George Duddy's Homepage

By George H.S. Duddy

George F. Askew is a well known local ship and boat builder who built and maintained a wide variety of vessels in British Columbia, Alberta, NWT, the Yukon and Alaska in the first half of the twentieth century. The following listing of vessels is an update of Table A of my book Called by the North published in 2022 based on ongoing research. Through a recently completed project of the Library and Archives of Canada, historic ship registration data is now available online. This has been useful in identifying additional vessels and for adding official numbers to the table entries. As noted in the notes on the table, all the changes and additions are identified in bold print.

The authour has been a member and contributor To the Nauticapedia.ca Project for many years and has worked carefully with John MacFarlane to make sure that this latest effort is in entry harmony with the Nauticapedia vessel data base. The Nauticapedia summary of vessels is alphabetically ordered, with individual entries for vessels with varying names. Unlike it, this table is arranged in chronological order in harmony with George Askew’s life and includes only one entry for each vessel regardless of many names it displayed over the vessel’s life, although these names are identified in the single entry.

The Nauticapedia.ca summary Askew document with live links to individual data base entries is found at this website address: https://nauticapedia.ca/Articles/Vessel_Builders_Askew_BC.php

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all that helped: John Macfarlane, David, daughter Janice, my writing mate David Bruhn webmaster and grandson Toby.

Appendix A Update June 2025: Vessels Designed or Built by George F. Askew

Notes:

1. In Canada, only one vessel can be registered under a specific name at any time. 
2. In vessel names, numbers without parenthesis are part of vessels names.
3. Numbers within parenthesis are not part of the vessels’ names, they indicate the order of usage of the name based on the Nauticapedia.ca vessel data base.
4. Shipbuilding noted performed at Fort McMurray, was actually performed at a location nearby on the Clearwater River that became known as Waterways – for the purpose of this table the community names are synonymous.
5. All entries shown in bold print are part of the June 2025 Update. 
6. Note for the 1941 entry, the Vancouver Sun 5 March 1941 article quoted for the Watson Lake project shown on the earlier version of the table, the number of vessels actually built and registered exceeded the number quoted, ie 3 tunnel boats instead of 2 and 14 scows instead of 12.
7. D.R.S.W and D.R.T.B probably stands for Dease River Stern Wheeler and Dease River Tunnel Boat while D.R. stands for Dease River for the 14 numbered scows.