Engines survive because people care for them. The historic site celebrated that network with short profiles. Here those pages are rewritten as heritage notes. Period contact details, magazine subscriptions, and book prices from the mid-2000s are omitted; look up current sources if you wish to follow the living clubs or publishers.
Andy Talbot
Andy Talbot is described in the archive as a retired engineer and engineering teacher who turned to magazine writing. His work appeared regularly in Canal & Riverboat and Waterways World, with additional interests in horticulture and travel. The core of the profile, for this site, is his long attention to boats and old engines — especially those with a marine connection.
The original page linked galleries of semi-diesel “crude oil” Bolinders and four-stroke diesels. A few strong frames are kept here as examples of that photographic contribution; the full dump stays offline.
Kevin Whittle
Kevin Whittle’s archive story begins with a 1971 hire on the Shropshire Union Canal and a 30 ft narrowboat by 1976. Over the years he fitted out three craft, including Tebay — a 1929 Yarwoods boat built at Northwich for the LMS Railway Company. Vintage engines were a constant, even when they were still casually called “second hand”.
From that hobby came The Oil Engine Company (from 1989), rebuilding vintage marine engines for canal boats: Bolinder semi-diesels, Listers, Dormans, Gardners, Fowlers, Ailsa Craigs and more. A customer request for a Kelvin in 1991 shifted the centre of gravity. The Kelvin J3 he rebuilt — about 4.5 litres, roughly 33 shaft horsepower at 1,000 rpm, idling near 225 rpm — was tall, narrow, brass-and-copper heavy, with individual cylinders and heads and external coolant pipework. Petrol start with magneto, then changeover to diesel: proportions that suited a narrowboat engine room unusually well.
As supply of decent donor engines dried up, remanufacture of Kelvin J and K parts became essential: heads, guides, valves, cylinders, liners, pistons, shell bearings, flywheel bolts, manifolds, starter brackets, gearbox parts and more. The archive also records the Kelvin Register and the Vintage Marine Engine Club as mutual-help networks, plus two books — The A to Z of Vintage Marine Engines and Vintage Engines for Narrow Boats — that collected installation practice and maker history. Those titles remain useful references for owners; check current availability rather than mid-2000s prices.
Why this belongs on a Bolinder site: the same ecosystem of clubs, magazines, rallies and pattern-makers that kept Kelvins alive also kept Bolinders on the water. Minnow’s BM9 story even notes a Kevin Whittle connection in the archive boat pages — see Minnow.
Related reading
- Boat stories
- Engine registers
- History
- Sound & video — hear engines of this tradition