Robert Maccoun

(in his own words: 'the 'ou' is pronounced like thou')

Robert Maccoun was a ship-building engineer with long experience in the conservation of veteran craft. He was employed by the Trust as a consultant, and was responsible, pretty much single-handedly, for rescuing four college barges from a watery grave by replacing their rotting wooden hulls with either a replica wooden hull (in the case of Jesus Barge), or steel 'shoes'. 

As a member of the Oxford Civic Society, he also designed the wrought iron street lamps in the 1970s that you see all around Oxford.  Read more

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, 22nd March 1987, journalist Jayne Gilman interviews Robert: 

"Mr Maccoun is a slow-speaking seventy-six-year-old New Englander with a consuming passion for boats. He came to Oxford to buy as steam boiler, saw the barges, and found instead a cross between a crusade and a sentence to hard labour for life. His arrival in Oxford coincided with the formation of the Oxford College Barges Preservation Trust to which he promptly introduced himself. And he has been in Oxford, on and off, ever since, living on a boat and working, unpaid, to save at least some of the barges from ending up as soggy matchwood.

'They fascinated me, because I could see they were the last survivors of a tradition of decorative naval architecture that lasted from ancient times until just after Nelson,' he says. 'The oldest one, we think, dates from 1865, while the most recent was built in 1930, and they were so individual. The Hertford barge was classical, representing the Greek revival. The Kehle barge was art nouveau; antoehr one was Gothic. They really were quite extraordinary'...

Robert Maccoun is working on the Hertford and Corpus barges. 'I can do most things, except joinery and things like windows and decorative railings. The steel hull we've placed under the Corpus Christi barge was made by me, with volunteers and part-time helpers. Welding on the bank of the river, mostly.'

His childhood sounds like something out of Kipling. His mother died when he was four and his father,, an officer with the US coastguard, simply took the child with him wherever he went - on the North Atlantic ice patrol, on shore resue work, to shipyards from Maine to San Francisco. As his father rose to be an Admiral - the US outsguard is rather more gung-ho than ours - and stayed on shore, young Robert learned about boats and ships from the inside out, in shipyards. 

'When I was twelve my father bought me my first boat, a 16ft steam cutter. She was built in Cowes...He had the bos'n and chief quartermater of his ship rig her up with a sail for me, and I sailed her round the harboutrs from Bopston to San Francisco. Every vacation I was hanging about the boat-yards. It certainly was a wonderful childhood' 

He studied engineering and went into shipyard work, though he spent three years at sea, in merchant ships, with the men they call the Blavk Gand - engine-room men who are perperually black with the filth of oily machinery. By the end of World War II he had risen to manage his own yard and decided to 'get an education'.

He settled in France with a US company...[and] acquired the last surviving bateau mouche on the Seine. These old Parisian river steamers had long since been replaced by diesel craft, and finding spare parts for its rstoration was a considerable problem. 

So when he heard that Salter Brothers, the Oxford river-boat company, were putting diesel engines into their steam-powered boats, he came to Oxford to see if he could pick up a boiler for his bateau. And it was then that he saw the barges. 

Presumably, Robert Maccoun will be involved [with the barges] for as long as he can hold a blow torch and after, even though he still has his bateau mouche in the process of restoration across the Channel; work in progress in Venice on a plan to extend the naval museum; and a home in New England which he feels he ought to go to now and again. 

He is content in Oxford, living on a friend's boat in an inaccessible backwater, 'It is very comfortable,' he says, clomping up the ladder to open the hatch like a man thirty years younger than he is, 'although that bad winter we had a couple of years back, when we had 6 ins of ice round is, it wasn't wonderfully warm. I'm a happy man.'"

Links to further information

Robert Maccoun wrote an article 'The Trust for the preservation of Oxford College Barges' for the Oxford Civic Society Newsletter no.45 (January 1987)

Audio of Robert Maccoun being interviewed in 1988 can be bought online or listened to on site in Oxfordshire public libraries (1988)