Philip Stevens - My time at Morgan Giles
7 am on January 2nd 1962 saw me walking from my lodgings in Northumberland Place, Teignmouth, towards the Point where stood the big iron sheds of Morgan Giles Shipyard. It was half dark and freezing cold and I was nervous, despite a good hot breakfast from kindly Mrs. Mallett, who had engaged to provide me with bed, breakfast and an evening meal all for £3 a week, this being the first day of my five year shipwright apprenticeship at the then famous yard.
I had left boarding school and been sent to the colonies, as often happened in those post-war years when the Empire still offered opportunities to young people to achieve a competence. But in Salisbury (now Harare) in those days apartheid had not been invented as an official doctrine, which is to say it was still the natural, unquestionable order of things for black people to get off the pavement for whites. After a year as enagement trainee in an asbestos factory I returned home to Cornwall, a classic ex-public school under-achiever, to live with my widowed mother and wonder what to do. Fortunately we lived a stone’s throw from the lovely Helford River, and I learned to sail and then to race small boats, and it soon became clear, at least to me, that my future must involve boats, sailing and the sea in some way or another. Poring through the weighty journal of The Ship and Boatbuilders National Federation, I came across Morgan Giles, discovered them to be exhibiting at the Earl’s Court Boat Show, and went and made myself known to the genial Captain Michael, son of the founder and at that time managing director, who told me to come and talk to him at the yard after the show. At 21 I was much older than the average apprentice and was surprised to be subsequently offered a place till it transpired that I was to be a ‘pupil’, which meant that half my five years’ apprenticeship would be spent in the drawing and other offices, in return for a premium of £500 to be paid by my long-suffering mother.
Frank Morgan Giles, the yard’s founder, who inhabited the big front office until shortly before his death, had already made a name for himself in the early years of the century designing day sailers for early sailing clubs, particularly on the East Coast, and more glamorously by winning the Prince of Wales cup for International 14s, the acme of dinghy racing in the twenties. Around that time he moved toTeignmouth, which many believed to be a mistake, yachting then being centred more on the Solent and the east coast; with the coming of the 2nd World War however, Britain’s general unpreparedness meant that many hitherto small yards, Morgan Giles included, had a remunerative visit from a frantic Admiralty, to be enlarged and improved with newsheds and slipways, in return being summarily given contracts to build minesweepers, patrol boats, whatever was needed. It is said that Morgan Giles built more than a hundred boats for the Admiralty during WW Two. And while he would have been fully cognisant of the profitability, I would bet he hankered in secret for the days of peace to return and with them a return of sailing boat demand. He was soon able to take advantage; in the late fifties for example, the Admiralty came through with a splendid order for five 13-ton sail trainers for BRNC Dartmouth, with a further two for the naval engineering college at Manaton. It can be imagined how hard those boats were worked, and if I say that most of them are still sailing to this day, that will give an idea of their sound design and the high quality of the workmanship.
Many fine boats were launched in the early decades; an essentially competitive man, the Old Man turned his hand to metre boats even earlier on. In I think 1926 he produced a 6-metre called Ancora, of particular interest to our story because Ancora turned up again in the mid-sixties at Teignmouth, from where exactly I have no idea, but the Old Man determined to race her, and somehow one Saturday I found myself on board along with Bill Hutchins the Rigger and one of the hands, possibly Dicky Bird, as crew, with of course the Old Man, by then in his 80s, as skipper, properly attired in spotless white shirt, black tie and immaculate black No. 1 reefer jacket, the effect a little spoiled by a blue Peter Storm hood pulled tight with a draw string with little crinkles all round his face under his peaked cap. Ancora, the 6 metre, was 40’ long and 6’ wide, a real plank on edge with minimal guard rails but no pretensions to anything namby-pamby like a pulpit; in anything like a breeze, she lay down and exhibited the most vicious lee helm, to the extent that I more than once was obliged to put a hand to the tiller to relieve some of the strain for the Old Man.
