fishing boats called lerrets, which will be exhibited along with their stories, archive photographs and oral history recordings of the fishing families who made their living from these boats.  One of the lerrets on display is the last remaining seaworthy historic vessel ‘Vera’ and the other is the new lerret ‘Littlesea’, built by eye by local boatbuilder Gail McGarva with the assistance of local boatbuilder Roy Gollop.

 

Vera
 
Littlesea


Where we stayedAlso included in the exhibition will be historical material relating to the RNLI in Lyme Regis, featuring many archive photographs.  There will also be the story of the RAF boats that were stationed at Lyme, including scale models.  Museum local historians Ken Gollop and Graham Davies have also made a selection of the fascinating historic images from the museum’s photographic archives, a selection of which are shown below.

 

    Lyme beach c1930

Elephants on the beach pre WWII   The steamer arrives

There is also a selection of paintings related to Lyme and the sea on display in the Museum's Rotunda Gallery until mid January 2012.

Lyme in a storm - Reed