TBYC Early Days by Michael Wetton by TBYC

Early Memories of Thorpe Bay Yacht Club

By Michael Wetton 0

Places to Sail from FIRST BASE - THE BEACH HUT DAYS .................................................... 4 SECOND BASE – A HUT OF OUR OWN! .............................................. 27 THIRD BASE – THE BEST CLUB IN TOWN! .......................................... 33 OTHER MEMORIES ............................................................................. 35

FIRST BASE - THE BEACH HUT DAYS I was 8 when we moved to Thorpe Bay and I had no interest in the water at that time. I remained at a school in Maidenhead, so my recollections are hazy, patchy and partly based on hearsay! My sister, Pat’s, great love was horse riding and, as neighbours of the Hobday family, she first made contact with Terence (Kit’s brother, better known as Tess) who was also into horses. I think Kit was still away, serving King and Country as skipper of a motor gun boat in Coastal Command. As our armed forces were stood down, those who loved the water congregated around Kit Hobday and others set up Bleak Lodge which offered Soccer, Cricket and, later, other sports. Kit was joined by one or two other MGB skippers from the same patrol group, including, I believe, Mike Patten and John Oddie. Mike Patten’s father, Frank was a builder who built practically every house on the Burges Estate in Thorpe Bay between 1950 and 1980. John Oddie went on to become Kit’s brilliant crew on Jewels and Hornets. None of this had any relevance either for me, a cricket and football fanatic, my father, who loved golf, or my sister who was crazy about horses. Although a cousin had tragically died in a horse riding accident, it was somewhat of a surprise to me to return from school for my holidays one year to find Pat was now the proud possessor of a Jewel “Topaz” and the horse had gone.

Jewel J 49 Topaz stretching sails (with Mary ?and Audrey Christmas? on board) and with Pat Linnell (nee Wetton) at the helm.

Suddenly the only place to be in the summer was the Hobday’s beach hut “St Helens” located between the Broadway steps and the Thorpe Hall Avenue ramp. It was not a particularly large hut and was always bursting to the seams with enthusiastic youngsters. A fairly solid flag gantry had been erected for the racing and I think it also had a central flagpole but I cannot recall if that flew the TBYC Burgee and if so who had devised it. Certainly, someone had found an old shotgun for the sound signals. In those days guns and ammunition were freely available in High Street shops, even to teenagers! Not that I was ever allowed to sail in Topaz or any other Jewel. I was banned “because I could not swim”. The irony being that I had learned to swim from age 5 or 6 and had already won my first swimming race by the time I was 9; whereas to the best of my knowledge, my sister has never been able to swim. I suspect that big sister did not welcome the prospect of having little brother in the boat! Jewels, like the considerably older EODs and TEODs were solid clinker build boats with a steel centreplate and also a steel rudder plate, I think, both of were of some considerable weight. Jewels were built by James and Company of Brightlingsea where, incidentally, a young Reg White was serving his apprenticeship. Launching required a team effort to get the boat off the trailer at the bottom of the Thorpe Hall Avenue, down the ramp to the bottom of the beach at low water where it had wait to be floated by the tide and walked to its mooring. It took at least ten people to manhandle a Jewel across the beach. At the end of the season the procedure was reversed at high water. Heaving them on or off a low loader took a lot of doing. Even when you got them to the mooring you needed a dinghy to get you out and back, and if the tide went out you had no option but to carry it back! 7

Although they were the right boat for our water at the time, Jewels were rather basic and slow. They relied on a heavy boom to keep the sail full (they did not have kicking straps or anything like that) and only had little round metal buoyancy tanks to stop them from sinking if things went wrong - barely adequate to counteract the weight of the steel centreplate and rudder and keep the boat on the surface. It should be remembered too that there were no rescue boats at that time. After a capsize, the usual procedure was to anchor them where they were, hitch a lift ashore on another boat and then wait for the tide to go out. Dash out to your stranded Jewel, bail it out and get it upright ; wait for the tide to return and finally walk it as rapidly as possible back to the mooring before the water got too deep. This often involved being up most of the night and had two consequences. Firstly and obviously, skills were rapidly honed to prevent any risk of a capsize, and secondly my father bought a little motor boat called “Sinbad” which became effectively the Club’s first

rescue boat – well maybe not the club’s…In fact what happened was that he followed about ten feet behind Jewel J46 Garnet Jean Williams (nee Smith) Topaz throughout each and every race until my sister’s patience snapped and words were exchanged! Racing was Kit’s life blood and he was always keen to win fair and square. So with a rather motley fleet consisting of Jewels, EODs, TEODs and the Jewel 46 Garnet c 1950. MacKay family’s Sailed by Jean Williams (nee Smith) extraordinarily heavy Note the lack of houses ashore. and slow Norwegian Gaff rigged cutter, Kit and co devised a handicap system. This not only rated the boats but the individual helmsman and crew too. Racing was therefore highly competitive. Prize giving was a very social event at the Halfway House pub and Kit saw to it that the event was well reported in the Southend Standard. Our only “luxury” at the Beach Hut was provided by occasional visits by a vendor from the Crescent Ice Cream Company who offered strawberry and Vanilla ice creams for, I guess, around 3d (1.5p) As he had to walk all the way from Southend and only had a rather inefficient cool box, the emphasis was on the cream rather than ice. Much later, they started offering choc ices for about 6d that 9

seemed to hold their coldness better, but seemed dreadfully expensive! The hot racers in those days were of course Kit and his main rival was Terry Wheeler, Barbara Herve’s brother, who sailed an EOD, Minuet. The problem was that, if Kit and co wanted to compete against other clubs, the only place they could go in reasonable safety was around the pier to Southend Yachting Week – quite a large event in the yachting calendar in those days. It would be too dangerous to sail round to Burnham and trailer sailing would not be invented for another decade or so. Kit was not that thrilled that TBYC had to go to them and they did not come to us. It did not help a lot that Terry Wheeler defected to the other side of the pier where there were fleets of TEODS and EODs to race against. So the idea of a Thorpe Bay Regatta was conceived. Southend Yachting Week was perceived as being a bit stuffy (it had royal patronage once and could not quite get over it) - so our regatta would be a breath of fresh air. But in order to get that off the ground, RYA membership was an unavoidable prerequisite. I am told that the RYA was a bit surprised to get a request for membership from a club with a totally teenage membership and it “suggested” that the senior flag officers and key administrative positions would be taken by ‘seniors’. If you have ever looked at the Club Honours board and wondered why Kit was displaced by “old Man” McKay, now you know! He was the only safe pair of adult hands they could find prepared to take on that role. My father, a chartered accountant with his own practice in the City of London, was Vice Commodore, my mother took over temporarily as Secretary to bring order to the club’s chaotic records. The admirable Fred Pennington (a retired director of Hambros Bank) became Treasurer. Kit Hobday was the ever dynamic sailing rear commodore. With this team the RYA was satisfied and the club was on its way! 10

Although the Jewels were not boats for offshore sailing, that did not stop the intrepid Hobday and others from the far side of the pier mounting the occasional expedition to the Richard Montgomery, the wrecked ammunition ship off the mouth of the Medway. They allegedly would recover any stray ammunition they could find lying around on deck and return with their booty to open it up and make their own fireworks on the beach! Remember they were ex Coastal Patrol, so maybe it was not as dumb as it sounds…probably it was though. Please don’t try this nowadays, especially smoking a cigarette over several megatons of very dodgy high explosive! Anyway, if you ever sail over there today and wonder where all the bits have gone….

