CHUCK PAINE DESIGN summer. By the end of the summer of 1975 she was finished. Finally I and the world had a Chuck Paine design that actually floated! I singlehanded her to the Newport Boat Show and Tom Morris and I sat on her and we began selling boats – to our immense surprise and pleasure the Frances was an immediate and remarkable success! Frances wasn’t perfect – no boat is – but there was something about the way she looked, and the fact that she sailed pretty well compared to her more old-fashioned competitors, that began to attract attention to my designs. In order to promote his efforts Tom Morris sent a black and white photograph of one of his Franceses to all of the European yachting magazines. Bernard Hayman, the editor of Yachting World at the time, wrote an embarrassingly favourable editorial about the boat. As you see quoted here from a subsequent issue of the magazine, the response was tremendous: “Two months ago a small double-ender was used to illustrate Yachting World’s leading article, a return to simplicity in cruising. That single photograph has produced more correspondence and enquiries than any other boat in the last ten years. The boat? A Frances 26, designed by CW Paine.” – Bernard Hayman. Four British boatbuilders saw the design’s potential and competed for the right to build the boats. Tom and I chose the one most like us – young, hungry, honest and ambitious. Peter and Ida Gregory and the Desty Brothers built Victoria Yachts in Southampton from virtually nothing. But it grew rapidly, and after a year or so of hard work and heady success, they moved to a larger facility in Warsash and began to order more of my designs – one of them a sistership to a design that Tom Morris was already building, the Victoria 30, and others completely new designs: Victoria 34 and 38. Victoria Yachts began with this – my Frances 26 but with a saucy little cabin you could stand up in- if you weren’t too tall. Most of them had an enclosed heads which got the ladies to come on board. Something like 100 individual yachts were built on the same hull, with different deck and sailplan configurations. No boat of 26ft is large enough to be truly seaworthy in dangerous conditions, but with 50% of their weight in
Bernard Hayman, editor of Yachting World, wrote an embarrassingly favourable editorial about the boat CLASSIC SAILOR
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