Summer Report

Here in mid Argyll it's been a very mixed summer for sailing. We had a great spell of sunny weather in June, but with many days when there was either no wind at all, or a furious land breeze brought on by the heat. Then it seemed that summer had gone, and for a month there we had cold wet days, with a lot of easterlies, which here mean nasty squalls and no fun at all. The image above was taken by pals on one of the few recent good days.

We have had some interesting visitors to our loch. A month ago the extraordinary Kaos managed to squeeze her way into the head of the loch, the flagship of a Walmart heiress with, one understands, two skippers and a crew of forty two. The weather was dreadful that day, with little visibility and lots of rain, so it wasn't a surprise when she left and returned to warmer climes, where she was visited by environmental activists with pots of red paint. 

Around the same time, there arrived on our shore one of the oddest ships we've seen ever seen here, a reinterpretation of one of the oldest craft in the world, and the brain child of the guru of Ullapool. Arriving in bits, it took him some time to connect it all together, with what looked like scaffolding poles.

I declined the chance to spend a wet weekend on Eilean na Gamhna, the Isle of the Stirks at the head of our loch.

The weather improved the next day and the Admiral posted this image of her travelling fast.

Finally, a visit from a ship that would suit fine, if one were seeking a live-aboard and had a bit of cash.

Built by Hall Russell of Aberdeen in 1963, she's one of the last of the fine, stylish cruisers that Scotland once produced in great numbers. Now named Jura II and sailed by her hands-on owner, Cameron McColl, it was lucky that we had a fine morning for me to get out for a photograph.

The lack of good sailing days hasn't bothered me too much, as I've been very busy with the publishers of my book on the magical fleet of Scottish Islanders, one of which, Stroma, adorns the top of this blog.  I'll soon be in a position to reveal full details, so, if you're interested in traditional boats and the folk who fall in love with them, watch this space! In the meantime, see my last post for information on the Scottish Yachting Archives.

The Scottish Yachting Archives

William Collier and David Gray

I’m just back from a fascinating visit to the Scottish Yachting Archives, run by my old friends Dr William Collier and Antony Harrison.

My association with William and Antony goes back over thirty years, to the time they acquired the business of G L Watson & Company Limited. The founder, George Lennox Watson, pioneered the idea of a pure yacht design company not associated with a working boat yard. This meant that you would get a well engineered design that could then be taken to any of the ship yards and boat builders operating around the Firth of Clyde for tendering. By contrast, builders such as the Fifes would expect a client to have them carry out the whole operation, from initial discussions to launching your yacht from the muddy shore at Fairlie.

Despite these different approaches there was no hostility between Watson and his contemporary, the third William Fife, the latter frequently building the former’s designs and both no doubt benefiting from the other’s ideas. There have been numerous articles written about the relations among one of these brilliant men and the third member of Scotland’s great boat design trilogy, Alfred Mylne, who was trained by Watson and left to form his own company, again a pure design agency, at the age of twenty four. I and others have written about this elsewhere; my own view is that the idea of conflict between Watson and Mylne has been at least partly stirred up by some of those who followed, to nobody’s credit. While Mylne lived until the late 1950s, his mentor Watson worked himself to death at the age of 51 in 1904, so there have been no living witnesses to speak for him. ‘S e saoghal beag a h’ ann, it’s a small world, as the Gaels say, and my own view is that there would have been enough work to keep all of these fellows too busy to spend time squabbling. The good news is that their successors are on the best of terms and it’s not true to say, if it ever was, that “Mylnes don’t drink with Watsons”, as the lead photograph shows.

William and his opposite number at Mylnes, David Gray, share the ambition of keeping the surviving records and artefacts safe for posterity, despite the truth that such things are expensive to preserve and there’s almost no chance of profit from old drawings. Having said this, many of those plans are capable of producing fast, safe, wholesome boats, as we saw exactly a year ago at the Fife Regatta, when Hubert Stagnol launched his lovely recreation of Watson’s Red, the first one design in the world, into Scottish waters at Portavadie.

Red at the Fife Regatta, photo from Marc Turner

The archives also contain, at the more extreme end, a few designs that were never built at all, perhaps because the building techniques and materials then available couldn’t have made them strong enough. There have already been a few recreations of boats actually built, German Sonderklasse and American carpetbaggers being examples, using modern epoxy resin techniques. While Watson preferred to concentrate on sea keeping ability, the Fife archives contain several enticing possibilities for those seeking pure fun.

So, to the Scottish Yachting Archives, located in one of Glasgow’s many cultural hubs, an old industrial building that is now home to many in the arts and creative sectors, next to the historic Forth and Clyde canal.

I was astonished at the sheer volume of materials, from actual drawings, working notes and specifications, to builder’s half models and client’s full models, to volumes of records, correspondence and the occasional fragment of an actual vessel. Families have donated their albums of photographs, while my friends have examined auction catalogues at home and abroad to locate and bid for anything relevant. Surprise finds have included a model, made for an aristocratic client, found in a sale of agricultural machinery in Switzerland.