Another destination visited by the more adventurous was Holehaven, which has changed a bit over the years

Anyway the fleet was slowly growing, the racing was very keenly fought and very well run. But, at a certain point, a member of the public wrote a letter of complaint to the Council. They said that they had been sitting peacefully on the beach enjoying their picnic, when a group of rather boisterous youths in a beach hut began firing a shotgun over their heads at roughly five minute intervals and was that allowed? The Council had words with the Club and we were told that we could fire the gun from the water but not from the hut, so the search was on for a suitable boat. My mother had by then handed over the Secretaryship to Captain Patterson, recently retired from Shoebury Barracks. He was a perfect choice - efficient and a man of great presence and authority. He recalled the garrison owned an old double ended ships lifeboat which he was sure was surplus to requirements. In that he was right but he was displeased to find 14

the Army expected to be paid £20 for it and would not budge. So finally the deal was done and exactly the same time two saluting cannons appeared, pretty similar to ones that the Army used to have in Shoebury – no one quite knew where they came from where, but I am sure anyone would have given £20 for them…..! These were then used to start the races and the shotgun was more or less retired. The two cannons now hold pride of place in the Trophy Cabinet in the Clubhouse. Our new Start Boat was painted dark blue with red and white trim lines around the gunwales and was called Captain Pat (of course), after Captain Patterson and gave us faithful service. I do not know when it was finally retired or what became of it, but as it had no motor it did have it limitations. At around this time Kit Hobday had a rather fine Motor Yacht Kismet. I am afraid I cannot name anyone in the pictures below….However, it is noticeable that no one was wearing

lifejackets and typical of those time there were no lifelines around the boat, everyone smoked and, reflecting the immediate post war association with the military, hats were definitely cool

But two more faces from the past are those of Terry Wheeler (Barbara Herve’s Brother) who sailed an EOD called Minuet and gave Kit a good run for his money and later became a highly rated Hornet sailor, on the right David Cotgrove part of the Leigh fishing family, who may have sailed a TEOD Chloe.

Kit Hobday at Pat Wetton’s 21st but not sure about the others…..David Williams

Pat Linnell (nee Wetton) and Kit… Another Group with Mike Aster ? Leo Melhuish ? at back centre.

Kit at left Brian Pennington at right not sure about anyone else but next to Brian could be Leo

Going back to the Captain Pat, we always maintained warm and friendly relations with Shoebury garrison. Their C.O. was an honorary member of TBYC and our Commodore was a always invited to their formal Mess Dinner once a year, which was by all accounts an event not to be missed. The Club had now expanded to the point where, in addition to Kit Hobday’s father’s beach hut, we rented the thatched tennis club hut at the junction of Thorpe Bay Gardens and The Broadway for a social evening every Friday. Members paid 2/6d per year or 12.5p in today’s money which paid the rental of the hut. When the Tennis Club eventually wanted it back to store groundsman’s equipment, we were offered the use of a room over the garage of the Williams family along Thorpe Bay Gardens towards Thorpe Hall Avenue. Jean Smith sailed another Jewel, Garnet, and eventually married 20

David Williams who worked on Yachts and Yachting Magazine. Activities mainly consisted of table tennis, drinking lemonade (alcohol was not even on offer!) playing of gramophone records on a wind up player. In reality it was a large gathering of Thorpe Bay’s prettiest girls around Kit. By this time, the sailing side was as even more exuberant and competitive, the membership records, general finances and administration were under proper control and the Club had a constitution. It held formal AGM’s at the Halfway House pub. The regattas were a growing success and were indeed rather different from Southend Yachting week. The TBYC regatta was aimed more at a teenage market and lay somewhere between our current Cadet Week and an open meeting in current day terms. Apart from races for the Jewels, EODs and TEODs etc, it included rowing races (remember all our boats were kept on moorings and we did not have a bosun’s launch so everyone had a pram dinghy or similar in which to row out). Mike Astor was usually champion rower (he had overall responsibility for the Southend Council’s famous public gardens and was among the strongest of the Club’s members) Swimming races started from the beach and rounded the pole at the end of the concrete outflow (by what is now our slipway) and back to the beach. After the day’s activities there would usually be a dance at the Halfway House. A word should perhaps be said here about the Halfway’s very helpful landlord, George Learmouth. We were always made very welcome there as our social home from home. At some stage, probably around 1950, someone noticed the Halfway had a Badminton Court marked out and the TBYC Badminton section formed. It was here that I first met Ann McKinley and got a frightful wigging from her when I discovered a soda siphon and used it as a water pistol on the other players – I think I was aged about eight or nine and never tried anything like that again!. 21

When TBYC eventually had its licenced clubhouse, the link with the Halfway was broken and the Badminton section moved to the Arcade in the Kursaal before finally disbanding. One amusing incident here happened after a rather icy winter. One of the first trippers to use the famous Kursaal Amusement park was a rather substantial lady from the East End. In those days the Kursaal had Elm lavatory seats. Unbeknown to anyone the frost had got into the wood and opened up some cracks. When this lady sat down, the cracks opened allowing flesh to enter. When she tried to rise the cracks sprung tightly shut, holding her prisoner. Soapy water, alas, did not help, so two burly electricians were sent in to stand on the edges of the seat to keep it open while she escaped. Eventually all the badminton players transferred to Bleak Lodge playing at St Audrey’s Hall in Johnston Road, where we were joined by Vernon and Mavis Holland, who did sterling work for the Club on the house side and Tony Padbury, who has more recently been the Club Secretary. Back to sailing… Our regattas did not attract huge fleets but they did do a lot to boost membership. It is difficult to remember how many members we may have had back then but four or five dozen would probably have been about it. Of this number the majority would have been teenagers, next would have been aged twelve and under and a few adults were being persuaded join to join mainly to boost club funds. It should be remembered that the Country was still recovering from the War and we were still enduring incredible austerity. Thorpe Bay was, of course, very different from today and was largely undeveloped. With a journey time of 1hour 20 minutes by steam train to London (if things went well) and an annual season ticket costing nearly £120, it was not thought to be a likely place for the developers to move into to build commuter homes – how wrong we were! 22

As can be seen from the map dating back to about 1955, only Thorpe Hall Avenue, The Broadway and St Augustines Avenue went down to the seafront. Thorpe Bay Gardens was made up as far as the Bowls Club after which it became a dirt road as far as Barrowsands and Burges Road. From the Bowls Club onwards the area was completely wild with bramble thickets and rabbits in abundance. An ideal place to take the dog for a walk but not much else! Burges Road was fully made up and joined up with Maplin Way, but Maplin only went towards Shoebury – there was no roadway to the seafront. The landward side of Burges after the last house was a large field owned by farmer Swan. There were terrible stories that if you walked your dog on his land, he would shoot it and as likely as not you too. I took the risk and never even saw him, so I am here to tell the story! Going on up towards the railway there was a series of ex-anti-aircraft gun pits used in the war and by then known as the ‘ups and downs’ and beyond the railway and slightly east was a huge and very active brickfield. Going up towards St Augustines Church there some narrow tarmac roads installed by the Army with a collection of Nissan Huts. One of these was a popular venue to rent for private dances and parties. If there was a 21st to celebrate that is where you went! Down towards the seafront by what is now our slipway there was a little dirt road cut into the wild vegetation. At the time, I had no idea why it was there but I guess it where the brickfields lorries parked to unload their wares onto barges that called at the ramp.

