HEART OF OAK
Gentleman’s cutter returns to glory
RAGE & RIGHTEOUSNESS VICTORIANS WHO INVENTED CRUISING
WHISKY DISTILLERIES IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT DRAM
SAILING SUFFRAGE THE STORY OF PETER PEARS
GENTLEMAN’S RELISH
War, woe and sinkings should have ended Cachalot several times over. Her survival today is testament to owners Steve and Beverley DaleyYates. We found them in Ramsgate, ahead of the Dunkirk Return
WORDS CARL RICHARDSON PHOTOS BEVERLEY DALEY-YATES, SANDY MILLER
Having migrated north, six Tasman Seabirds are now thriving in Queensland
WATCHING
TENDER FOR LIFE
The motor yacht Atlantide was commissioned at the height of the depression as a racing yacht tender, a role she performs to this day
WORDS STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES PHOTOS CORY SILKEN
FAIRY TALE COME TRUE
The Fairy One-Design keelboats are among the first examplars of the one-design conecpt, born in Ireland. They’re doing just fine to this day
WORDS AND PHOTOS
BARRY PICKTHALL
A WOMAN CALLED PETER
The intrepid Peter Pears was a great force in leading women to the water
WORDS NIGEL SHARP
While many readers will be familiar with the marine journalist Maurice Griffiths, and perhaps even of the marine artist Charles Pears, few may know the story of the intrepid yachtswoman they both married and who championed sailing for women.
Dulce Hazel Kennard was born in France in 1900. By the 1920s, she was regularly writing articles for sailing magazines and, all too conscious of the fact that she was working in a male-dominated profession, used a pen name – Peter Gerard. It was the first name by which she was generally known for most of her life.
She first met Maurice Griffiths when he visited the offices of a magazine where she worked to try to sell his articles. They were married in 1927 and jointly owned a converted Lowestoft Pilot Cutter called Afrin. They didn’t keep her for long, not least because Peter was keen to have a boat of her own which would be more suitable for singlehanded sailing. They found Juanita, a modified 1896 Falmouth quay punt. Maurice then bought Wilful,
a 30ft (9.1m) gaff cutter that had been designed and built by Charles Sibbick in 1899.
The relationship mirrored this yachting separation and in 1933 Peter married Charles Pears, who had been the official naval artist in World War One and who designed posters for the London underground. After their wedding ceremony in Kensington Register Office, Charles told a Daily Mirror reporter that “his bride was quite as famous as he was.”
Charles had his own boat, Wanderer, an 1888 Arthur Payne 10-tonne yawl he had owned since 1924. Although they spent their honeymoon on her, cruising along the Normandy coast, Peter’s sailing relationship with her new husband echoed that of her first.
She frequently crossed the North Sea and English Channel and sailed to Scotland at least once. “Mrs DH Griffiths is something of a pioneer among yachtswomen for she carries out cruises which a few years ago would not have been thought possible for a woman,” it had been reported on the Out-of-Door Woman page of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in July 1932. “She has several continental cruises to her credit. A heavy craft such as hers, drawing six feet of water and with no auxiliary motor, is undoubtedly a big proposition for a lady to handle, but it is astonishing how a deficiency in physical strength can be balanced by an abundance of cunning.”
At some point during this interwar period, Peter sailed Juanita singlehanded from Torbay to the Solent, into the eye of a 75 mph wind-over-tide blow through the Needles Channel. “Then came that one bigger than the rest,” Peter wrote later in Yachting Monthly, “the one that says ‘I’ll teach you, you cocky little sprig!’ It rose up and hurled itself upon us with a roar, pinning Juanita on her beam ends. It gave me a rotten shaking.”
TS JUANITA
For much of the 1930s, Peter spent a considerable time encouraging other women and girls – cadets as she called them – to sail, and teaching them how to do so. She would typically take two “apprentices” at a time on two-week voyages as far afield as Holland, Belgium,
Below: Juanita o Harwich, some time in the 1930s