The unit in the north of central Glasgow is very much a working hub, rather than a potential museum that people can drop into, so the more obvious public benefits will be seen in what emerges in due course from the analysis and research that I saw going on. One aspect of this will be a series of published works on aspects of yacht and boat design and construction in the Scottish golden years, for which purpose my friends have established a publishing imprint. This has led me to the best bit of serendipity to come my way in years!

I bought a Scottish Islands Class yacht, designed by Alfred Mylne, when in my twenties, as an affordable way to get afloat, but ended up keeping her for over forty years, during which time such little ships acquired the status of classics. Towards the end of 2010 I conceived the idea of writing a history of the class and to this end set up a blog, Scottish Islands Class, which in turn led to an initial draft of a book three years later.

It then took a further decade to follow the leads that arrived in online comments, before I was in a position to start propositioning established publishers. The results were in virtually all cases the total absence of even an acknowledgment. A couple of very small operations did reply, negatively but at least politely. Learning of William’s ambition to start an imprint was therefore a piece of unimaginable good fortune, especially when he read the text and decided to go with it.

On the face of things, the Scottish Islanders may seem to be something of a niche interest. Only a dozen were built and there are few survivors from among the early sailors, although three nonagenarians shared their memories. Because of this I have broadened the scope.

The work starts with something of a social history of some of Glasgow’s families at play a hundred years ago, then takes us through their struggles as the survivors returned to sailing after the war and finally moves into our times, when a new generation now cherish these remarkably sea worthy and fast little yachts as basic cruisers. I’ve added in a few west coast anecdotes and sketches for good measure. If I’ve sparked your interest, please feel free to send me a message by commenting here.

Gigha on the West Coast

Utterly lovely video of my old friend Scott and his son on their yacht Gigha. She's a couple of years younger than my Stroma.

The footage towards the end reminds me of sailing over the same waters in Stroma, in similar conditions, in the Summer of 1977, tramping along in a good breeze with no worries, knowing that these old ladies know the coast better than we will ever do and will always look after their custodians.

It's great that another generation is coming through to experience the truly civilised behaviour of a properly engineered, if unengined, little ship.

Watch the video here:


The Raeburns on Gigha

Sell wot you got, not wot you ain’t got…

This is the second guest post from Richard Pierce and contains a lot of thought-provoking stuff.

Sell what we’ve got….not what we’ve not got!  I was stopped in my tracks when I heard this clear order from the production manager to the marketing department of the competent manufacturing company I worked for in my early 20′s. And the absolute wisdom of those words has rung in my ears ever since a project I embarked on in the early 1990′s.

The mantra works in a number of ways, but fundamentally it says deal with certainties, not possibilities.

In the early days of my own boatbuilding business we had few orders, but it was immediately clear to me I should use my time to produce boats, solid products that had a value that could, sooner or later be realized. If a day passed with no product a day was lost that could never be regained. We duly started to turn a profit.

Without a sample available, winning a customer is much more difficult, so a substantial part of each day was spent creating new boats. For the first few months these were capitalized by a bank loan of £500, sufficient to cover the material costs of 4 small dinghies in those days. Within 6 months the loan was repaid, and we never used credit again, preferring to re-invest the proceeds of sales in more tools and materials.

After 10 years trading this model was providing a steady if unremarkable income for a few faithful helpers and me. A flow of orders flowed from the distinguished house-style of our product, which was clearly different from anything  anyone within hundreds of miles of our sales pitch was offering. We were building beautiful race-winning yachts.

Then the catastrophe happened. I was lured into a contract to build two racing yachts, just a little larger than those we had been turning out regularly for a few years. Armed with hundreds of photographs and drawings of  typical and contemporary 5-5metre class (34ftLOA) racing yachts I gave a fixed price, and set to work.

CAD machine printing was a new innovation at that time, and in lieu of a  bulky envelope of sweet smelling dye-line construction  drawings, the first package from the designer was a roll of drawing plastic showing the sections, neatly and accurately printed full size, followed by many feet of fax. Precise in some ways, but not a firm base for a contract I later realized….

Time being of the essence (the yachts were to be delivered six months hence to Norway for the World Championships) we set to with little other than a small scale profile drawing showing the station locations and the luxurious, full size, planking-reduced sections to work from. To save time and money the designer’s proposal was that we would remove the decks and cockpit soles from 2 old 5.5′s and install them ready fitted out to the new hulls and keels.  Retaining the old sailnumbers would also avoid the substantial payment of a building fee to the IYRU, an organization to which one of my customers was a past chairman!

The new hull building proceeded apace, with slight delays occuring with the delivery of the designer-specified non woven tri’axial glass cloth, a material I had no previous experience with. (In the event this material needed so much epoxy to fill its interstices its doubtful it was, in practice, any better than a conventional flat weave low-crimp cloth).

 

At this point line drawings for a bulb keel arrived… at the last possible moment, with some further details later by fax. A pattern had to be built and delivered to the lead keel foundry, Henry Irons in Cornwall some 388 miles distant. The shape was significantly more complex than anything seen in the 5.5 class before, and so the pattern took twice as long to make.  Apart from superior hydrodynamics the designer was aiming to place the CG lower than conventional, which meant that a hollow stub keel had to be built into the hull.