Southend itself was in recovery mode after the very damaging events of World War 2. Everything was still on ration and there was no such thing as truly white bread. On the bright side petrol was under two shillings a gallon – that is 10 pence! Beer was similarly priced with Watney’s Red Barrel being the clear market leader. In later years, Watney’s were quite helpful to the Club, funding many improvements to the bar and beer storage facilities as soft loans repayable against beer consumption. We always managed to achieve our goals there! It was at this point that a number of things came together that played a big part in the Club’s future. Firstly and sadly, Kit’s father, Clifford Hobday, died. He had established a very successful electrical wholesale business, protected, as it was, by the Resale Price Maintenance laws. When Kit took over, he installed a number of his friends in the business, who seemed to be free to offer amazing discounts to virtually anyone who asked, especially their friends. That and the fact Kit had no answer when RPM ended meant the business failed. Kit now had only his immense charisma to fall back on. Fortunately, this was about the time when the value of having a good Corporate PA was being recognised and Kit was tops at that. Apart from building his own career he developed a circle of wealthy and influential friends many of whom also became friends and benefactors of sailing in general and TBYC in particular. Among these were CJ Morehouse, who owned the Kursaal, Bertie Holloway, a plastics millionaire, who funded the first UK C Class catamarans for the “little America’s Cup”, Jack Purle, Chairman of Redland Purle, Whose son in law, Tony Morgan, was Keith Musto’s crew in the Olympic Silver medal winning Flying Dutchman, Lady C, Peter de Savory of America’s Cup fame and so on. A second chance acquaintance was that my father had wanted to move nearer the Golf Club and asked Tony Ayshford (of Ayshford and Sansome who managed the Burges Estate for Ynyr Burges) 25

about building sites in Thorpe Hall Avenue. He found Tony to be very helpful and pleasant to deal with and that too played its part later. They became firm friends at the Golf Club as did I playing cricket with him for bleak Lodge. The real tipping point though was the growing reputation of our Regatta and the steadily increasing membership. Someone – I have no idea who, or where he came from, turned up for the regatta one year, towing a Firefly. This was revolutionary stuff indeed! It had always been assumed our waters were only safe for displacement boats so this one provoked a mix of scorn and curiosity. We, of course, provided him with typically blustery, unpleasant conditions and the Firefly spent half its time doing full-bloodied planing reaches and the other half recovering from capsizes! One has to remember, Jewels NEVER planed and Jewels could NEVER be righted after a capsize, bailed out and then carry on racing. Suddenly everyone was looking interested. That effectively marked the end of an era for the Club. The hunt was on to find a successor to the Jewels, EODs and TEODs. Kit wanted a boat that could plane!

SECOND BASE – A HUT OF OUR OWN!

Although it was a Firefly that started the revolution, there was quite a strong tide running in favour of bringing the National 12 to Thorpe Bay. Easily light enough to keep ashore, simple enough for a man and wife to crew and lively enough to plane. We now had enough older members to get more than one racing fleet together. CJ Morehouse was a National 12 man and gave a lot of moral and material support to get the class up and running. The Jewels, that served the Club so well, were now no longer wanted and gradually were sold to new owners elsewhere. But that was not quite the end of the story for them, because they were adopted by Walton and Frinton Yacht Club at Walton on the Naze. W&FYC bought all the design rights and now has quite a reasonable fleet, including J49 Topaz.

I think at this stage it worth looking at the boat building technology of the time. Up to the 1940’s no one really attempted to build a boat other than with planks of solid wood. Clinker and carvel were therefore the only two choices. During the war new glues were discovered and began to be used for some high tech aircraft applications. The Mosquito was mainly glued together as was the Russian Yak 24. The Russian glues were so good that the Yaks are still flying today. After the war, the new glues opened new doors and marine quality plywood was invented. Jack Holt designed a range of hard chine plywood dinghies including the GP14 and the Enterprise that were affordable, trailable and good family boats. Fairey Marine moved up from the Firefly with their very successful Albacore (memorably described as a pregnant Firefly at one sailing supper!) Later, of course, glassfibre took over. Sails were still made of cotton, which needed very careful running in, in light winds to stretch them to a good shape. A suit could be turned into a baggy wreck if that was not done properly. They also had to be cared for between races to ensure they dried out otherwise they would rot. It was a huge relief, therefore, when Terylene sails came along and we could just stuff them into the bag and forget about them! The picture shows Alan Butler in C’est si Bon about 1960 with the new Terylene sails and Michael Wetton in Manina (GP2318 with the old cotton sails). Most masts were wooden, which was fine up to a point. It was possible to break them – I smashed one into three pieces flying a spinnaker in heavy weather. We flew off the top of one wave into the back of another and bang went the mast. They were a bit of pain in the winter because they had to be 28

laid completely flat and fully supported, otherwise they warped. Peter Jones, one of the GP14 stalwarts who lived at the seaward end of Marcus Avenue, kindly had a small trapdoor fitted into the peak of his house so that the fleet could lay up their masts in his roof – the perfect solution! Apart from a range of sailing dinghies, Jack Holt also marketed all sorts of chandlery, including the then ubiquitous buoyancy aids in yellow plastic with foam flotation pads embedded in them. I religiously wore mine for many years unless it was so hot I only sailed in swimming trunks. When I joined the local sub aqua group at the Westcliff Swimming Pool (now the Leisure Centre), I decided to see just how much lead the buoyancy aid would support and was shocked to find the answer was - absolutely none! After several years of trusting it with my life, it turned out to be completely useless. Moral – safely test your buoyancy aid once a year to see if it works. Back on the water, the Hobday clan wanted something a lot more spicy than the National and they found what they wanted in the Hornet. Designed by Jack Holt in 1952, this 16 foot performance dinghy with its sliding seat for the crew, was the ultimate racing machine of the time. Very fast, very demanding and very satisfying. Kit said farewell to his faithful Jewel “Amethyst” and bought the first of a series of “Black and Blue” Hornets. This presented the committee with a huge problem. The beach hut did not have a place to store the new trolley launched boats. It was impractical to expect members to keep them at home and walk them down to the Thorpe Hall Avenue ramp each time, so what to do? TBYC at that time was focused on the area between Thorpe Hall Avenue and The Broadway and we really needed somewhere flat and convenient nearby, so my father did the obvious thing of approaching the Tennis Club. 29

