Holland was always fascinated by ships and the sea - both his parents had worked at the Royal Dockyards at Chatham, his father as a blacksmith and his mother in the sailmaking lofts. On one of his last visits to Plymouth College of Art and Design to do their external assessments, he was taken round part of the docks. For once, he didn't have a sketch book with him, or time to get his impressions down, so he asked the PCAD team to take some photographs of four old boats that were waiting to be broken up. Once he received the photos, he painted two versions of the scene, one as oil on board (shown below) and another version as a watercolour (now in a private collection). These works were done around 1980, and both paintings took the name of one of the boats - Trevol and Friends at Plymouth.