The fabrication and installation of these elements took way longer than the usual 5.5 arrangement (which was simply to bolt a fin onto a flat on the bottom of the canoe body using big washers and ten or a dozen bolts ready cast into the keel). Apart from the enhanced difficulty of ensuring perfect alignment, many hours of extra manufacturing were involved in this ‘new’ layout

Did I mention a call from the foundry? The lead castings turned out significantly heavier than designed, and so had to have the top 4″ removed, to be replaced by deadwood. Another small job in itself that multiplied the time needed to fit the keel. At this point I had to move the yacht hulls to other premises with the benefit of an overhead crane… the finished & painted hulls could not be simply lifted onto their completed fins standing on a trailer. This also complicated the painting  process… each boat took 8 hours of almost continuous paint spraying.  I climbed on and off 2ft high benches to reach from deck edge to keel sole, round the boat 6 times. Painting just a hull or keel is very easy by comparison.

Fitting the keels did not bring the job to completion… another first for these yachts was the inclusion of a trim tab. As all yachtbuilders know, fitting, fairing, flapping and pivoting a tab or rudder to the trailing edge of a keel is a highly skilled job. The final sting in the tail was a call for existing rudders to be modified. These would be extended in depth to almost the full draft of the yachts, with a modified foil section. Sometimes its easier to start from new!

Further delays were encountered when special chainplates had to be manufactured… the fabricators did a great and prompt job, but I was frustrated that the drawings were not available at the outset of the contract. Off-the-shelf parts also caused frustration… specified stock rudder bearings from an American manufacturer with a UK agent arrived only after much chasing on the telephone. What a waste of time. At a late stage new masts from an untested alloy were specified, and when the tubes were drawn they proved almost impossible to drill to mount fittings!  Fortunately this was outside the scope of my contract.

In the last month before delivery another insideous, unforeseen factor grew out of control. With time slipping away one owner started to call on their newly invented mobile phones, not just once but many times a day, each time with another good idea. I estimate I took over 150 calls, 75 hours, during that last month, with no positive benefit to the yachts.

Even loading a yacht on a trailer into a container sounds simple… in the event it would have been easier to tow the yachts to Norway behind the trusty Scimitar!

I learned very painfully that I should always keep a diary of additions and variations to contract, however insignificant they might appear at the time. In this instance each variation from the conventional seemed almost trivial, but collectively they would have been my downfall had it not been for other trade. From that time onwards, customers were welcome at the yard after 4 on Friday afternoon to inspect progress, meet or phone to agree variations to the contract. All other time was ringfenced for construction.

The ability to build a beautiful boat is not sufficient to ensure a fruitful future in boatbuilding. Skills in sales, estimating, accounting, purchasing, man management, planning, contracting and transport are equally important elements; ignore any one at your peril.

Sell what you’ve got…. this does not necessarily have to be something you have completed, it could be a skill or experience you have already acquired, but  whatever, it should be something of which you are in complete control of every last detail, from drawing to finished specification. Something you have in stock.  The most reliable sub-contractors will sometimes be unable to deliver, but then its your head on the block, not theirs.

Happily 20 years on, the yachts have new owners, are re-named and sailing in the Netherlands, see the picture at the top of this post.

Comment by Ewan

There are at least two lessons here. Not only should you only sell what you can deliver, but when you have no client in view you must keep the yard busy by creating something you can sell later.

A good example of the latter is the beautiful Rosemary IV built by William Fife III when the Fairlie yard was temporarily out of orders. The result was not only a lovely work of art, still sailing today, but one of the few examples of what the designer really wanted to produce, unconstrained by the troublesome requirements of a customer. I've written about this before, here: The designer unconstrained

A similar episode happened when I was building Sonas to a design of the late David Ryder-Turner (David was indirectly responsible for Richard and I meeting up, but that is a story for another day!). By the late 1980s orders for wooden yachts were few and far between and the McGruer yard had been suffering like many others. Under a scheme funded by public money the yard was persuaded to build a little yacht on spec and to engage some trainees in the process. David readily agreed to do the design work, I suspect gratuitously, and four young people were duly signed on for the duration of the build. The result, the lovely Amber, was sold before she was completed. Sadly no lessons were learned by management, who failed to cash in on the new talent that had been acquired. Amber will remain for all time the last wooden yacht ever produced by this once great yard. 

The Royal Windermere Seventeens - a guest post by Richard Pierce

       Many predicted the demise of the Royal Windermere 17 restricted class through the 1970′s as race          turnouts dwindled, and mass-produced glassfibre boatbuilding boomed.  Indeed the National Trust        conserved a couple of yachts in sailing order as an important Lakeland icon, fearful that the heritage        would be lost. The yachts could be hired from Fell Foot Park by the half day. 

Then in 1981 David McCann asked Ian Howlett to design a new 17 for Richard Pierce to build. Freedom, no 44 won her first race, and absolutely dominated the fleet in her first season. Not only was her hull form a significant development in the class, her construction revolutionised the structural integrity (and maintenance needs) of wooden racing yachts, and revitalized the class. 

