The Vanishing Age of Sail

Kelsick Wood was a nineteenth-century Georgian shipbuilder in Maryport, Cumberland, with a private passion for painting. He combined his two loves in his journals, where shipyard contracts and inventories share their pages with beautiful and curious watercolour pictures. The Vanishing Age of Sail revels in the rich, textured story behind these little books. It shows how each small shipyard on Britain's coast played its part in Britain's economic expansion in the nineteenth century. It is also a personal tale, and the faces which look out from Kelsick's journals remind us that these wooden ships and brigs carried the dreams and livelihoods of all those who owned, commanded and crewed them.

Simon Francis Brown's highly visual title speaks immediately to lovers of maritime history, illustration and the Georgian era, drawing in daydreamers and doodlers alike.

About the Author

Simon Francis Brown is an English Literature graduate from Oxford, with a passion for maritime history and illustrated manuscripts. He began his career in academic publishing and has worked for many years in management and communications. He lives in South London, and is a keen mudlark, hunting for history on the banks of the Thames.

Praise for The Vanishing Age of Sail

'Brown takes the reader on a socio-economic journey, in this case that of a small Cumberland shipyard at Maryport and its Georgian owner, Kelsick Wood. But it is not Wood's production of wooden ships that is the fascination of this slim volume but the fact that, faced with a sheet of paper, he could not resist doodling or sketching upon it. His journals, accounts, invoices and estimates are all covered with beautiful and curious watercolour pictures. Some, indeed, are of proposed figureheads, but many are of men and women who have no links with the details on the page. Ironically, it is these sketches that have ensured that his journals with their details about the vicissitudes of shipbuilding in a small northern yard, have survived. They form the basis for Brown's fascinating study of the Kelsick Wood shipyard. This book would give anyone interested in shipbuilding in the age of sail a most interesting insight.'
– The Naval Review, October 2025

'A fascinating account of 1820s and 1830s Maryport life seen through the journals of shipbuilder Kelsick Wood, which record timberyard business and the smithy's coal consumption alongside striking pencil drawings and watercolour illustrations.'
– Cumbria Life Magazine, August 2025