I do not know how long the meeting went on for, but it could be summarised like this… “You have lots of courts which are not fully used. Could we have the end two as a dinghy park please?” The answer went something like this … “No” So the next stop was Ayshford and Sansome. Had they any ideas. They suggested we look at the site where our Bosun’s store is now located. At that time Burges Estate owned the Thorpe Bay foreshore and were ready to offer a deal. The site did not look that good to be honest. I think the brickfields used the ramp for shipping bricks out in barges and their ramp side loading office may have been there at one time. One thing for certain was that no one used the area when we were looking. The problem was that the site was out in the wild but it was the only ramp that would suit our needs. There was also a structure of sorts, but it was pretty well useless. Four walls about six foot high enclosed nothing, just the beach six foot down. After a lot more talking it was agreed that we would take the site provided we could also reserve the double plot that was later to become the site of the Clubhouse onshore. A sturdy builders site hut was then located that would be a perfect fit for the stub walls on the beach. (I am not sure if this was offered by Frank Wheeler, Barbara Herve’s father, or Frank Patten or maybe even someone else totally. But it was definitely a builder’s shed) There were two snags. First we needed to build a solid concrete floor for it to stand on and second the rock bottom price of the shed was £200. Fred Pennington and my father tried all different ways to raise the cash. No one in their right minds wanted to offer a loan of that amount to a club with a fairly modest membership paying only 12.5 pence per person per annum. Money was still very tight in terms of getting any sort of a bank loan, even for Fred with his banking connections. So the alternative idea was floated of selling Life Memberships for 30

£10. After much arm twisting we had twenty takers and two hundred pounds in the bank! For those who think this was too cheap in terms of today’s money, try multiplying today’s current subscription by 80 - that is the act of faith that these subscribers demonstrated in the Club at that time. The area in front of the ramp was littered with what I thought were rocks but were probably lumps of brick burr dropped from the barges. Many weekends were spent lugging these up the beach and lobbing them into the base of our new club site. This provided a solid base, cut down the concrete we needed and it also meant the seabed was much safer. Finally the cavity was filled and the concrete was laid. Once it had set the Hut was erected and TBYC had its very own clubhouse for the first time. The completion was marked by a photograph of everyone standing proudly in front of it, which is, of course, the one in the main bar. This was our new Headquarters, made possible by the sale of 20 Life Memberships.

The new hut was an instant hit. It was fitted with a small tea bar in one corner where we could buy Ledicot’s fizzy lemonade, cherryade, 31

ginger beer etc. from large bottles with those wire cage things and white china caps with an orange rubber washer to seal the bottle shut. There were some snacks available such as Smiths Crisps. I think the hut also had electricity and a tea urn. It was under the stern control of Coral Larkin (later Price), who ensured everything was kept in good and clean condition. We had some chairs for the balcony but originally there was nothing to stop you falling off onto the beach five or six feet below. The Race Officer’s box was a much later addition, so there was plenty of space at the end of the site. In bad weather everyone could be inside with the large sea facing windows open. In those days you could have windows in a hut like that and not expect burglars to strike. The only incident I can recall was that someone refilled the ginger beer bottle with soapy water as a joke. Coral was NOT amused! The Club was by now holding regular social events at the Halfway usually with music provided by the Whirlwinds, a sort of Beatles tribute band and extremely good they were too. It was not just TBYC that was changing. Boats were being improved too. The GP class had approved Terylene sails, then a genoa in place of its rather underpowered jib, then spinnakers and built-in buoyancy in place of the barely adequate buoyancy bags and finally fibreglass hulls.

THIRD BASE – THE BEST CLUB IN TOWN! It was shortly after that, that I went to a school outside the Borough and focused on Cricket and soccer, playing for Bleak Lodge in the holidays. Our cricket captain, wicket keeper and opening bat was Tony Ayshford. It was many years before I returned to TBYC and much had changed. The new Clubhouse had now been built, albeit with septic tank drainage and it was still in splendid isolation as far as neighbours were concerned. The field behind the club was still farmed for crops such as cabbages and in wet weather it was the cabbages that had an aroma like none other, not the drains! By this time the elite fleet was the Hornets led from the front by Kit with staunch support on the water from Mike Patten, with Malcolm Price as his right hand man on the shore. Ian Kennedy was his social secretary. Ian was renowned for his lusty renderings of Nobby Hall at the end of each dance at the Club. Fred Pennington had remained as Treasurer and issued the little red life membership cards to the twenty who had funded the hut,

replacing a much less prestigious pink paper card. Later versions looked a good deal smarter.

Fred related how the Club had installed a security alarm at the base of the beer hoist, connected directly to the police station. Allegedly it was discovered by someone in the force that if you rattled the beer hoist door, the alarm would be triggered, Fred would be called to the Club to open up and see if all was well, and then beers would be dispensed all round as a way of saying thank you. The alarm was shifted to the top of the hoist and Fred was not called out again. Apart from the Clubhouse we also had a decent space to use as a dinghy park. The old hut had had its windows blocked up and was used as a store. We did by then have own rescue craft a little wooden flatty with a dodgy ten horse outboard. In those days if anything went wrong we called for Geoff Sell who worked in a boatyard just next to the gas works. Geoff’s battered old Bedford van would ferry anything from fuel and bits for the guard boat to ham and doughnuts for the teabar – if they were a bit greasy, so what!. Peter Little who worked at the boatyard built himself a similar hard chine plywood boat which he also pressed into service as a guard boat when needed. He had an equally dodgy ten horse outboard so 34

the rescue boat coverage was not that reliable. It also did not help that there no such things as handheld radios then, so everything had to be co-ordinated by hand signals. That did not stop the Club hosting some quite large national Championships, including the GP14 nationals pictured here, which had a limit of 120 boats and a waiting list. To attract that number for what was only a weekend event was quite remarkable.

OTHER MEMORIES The Club was now led in every sense by the Hornet Sailors. Racing was extremely competitive and no one would dream of retiring even if the wind died and the tide was ebbing…..even if the boats were drifting past the end of the promenade….. even if there was a red flag flying on the (still often used) army rifle range just beyond the end of the promenade. However, when the first bullet splashed into water close by and the second (so the yarn goes) hit the top of the mainsail of one of the boats, things changed rather rapidly and everyone paddled for their lives! -0-

TBYC Committee Boat 1966 During the Little America’s Cup Series

There was a new sport invented early one November. Rockets were lined up on their side along the balcony facing seaward, and when a bus appeared…. The police soon put a stop to that. -0Something more permanent from the Hornet impetus, was the Committee Boat. It was discovered that Whitstable had a purpose made Committee Boat that was the envy of the Kent yacht clubs. Mike Patten and Kit literally raced over to investigate and then raced back. Mike allegedly got it all wrong on a corner and wiped the rear wheel off his Austin Healey 1000, but that did not prevent them from ordering our committee boat, It was slightly bigger and better than Whitstable’s with all the snags ironed out too, making it just that bit better than theirs. Kit always wanted TBYC to be best! In those days it was painted white with the TBYC burgee emblazoned on the side of the cabin. It went orange many, many years later. -0As far as I was concerned, cricket was it, but the Bleak Lodge cricket team had just had three matches on the trot lost for silly reasons (including the works was on strike so the cricket team was too!) so I wandered down the club to see if I could find out what sailing was like. There I bumped into Ian Kennedy who introduced me to Charles Dutson. Charles had always sailed with his wife Sue (in Suecha - GP 3248) but she had just slipped a disk and he was hoping he might find a crew on the beach. One race later and I was totally hooked! Sue has left her mark on the club, because it was she who proposed we send out a newsletter from time to time, suggesting it be called ‘something like Newsbuoy’.. 37