Freedom’s launch heralded an unprecedented decade of  excitement, growth, and development. A flurry of yachts were brought out of retirement and restored, some half a century old, and just a year after Freedom’s launch Brian Ellis ordered Falcon, no. 45 during the excitement of the 1983 America’s Cup. The class hastily (and sadly… rp) ruled against winged keels when it was rumoured that the new yacht would sport this feature! 

Throughout the class history America’s Cup designers have been called to draw Windermere 17′s.  Alfred Milne, David Boyd, Arthur Robb, and Olin Stevens are all represented, and until the late 1960′s Windermere 17′s hull forms resembled 12m yachts of the day.  But at this point RWYC sadly ruled against the newly emerging bustle. This feature would have reduced the building cost and maintained the handling character of older yachts.

Un-noticed by most, the reason for Freedom and Falcon’s superiority was largely down to a reduction of wetted area, achieved by moving the rudder post forward and thus shortening the keel. While significantly reducing skin resistance, this had the unfortunate consequence of increasing the likelihood of stalling the rudder with attendant loss of control. Ian’s later designs incorporated a skeg behind the rudder which helped alleviate the unfortunate characteristic, and Freedom and Falcon were modified in due course.

The 1984 season opened with the launching of Falcon, sadly disqualified from her first race for a pre-start port & starboard incident involving a boat from another class that unsportingly strayed into the the starting area and forced its right of way.  But thereafter Freedom’s absolute superiority was challenged and the remainder of the season was hard fought between the two new yachts. The photo shows a typical finish at the Henholm line after several hours of close fought racing!

Authenticity versus Modernity

People often say, with reference to their favourite designer (Watson, Mylne, Fife ...) if he'd only heard of carbon fibre he'd have used it. It's rather trite, like saying the Vikings would have used epoxy instead of moss to caulk their seams and the Picts would have been far happier with fibreglass coracles than skin ones. Readers of the Jack Aubrey stories will know that only under something like the post system, which placed senility at the top level within the Lords of the Admiralty, would one deliberately hold out against progress. Even they gave out in the end when it stared them in the face, or rather the stern, as happened when HMS Rattler won her tug of war against the Alecto in March 1843, finally demonstrating to even the most afflicted of their Lordships that propellers are better than paddles.

I had the chance to spend a weekend reflecting on the issues of mixing modern materials and old boats just after September Eleven at a conference in Monaco, attended by many from throughout Europe but virtually none from the States, for obvious reasons, apart from Olin Stephens, who had spent a good bit of that Summer in the Mediterranean.

We had found the invitation from the Principality a few months earlier behind the door of our retreat in a remote corner of Argyll, addressing me as the President of the Scottish Classic Yachts, an organisation that I had not heard of until then, but that I was pleased to establish immediately.

Anne and I will always remember the wonderful hospitality we enjoyed that weekend and the sights that we saw. We had not previously seen the sea being hoovered by floating vacuum cleaners to remove all traces of late night revelry, nor hills with lifts inside them to save the weary feet (how many Munros could visitors bag with such devices, were the Scottish Government only to fit them here). There were extreme contrasts of style and naffness, at one end the Clubhouse with its glittering crystal gantry and elegant, solicitous, tuxedo-clad bartender, at the other a harbour parade of Rivas chauffeured by dark-suited Italian industrialists, their, usually somewhat younger, ladies taking part in a "Princess Grace Look-alike Competition".

The conference had a serious purpose, however, to consider and vote on proposed  new racing rules for adoption by the CIM (Comite Internationale de la Mediterranee) introducing a "co-efficient of authenticity" in terms of which yachts would be handicapped for racing on the basis of the extent to which "inauthentic" materials had been used in construction or restoration. This followed a number of races in which the fifteen-metre The Lady Anne, with carbon fibre in her top-mast had trounced the Tuiga, the club yacht of the Yacht Club de Monaco. (The thought did occur that the latter's crack English crew disciplined by a certain Mr Goss had had something to do with vanquishing a slightly more laid-back local team.)

Simply stated, the new rules required a yacht that contained certain materials, whether or not critical to her speed (formica in the galley perhaps an example of the latter) to carry a penalty of a percentage of a varying amount dependent on significance.

In the course of the discussions, which I attended while Anne marvelled at the wonders of the harbour and its denizens, it seemed that there was a clear divide between the Northern Europeans and those from the Mediterranean. (Perhaps some of us felt that we wouldn't be invited back anyway.) Our Swedish friends pointed out that many old square-metre boats were maintained by youngsters who could not afford authenticity. I felt greatly in sympathy, as I was then in my sixth year of the restoration of Stroma, using the best materials I could afford. (I've already written about that project, here Reflections on the Scottish Islanders) Their and my mild reservations were supported by a charismatic senior yachtsman from Britanny, whose considerable personal wealth gave him the credibility in that company to point out forcefully that prohibiting the only materials that many enthusiasts could afford would render the sport ridiculously exclusive and kill it off in the longer term.

At the end of the weekend there was a delightful dinner in the clubhouse and the next morning we were driven back to the airport by one of the royal bodyguards in a Lincoln with tinted-glass windows. We were also informed that the measures had been duly passed.

