Saleroom
By Dave Selby
Right: In 1877 iron clipper Coriolanus made the run from the Scilly Isles to Calcutta in 69 days, a record never surpassed in the era of sail. Display model sold for £1,860.
CHARLES MILLER LTD
How clippers lost the race against time The survival of the Cutty Sark is all the more remarkable when you consider that most clippers had short, precarious careers often ending in calamity. Such was the price to pay for prioritising speed over cargo capacity, as with their massive spread of canvas, clippers were driven hard and often over-pressed in efforts to secure best market price for their precious freights. The average life of the six clipper ships represented in Charles Miller Ltd’s most recent marine sale was just 31 years. Three of the
CHARLES MILLER LTD
six were lost at sea, but the overall average active working life is much reduced when you consider that those that survived into obsolescence spent years, even decades, languishing as hulks before being broken up. The composite-built tea clipper Maitland (1865) survived just nine years before being wrecked on a coral reef off China. Sir Lancelot, also built for the tea trade in 1865, survived for 30 years before she Above: Builder’s half-block model
was lost in a cyclone bound for Calcutta; by then she’d
of the Maitland, built 1865, reveals
been reduced to carrying a low-value cargo of salt. By contrast, the 1876 Coriolanus, often considered
the composite build with traces of internal criss-cross iron
one of the most beautiful all-iron clippers, ended her
framework; model sold for £3,100
days as a migrant ship running from the Azores to the USA in the 1920s, before being broken up in 1936. The brief glory of the clipper era was ended by the
Right: The composite Sir Lancelot would be more celebrated today if
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the rise of
she’d set off earlier in 1869 Great
steam. By then consigned to history by simple
Tea Race. She set a new record of
economics, they finished their sailing lives scrabbling
89 days, but Thermopylae arrived
for cargo as stately but tattered tramps of the seas.
first after 91-day passage;
Charles Miller Ltd’s next sale: 2 November, London
HISTORICS
watercolour sold for £496.
HISTORICS
Italian style and English speed There’s no doubt automotive styling and engineering enormously
very extensively restored 1967 example was estimated at £55,000-
influenced the evolution of post-war speedboat design, but the
66,000 at the Historics’ 17 July classic car sale.
inspiration for the Italian firm Riva and the small British Albatross outfit came from vastly different well sources. When Carlo Riva went on a trip to the USA to negotiate engine
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Meanwhile the ethos of aluminium-hulled Albatross (above right) came straight out of Lotus sports cars and founder Colin Chapman’s mantra of “add lightness.” Moreover, at the heart of this
supplies, he also brought back the design motifs that would
restored early 1960s Series A sports and race boat is the famed
become a Riva signature in glamorous wooden craft garnished
Coventry Climax engine that propelled the original Lotus Elite to
with bedazzling chrome flourishes, glittering dials in a car-type
giant-killing feats on the race track. Series A Albatrosses with
dash, curved windscreen and flamboyant two-tone upholstery.
Coventry Climax FWE race engines could easily hit 45mph, and
Adopting the American terminology, the 5.7m Riva Junior (above
this example with engine bored out to 1440cc and twin Weber
left), with white-painted wooden topsides, was classed as a
carbs must surely exceed that. That’s a lot of performance in a
“utility,” but was much more than utilitarian. And of course, at its
lightweight 3.9m two-seater, and with an estimated of £18,000-
heart was a General Motors automotive-derived 180hp V8. This
23,000, a fraction of what a road-going Lotus Elite would fetch.
CLASSIC BOAT SEPTEMBER 2021