We weren’t doing too badly, nevertheless, till it came to the down wind leg, and trying to get the spinnaker up at the earliest possible moment, what with the boat heeling and very little to hold on to, it got away from us and tangled round the forestay. Peter Storm or no, old Giles gave vent to his feelings in no uncertain manner until it became clear that we weren’t going to get it set, when he made us get it in again and smouldered for a bit. Later he apologised though, and all was well, though we didn’t exactly win that one.
So there I was, cold and anxious, tipping up at the yard for the first time, to be welcomed at the main gate by the amiable ex-naval Lou Back, our storeman, and his sidekick Bob Gilroy, a man of few words, and even fewer of them friendly, only to discover that a one day strike had been called by the appropriate union, and that only we apprentices, I was given to understand being too young to go on strike, were there. It appeared that strikes at that time were more or less unheard of … there were certainly no others during my time and no one seemed quite sure what to do (I should say my wages as a first year apprentice amounted to £3 2s 1d a week, or exactly 1/8 3/4d an hour; I actually saw it written, odd farthings and all, in the wages book subsequently). A shipwright’s wage was between £12 and £15 a week at that time. So I and a fellow apprentice called Rodney Back, a friendly sixteen year old, were sent to rivet on No. 749, a 27’ Monaco fast cruiser then on the stocks. The Monacos were a series of very high-end luxury motor cruisers recently developed by the firm, beautifully designed and built by very experienced shipbuilders at all stages, which became well known for a number of years. The construction was basically marine ply on closely spaced frames of Canadian Rock Elm, a fine and very flexible material which was cut and laminated round building frames using resorcinol glue. After glueing up and cramping to the building frame with many G-cramps, these by then very heavy items were stacked side by side in a hot house to cure; removed when dry, each new frame was uncramped from the building frame, planed up flat on the sides and with a bevel on the outside corresponding to its final position on the boat, ready to be erected on the keel in the usual way. Ply cushions would be added to spread the load on the ply skin which was added subsequently.
So Rodney took me in to where No 749 stood ready on the stocks, and presenting me with a riveting dolly, a heavy piece of round steel bar about 2” in diameter with a little narrow point sticking out from one end, invited me to get under the boat and hold on to each rivet while he riveted it. I discovered later that on cold days; i.e. when the temperature got below freezing, you could take your dolly to Bill the blacksmith who would warm it up for you on his fire. Rodney explained the pattern he would follow so that we should each be on the same rivet at the same time; essential when you come to think about it since we could not see each other. This actually works very well as long as there is an element of mutual agreement! So there I was, crouching or lying under the boat with my freezing lump of iron, on a very damp concrete slipway which led out under the big steel doors, below which the top of the tide came sucking and surging in to within a few feet of where I was, full of seaweed and much more nameless rubbish from Teignmouth harbour, while a brisk wind blew in through the larger holes rusted in the doors, with my obliging friend Rodney inside the boat operating a compressed air riveting gun which sounded rather like a machine gun going off at short intervals a few inches from my ear while I held on to each rivet head like grim death.
The next day everybody was back at work. We numbered nearly a hundred in those days, with nine different trades represented if you counted the labourers, which you better had if you wanted a boat moved, a launching cradle put round a new build … any one of a thousand jobs involving, particularly, heavy lifting. The labourers inhabited a cellar under the main shed which smelt strongly of tallow, which arrived in normous drums and was used for greasing the ways. Their foreman was a large and formidable character called Greybird Matthews, who doubled as Teignmouth’s fire chief, so might occasionally, along, surprisingly, with most of the labour force, become temporarily unavailable to the yard.