A problem may have been resolved for those competing in races along the South of France but for the rest of us it remains. So far I've highlighted the question of money and for me affordability wins hands-down. A generation or so ago yachting was truly the sport of the super-rich and we must avoid going back there, or the sport will stifle itself with exclusivity. What are the other issues?

Authenticity has a number of facets. In its purest form perhaps it should be confined to museums, although the treatment of the Cutty Sark shows another way forward, preserving the artifact while enhancing the visitor experience with proper access by use of modern technology. At least one hopes so, but of course only time will tell.

Elsewhere these competing aims, conservation and visitor experience have conflicted disastrously. The old City of Adelaide, latterly Carrick, sat more or less happily afloat in Glasgow until after a few sinkings, from which she always recovered, and some complicated political intrigues, the details of which have never been disclosed to the tax-payer who ultimately paid for them, she found herself in the lower Clyde where, contrary to much professional advice, she suffered the fate of being hauled on a slipway to dry out for the first time since her launch in 1864. A dubious visitor magnet was created at the cost of the ship herself, which proceeded to destroy herself over the following years.

The lesson is that in pure conservation terms some things should be left where they are, perhaps even if that is on the bed of the sea in some cases.

People are very emotional about pedigree too and will value something that is demonstrably old even in the face of evidence that perhaps most of it isn't. It may be true that a hundred or so years ago a client presented William Fife III with a hatch picked up from the shore after a storm and simply said "please repair my yacht". More recently it's certainly true that after the Barnato Bentley known as "Old Number One" sold for £10 million the purchasers, a company financed by a Mr Kohji Nakauchi refused to pay for it on the grounds that the car had been rebuilt so many times it was no longer the original. The purchaser lost and the case report is a splendid piece of judicial writing by Mr Justice Otton, worth reading, here The Case of Old Bentley Number One

The sad thing in all this is that the value in the works of our great designers should be precisely in the designs that they produced, rather than the original manifestations thereof, but the marketplace says that it isn't. Until it does many of those fantastic designs will be destined to remain on the page rather than on the water.

The Other Fyfes

The Fyfes of Bute

A great deal has been written about the legendary Fifes of Fairlie, the three generations of craftsmen who produced some of the loveliest yachts ever seen. Many of these are of course still around, a few in original condition but mostly re-incarnations and a few entire new-builds. In fact this talented family were spread much more widely than just around Fairlie and this post is an attempt to commemorate one of the other branches of the family which has been somewhat eclipsed by their more famous relatives, namely the Fyfes of Bute. The above appears to show this family of three brothers and some of their workforce in their yard on the shore at Ardmaleish, near where Alfred Mylne was later to establish his Bute Slip yard.

In her well-known history "Fast and Bonnie" May Fife McCallum recounts how:-

"A cousin [of William Fife I] John, who was a carpenter in Ardrossan, and his wife, both died about the same time, and an uncle in Ardrossan took care of their three sons. Apparently these orphaned boys were not happy in this household and walked from Ardrossan to Fairlie, a distance of about ten miles, to throw themselves on the mercy of their father's cousin. He took them under his wing and employed them as apprentices. On completion of their apprenticeship they crossed to the island of Bute where they set up a successful boat building business at Ardmaleish."

This struck me as a slightly romantic tale of Victorian hardship and kindness and I wondered if in fact the boys were transferred by agreement not just in order to be trained but also to add much needed workers to the rapidly expanding Fairlie yard. I decided to try to discover a little more from the records.

I find ancestral research fascinating and have had a lot of pleasure, for example, in tracing my own tribe back about eight generations. A few years ago this sort of research would have entailed numerous visits to the national and local archives and been too time-consuming for anyone with a career to undertake. Now thanks to some excellent websites matters are much easier.

There are still pitfalls, such as confusions over spelling and the tendency for families to favour particular forenames. There was also a Scottish tradition of naming later children after earlier ones who had died, which doesn't help the historian. Both of these aspects can be found in the Fyfe/Fife history, with forenames such as John and William being favoured.

According to May Fife McCallum a John Fyfe was born in Kilbirnie in 1743 and moved to the Earl of Glasgow's Kelburn Estate to work as a wright in 1770. He and his wife Janet, nee Fyfe and probably a cousin had at least six children of whom four sons, John, James, William and Allan followed their father's trade, William becoming the famous William Fife I. She goes on to record:-

"It appears that John Fyfe Junior, the eldest son of John the wright on Kelburn estate was building fishing boats at the beginning of the 19th century. Old customs records list fishing boats built by him at Fairlie and registered at Irvine, the local port of registration at that time. As a youth William Fife, born in 1785, may have been attracted to his older brother John's business, and thus began his introduction to boat building."

Nothing more is said of this John Fyfe Junior and I was intrigued to find out if he could possibly have been the father of the three orphans, whose names I already knew were John, James and Thomas. I discovered the following, from the 1841 Census:-

This establishes two things. Firstly this John is not John Fyfe Junior, as he was only thirty in 1841. Secondly he was an established shipbuilder, not simply a carpenter. A further search showed that he died from jaundice on 14 May 1848. I couldn't find his wife's date of death. Note that John's brother James is living in the house, as he features later in this story.

