Riverside:
Boats
with Stories Our
Boys -
Nick Baker I’m absolutely
fascinated by the fact that the principles are, of course, the same, but
the actual engineering is so different. This is so heavy work. I have to
say sometimes inefficient in the sense of muscle power where, on a modern
yacht, you’ve got lightweight blocks and artificial fibres and so on,
it’s all set to get a lot of power out of very few - not labour
intensive – this is more hard work, but absolutely wonderful too. The dark blue one,
the Mischief, she’s 35 years old, she’s no youngster! But this, Our
Boys, is 1911, and, of course, comes from a previous era, where that
one was looking forward to new developments in yacht design. She was built
at Paglesham just, I think, for general fishing duties, so she would have
gone stowboating with the big nets and maybe oyster dredging, but also
spent much of her life as a police guard boat. So these were vessels that
people would stay on board, and just watch over the fisheries. I’ve sailed since
I was pretty young, about 13, 14, I’ve sailed, really, most of my life.
I’m actually quite a cautious sailor, whereas I think, some people, they
go aboard big modern yachts, and they think it’s very easy, and then
suddenly, when they are at the sharp end, they suddenly realise it’s not
so easy. And we’re getting a lot of that nowadays because people have
more disposable cash, and they buy big boats, and so that’s why I’m
involved with the Nottage, with teaching, and I feel quite seriously, that
there is a need to teach people. And one of our projects at Rowhedge is
called the ‘Heritage Project,’ is to build a museum, but it isn’t
just a sort of museum of artefacts, it will be a museum where, hopefully,
this boat, and possibly another, will be able to show people traditional
sailing skills, so it’ll be a very sort of active museum. I learnt the skills
from an old gentleman who is a brother of quite a famous yacht designer
and sail-maker, Norman Farrer – his brother is Austin Farrer. He was an
interesting character, but he’d come from the Victorian era, almost, of
sailing, when you had a man on board! And those days are long since! But
he taught me very well, and then after that, it was just in my own boats,
and I built a boat. I built a 23-foot wooden boat, which we used as a
family boat for about 15 years. Being a physicist,
to me, I love thinking about how the boat is sailing, how it’s working,
but, of course, those are things that some people can do instinctively,
and I sometimes have people on board, people who haven’t sailed before,
some people can sail to windward, just instantly seem to get the message.
Other people, it doesn’t matter how many times you explain, they just
don’t get the message. And that may be not just so much conscious
science, but just that sort of unconscious skill, so I think that’s very
important. And also, being safe at sea – understanding the weather and
things like that. And tides, yes, of course! Yes, it’s amazing how many
times I’ll see people struggling rowing down the river, in the middle of
the river, against the tide, and it hasn’t dawned on them it might be a
good idea to row nearer the shore, and dodge the tide! It’s amazing, we
live in South-East England, 50 miles from London, I can get on my boat, go
round that corner there, and I can hardly see another soul, just birds,
the odd seal, fields and saltings, that’s amazing! So I think one of the
joys is that boats get you into places that you just don’t get to by car
or by bus or transport. I really like that. That’s very special. But
also just the actual process of sailing I find enjoyable. It must be like,
say, gymnastics is to somebody, or dancing, it’s got that same sort of
lovely physical beauty about it. Rowboats and smacks - Crispin
Yarker The boat I’ve
held for the longest is the boat I first sailed on, which is a little
12-foot plywood racing dinghy, built in about 1959, which I sailed on in
North Wales, at the age of nine. I’ve still got that, and it’s
followed me all round the country, in various garages and gardens, in its
complete state of disrepair and rot. It was given to me 15 years ago, as a
wreck, and it’s remained a wreck ever since, but I’ve still got it.
But since that, I’ve got a few small rowboats, locally built clinker
rowboats, and, of course, the smack I bought. I’m tending just
to hoard the rowboats, because they’re too fragile to be used
commercially, but they’re too valuable to allow to rot away completely
or to be destroyed. They’re valuable because they’re not being built
any more. No one’s built commercial wooden rowboats for about 50 years.