The work routine began with clocking in at 7.30 am, a card-punching exercise, with a 10 minute break at 9, for the purposes of which George Rowe, the landlord of the Lifeboat Inn, just a stone’s throw from the yard gate, would open to sell small hot pasties which we craved, especially us boys who were permanently hungry. I think they were 6d each. You raced out when the bell rang, got your pasty from George, a substantial man, the sight of whose crimson-mottled upper body stretching an acreage of string vest to its utmost at that time in the morning is something I shall never forget. Clutching our pasties we raced back in to sit with the others till the bell rang again, when out of self respect no one would move, although somehow in a few minutes everybody was miraculously back at work.
To start with I was put with Al Chaney, a charge hand building a 42’ Monaco, and from Al learned an immense amount of shipwrighting. I remember that on my first day he gave me a piece of plywood saying: Take that over there to that bandsaw, cut along outside the line and bring it back”. Having at that stage never used a bandsaw in my life, I suggested he might be taking a bit of a chance, which tickled him pink; he kindly explained how to switch it on, and of course I managed. I met up with Al again quite recently as it happened, and we had many an enjoyable reminiscence about our experiences of fifty or sixty years previously.
In due course, riveting did present me with a problem; I discovered that we boys might be 2 Monaco cruisers on one of our gangways at Teignmouth c. 1965 expected to go on doing it indefinitely, cheap labour as we were, and having in my estimation learned all I needed to know about it in a couple of weeks, I started to pester George Briggs, the shipwright foreman, to move me up to where I’d spied a Dragon being built right up at the top of the shed at the far end of the mould loft. This was a vast and very flat and even floor painted a matt black on which the designers would draw the lines of boats out full size for the shipwrights to take their patterns from. The Dragon is a thirty foot racing yacht, a very beautiful Swedish design, also being at that time an Olympic class, so as you can imagine, I was longing to get up there, sail being, as I think I explained, the ‘thing’ as far as I was concerned. So I pestered George as much as I dared until he finally gave in, and up I went, passing on my way Mr G K Collyer, the chief designer, shuffling about in knee pads drawing lines out full size on the floor. For straight lines (I seem to remember there was room for anything up to about 100 ft long on that floor) Mr Collyer showed me how he would stretch a string line between two nails in the required position; the string would be rubbed along all its length with a pink chalky substance, then pulled up vertically in the middle and let go so that a dead straight pink line was traced onto the floor. Many such techniques, quick, efficient and low-tech are still, I am happy to say, used throughout the ship - and boatbuilding industry. So I eventually joined an old shipwright called Lloyd Foot who was busy putting the Dragon together. It should be remembered that most of the boat builders at that time were very experienced; Lloyd was probably 60 then, and like most of the others had been at it all his working life. My feeling looking back now is that due to a certain laxity in management then, the tradesmen were underpaid and under - appreciated. This is in no way a criticism of The Old Man, as we called Frank Morgan Giles, our founder, whom I still shouldn’t presume to criticise even now. But however it was, they had a yard full of men sharing massive experience and able to work together, a vanishingly rare and valuable commodity in these days of slipshod practice and under-trained apprentices. Certainly by the time I left MG five years later, more than one qualified shipwright had left to join the building industry, where the wages were better.
That particular Dragon was stripplanked, in strips something under an inch square in section; an idea of The Old Man’s which nobody seemed quite to understand. Where sailing yachts were concerned, however, he usually got his own way, so strip-planked she was. Lloyd, hawk-eyed for a true line, would get out his red (soft) pencil and scribble extravagantly here and there all over the surface of the planking, then hand me a cork sanding block; after the first time I knew at once that the rest of my day would be spent sanding off the high spots; and woe betide me if any traces of Lloyd’s pencil marks remained when he came to inspect my progress. I must have spent two full weeks sanding the hull of that Dragon, and if she still exists I hope her lines are still as true as they were in 1962. I can certainly say that it would have been many years after that before I could be fingerprinted again with any success, should I ever have needed to be.
