Flagship represents city’s maritime heritage

One of the grand old ladies of yesterday’s flotilla, the Humber sloop Phyllis, was built just a decade later. She had been hard at work 19 years when the Queen was born on April 21 1926 and is the oldest of the restored sailing barges on the Humber.

Yesterday Phyllis was charged with carrying civic dignitaries from Hull, and other towns and villages around the Humber as the flagship, and flew the standard of the Lord Mayor of Hull and Admiral of the Humber, together with those of the represented districts.

Although primarily built for the coal trade, Phyllis and other sloops would have been used for to transport just about every kind of commodity that came into the ports of Hull, Grimsby, Immingham and Goole. In the 1980s she even joined in the search for the Loch Ness monster.

The vessel has been a labour of love for Kath Jones and Alan Gardiner, since they rescued her from a boatyard in Inverness over a decade ago.

On their website they say: “Work on Phyllis during her restoration has at times been difficult, the drive to restore her comes from the wider interest we have in the sailing barges of the Humber fuelled by meeting people with similar interest, some of whom were once a part of the industry.

“Every penny we have spent on her restoration has been spent we think wisely on a sympathetic restoration of Phyllis to an affordable standard.”