Anyway I sailed with Charles for two or three years as Sue’s back was never quite the same. During that time the club took the decision to lease and clear a much bigger dinghy park. This was highly necessary because TBYC now had decent racing fleets of Cadets, Hornets, GP’s, Enterprises, Albacores and National 12’s. The Class Captains did tremendous work marshalling their fleets and Newsbuoy was used to canvass additional support for the classes as well as trumpeting successes. The GP’s were led by Alan Butler and heaven help you if you left the boat in the dinghy park when racing was on! You would certainly get a phone call asking what was up. It was at this stage that I got interested in a GP lying neglected and unused in the dinghy park. We knew the owners name but no one had a contact address. After much digging I did make contact and bought Manina for £60, selling it some years later for £120 and being offered it back some years after that for £180! No deal! -0By now the club was big enough to offer its facilities to a wide range of Class Associations for regional and National Championships. As part of this growth, the committee felt it was time for us to have a wholly professional back up team of paid staff. The bar was run by Mac and on the water, Buck was the bosun. He had previously been with the British Antarctic Survey and was as tough and gnarled as teak, and a wizard at all things boaty. The club had, by then purchased a totally reliable but not very fast, double ender with an inboard diesel as Buck’s launch and TBYC was as well-equipped as many UK yacht club to lay on these events. The GP’s came here quite regularly but, as mentioned earlier, numbers had to be limited and staged as four races over the weekend plus a practice race on Friday. It always seemed to be light winds for the GP’s and the first time they came, we watched then 38

manfully paddling back from the finishing line near the Mulberry on the last of the tide. When they were close enough to the shore for them to hear us, somewhere near the Distance Mark, we called out that the water was shallow and aching arms could be relieved by jumping in and walking the boats back. Next day, the first race ended at high water, of course, and the boats were paddled back for lunch. When they reached the distance mark….Oh dear! For many years, St John’s Ambulance kindly provided us with an ambulance and a medic (usually the same man) in case anything went wrong. One year after a morning of no wind at all, I was race officer and suggested everyone stayed ashore until the breeze picked up. The Ambulance man went off to get some shopping and the visitors set up an impromptu football match, resulting in one of the top crews breaking his leg. With no St John’s man we had to summon an NHS ambulance. The St John’s medic could not believe it that for year after year nothing had happened and then he was missing when we needed him. Launching and recovery was always a bit of a problem with boats as heavy as GP’s. Often the launching trolleys had tiny wheels and these embedded in the sand too easily, so when we had 90 or so GP’s wanting to launch and come ashore in short order, something had to be done. We turned to our good friends the army at Horseshoe Barracks; Shoebury could they help please? A team of squaddies duly arrived, absolutely delighted to be involved in something that was much more fun than square bashing and earning them loads of free beer afterwards from grateful crews. The soldiers formed teams and as the boats reached the shore, grabbed them, with helm and crew still aboard, hoisted them clear of the water and ran them up the beach! It was a sort of variation on the Field Gun contest at the Royal Tournament, worked well for us and delighted our visitors. 39

This short term fix obviously would not do for a TBYC that was growing in stature and Manina 1961 – note slipway behind wealth and it blocked by spectators and one boat was decided we had to have a slipway. One scheme, to put a timber deck over the concrete groin at the bottom of the ramp, was initially not possible because the Authorities refused to allow us to drill holes in the concrete to secure the wooden slats. However we were able to add a layer of new concrete with a longitudinal plank embedded in it and build a fairly narrow slipway using that to anchor the slats. Because only one boat at a time could use it, and it was not quite perfectly aligned with the bottom of the ramp, it was never really practical. The next idea was to build a much wider slipway resting on the stones just beyond the end of the ramp. It was only meant to get the boats over the loose stuff at the top of the beach and onto the firmer sandy area but even that was only a partial success. The Council unfortunately replaced and relocated the breakwaters along the foreshore. The shingle transferred our way and the slipway was soon buried. I think it is still there if you care to do a bit of digging! In fact when we first moved to Thorpe Bay in 1945, the older beach huts stood so high above the beach, it was possible to walk under them, much as the ones between the yacht club and Shoebury now. The slipway problem had not gone away, which is more than could said for our Army friends, which had by then largely vacated the 40

Barracks. The next “slipway” was provided free. We approached the then national Coal Board and asked if we could have some of their retired conveyor belting. This consisted of enormously heavy and durable black rubber belts and each length spanned the entire beach from the ramp down the edge of the mud. They were very nearly wide enough for a launching trolley so two side by side did the job to perfection. Gales did not shift them and it was not too much work to keep them swept clear. Launching trolleys glided down them beautifully right down to the water and they stayed in use for a year or two. I have no idea if that too got buried or if we had to get rid of them. Our next effort was a vastly superior effort, masterminded, I think, by Howard Janes. Constructed of Greenheart Oak the new slipway took the boats directly from the top of the ramp down to the mud. I think it only cost around £20,000. Howard had estimated what weight it would need to support if two or three waterlogged dinghies were on it but it was also intended to allow cruiser owners to take a launching trolley down the slip and across the mud to their boats. Howard was alarmed to put it mildly to see people driving cars down onto the mud! It was not really up to carrying that sort of load. So the last few feet were therefore lopped off. The current slipway is a far stronger and more durable construction and should serve the Club for a very long time. -0Elsewhere, Canvey Island had become important for the Club. The Prout Brothers tried strapping together two canoes and rigging a mast and centreboard on a bridge deck to see if it would sail. It did, and they designed and built a whole range of catamarans ranging from the Shearwater racing dinghy to the Snowgoose luxury cruisers from their base on Canvey Island. Thames Marine was another

Canvey Boat Builder who built the early glass GP’s and went on to build the Snapdragon range of cruisers that soon became the favourite entry level Reg White and John Osborn cruisers at the Club. On a different vein, John Fisk, Commodore of Chapmans Sands Sailing Club and friend of Rod McAlpine-Downie (the designer of Hellcat 1 etc.) agreed to mount an official challenge for a new trophy for C Class Catamarans to be called the Little America’s Cup. They did not have the water to run it, so they asked TBYC to be the hosts. New dinghy classes were beginning to proliferate and Thorpe Bay seemed to be a magnet for Catamarans, not so much as resident classes but more as hosts for open meetings. We regularly ran races for Shearwaters and Yachting Monthly cats, but nothing prepared us for the next supercat generation. The GP fleet had gone to Brightlingsea for an open meeting and suddenly the first ever C Class catamaran, Hellcat 1, swept past us at huge rate of knots. This was a project instigated by John Fisk, a member of the IYRU Kit at the Little America’s Cup 1966 multihull committee, Bertie Holloway, designed by Rod McAlpine-Downie, and with a sailplan 42

