Lady Diana

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LADY DIANA

photos & details ex Ken Ricketts

Phil Seabrook had Billy Rogers design and build the 36 foot Lady Diana for him in 1950 and fitted her with an Austin Skipper 100 from new, replacing it with a 155hp Nordberg sleeve-valve engine in 1956 shortly before he sold Lady Diana to Monte Winter. She performed better with the Nordberg than she did with the Austin.

Ken was aboard Lady Diana several times at Kawau Island during Christmas 1950.

She is still around today & still fairly unspoiled, as per the above photos, except for the lovely original varnish work, on the combings, which unfortunately has long since gone.

She also has an almost identical sister ship called Margaret Anne (photo below), which apart from a flybridge & varnish, is also fairly original, as per the photo.

MARGARET ANNE POST 2000

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8 thoughts on “Lady Diana”

  1. Vintage Seamer is a wonderful source of great & accurate knowledge, as we all know, but he has made reference above to MARGARET ANNE being built by McGeady, & sadly this is one of the rare occasions, he is not correct.
    If one reads the other earlier post on MARGARE ANNE, there is a comment that confirms she was built by Billy Rogers along with LADY DIANA. — KEN R

    NOTE: comment should be on the Margaret Anne post not the Lady Diana. Also Vintage Steamer was just expressing his opinion. Alan H

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  2. Pingback: Lady Diana | waitematawoodys.com #1 for classic wooden boat stories, info, advice & news – updated daily

  3. You get nice burbling noises with low bmep, a bark with high bmep. Remember that bark of your 3 litre Bentley?

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  4. Two different builders here, one is the typical brutal McGeady style -flat sheer with square ports. Contrast with the other with a nice sheer, round ports and just a bit more aesthetics -surely Billy Rogers. I never thought the roundish windows looked well especially when the upperworks lost their varnish….. BTW Harold, Makura had a Nordberg too -it ran smoothly and burbled nicely. Contrast with the 60 hp Fordsons that were slowly displacing the petrol engines.

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  5. Lady Diana was for many years owned by Coastguard stalwart Trevor Kelly and thereafter one of his sons had her up in the bay, he always used and maintained her. Update on Margaret Anne the flying bridge has or is about to come off, somehow wont be the same without Roy glued to his seat up there driving around Kawau.

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  7. PS. Sorry to rabbit on about engines again, but there is a strong marine connection for Hercules. The various Hercules side valve engine blocks were used for many years not only in trucks (eg Diamond T) and agricultural machinery (e.g. Massey-Harris, Case, Oliver etc) but also by other marine engine manufacturers like Kermath, Gray and Chris-Craft. In fact, Chris-Craft bought a controlling interest in Hercules in 1951 to ensure the continuity of engine supply and development and the better management of Hercules.This probably resulted in companies like Nordberg being discouraged from sourcing from Hercules. Most turned away from high-torque, low rpm, side valve sluggers to the widening range of high-performance ohv 6s and V8s of automotive origin and much greater power to weight ratio.

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  8. Ken has lifted most of the info here from the earlier postings on WW about MARGARET-ANNE. However he has misinterpreted my reference there to the Nordberg Knight engine installed by Phil Seabrook in 1956, calling it a “sleeve-valve” engine. Seabrooks were, of course, the agents for the Austin range of marine engines as they had been master agents in Auckland for the Austin car since the ’20s. They got the agency for the Milwaukee-built Nordberg range around 1954, hence the repowering of LADY DIANA as a “demonstrator”, if you like.
    Nordberg had been in busines for many years manufacturing heavy machinery, rock crushers, steam engines and heavy duty diesels for e.g. oil-rig pumps. They decided to get into the manufacture of cheapish gasoline marine engines in the ’50s.
    The Nordberg Knight was not a Knight-patent sleeve-valve at all. It was a humble 339.2 cu in 4″ x 4.5″ 6 cylinder side-valve based on a bought-in JX Hercules truck block. It was the top of the Nordberg range with 155 bhp. Other models in the range were the Bullet, Bluefin, Tarpon, Arrow, Colt and Marlin.
    So the “Knight” is just a model name, not a description of its valve operation.
    By the 1950s the Knight double-sleeve engine was a thing of the distant past in terms of cost of manufacture and servicing. By WW2, even the Knight sleeve-valve stalwart Daimler wore poppet valves in its engines and the only real sleeve-valve holdouts were the much more efficient and less complex Burt-McCallum single-sleeve Bristol aero engines.
    Dinosaur side-valvers like these Nordbergs were old hat too by the 50s except for the odd make like Universal which soldiered on until the 60s. Nordbergs stopped making this range in 1957.

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