You can build them at the Nottage, and spend two years and £1,000
building one, but that’s not a commercial one, that’s someone’s
pride and joy. There are very very few left, and I think we have a duty, I
very strongly believe this, we have a duty, living in the 21st century, to
maintain a record of what has gone before. They were tenders to get to and
from the smacks, and the smack to the shore, from smack to smack, and to
carry fish, to be able to scallop the creeks, and do a bit of fishing with
a small net from the boat – general purpose work boats, equivalent of a
pick-up truck, I suppose, on the road. But they’re all hand-built,
usually by a boat-builder and a boy – an apprentice. They just look
right. I like the look of them, the feel of them. It’s easy, looking at
James Dodds’ prints, to see the attraction in small curvy rowboats. I had a smaller
smack before the Saxonia. I had a smack
called the Mary, which is a Brightlingsea
built smack, built in 1900, and I bought her, really, because she was
relatively cheap, and I could sail her single-handed – that was a great
attraction - after having for seven years run a 38-ton sailing trawler,
which I kept for the last five years in Brightlingsea. I looked forward to
be able to sail something without having to ask other people to come along
with me, or pull ropes, or dangle fenders. She was built in
Brightlingsea, she was a very authentic local oyster smack, for oyster
dredging in the local creeks – in the Pyefleet and the Colne. In fact,
I’ve dug a little a bit into her history, and from 1914 through till the
early 1960s, she was owned by one family, and they used her in West Mersea
on their oyster layings, a fishing family, an oyster family – the
French’s. But by 1960, she’d become an unstable wreck, and was sold
away to become a torn-out yacht for a while, and was eventually rebuilt in
the 1980s. So when I bought her, she was in very sound condition, having
been rebuilt locally. Saxonia - Crispin Yarker I then sold the Mary,
after two years, and bought the Saxonia.
That was three years ago. The owner approached me and said, ‘I would
like you to buy Saxonia, I don’t want
to sell her to anyone else,’ which is flattering. I had sailed with him
quite a bit, both on barges and on the
Saxonia. She has a long story but I’ll try and make it short. She
was built in 1930, for William Young and Son, to augment their fleet of
existing bawleys based in Leigh-on-Sea. She was built by Aldous in
Brightlingsea, who are a well-known yard, a very very large yard on the
East Coast, specialised in building smacks and bawleys, and also yachts,
although their main income earlier was probably maintenance of the large
gentlemen’s racing yachts, the Victorian/Edwardian era. So she was
picked up by William Young, one of his skippers, taken straight to
Leigh-on-Sea, and put to work, after having an engine fitted, which is
interesting, being probably the last bawley to be built with a full
sailing rig, but also the first bawley to be built with an engine. So she
straddles that world of the pure wooden sailing boats and the modern
motorised motor smacks. She’s built of pitch pine, with an engine and a
full sailing rig. She fished out of Leigh-on-Sea, for whitebait. And she
was also the last of the stowboaters. She worked for Young’s under
various skippers, principally a skipper called Ken Boundy, who had her for
at least 15-20 years, as a paid employee of Young’s, until 1964, when
she was then sold to the Colchester Oyster Fishery Company, based in East
Mersea. I’ve been told
that she was fitted out with a slightly more comfortable cabin,
fore-cabin, and also with lockers and a bunk, aft, for a skipper, to
enable William Young and his wife to take themselves and their daughter
for a week’s holiday every August, over to Holland, or wherever they
should want to go. The Company, today, is worth some £350m. a year, as a
multi-national fishing conglomerate. It’s now based in Grimsby, not
Leigh-on-Sea, it moved to Grimsby in the 1960s. However, the
Saxonia worked, was sold away from Young’s in 1964, when stowboating
had become obsolete with the introduction of a new method of fishing known
as pair trawling, where you need powerful motor fishing boats, with the
nets strung between them. However, the
Saxonia carried on working for the Colchester Oyster Fishery as an
oyster dredger, and she dredged in the Pyefleet, not more than a mile from
where she was built some 30 years earlier, and worked as an oyster dredger
through till about 1978/79, when she was converted back to her original
sailing rig, and used as a private yacht. I’ve been
chartering her, since I bought her three years ago. Her previous owner,
Jim Lawrence, had chartered her all the time he’d owned her, which was
about 15 years, but not on a commercial level, he did maybe a half a dozen
to a dozen charters a year, really to promote his own business, and to
promote the ship, and to keep the ship working, so he could say that
she’s never been taken out of trade. I’ve built up that business quite
considerably, and now I’ve made it my full-time living – taking
charter parties out on Saxonia. Last
year, I did 40 trips, in the period from early April to sort of
mid-October, which is an average of about 2-3 trips a week. We try to vary what
we do. For me, really, it’s just going out for a sail, but I do put a
different focus on what we do. For example, we do traditional oyster
dredging, we take part in the Annual Oyster Dredging Match, in Saxonia
– I’ve got a set of oyster dredgers for her. We also trawl with a beam
trawl. I’ve got a set of herring nets, which are sometimes used.
They’re all different methods of fishing which have been used, locally,
for hundreds and hundreds of years, until the introduction of modern
suction methods, using massive hydraulic machinery. It’s interesting to
show people how fish were caught by hand, without mechanical aid. The
people who come are ‘active retirees’ – people with money, people
whose children have left home, the people who also have perhaps got a good
pension, or don’t have financial worries – they’re not poor people.
