AHOY THERE, SKIP

Fareham-based waste management specialists Cleansing Service Group are used to providing customers with containers for use in a whole range of disposal jobs.

But company bosses were taken aback to be asked if they could supply a builders’ skip which could be converted into a D-Day type landing craft and ‘driven’ up the River Itchen.

The request came from Winchester-based TV production company Form Films which is making a new series of history programmes for the BBC.

The series will feature a World War 2 landing craft which spearheaded the Allies’ bloody assault on the Normandy beaches as D-Day got underway.

“Designers of the landing craft had many problems with their prototypes and the film shows how they tackled these issues and how the boat became one of the most important vessels of the war,” said Laura Anscombe, a member of the Form Films’production team.

“The skip has the flat bottom and box shape similar to landing craft and we wanted to adapt it as a practical experiment to illustrate the evolution of the craft used during D-Day.

“We knew it was a somewhat unusual request, but CSG quickly responded and delivered a fully cleaned and painted skip to us in time for filming. They even lowered it into the water for us.”

An outboard engine was fixed to the six cubic yard skip which was then ‘skippered up’ the Itchen by Hampshire-based national sailing guru Tom Cunliffe who is presenting the series, accompanied by Bitterne boatyard owner and round-the-world yachtsman Ian MacGillivray who had adapted the craft.

Mr Cunliffe said: “If you’d designed a skip to go to sea, then this one from CSG would have been it! It had good freeboard forward which allowed it to power into the wind without getting waves over the bow, and aft it was cut just low enough to mount the outboard.

“We had an outrageous amount of fun and learnt a lot of serious lessons from the experiment. We had a safety boat standing by so that we couldn’t possibly be a hazard to navigation, but it’s definitely not something you should be trying in your local river.”