Page 8 - Mar-Apr 2020

HERITAGE IN REVIEW - 2018/2019
Heritage Committee
If you visit England, you have the opportunity to visit one of the world’s great maritime museums at Greenwich, and view a thousand years of maritime history, from fighting sail to world-championship sailing skiffs from the present day. And this is not all, for the National Maritime Museum, of which Greenwich is the jewel in the crown, has outposts in other ports, to show naval, merchant marine and yachting artefacts. Plus, of course, there are a myriad of other museums to tempt the nautically- minded traveller. In the US, the museum-goer will find a profusion of marvellous places to inhale the aroma of varnish and admire the models and drawings that gave birth to world-famous yachts.
Our own country is not so well
supplied; Halifax has a general-interest maritime museum with a limited amount of yachting material, but what should have been a major draw for the historically minded sailor, the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston, has faltered for years and is now only recovering from a major crisis. So what that amounts to is that RCYC and its collection are it, the major heritage resource for yachting. Fine as our collection may be in its own right, its relative value just becomes greater and greater. The Club has been recognized by experts in the US and Britain as the foremost repository of yachting history in Canada and an invaluable international resource for its collection of models, which are the truest representation of what earlier vessels actually looked like. We have done well in the past and we continue to make strides in adding to and presenting what we have. As we move ahead, we have to hope that other museums regain their strength.
Heritage is not just something we have; it’s something we do – celebrating and enjoying our past and the material things that evoke that past. Our Heritage dinners give a lively shape and colour to the events represented by our trophies and our artefacts. This year‘s Heritage Dinner spread the task of colouring the page over two speakers. Commodore Jamie Keating and Tim Walsh brought two eras of Our Fabulous Racing Fleets Past And Present to life in broad stroke and anecdote. It’s no secret that the Club’s decades-
long emphasis on the head-to-head competition of fleet racing has sharpened everyone’s game and our speakers evoked a few of sailing constants – the fun, the frantic effort – and even a bit of the fear for us that night.
Such evenings would scarcely be possible without the detailed records provided by our Annals. After a long interregnum with no and then slow writing of our history, Louise Cannon has charged ahead to lessen the gap to within a nose of up-to-date-ness. Diane McElroy is poised to leap the narrow remaining gulf, after which a new team, led by Tim Walsh as editor-in- chief, will take up the quill. Louise’s completed Annals are available on the website. For those who would like the earlier printed and slip-cased Annals, copies are on sale at the Pro Shop.
As readers of previous Heritage reports will know, the care of the Club’s collection has been of increasing concern of the Heritage Committee over the last half-decade; our goals are now in sight if not actually delivered. We now have a full suite of secure freestanding trophy cases in the City. On the island, a new structure is set to arrive before the beginning of the season – this will display our trophies with contemporary lighting and unhindered views, yet keep them safe. We have a design for the embedded trophy cases in the City, and again, these will make our sailing and sports holdings visible, yet much more secure.
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MARCH/APRIL 2020 • KWASIND
HERITAGE