canal, while shorehead boats extended their range eastwards into the Firth of Forth and westwards as far as the Isle of Bute and from there up the length of Loch Fyne, their length kept at 66 ft (20 m) to use the canal locks. Both these types had a crew of three. Puffers of a third type, the outside boats, were built for the rougher sea routes to the Hebrides islands with a crew of four and the length increased to 88 ft (27 m) still allowing use of the larger locks on the Crinan Canal which cuts across the Kintyre peninsula. There were more than 20 builders in Scotland, mainly on the Forth and Clyde canal at Kirkintilloch and Maryhill, Glasgow. During World War I these handy little ships showed their worth in servicing warships, and were used at Scapa Flow, and for World War II the Admiralty placed an order in 1939 for steamships on the same design, mostly built in England, with the class name of VIC, standing for "Victualling Inshore Craft". After the war a number of VICs came into the coasting trade. The Innisgara was fitted with an internal combustion engine in 1912, and while puffers generally were steam-powered, after World War II new ships began to be diesel engined, and a number of VICs were converted to diesel. The coasting trade to serve the islands was kept up by the Glenlight Shipping Company of Greenock until in 1993 the government withdrew subsidies and, unable to compete with road transport using subsidised ferries, the service ended. In fiction The short stories which Neil Munro first published in the Glasgow Evening News in 1905 appeared in the newspaper over twenty years and achieved widespread fame, with collections issued in book form from 1931 still in print today. With the continuing popularity of these tales, the puffers became film stars in The Maggie, and Para Handy with his Vital Spark was the subject of three popular BBC television series dating from 1959 to 1995. Surviving craft A small number of puffers survive as conservation projects, though most have diesel engines. VIC 32 is one of the last few surviving coal-fired steam-powered puffers and is based at The Change House, Crinan. She was built by Dunston's of Thorne, Yorkshire in November 1943 – a busy time for the Clyde Ship building yards. As the wartime Admiralty needed 50,