Lloyd was an unusual and interesting man in that he never married and loved to spend his holidays in far-flung places; he would go off on his own, preferably to Spain where he developed a passion for watching bull-fighting, coming back to regale his mystified colleagues with stories of A Monaco 48 off Teignmouth (the name is written on one of my air intakes!) the sights and sounds of the bullring. I say unusual, though having spent my life meeting unusual and interesting people, I’m inclined to think that those who were neither were rather the exception, and that too frequently as the result of severe financial constraints.
On the subject of Dragons, a co-pupil of mine, one David Harris, a genial Welshman from Mumbles, was then crewing for a local Dragon sailor called Martin Parry who got himself selected for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics; I believe they were narrowly pipped to a bronze by the USA.
It was around this time that I eased myself out from Mrs Mallet’s kindly offices, and David Harris and I together took a little house in a terrace in Bitton Park Road, where we negotiated a rent of some £4 a week; with 2 bedrooms and a little loft which we subsequently sublet, probably illegally, to another pupil; we felt we were doing quite well. Our food bills in those days were somewhere in the region of about £3 a week each; I have forgotten many of the details, though I do remember that on my way home from work I would often stop at the local fish and chip shop for “two fish and nine of chips”, at a total of 2s 9d (for those too young to remember, this might have translated a few years later at conversion as around 13 new pence). On the low side of our terrace, incidentally no longer there, the whole area having been subsequently redeveloped, you could park your car on a sort of bumpy slope which led down to the backs of the houses below, where friendly children in a surprising range of skin tones would sometimes offer me bits of bread and jam after my lunch break; Teignmouth was a port town in those days … perhaps still is to some extent … loading and unloading clay and timber into and out of coasters over on the commercial quays, and like all port towns you might say that it set its own rules, particularly as regards night life.
Around then a new shipwright was taken on, one Neil Gamble, a hardy northerner who had built his own boat, a 24 ft Eventide sloop, and sailed her down the East Coast living on board and stopping to work on the way where fancy took him. Fetching up in Teignmouth and finding Morgan Giles to his taste, he settled down for a while, and we became friends, and one November day he expressed an interest in sailing over to Alderney, which he had heard was an interesting place. One thing led to another until one night late in November I found myself sitting in Sgumain (Neil had a passion for rock climbing, and Sgumain was called after one of the better-known peaks in the Cuillins), with Neil and Dicky Bird, another of the yard shipwrights, making last minute calculations on tides (Teignmouth is an interesting place to get out of, especially at night). We switched on the radio for a forecast and were regaled instead with breaking news of the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Well, presidential assassinations in those days were very shocking, and it seems rather more efficient than of late, and it was a thoughtful crew that took little Sgumain out into a pitch black and somehow unfriendly Channel. The wind was light however; Neil started his engine and set us a course for Alderney; “That should about do it”; and Dicky and I went below to try and sleep, w hout much success under the circumstances. A bleary red dawn showed us land in the far distance more or less ahead which Neil claimed was Alderney. So it proved, we headed in, and if I claim that Neil cooked us bacon and eggs and coffee on the way it seems at least highly probable; in the intervening 60-odd years I may have become hazy on some of the fine detail. Soon we were turning in behind Braye Harbour’s long high breakwater, to moor alongside a quay a little further in. Neil was right, Alderney is a very interesting place with its long and eventful history of invasion and defence from Roman times onwards, a history of endless attack and fortification with the evidence everywhere. Sadly we were due back at the yard on Monday at 7.30 am, so were all too soon obliged to consider our return trip. The weather however had other ideas; it set in hard from the west, so hard in fact as to deny us all possibility of a swift return. By now it was raining, not pleasant walking weather, and Dicky and I were settling down rather despondently to an enforced stay in Braye when Neil decided that it would be more fun to see if we could make Cherbourg, which was down wind, and if we got a move on, down tide too. We should, he thought, that admirable man, sail as fast as possible so as to get there and out of the weather as soon as could be, an argument there was clearly no gainsaying, so off we set, everything up and our modest little engine at full chat. Surf was now hitting the breakwater with not too far distant thunder, with sheets of spray flying over the top, and I must admit to some trepidation as we came all too soon out of its shelter. But Sgumain responded magnificently and, briefly, with wind and tide behind her, surfed on her hard-chined little bottom all the way to Cherbourg, what I can only describe as one of the most wildly exhilarating sails I can remember. Rash some would call it, but I found my faith in Neil’s judgement well-founded, and I was soon experiencing the exotic delights of my first trip to a proper foreign country. All I can really remember is buying a postcard with a foreign stamp to send to my mother. I don’t know how else we managed. I suppose we had passports; I must have had enough money for the postcard and the stamp. I just remember that it was all delightfully foreign, and that leaving as soon as the wind freed up enough for us to lay Teignmouth, we finally arrived back on the Thursday, having been gleefully abandoned to a watery grave by the rest of the yard, who were obliged to suffer the anticlimax of our safe return, which I have no doubt they vented on us.
