Ruahine III in Clydebank, Scotland

Tuesday 21 April 2020

The fantastic photograph below, from my collection, was taken at the John Brown Shipyard, Clydebank, Scotland, c.1949. Thank you to Herb Ford, author of Pitcairn Island as a Port of Call for the following information:

This would have been Ruahine III (both I and II were built at a different yard – Wm. Denny & Bros, Dumbarton) and she was launched on December 11, 1950, so the photo would most likely have been taken in 1949, given the degree of completeness shown; can’t get closer to an exact date for you than that.

Ruahine III made her maiden voyage from London to Wellington on May 22, 1951, after having been handed over to the New Zealand Shipping Company (which was then actually the New Zealand Shipping and Federal Steam Navigation Company) on May 3, 1951.

In 1968, after having been transferred to Federal ownership in 1967, she was sold to C. Y. Tung’s Orient Overseas Line, Hong Kong. She was renamed Oriental Rio. In 1969 she left Hong Kong on the Round the World Service.

This great ship arrived at Kaohsiung for scrapping on December 31, 1973.

External link: The story of the Clyde Bank Shipyard

From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

Because I've always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don't need to explain; maybe you'll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can – what was just inside the door.

The wonder is even stronger with old stereoscopic views – the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth. It's never been a mystery to me why the whole country was once crazy about them. Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real: Insert a view, slide it into focus, and the old scene leaps out at you, astonishingly three-dimensional. And then, for me, the awe becomes intense. Because now you really see the arrested moment, so actual it seems that if you watch intently, the life caught here must continue. That the raised horse's hoof so startlingly distinct in the foreground must move down to the solidness of pavement below it again; those carriage wheels revolve, the girl walk closer, the man move on out of the scene. The feeling that the tantalizing reality of the vanished moment might somehow be seized – that if you watch long enough you might detect that first nearly imperceptible movement – is the answer to the question Kate has asked me more than once: "How can you sit there so long – you hardly move! – staring endlessly at the very same picture?"

Time travel with old photographs

Ruahine III in Clydebank, Scotland

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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Time travel with old photographs

Ruahine III in Clydebank, Scotland

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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