After WWI

At the end of the war Percy Richmond left Thalatta and one of the Wynnfield Company’s wartime skippers, Herbert John Body, of Southend, took over as skipper. Thalatta was employed taking materials to the depths of war-torn  Flanders for post-war rebuilding. Many years later, Thalatta was recalled by a Mr E. Taylor of Chatham, who was at that time a boy working in the barges, as working her way up the canal through the barren, empty, sorrowful fields of Ypres, so recently the scene of unimaginable horrors. Mr Taylor recalled the absolute quiet of that awful place – ‘a quiet that belonged to a hundred thousand dead’ – which seemed to him more horrifying than all the din of battle. Between 1919 and 1921 Thalatta’s passages took her to Paris, Antwerp, Brussels and Rotterdam. After that she carried cement to Torquay, china clay from Fowey to Greenhithe, and granite chippings from the Channel Islands.