But they’re also interested. They haven’t settled back into doing
nothing. You’ll quite often find a lot of people on board who were
whaling in the Antarctic only a fortnight previously, or trekking in the
Andes the previous year. They seem to be people in their fifties or
sixties, seventies, who want to enjoy life while they still can, enjoy it
to the full, and try all the things that they’ve never tried before, and
can afford to try now. And that’s very exciting for me. I also have
groups of children, I try and encourage the local schools. I’m speaking
to the Wivenhoe schools, and I’d like to get the University involved as
well. My initial interest
in sailing, is maintaining the traditional skills of sailing a gaff-rigged
boat, a very heavy gaff-rigged boat – she weighs in at about 20 tons –
still rigged out entirely, exactly as she would have been in 1930, as a
working boat, and keeping alive the skills of the rope work that’s
associated with keeping these boats in commission, and maintaining an
awareness of how life used to be a hundred years ago. And for me, what
makes her valuable is that she’s one of only six, where once there were
several hundred. And there are now only six boats like that, and most have
been converted to yachts – pulled apart, rebuilt, turned back into
fishing boats, and there are some bits of original wood, but not very
many. With Saxonia, we know exactly where
every bit of wood came from. Most of it was built in 1930, except that
she’s had a few knocks and bangs and had to have things replaced. So she
really is a museum piece, but a very very sound and strong one. There’d have been
a skipper and a mate, and possibly they’d have taken a boy out, a
15-year old, because he’d be cheap. But she would have been worked by
two strong men. Heavy work. The gear is very heavy. And they’d expect to
catch anything from between a quarter of a ton, and a couple of tons of
whitebait, in one haul, so they had to be very strong as well, because it
was all pulled up by hand. I’ve lived in
Wivenhoe for the last four years now, but I’ve been sailing here for
about the last 15 years, in Wivenhoe and Brightlingsea. I was attracted by
the type of sailing that was carried on in the estuaries, namely the
sailing barges, coasting barges, small river barges, the big smacks, the
small smacks, and the bawleys that do exist here, and don’t exist at
all, on the South Coast of England now. The Solent is just one sea of
white plastic and speedboats. There is traditional sailing in other parts
of the country, in Falmouth, and in the West Country generally, and also
on the Lancashire Coast, the Isle of Man, but it’s fairly limited.
We’re very lucky, in Essex, to have the rich and wide variety of
different traditional sailing craft and there’s a lot of historically
very valuable craft on this part of the coast. There’s one smack
here that was built in 1808 – that’s nearly 200 years old – and is
still in full working commission, the Boadicea. She’s mostly in West
Mersea, but she’s also got a berth in Brightlingsea. She’s in
Brightlingsea this year. Metacentric
yacht - Andrew
Cocks My boat was designed
by an amateur designer in 1939, and it’s a man called Dr Thomas
Harrison-Butler, and he was actually an ophthalmist, and designed boats.
He was obsessed with something called the ‘metacentric’ theory of
yacht design, which was pioneered by a man called Turner. The idea was to
build a boat with perfect balance, so he wasn’t giving any consideration
to how much room you had inside, he basically designed a boat that went,
and then fitted everything out around it. And he went from a whole series
of design, so this is the ‘Rose of Arden’ design. So this was built by
Wistocks, round at Woodbridge, in 1939. The one lady owner
that owned it, I think between something like ’58 and ’63, and on the
Blue Book – registration for the Admiralty – you always have
people’s profession down, it was always, in the early days, company
directors, because they were the people that had the money, but her
profession was ‘gentlewoman,’ which I always rather like! And we’ve
also had one author owned her, and, in fact, I’ve got one of his books
on board, a man called Simon Nolan, and he owned her for a couple of years
in the mid-Sixties, so it’s quite a common interest here, because I’m
a publisher - so it’s gone from author to publisher! But you don’t
really own boats like this, you just look after them for a period, and
make sure they don’t go downhill on your watch, and then they get handed
on to someone else. We don’t do
terribly well, by and large, when we’re racing, because she wasn’t
designed as a racing boat, she was designed as a boat for cruising, and
therefore I always call her a ‘gentleman’s yacht.’ But, of course,
there’s an element of tongue in cheek in that really! I’ve been sailing
for an embarrassingly long time, I’m afraid! It’s sort of 40-odd
years. I was just very very fortunate, the secondary school I went to, had
a very enthusiastic Headmaster, who was a sailor, and a couple of Torch
dinghies –one of which was built at the school – and I started sailing
in dinghies, and I haven’t
