Aboard the Good Ship Swallow

Members of the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Plymouth take out the Swallow launch for a trip on the River Tamar and over to Cawsand. The trip takes in the Royal Navy base at Devonport, still the largest in Western Europe. Ships in this film include the G-class destroyers HMS Griffin, Gipsy and Grafton launched in 1934, HMS Courageous and transatlantic cruise liner the Twin Screw Steamer Veendam, which stopped in Plymouth that summer on its ways from New York to Rotterdam.

The family enjoys high tea including jam and egg custard tarts, sandwiches, Victoria sponge and other delights while listening to the wind-up gramophone and a Crown Record. Woolworth launched Crown Records in 1935 on Bakelite, an early form of plastic. Upstream is the Calstock Viaduct holding a single track of the Tamar Valley Line opened in 1890 and extended in 1908 when the viaduct was finished and running from Plymouth in Devon to Gunnislake in Cornwall. The river narrows towards Morwellham Quay, a river port for the Tamar Valley mining district where deposits of silver, tin, lead and arsenic used to be extracted. The port served the stannary town for tin, Tavistock.