conceived by Seahorse Sails (in the person of Clarence AustinFarrer). Reg White, who was already was a top Hornet sailor, had built it and sailed it with his brother in law John Osborne. When Rod McAlpine-Downie received a challenge from the USA saying they had the fastest Catamaran, John Fisk and Rod drew up a set of rules and launched the “Little Americas Cup”. The racing was under the auspices of the IYRU, naturally, and equally naturally Chapmans Sands was the recognised club accepting the challenge. The only place to stage this event was Thorpe Bay, because we had the water and the organisation. Thus the Americans came first with Wildcat and Beverly and were easily defeated. The Aussies tried next bringing over two boats, Matilda and Quest some six weeks before the challenge started so that they could tune up. Matilda, they said, was the World’s most beautiful C Class and Quest the fastest. Reg White arrived the day before racing with Hellcat 3S, Miss Helmsman – much prettier than Matilda and much faster than Quest. In fact Quest started to fall apart during the week’s racing and they said it was beyond repair. The hulls seemed to be fibreglass over a cardboard honeycomb base and it was delaminating. Reg rebuilt it for them overnight and went on to win a series whitewash! It was not quite all plain sailing. Because of the huge speeds, the course had to cover a very large area and the racing went into the main shipping channel and well beyond the area covered by our still fairly limited guard boat fleet. At one point Miss Helmsman sliced straight through a large wave and dislodged both Reg and John. Fortunately Reg managed to grab a toe-strap, John was attached to the trapeze and boat stayed upright. So they were able to clamber back on board and never lost their lead and it was not until much later that they told anyone. Had they lost touch with the boat it could well have ended in tragedy. Clarence Austen Farrer was by now convinced that the next generation of racing cats would be powered by a unarig with a wing mast. I would describe Clarence as a boffiny type of person. He had 43

been following the racing from Claude Curtiss’s motor boat “Viva” which was kept on a mooring on the Ray Creek and had much in common with Kit’s boat Kismet in terms of safety features. On one occasion he had been asked to walk the dinghy to rear of the boat after it had been unhitched from the mooring buoy. He was so deep in thought about the wing mast design he walked straight off the back of Viva and fell into the water. Fortunately he was fished out unharmed. TBYC hosted the little Americas Cup from 1962 to 1969 when the Danes won it in Opus 11 by a narrow margin of 4 – 3. It is still contested but not on an annual basis and not by any local club. John Fisk retained his strong interest in the class. His boat was called Miss Senior Service – no prizes for guessing who sponsored that one! The C Class was a restricted design but being one-off’s each boat was very costly. I think there were five or six in the UK at their peak and they did race at TBYC but none was based with us. The class does still survive internationally and new UK challenger called Invictus unsuccessfully contested the last match in 2011. John Fisk’s own C Class boat was sadly not the fastest on the water but he did achieve his five minutes of fame one very windy day. He phoned the Club from Whitstable to say he had strapped his young son the mast and was leaving now. In something like half an hour’s time he rang Whitstable from our phone to say he had arrived! It is about sixteen miles by the way. However C Class did spawn the Tornado Class (a McAlpineDownie design with Reg White input) and we soon had a fleet at TBYC. It was fortunate that we still had Buck the Bosun. If one of these beasts capsized, which happened not that infrequently, they almost always went fully inverted. A tornado in this state is very hard to get upright again, but Buck simply took a hold on the forestay and keep pulling upwards on it until the boat was sitting on its transom ends and flipped sideways and upright – and all that 44

without gloves! I tried to do the same with a Hobie Cat and could not get anywhere near lifting it. -0In the early 1960’s, we got a request from Michael Bentine, erstwhile Goon Show star and riding high at that time on the BBC with It’s a Square World. He wanted to do a one off sketch of the Doomsbury Private Lifeboat Station using our slipway. The idea was that when they pushed the lever to launch the lifeboat, it stayed where it was and the lifeboat house slid into the water instead. While they were doing that they saw Thorpe Bay at low water and devised an episode where they set up an expedition to find the source of the Thames. When they got there they found a dripping tap and turned it off and the Thames dried up leaving all the boats stranded on the mud. They kept thinking of new (better?) things and stayed quite some time. Two rather unfortunate things happened during this time. A passerby on a motor scooter was so busy rubber-necking that he went into the back of a parked car and broke his leg. The other was that Buck the Bosun got a taste for the bright life and took up a job in the media, I think with Michel Bentine. -045

The GP fleet was now growing to be quite a force. We had over thirty boats in the park and Alan Butler saw to it that the racing fleet was also into the high twenties. A slightly less usual open meetings we attended was the Southport Twenty Four Hour race. The race was held each year on the marine pleasure lake on Southport seafront at the end of September on the same night as the last night of the Proms. In some ways Southport is like Southend in that it has the second longest pier and the tide goes out a very long way. Unlike Southend though, the tide does not seem to come back in again very often, so we could all park on the sand without risk of being flooded! 46

The race started at midday Saturday and finished Midday Sunday. The object is to sail as many laps as possible around the one mile or so circuit. One can change helmsman and crews as often as one wanted. Everyone either brought their own tent or slept in one of the two large marquees after Terry Lightfoot’s jazz band wrapped up for the night. To comply with the International Collision Prevention Rules, each boat was handed one small red bicycle type light and a green one. At dusk they had to be turned on and after an hour the battery was flat. Never mind!

Southport SC Clubhouse and Start/Finish Line Docking Area

Obviously we also took some star quality from other fleets with us, (Tony Herve, a previous Cadet National Champion and then in Hornets, and John Lane and Bob Bennett leading lights in Albacores, to mention but a few) but we went for fun rather than glory and glory was never achieved. A Welsh University team exemplified the fun aspect by towing a little yellow plastic duck round behind their boat which was specially renamed “Gwynneth Ith Good for You” for the event. 47

Racing started on the club line and boats sailed clockwise around the two islands. At night there was a spotlight on the start finish line so that they could log each completed lap and the boats could come into the docking area whenever they wanted. The technique was to have one person catch the bow and another the stern to hold the boat off the rather rough concrete sea wall. The current crew would leap out, the new ones leap in and the shore team give them a mighty push to get them under way again. One team had very smart docking master in blazer, tie, smart trousers - the lot. He was the one to make the final push but held on just that delicious bit too long. We could all see he had got past the point of no return and watched as he stretched to nearly horizontal and finally, to a tremendous cheer, dropped in, face down. Any thoughts that he might have done it as a joke were dispelled as soon as he surfaced….! Obviously we had to rely very heavily on someone not only lending their boat but also driving it all the way to Southport and back. One year, the boat owner had a minor misfortune, puncture or something, which made him late, and then a rather greater one as he tried to make up for lost time – earning a speeding ticket. Peter Wadley, my crew, and I were also later than the rest and found they had already left for our by now traditional schooner or two of sherry and a good fry up at a nearby Berni Inn. We decided to sip our schooners before going into the dining room and it was just as well! Having had a rotten journey and arrived to find everyone gone, the boat owner was rather more than cross and was, he said, going to drive home first thing in the morning with the boat. We tried to placate him with a suitable libation and summoned assistance from the rest of the fleet. One by one they came out to pour oil on troubled waters and schooners of sherry down a troubled throat. By the time we were finally all sitting together in the dining room the atmosphere had thawed and it was becoming increasingly difficult to understand what our unfortunate boat owning friend was saying any more. Early next morning when we reassembled at a little café 48

in the town for an equally traditional breakfast fry up, he was nowhere to be seen. When he did emerge, he was a curious shade of pallid green and was clearly not going to drive anywhere, in fact, he did not even want any breakfast…. The good news was that all talk of the boat going straight back home had disappeared! -0In 1964, Ian Stobart and I also sailed in the Tideway Race. This was for certain classes (GP’s, Enterprises, National 12’s and maybe one or two more) We raced from Putney (Ranelagh Sailing Club) to Tower Bridge and back. Lunch was served by ladies of the WI at the as yet undeveloped St Katherine’s Dock.