A little later, Neil announced that he had just swapped Sgumain “for that”, pointing across to the next quay where was moored a large and magnificent yawl, about 60’ long, built, it transpired, in Greenock in the 1870s of pitch pine on oak with superb Oregon spars, as a mission ship for the northern isles. I felt myself lucky even to be allowed to go on board even in harbour, where we were allowed to admire her wood panelled interior and her single cylinder Kelvin engine. I did get a sail later on, but by the time she was fully done up I had already moved on. I next saw her at Mylor, rather sadly all tricked out in courlene, and I don’t know what happened to her after that. Should love to though.
By this time at work I had got myself into a bit of a niche, where unusual jobs might happen my way. This had its ups and its downs. A particularly interesting project involved making a half model of a Monaco cruiser, on which I was to create sections of double diagonal ply planking to see whether such a technique might be able to be realised full-scale. I don’t think anything came of the idea, but I enjoyed fiddling with the model immensely. Much less welcome were the fibreglass air intakes for the Monaco engines. At that time the bigger boats were fitted with twin Caterpillar diesels providing 300 horsepower each (in exchange for 32 gallons of fuel per hour at cruising speed), and Ralph Shoreland, chief designer for the Monacos, had designed efficient and very fine-looking streamlined air scoops to be fitted on each side of the saloon deckhouses. Well, to mass-produce something in fibreglass involves making a very careful model or ‘plug’ in wood, sealing it with a perfectly smooth hard finish, and then taking a mould off the plug, again perfectly finished, in which your final, in this case, air scoops can be laid up in whatever quantity you need .
So stage 1, the wooden plugs (remember the scoops were to be in handed pairs, one port, one starboard) and stage two, the moulds, had already been done, and I was taken all the way over to the electrician’s shed, my first voyage so far from, as it were, home territory, where I was installed in a little offshoot of Bert the electrician’s shed with a finished pair of moulds and the wherewithal to make things in GRP, namely an ample supply of cryptic resin, chopped strand fibreglass mat, white pigment and releasing agent. A very helpful operative arrived from Scott Bader, an excellent firm who supplied all the relevant materials as well as showing one exactly how to use them, and I was soon well on my way to my first pair of scoops. The secret lay, of course, in scrupulous cleanliness, together with the thorough and proper application of the releasing agent, which enabled me to separate the finished scoops from the moulds at the end. Luckily I got the first pair right, which put me in well with George, and I went on to make several more before my usual bugbear of “I still want to make wooden boats” reappeared, and I managed to unload the GRP activity onto somebody else. I did get a lot more experience in wood construction before it became time to head for the drawing office for the second stage of my time.
It should not be supposed that life in the yard was all grim and grind. In a place that size there was room to have fun if you were sensibly careful, and we did. One game I remember us devising came from the Monacos being finished with teak laid decks epoxied down on marine ply; the seams were filled with a black plastic rubber compound which was chiselled off after hardening, then sanded smooth with a belt sander giving a very smart appearance. The trick was to get hold of the long strips of rubber and roll them up in balls which you could then hurl at an unsuspecting victim, ducking out of sight before it found its victim.
