Posted by Robert Dilley on September 11, 2002 at 20:55:07 from 65.39.15.64 user rdilley.
I knew I had seen it somewhere. In Christina Hardyment's "Captain Flint's Trunk", p 197:
... we came across a huge wooden skeleton lying in the mud. A barge's bones. The Speedy? "No," said the Mastodon, who knew all about Secret Water. "Those are the ribs of the Alpha. There was a chap called Sampson who owned the island in the 1940s. He went out wildfowling one night and his house caught fire. So he bought the Alpha and used her as a houseboat while he built another house."