GP’S beached ashore for lunch. 49

Fireflies massing for the return leg to Putney - with GP14’s waiting ashore

GP’s Waiting for their start 50

As can be seen, a huge number of spectators lined the shore and while we were being fed, they, no doubt, shared their sandwiches with the pigeons. Big mistake! When the gun was fired for the return leg, every pigeon within half a mile dropped its load. The Thames was vastly different then from today’s scenario. There still many working wharves and large trots of moored dumb barges. The first leg was very windy with unexpected squalls coming from around buildings often from the “wrong” direction. This caused grief to many as witnessed by the number of blue or white sails (the Fireflies and Enterprises started ahead of us in GP’s) being swept under the moored barges. Fortunately no one was hurt but I imagine that the Health and Safety boys would not let a race like that happen again now. We made it safely both ways but had problems soon after. I had bought a home made road trailer which worked fine going up but a wheel seized in Warwick Avenue coming home. Amazingly we were close to an engineering shop and the owner managed to straighten out the roller bearings and get us on our way and refused all payment. He gave us a stern warning to keep the speed down and make frequent checks for overheating. In London itself with traffic lights and speed limits that was easy but once on the Arterial we had to resort to desperate measures – we stopped at every pub we could see and after a suitable pause for refreshment continued on our way. Also amazingly, we made it home safely and very happy.

St Katherine’s was still undeveloped in 1967 when Sir Francis Chichester returned in Gypsy Moth IV after his circumnavigation.

-0Our star GP14 helmsman by this time was Tony Foster-Taylor. His crew, Graham Scrine, shared a rather smart basement flat with him in Notting Hill Gate. It had all the latest in terms of hifi and electronics, so not surprisingly they had installed metal security grills on the windows. The dear old lady in the flat above, seeing the bars, thought Tony had constructed a prison to keep Graham captive and was systematically starving him, so she waited until Tony went out and then sneaked down and left plates of food with a pie or cake or sandwiches, rang the doorbell and ran back upstairs in case Tony came back and captured her too. -0During my time in TBYC, I have spent a bit of time doing various tasks on the Committee. Nothing was stranger than the time I arrived a minute or two late expecting to find the Commodore opening the meeting and everyone else sitting there attentively. Instead, I found the Commodore doing what the Commodores did best (talking) but everyone else on their hands and knees or peering into dark corners taking not a blind bit of notice. As I entered I was greeted with a silent “Sshh!” and warning fingers pressed to lips. Then a Eureka! moment and the curtains were pulled back to reveal a microphone taped to the window. A wire stretched down to the Stewards flat. It seemed that the stock valuers had reported a discrepancy in the bar stock and the steward was eavesdropping on the committee meeting. The plan was that he was going to be invited to join the meeting but the microphone wire had been spotted accidentally and rang alarm bells and it was decided to discuss the bar as the final item on the agenda. When this item was reached, the microphone was unplugged and someone went to the Stewards flat to ask him to join us; he refused. 53

Locks to the upper deck were hurriedly changed and a note suspending the steward was pushed under the flat door. It was all sad and unpleasant. That was the end of that steward’s tenure at the Club, but not quite the end of the story. We checked our personnel files to see where we had gone wrong and found we had been given a glowing reference by the previous employer – another yacht club further up the Thames as it happens. When we called them, they said they had not written anything nor would they. The person concerned had cheated them out of thousands of pounds by manipulating the bar takings. Because they only did an annual stock check. Not only that, but they later discovered he had secretly taped all their committee meetings! It seems, though, that they still let the person stay on the premises and he was left to open all the mail. So, when he saw an envelope with the TBYC flag on it, guess who wrote the reference? -0One or two other things from the committee room that may be of interest. This may start off sounding like a recent scenario… Ken Livingstone had just lost the election in London, but this time it was to Sir Horace Cutler and the elections were to the old GLC. The year was 1977. Kit, and I think Mike Patten, were invited to County Hall in conditions of greatest secrecy for discussions. The flamboyant Sir Horace wanted to bid for the Olympics to come to London so could TBYC host the sailing events? The classes involved were Finn, 470, FD, Tornado, Tempest and Soling. Kit reckoned the two keel classes could moor up in the Ray and had no hesitation in saying yes, but in the end Sir Horace did not go ahead. -0Another idea was investigated by Fred Williams, a man who had been our Treasurer and then Vice Commodore for some years. We had by this time grown our cruiser fleet to such a size that we were 54

always by far the largest club represented at the Calais Rally. He looked into the possibility of the Club having its own defaced Red Ensign. While it was not ruled out, it seemed the disciplines imposed were too great for us at that time. In particular, I was told, flags had to be raised and lowered at the correct time every day without fail, something we could not guarantee at that time. I should also mention Fred’s wife Olwen, who single handedly for many years took on the task of cooking sailing suppers in the little room behind the main bar that was then the kitchen. All we had to cook on was an ordinary household size gas cooker with four rings and one oven. For her to churn out three course hot meals for around a hundred was quite remarkable. -0I spent some time as rear commodore (house) and it was during one routine maintenance session between stewards, I think, that we realised that that the stewards flat gave a clear view through to the ladies showers because of the way the air vents had been fitted. Sorry guys! That has long since been taken care of. -0One of the more bizarre moments for me was a decision to lay the club marks with mathematical precision around a one mile circle. To achieve this, the club purchased a piece of string one mile long and got an army of members to fan out across the mud on a very cold winter’s day. I think there were so many practical difficulties getting everyone in a straight line and holding the string tight that perfection proved elusive. This experiment was never repeated for two simple reasons – it did not work and we could do better doing a fix with compass bearings. -055

I must give a mention to Bernie (Myers). He was very likeable, cheerful and always available to crew. And he was good at it, but accident prone. In the early days of the Hornets, spinnakers were stowed in a plastic bucket. Normally they could be hoisted quickly and smoothly, but if the crew inadvertently tied the uphaul to the bucket handle, you had to sail the rest of the race with a bright red plastic bucket at the masthead. On another occasion Bernie crewed for Bob Bennett at the Albacore Southern Area Championships. TV South was there and it was particularly unfortunate that as their boat approached the line to win, with the Cameras in a guard boat right alongside, they were hit by a squall. Bernie shot out as any good crew would, but his shorts remained anchored to the cleat, as I said right in front of the cameras In the same event Bernie was suffering from both insomnia and a blistering headache and got tablets for both from the doctor. Of course he mixed them up and fell deeply asleep in the bottom of the boat on the dead run again while they were in serious contention for line honours. -0On the subject of crews… We were hosting a Hornet Open Meeting which attracted Doug Bishop a hotshot from Whitstable. At the same time Keith Musto’s elite South East group Flying Dutchman 56