Another more subtle game involved two venerable painters, Ern Nathan and Ern Roper, who with luck could be found, each with a large paint tin, putting the foundation coat of aluminium primer in the bottom of a cruiser down below the mould loft. The latter was a mezzanine arrangement, i.e. only took up half the width of the shed, through all its length, so that leaning over the guard rail you could look directly down on the unsuspecting old painters below. Now all you needed was a very long piece of string and a carefully bent wire hook, which you lowered down and engaging the handle of one of the paint tins, haul it up a dozen feet and watch, in a paroxysm of glee, your victim searching in vain for his paint.
We built Monaco cruisers for all kinds of people, principally in the well-heeled industrialist category. I remember seeing that unmistakable fuss going on around a man who came aboard us at the Earls Court boat show (we were trailering a Monaco up there every year by that time, and up to 42’ was doable). He turned out to be a Mr. Wilkinson, no less than the maker of Wilkinson Sword loppers, razor blades and all that. He gave us his order, and said that his boat was to be called Master Cutler, “which is after all what I am”, he said. And so it was.
Another individual, a Frenchman, whom it would not be prudent to name, required a rather unusual interior layout. The usual arrangement in the bigger boats berthed the paid hand up forrard, with a central saloon below the bridge deck, and owner’s accommodation aft. But in this case the whole of the forward part of the boat was to be fitted out for the owner, saloon, very wide stateroom and all, while the crew were to be tucked away aft. It transpired, or at least this was the story told to us sniggering boys, that the owner’s young male lover was to be berthed forrard in the generous bed space for the delectation of the owner, who had had a pair of deer antlers surgically incised in the boy’s forehead. The name of the boat? Le Faune.
So to the drawing office, in a clean shirt and tie and no earlier than 9 am; an undreamed of luxury. At that time the front of the yard lay along the road, culminating at the town end in the main gate where, before the mould loft shed was built, some of the older hands could remember trading smacks and ketches lying on the beach with their bowsprits reaching up and almost across the road. At the other end, nearest the point, was a small house which contained the offices, and at some stage the roof had been given a floor and with windows all round formed the yard’s drawing office, with views in every direction. Here were Mr Collyer, responsible for many years for the Old Man’s sailing yacht designs; Ralph Shoreland, in charge among other things for the realisation of the Monaco project in conjunction with Cliff Parsons; the production manager; a couple of senior apprentice pupils, and now me. Each of us had an elephant-sized drawing board with foot-operated raising and lowering and a full-width straight edge which slid up and down the board on wire cables stretched over steel wheels in the interests of accuracy. I was very proud of my board, which had come from a used office equipment firm in Exeter for the princely sum of £20.
That was a happy time for me; everyone was willing to teach me all I could possibly need to know, so that I was able to achieve a modest competence in a surprisingly short time. Rules for scantlings, tables of offsets, how to calculate the volumes of irregularly shaped fuel and water tanks, all the nuts and bolts of yacht design were laid open for me to soak up; more intricate matters like how to make a yacht’s waterline appear where you wanted it to be when you launch her, always a stressful process, and the mastery of the principles of the metacentric analysis, which concerns the fore and aft distribution of heeled volumes, and can make the difference between a boat being a pleasure to helm in heavy conditions, or the opposite; about all these matters I was at the very least made aware of. Talking of the metacentric analysis, one day I was asked to crew, again with my old school friend Peter Reade. on a race to Jersey on a steel ten-tonner called Bootlegger, designed by Robert Clark, a designer who was a pioneer in the field. I don’t know if Bootlegger was a full metacentroid, but I can say that taking, as it happened, the first watch below, I was given a pilot berth in the saloon and had the most comfortable night’s sleep I have ever had in a boat under any circumstances. On the return journey I was given what was to me the huge privilege of helming, and just managing to lay Torbay on a very close reach I sailed her all the way in heavy weather; she felt as though she rejoiced as much as I did in giving all she’d got. It was certainly my most exhilarating sail ever.