A look at the 1851 Census showed that the boys weren't living with William Fife I at that time. Here is the entry for that famous household:-

So where were they? A further search shows two of them in Ardrossan, John a ship carpenter lodging at number 5 Harbour Street and James with his uncle James next door, still an apprentice. It also confirms that both were born in Fairlie. I haven't managed to trace younger brother Thomas and it seems the youngest, Daniel, had passed away.

This seems to confirm that far from being helpless little orphans the brothers were useful, fully or at least partly trained ship carpenters by the time they moved back to their place of birth in Fairlie and joined the workforce of William Fife I. Nor did they stay there long, for by 1856 a large wooden building had gone up on the shore at Rothesay, the Red Shed, probably not actually red in colour but named for the red rocks on which it stood. Here is Alexander Wilson's depiction of it.

On the front at Rothesay in June 2003 during the Fife Regatta I made the acquaintance of a delightful and well-informed lady, who turned out to be Miss Jean M Fife, perhaps the last surviving member of the Bute Fyfe family still in Scotland. I kept in touch with her and she kindly supplied much more information, with permission to publish it as I saw fit. What follows is based on her research in local libraries, conversations with local residents and so on, but not least her own memories of her family and a lifetime of holidays on Bute.

It seems that there were two James Fyfes building boats in Rothesay in the mid 1850s, described as Senior and Junior, but with only half a generation between them. This suggests that Uncle James (born about 1816) had moved from Ardrossan and nephews James (born 1832), John (born 1833) and Thomas (born 1838) had crossed from Fairlie to join him.

These Bute Fyfes were an industrious bunch and built almost anything that could float, apart from yachts. In his "History of Rothesay and its People" Dr Lawson records:-

"The Red Shed was below the level of the road. What is now the [New Rothesay, later St John's] manse garden was the ground on which the larger keels were laid of smacks of a goodly size. Smacks, fishing skiffs and rowing boats (also small boats with round sterns and one sail) were the craft built by Messrs Fyfe. There would be a number of new boats lined up on the ground on the margin of the roadway extending to the ladies' bathing place (now Isle of Bute Sailing Club). Behind the ladies' and gents' bathing places (the old bathing station) the land was lower than the roadway. This depression was used in winter time for the laying up and storing of small rowing boats."

On 13 June 1857 The Buteman announced:-

"On Wednesday last there was launched form the boat-building yard of Messrs. Fyfe a beautiful craft of the gigger rig, c. 20 tons, property of Mr Thorburn, Farmer, Isle of Muck. She was named "The Islander's Bride" by Miss Richmond, daughter of Mr Richmond, Temperance Hotel-keeper, Rothesay and is intended to carry produce of the isle of Muck to Tobermory, the nearest market port in that district, the owner being the lessee of that isle. She has a very faviurable appearance and, considering the cost she is built for, promises to be a swift sailing craft and a credit to her young and enterprising builders."

This would have been one of the first larger vessels built by the family, but they went on to greater things. In April 1858 the Buteman again:-

"Launch! On Tuesday afternoon there was launched form the building yard of Messrs Fyfe a sloop of c. 70 tons burden, the property of Mr Kelso of Arran. The vessel was name "Catherine Kelso." The launch was conducted with systematic accuracy and the vessel glided down the ways gracefully. We hope soon again to witness the launch of as large, if not larger craft form the same yard."

By 1861 the Census described James as a Master Ship carpenter, John as a ship carpenter and Thomas  as a mere journeyman. One can see that they all knew their station.


With the coming of the railways and the Clyde steamers Rothesay entered its heighday as a holiday destination for all classes of society. Wealthier families could afford to build or rent villas along the front, while more ordinary ones went into lodgings for the annual Glasgow Fair. There was terrific business for boat hirers well into the Twentieth century, in fact right up to the arrival of cheap package holidays in the 1960s.

After many years the road along the front at Rothesay was improved and the Red Shed was taken down. The Fyfes moved round to Ardmaleish, where they established their second yard on the site where there now stands a sea-food factory. Thomas (Miss Fife's great-grandfather) didn't join his brothers. Instead he concentrated on building rowing skiffs and in the 1881 Census is described as "boat-builder/hirer (17 boats)."

My grandfather used to take his family on holiday to Port Bannatyne and my  late father recalled that on such a summer's day in the 1920s they were out in a rowing boat off Ardmaleish Point when a whale appeared alongside the boat and alarmed the family. Fortunately my great-aunt Maggie, recently returned from her exploits in South Africa and quite fearless, sang to it and made it go away. It's very likely that the vessel had been constructed by the Bute Fyfes, but probably not by Thomas, as he eventually couldn't cope with an outdoor life and went to spend the rest of his life working in the yard at Fairlie.

The remaining Fyfes eventually concentrated on building fishing skiffs and three of James Fyfe's sons were working at Ardmaleish until the 1930s, by which time the boats were getting much bigger and designs were changing fast. Two of John Fyfe's sons were trained there, but George was drowned aged twenty in 1898 and  John emigrated to Canada in 1906. Most of Miss Fyfe's surviving relatives are now in Canada and the United States.