been able to get out of the habit ever since, really. I’m a member of
the Wivenhoe and Rowhedge Yacht Owners’ Association, and also the Colne
Yacht Club. I suppose the joy of
sailing, for me, is that, it’s like warfare, really. It’s a
combination of total utter boredom, and extreme excitement, and you never
know which is going to come your way next. GPs
and Mirror dinghies - Pat
Ellis I actually built my
own GP [general purpose dinghy]. From a kit, yes. Jack Holt, manufacturer
and designer, in London, used to produce these kits for GPs. Damn good
kit, too. A hundred pounds! And you won’t get a mast for that now! And
you got everything, the hull and booms, and the mast. They’re
three-quarter deck, but they’re a lovely little boat to sail. Yes, she
had a black hull, and bright red sails. That was something that we were
told, afterwards, was a silly thing to have, because if you go in a race,
and you’ve got red sails, and all the rest are white, they’ll pick you
out and say that you’ve crossed the line at the wrong time! But [the GPs]
they’re not fast enough for the boys down at Brightlingsea! They want
things where you’re standing out like this, on the end of a wire. We had
quite a few in the Club, didn’t we in the Sixties? Quite a few. They
could race as a class, actually. They provided young families, probably
with their first experience of sailing. And then came the Mirror Dinghy,
which you stitched that together with copper wire, that was ideal for
youngsters and families to learn with. Sailboats for holidays - Alan Tyne I bought a little
open day sail boat, and then after two years, about 1977, bought a little
kestrel sloop, Kitty, and we began to do
sailing holidays. Then in about ’80, we bought Taloah.
She was 24 foot, built in Wivenhoe, built at Cooks’ shipyard, for the
manager. In 1948, yes! The story was that they used up bits of timber that
they put by during the War, when they were doing Admiralty contracts. The
wood was good, the brass screws were lousy! She was designed by Maurice
Griffiths, a famous East Coast yachtsman, who edited the Yachting
Monthly for many many years, and lived locally. He wrote very
evocative little essays about the pleasures of sailing round the salty
muddy little creeks of the East Coast, rather than adventuring great
distances abroad. He designed a number of very beautiful little boats. She was a lovely
old wooden boat, and I spent a lot of time working on her, did a lot of
boat repair work with her, and kept her at Guy Harding’s yard on the
front. And those were lovely years, because it was always gorgeously sunny
at Guy Harding’s. It was the warmest place in Wivenhoe. The sun always
shone, it faced due south, it was well sheltered from the wind, and those
were lovely years, keeping a boat at Guy Harding’s, laying her up there
every winter, working with Taffy Taverner in the shed there, who was a
delightful man, and taught me all I know about carpentry. He was a very
stern taskmaster. He was the last remaining man at Guy Harding’s. Guy
had once employed 14 or 15 people there, but the business had died right
down to he was just doing a little bit of light boat repair work. I think it was
about ’88 or ’89, we went across to Holland in her, and that was the
first time we’d done that. Other people had been doing that for some
years. There were lots of members of the Club who would all get together
and go off to Holland every year. So then, roundabout
’91 we bought Tumbler, down near
Falmouth. She’s a Holman design – Kim Holman was a West Mersea naval
architect, designed some very beautiful boats in the 1960s. She’s the
spriggiest boat on the river! Everyone agrees! 35 foot long. Two masts,
yes. Very elegant. The sort of boat that, everywhere you went, people
would come across and ask you about her! We spent the next year doing
quite a lot of work on her actually – putting a new engine in, and new
accommodation inside - all at Guy Harding’s yard, in about ’92, I
suppose that was, and then the winter of ’91, I went off and sailed all
along the Brittany coast for as many months as I could. So that was great
fun. Jubilee
Sailing Trust and the Lord Nelson [The
Lord Nelson was the last great sailing ship built in Wivenhoe, by
Cook’s just before they closed, for the Jubilee Sailing Trust]. Jane Nicholas [The Trust has] two square-riggers, you know, tall ships, and both take about 50 people, and that includes the regular crew, which is nine or ten people, with the engineer and the Captain, etc., and then there has to be one able-bodied person for each disabled, and the disabled can come in wheelchairs. Last time I was on, out in Antigua, we had five wheelchairs on board, and it worked very well. The moment they’re on board, everybody seems much more relaxed, even handicapped people who have been slightly over-mothered. They’re on board, and they’re asked to do things, and they really enjoy that. There’s Tenacious, and the Lord Nelson. The Lord Nelson was built in Wivenhoe. And then Tenacious is a wooden boat, and it’s the largest wooden boat that’s been built for many years.
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