Around this time the use of GRP (fibreglass) was being developed for use in boatbuilding, and when I visited back from Southampton, about which I will explain later, it was to find plans and designs afoot for shifting in that direction. Angus Primrose, formerly of the well-known naval architecture firm of Illingworth and Primrose, designers of amongst others the famous if controversial Gypsy Moth IV for Francis Chichester’s solo circumnavigation, did us Warrior, a very sweet little 35 foot masthead sloop. The firm built the usual plug and mould, and at least one Warrior was sold; I had the privileged if nerve-racking job of taking the new owner to Dartmouth in her for a shakedown. All the fibreglassing equipment was bought and the techniques taught, again by, I believe, splendidly helpful Scott Bader; I cannot say that the hands took to GRP construction with overwhelming enthusiasm. Spraying into a mould a mixture of resin, catalyst and chopped strand mat while standing precariously on a sticky floor was nobody’s idea of fun, and the fumes were a problem. I believe that at least one would-be operative, working deep inside the hull, passed out from the intensity. I think we were a bit happy go lucky about things like PPE in those days They persevered however, and the next I heard was a plan to build GRP narrow boats for the inland waterways. I don’t know what became of that idea, but I did get involved in a project dreamed up by The Old Man and his faithful designer G K Collyer, building on their ancient reputation, to design and build a contender for the new One Ton Cup series; hence was born a lovely little 6 ton masthead sloop called Genesis, along the lines of the Lyme Bay cruisers. Full of optimism we took her to Cowes Week and the Round the Island race, but sadly it became apparent that although lovely to sail she was unable to match other newcomers in performance and rating, notably Kim Holman’s Twister that was turning the heads that we urgently needed to turn.
I believe Genesis is still around, and I should love to hear news Genesis on the stocks c. 1964 of her. An amusing Cowes Week story (amusing in retrospect): we had a small praam dinghy with us for getting out to the trots and so forth with one of those splendid little Seagull outboards, and I and Charles Easterbrook, another of Genesis’ crew and an old school friend, decided to motor out and watch the start of the Fastnet Race. I had the brilliant idea of lying just off the weather mark, from where, I decided, we should have a splendid view. We got into position, and switched off the engine, figuring that before we could drift too close, the fleet would have rounded the mark and be well on their way westward out of the Solent. It was by then blowing a bit and unfortunately we had left it a touch fine, which would not have mattered but for the Seagull, which chose that moment … we should have guessed, as you have guessed … not to start. Picture us there, Charles pulling for dear life on the starter cord, me trying to disentangle the oars, with a solid wall of hugely expensive and already hyper stressed out yachts bearing down on us very fast; to say the air was blue would be the understatement of all eternity. Well, we lived, as you can see, another day, which is to say that at the very last econd the Seagull responded and we turned and fled, not even daring to look back till we were well out of earshot in case someone recognised us.
Around that time I managed to wheedle permission to build a boat of my own, in an unused loft high up in the roof above the main shed, the understanding being that I should do the work on weekends and evenings, not use too much of the firm’s power, or help myself to too much of the firm’s materials. You might notice a certain drift to this conversation, and on our way down George did happen to point to a dust-covered stack of timber half hidden away on a similarly disused lower floor. “Honduras Cedar”, he said casually, looking sideways at me. He explained that the recently deceased Old Man had acquired a load thirty years earlier and never got around to using any of it. I tried to look uninterested, my heart meanwhile singing with excitement; Honduras Cedar was a very strong, ultra-light South American timber, now practically unobtainable, the classic material for building eight-boats when they were still made of wood, not to mention the very best of Cuban cigar boxes for its rich and much sought-after fragrance. And, I hugged myself, realising it was perfect for the boat I had in mind. This was a Shearwater Three, a 16’ 6” racing catamaran that, being totally speed-crazy, I had set my heart on after reading that one had been recorded officially doing a measured mile at 22 ½ knots. Designed by G Proud & Sons Ltd on Canvey Island in Essex, they were … still are for that matter … a one-design for racing, and Prouts were then doing an affordable deal; you could get a pair of hot-moulded hulls and do the rest yourself … just exactly what I needed, especially with a boat yard kindly at my disposal, not to mention a stack of the perfect timber crying out to be used.