Anyone interested in finding out a bit more about some ancient Kennedys can visit http://www.kennedystory.blogspot.com

James Buchanan of Govancroft, potter and yachtsman

An enthusiastic supporter of the Scottish Islanders was James Buchanan, the owner of the Govancroft Pottery, which he founded in 1911. It was situated at 1855 London Road in the extreme East End of Glasgow.

He was born in June 1889, so was only twenty one when he set up the pottery. I am reasonably certain that his parents were Duncan Buchanan, a builder from Kilmichael Glassary in Argyll, and his wife Lilias. The 1911 Census has the family living in a substantial house at 199 Onslow Drive in the East End and James is described as a wright and builder, working for his father and his place of birth is given as Largs.

In the early days the pottery made nothing but utilitarian stonewares with a Bristol glaze and in 1922 was described by one rival firm as having almost cornered the market in jam jars. During the 1920s there were vicious trade wars among the Glasgow potteries. J & R Tennent the brewers had established the Possil Pottery to produce bottles for their beer, mainly for the Chilean export market, but that market collapsed and thereafter there was serious over-capacity, with the result that the potteries were often selling their wares more or less at cost. The General Strike and the Coal Strike of 1926 caused severe retraction in the industry with many companies going out of business and by 1929 there were only three significant Scottish potteries left, Possil, Buchans of Portobello and Govancroft, with the third doing best.

No doubt as a relief from the commercial stresses James Buchanan found the time to take up sailing and acquired the six-metre Sunshine, built by Fife in 1926. He then commissioned Alfred Mylne's Bute Slip Dock to build him an Islander and Iona was launched at the start of the 1931 season.

As is well known, even in a one-design class people get the impression that there are differences in boat speed. We saw this in my post about Herbert Thom, who sold his new boat Gigha and acquired the older Westra to prove a point. James Buchanan went the other way. In 1931 he managed just one win out of six places, while William Russell's Sanda ran Herbert Thom's Gigha a close second. Something similar happened in 1932 with Sanda again second  to Gigha and Buchanan managing two wins out of nine places and again in 1933 when Buchanan's total went up to three wins out of eleven places. When at the end of 1933 William Russell put Sanda up for sale James Buchanan immediately bought her.

1934 was Herbert Thom's first year with Westra and unsurprisingly he became class champion in her. Sanda was again runner-up, but under her new owner's flag. In 1935 the same thing happened, Sanda getting four wins out of twenty three places. By then Mrs Bergius was on the scene with Jura and was to provide very stiff competition, actually winning seven times but losing out on total places. Again in 1936 the winning order was Westra, followed by Sanda with Jura close behind. By 1937 Herbert Thom had moved into six-metres and the Glasgow Herald reported:-

 "JURA CHAMPION OF THE ISLANDERS

Mrs W M Bergius's Jura, sailed by the youngest crew on the Clyde, is the champion in the Scottish Islands class. The members of the crew are Messrs Walter and Cecil Bergius and Miss Margie Bergius, sons and daughter of the owner. With her total of 29 flags Jura shares the distinction with Froya of having won the largest number of prizes during the season. As was the case last year, Mr James Buchanan is the runner up with Sanda. Mr R K Sharps' Bernera and Mr A R Keith Thomson's Fidra have had the most successful season of their careers, with 24 and 20 flags respectively to their credit."

And here is an extract from the Glasgow Herald's review of 1938:-

"The Scottish Islanders as usual provided keen and interesting racing. Mrs W M Bergius's Jura again tops the class, but this year only by a very small margin from Mr James Buchanan's Sanda, which had 4 wins more than Jura, but 4 fewer flags. Mr R K Sharp's Bernera is again in third place, close to the two leaders and well ahead of the other Islanders."

Finally in 1939 James Buchanan got his reward and became champion with fifteen firsts out of twenty seven places, followed closely by Mrs Bergius. By this time he was living at Ferness in Largs and Uffa Fox recorded that he was a member of the Royal Northern, the Royal Clyde, the Royal Largs, the Royal Western etcetera. (I don't know if the etcetera was added by Uffa Fox to save space or if James Buchanan had forgotten which other clubs he belonged to, or felt them too unimportant to mention. There's nothing like taking your sport seriously!)

Racing then stopped for the War and in fact the rose bowl donated to the Class by William Bergius remained with the Buchanan family from 1939 until 2004, when they returned it to me as the class secretary. We had the idea that the surviving boats should compete for it in that, their seventy fifth year, during West Highland Week, but in the event only three boats turned up and we thought it more appropriate to return the bowl to Adam Bergius. The image at the head of this post, taken by the professional photographer Tim Wright, shows the three contenders no 4 Stroma, no 3 Bernera and no 12 Shona.

In 1946 racing resumed and Adam Bergius recalls that  

"from then on after the Saturday race Jura would be off down the Firth with her crew and out of this came the islander’s annual race to Colintraive, with first prize an oil painting of the winner by the accomplished painter James Buchanan of Sanda. Second prize was a 40oz decanter of whisky to be returned empty! I still cherish James’ painting of Jura bowling down the Holy Loch on an evening race with straining spinnaker and crew in their red sock caps. These were jolly occasions when  most  competitors slept in Colin Rae’s hotel but the Juras had to slum it aboard."