class had come to the Club for a weekend of pre-Olympic tune up races. Apart from Hornet big guns, Keith Musto, the Jardine brothers, Johnson Wooderson and other racing supremos form the FD fleet were there and a heated discussion arose over whose crews had to be fittest to win races. So Tony Morgan went head to Head with Doug’s crew in a press up match. After the count reached 100, Doug’s crew gave up and sat on Tony Morgan’s shoulders while he did ten more. Try that at home! -0One of the FD fleet at the time was Johnson Wooderson, with Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (I think) ….with which he became European Champion. He was beginning to climb the rungs of Willis Faber. Naturally enough, he caught the eye of Deputy Chairman John Prentice, whose 47 foot boat Battlecry was in the running for the Admirals Cup team in 1978. In one of the pre-selection series, Wooderson was helming with Battlecry and another boat neck and neck as they approached the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse. It was windy, they were well heeled and they thought they could just squeeze past through. At very last minute, the wind headed them, they lost speed and the boat came upright. The top six feet of the mast poked through the walkway round the helipad, dislodging a plank and leaving them securely anchored by the mast in not very friendly conditions. All they could do was cut the rigging, break the mast and come home with very red faces. They had to swiftly write a grovelling letter of apology to the RORC. Nonetheless Battlecry was selected for the team, edging out Tony Morgan’s More Opposition for the honour of racing in the Admiral’s Cup team. . -0Another one prone to misfortune was Harry (Foxcroft). Also an immensely popular person. His boat was a trimaran cruiser called 57

three Times a Lady. After a series of minor misfortunes, many involving a tow back to the mooring, it had earned the soubriquet Three Times a Mayday! To be fair, he was new to sailing and made one or two errors like trying to outrun a cadet dinghy. A task made more difficult by still having his the anchor down. On a different occasion returning from the Yantlet, he thought he might be able to nip round the back of one small ship and in front of the slow moving much larger one a short way behind. Only at the last minute did he realise he was about to pass between a tug towing a tanker! -0By 1981 I had moved on from dinghies and had a slow old Snapdragon 24 – Miss Eileen 111. We decided that I would sail across to Calais with Charles our older son then aged thirteen, while my wife came over on the ferry with our younger son and the car. The plan then was that we would then meander along the French Coast. So Charles and I night stopped in Ramsgate and then set off in perfect sailing conditions for France next morning. Charles helmed as we slipped out of Ramsgate and I clipped on the foresail (no modcons like roller reefing or autohelm for us in those days!) He seemed quite happy to continue and was still helming when we coasted into Calais some ten hours later (I did say Miss E was slow!). I wonder if he is the youngest from the club to helm all the way across the English Channel. Anyway, if I am right with the dates, it turned out to be an eventful trip. By the time Elisabeth arrived two days later on the ferry with the car, there was a huge bank of dense fog half a mile offshore, so we decided explore around Calais by car. We found a super beach between Cap Gris Nez and Cap Blanc Nez, accessible down a little rocky pathway. There was beautiful clean sand, bright sun and a man in the water waving his arms and making the sort of noises that Peter 58

Sellers was so good at. We thought nothing of it – it’s a sort of French thing, we thought, until we heard a sort of hissing whoosh and a hang glider passed less than ten feet over our heads. Then we realised we were on the landing ground for quite a large group of them launching off Gris Nez. We scuttled off to a much safer pitch and had a thoroughly entertaining day watching them. When we got back to the boat we found we had a new neighbour, a Westerley Konsort, Go-Between. They had left Ostend intending to sail to Ramsgate, I think, but had encountered the thick fog. They were just studying their chart to decide what they would do when they heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching hydrofoil ferry on its way into Ostend, and it seemed to be heading straight for them. The skipper grabbed the radar reflector and leapt onto the cabin roof, brandishing it as high in the air as possible. The ferry sounded really close by then but changed direction and stopped engines. Moments later they heard on Channel 16 “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is the Hydrofoil P***cess A***d – we have just collided with another ship off Ostend…” But the drama did not quite end for them there. A sister hydrofoil had obviously been diverted from its journey to see if it could render assistance and kept crisscrossing the area at planing speed in dense fog and sometimes rather too close for comfort. Go-Between decided it was safer to duck back inshore where there was still clear visibility and take refuge in Calais. It was later reported by the skipper of the Hydrofoil that an echo that had not been there before suddenly appeared on the radar dead ahead and he had taken immediate avoiding action but had then struck a freighter a glancing blow. No one was hurt. -0One year, returning from Calais in hot airless conditions, we rounded North Foreland to sea a rescue Helicopter sending a winchman down to pull someone out of the water. It was all done 59

very quickly and professionally and the helicopter climbed, circled descended to a few feet above the water and pushed the “survivor” out into the water again! We watched as they repeated this exercise a several times before it flew off. We saw a TV documentary shortly afterwards featuring a young female officer who had volunteered to be the ‘casualty’ and was used for all these practice sessions. -0There was one other incident involving a rescue helicopter. Colin Lapwood and I had left Dunkirk in calm misty conditions while Elisabeth took the Sally Line with the children. It was as well she did because the wind rapidly freshened and it was blowing around force 7 as we exited the ‘Dunkirk Roads’. We had already picked up one mayday from a yacht off Burnham where the skipper had been poleaxed by the boom in accidental gybe, and then we heard a second from Moontide of Leigh that had got lost coming out of the Thames Estuary. A passing ship was able to point her in the right direction. Anyway, all seemed well. We made Ramsgate, locked in and snugged down for the night. Next morning the lifeboat maroon went up and we listened in on Channel 16. It was Moontide of Leigh again! Apparently they had been sailing all night, had not come across any of the expected navigation buoys and were all exhausted. The coastguard asked them where they thought they were, which was somewhere off Longnose (North Foreland). The coastguard decided to scramble the Emergency Helicopter. The next few minutes the telephony went something like this… “Moontide of Leigh. This is Rescue 66. Please count slowly from 1 to 10, repeat from 1 to 10 over.” This Moontide did a couple of times and then we heard. “Moontide of Leigh this is Rescue 66. We have you visual, you are approximately twenty miles from your estimated position!” Moontide was then given a course to steer and 60

ten minutes later we heard “Moontide of Leigh, You are making zero progress in the right direction. Please lower your sails and the lifeboat will be with you shortly. Prepare for a tow.” To locate a deal with a casualty so far out of position, and resolve the problem so quickly was astonishing. We were all waiting to see what Moontide of Leigh looked like, but we heard her asking to be towed into Margate so we were disappointed! -0I am sure there will be plenty of stories about ‘the big storm’. Considering the ferocity of the winds and the fact so many boats broke from their moorings, Sandhoppers were half buried, dinghies were tossed around in the dinghy park, it was amazing that much more serious damage did not occur.

Most of the cruisers driven ashore lined up neatly on the beach between the breakwaters. I believe that many were on their sides

and it was only because of the quick thinking of Brian Herve, who located a JCB working at East Beach and managed to secure it and its driver to come immediately, that the boats were righted, which prevented things going from bad to worse when the tide came back in.

Sadly, not everyone was quite so lucky. -0Quite possibly members will have noticed the Blasted Trophy without giving it much thought. A previous and much missed commodore Hugh Foster-Taylor was always ready to give a hand on the Committee boat if and when needed. The only slight problem was that he did not get on with the cannons and preferred the shotgun. This he believed was quite safe because it only fired blanks. We all tried to convince him otherwise – it is not good to have a gun pointed anywhere near to you. Fortunately he always ended up firing it upwards so all was more or less well. Inevitably, one day he was standing under the flag gantry when he fired and was much chastened to see the ten minute flag badly damaged and smoking a warning maybe to race officers and their assistants. The blasted trophy is, of course, that flag. 65

I imagine there has been a lot more written about the more recent times, so I shall sign off at this point. Michael Wetton