Round about then I was told to show a coachload of Old Age Pensioners round the yard. At the beginning of the tour, and quite without thinking I shepherded them into the engineers’ shop, where arriving at the far side they turned to face me, and I might have been warned by the collective gasp that all was not quite as it ought to have been. Flustered already, however, at Genesis, Cowes week, Beken 1965 being the unwonted focus of attention, I said my little piece about the engineers, and it was only as I turned to go that I realised the entire wall behind me was plastered with gatefolds from Playboy Magazine. I managed some sort of blushing apology which they kindly accepted … I think they were more amused than shocked, and I tried to keep a better look out for the rest of the tour.
Meanwhile my sojourn in the other offices was less instructive. Apart from Cliff Parsons whom I have mentioned as being technically clever (he did his time with GWR in their railway workshops at Didcot, one of the best engineering apprenticeships the country could offer), the firm was by now under the directorship of various ex-armed service relatives of the owner who, whatever their imagined competences, were by no means capable of running a shipyard. I will give them credit for sending me off to Southampton to do a 6-months course in Boat Yard Management being offered by the Technical College at East Park Terrace, from which I benefited greatly. In the meantime the yard went into receivership, and was acquired by a London holding company, Thomas Roberts & Son for, it was said, tax loss purposes. To do them credit the CEO, John Roberts, was extremely interested in getting the yard going again and making it profitable; tragically he was killed shortly after in a car crash, and we heard that all interest in the yard died with him. Some small firms were contrived to keep the facilities going, but the inevitable end came not long after; the yard was closed down and demolished, and assisted flats for elderly people built on the site. Incidentally it must have been shortly before this that a tragic and unwanted tailpiece occurred; a man called Donald Crowhurst, a would-be contender in the 1968 single-handed Golden Globe round the world race, turned up with his boat, a trimaran called Teignmouth Electron, in a state of hopeless unpreparedness, had her hauled out on one of the slips, and set about the impossible task of getting her anything like ready for the race. Since verything was in complete chaos, since he brought hands from the yard where she was built to do the work, and since the local lads quickly formed a very poor opinion of the boat herself, it seems that despite Teignmouth in general taking a project to its heart which, after all, would, had it succeeded, have put Teignmouth on the global map in the best possible way, it was understandably unpopular with the local hands who were expected to lend a hand in a project which as professionals they could see was irretrievably doomed to failure from the start. The eventual outcome has already had all the publicity it needed, and there is fortunately nothing I need add, except perhaps a word of sympathy for Nigel Tetley, one of the other contenders, who was more or less obliged to drive his already severely battered Victress trimaran to destruction less than a thousand miles from the finish of the race under the impression that Teignmouth Electron was fast coming up from behind to pip him at the post.
It was not long after all this that I took a girl friend back one day to see where I had spent 5 of my formative years. So imagine my surprise on being confronted with nothing but a high corrugated iron fence, and finding a gap to peer through, my utter, desolate shock on realising that on the other side was nothing but an empty muddy slope between me and the beach. I probably shouldn’t have minded; I was by then well on my way back, if belatedly, into academic life; I can only say I did mind, profoundly. Not just a physical shipyard but a whole communal entity was wiped away with all the stories, all the traditions, and a whole lifetime of history, of boys growing into men, of splendid yachts launched, voyaging all over the world, many of them indeed still sailing; perhaps that after all is what really matters, that and for me the pleasure of still being able to go and reminisce with my friend Colin Wood, a fellow apprentice still living less than a stone’s throw from where it all happened.
Phil Stevens