Before 1946, Govancroft's wares are the most ordinary of commercial and domestic stonewares. But from then on the range was massively expanded.  Ordinary stoneware, particularly for the kitchen, continued to be made but a series of bowls, pitchers and baskets was designed, often with dabbed colour under an opalescent glaze. It was as if, having seen his pottery from its foundation through the difficult pre-War years, James Buchanan now felt he could indulge his artistic abilities. Through the fifties and sixties the pottery would continue to innovate, producing ranges of decorative items for the tourist trade and some highly successful decorative flagons for the whisky industry, including coincidentally for the distillers Buchanans. I believe that the pottery eventually became so successful with this line that it was taken over, sometime possibly in the early 1960s.

Govancroft Teaset

Meantime James Buchanan continued to race Sanda until the end of 1949, when he sold her to Robert K Sharp, the long-time owner of Bernera. This was the second time Mr Sharp had sold his boat and immediately regretted it; the first time he had been able to buy her back.

Of James Buchanan's boats it seems that Iona no longer exists. There was a rumour that she was destroyed deliberately around 1980, for what reason and precisely how we do not know. Some reports are that she was towed out past Hunterston and scuttled, others that she was broken up on shore. It's unlikely that anyone would have sunk nearly two tons of precious lead. I would dearly like to know anything further about her. Apart from Westra she is the only missing boat.

Sanda was found in Mallaig a few years ago and has been acquired by Huw Jones, who recently informed me that he is looking for someone to take her on.

Start of the Tarbert Race at Hunters Quay

This image, from a photograph by Ian G Gilchrist, shows Sanda  just ahead of Dragon no UK 26. This Dragon, Argee, was built by Robertsons in 1937 for Miss Sheila Leitch, so we can approximately date the photo. (I suspect she may have been a member of the famous Tarbert sailmaker's family.)

Crinan Classic Boat Festival Part I

It's been a pretty mixed season for the Stromas, as we have had some pretty awful weather and when it's been nice and sunny there's usually been too much wind for social sailing. The storm in May had an unsettling effect and maybe we have not really wanted to be far away from our very secure hide-out at the head of a sheltered  little sea-loch. As I write this we're waiting for yet another blow and Poor Little Tam, the poet, has just sent a message "woe that ever I was born, to suffer the horrors of ex-hurricane Katia." And Stroma is still afloat, waiting patiently to be taken out. She was a bit happier in the picture above, waiting for a little Danish Oil to freshen up the toe-rails.

What we missed on quantity was made up for in quality however. Sometimes one grabs a few days of utterly idyllic sailing in perfect conditions of wind and sun, beautiful scenery and good company and such an episode makes the whole business of looking after an old boat worth while.

This happened for us in early July, when we went South to the fifth Crinan Classic Boat Festival, organised by Mike Dalglish and Ross Ryan. I was in two minds about going, because the previous four events have taken place in conditions that verged on survival at times. Last year's event was a horror. Given a bad forecast Stroma was left on her mooring and we took the Kelpie down by road, only to take her home a few days later after managing less than an hours sailing, or more accurately hanging on for dear life and frenziedly bailing.

This year I didn't have my usual crew, as they were all attending a wedding. Young John Wilson, who hadn't come along since 2006 (see An Innocent Pursuit), managed to prize himself away from wife, son and horse and come along. (He's not so young maybe, since we have been sailing together off and on since the early 1980s, but at least he's a bit younger than me.)

Thursday 30 June was a lovely day with a blustery West-north-westerly. It was too good a day to waste waiting for the tide, so we got underway in the late morning. I reasoned that it would take us a while to get down South against the tide to the Dorus Mhor and if there wasn't enough wind to push us through once we got there we would just have to sail about until slack water.

Under one reef in the main we had a fast but comfortable sail South and arrived at the Dorus Mhor even earlier than expected. We could see our destination a  couple of miles away on the other side of a mass of water boiling up against us. After a quick conference we decided not to hang about for slack water but to chance going through. Soon we were charging into the channel on an extremely broad reach on Starboard tack.

We were now presented with a tricky choice. Holding to the North side, near Craignish Point, would keep us out of the main stream, but ran the risk of a tidal eddy grabbing Stroma and giving us an accidental gybe, but keeping a safe angle to the breeze would soon bring us into an adverse stream running at about five knots. The solution was to go on towards the edge of the stronger stream, then gybe and reach back to the North side. Gybing in a breeze, when the skipper steers and issues commands, one hand hauls in the main-sheet, another tends to the running backstays and someone else looks after the jib-sheets is really quite easy. It's less fun when there are only two of you on board. Making sure you don't lose the mast is the priority, so our efforts weren't tidy. A few minutes later we had to gybe again, as we were now closing the Craignish shore at a great rate and it was obvious that we couldn't clear the point into Loch Craignish. Invigorated by the gybes and minus some pride and a couple of slides from the sail-track we were then clear of the worst of the tide and running fast to our favoured anchoring spot.

By late afternoon our ship was sitting nicely a hundred metres or so off the entrance to the canal and we were looking forward to the Festival's delights, not least of which are meeting old friends, making new ones and sampling the fine Bruichladdich that is a feature of these events.