Where other men might have partitioned their personal and professional lives, Kelsick Wood threw it all in together, and combined his shipyard records with the pictures he painted and drew. The results are remarkable, often chaotic but utterly charming.
Some of his pictures related to shipyard business, including designs for figureheads and billetheads, and sketches of the yard’s ships at sea.
The above figurehead design is for the Coeur de Lion (launched 1834). The original registration document at The National Archives in Kew shows that the Coeur de Lion did indeed have a carved figurehead of a lion and shield.
The diary entries above are from January 1834. They share the page with a brig’s decorated stern. Kelsick himself carved two stylised dolphins like the one above during the time of his short-lived diary.
Above is one of Kelsick’s designs for billethead (ornamental woodwork at the bow, typically on a smaller scale than a figurehead). The picture beneath the carved woodwork, with the EMANCIPATION scroll, is one of several which celebrate Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
Each of these pages shows Kelsick’s habit at this time of creating a wonderful tangle of word and image. It is a style he would move away from later in the 1830s, when his later journals become more ordered and his pages alternate between shipyard notes and uncluttered illustrations.
