Tore Herlin and the Juni boats

Tore Herlin is not as well known in this country as two of his creations, the tall ships Gladan and Falken. While chief architect to the Swedish Navy he enjoyed a parallel career as a designer of yachts and small boats inspired in large part by his wish to encourage sail training at all levels. The little yacht Juni, which I found in Stockholm in 2005 and brought back for restoration, is a "Pojkbat" or young persons boat intended for this purpose. 

The original Juni was built about 1935 and resembled the Swedish Starboat, a design that was adopted here with the addition of a counter for the Loch Long. She proved to be very fast and seaworthy for her size with the result that numerous copies followed, some in carvel mahogany and some clinker planked in oak. They were taken up by boat-building schools as a conveniently small project, so that the design was used to teach building skills, resulting in a boat which teaches sailing. My Juni was built in 1973 to the order of Sonja Herlin, Tore's daughter, to replace the original boat after she was destroyed in a fire.

I didn't know all this when I first saw Juni looking rather dejected in a garden in Dalaro. It was obvious that she needed a lot of work, but the quality of her original build shone through, crying out for restoration.

The story of her return to Scotland is one of the first posts on this blog and can be read here An Expedition to Stockholm. Only once she was safely here in Argyll was it possible to remove the furniture and floorboards to get a proper look at what needed to be done. This also gave me a proper understanding of the quality of the work done by the Storrebro School. The hull is of close-seam construction, that is to say there is no caulking or stopping between the planks. She has swept decks in teak, also a masterwork in small scale. Varnished mahogany topsides meant that any mistakes would be highly visible. The project was going to be more challenging than one on a larger scale.

Any restoration will take a lot of time and throw up problems that have not been met with before. A good way to proceed is to start with the routine but time-consuming jobs, removing old paint and varnish and so on, while researching the more difficult and novel tasks. The former work will have to be done anyway and the time involved mindlessly scraping and sanding gives one plenty of time to think and plan.

I won't bore the reader with all the details of what was done. The topsides, spars and internal furniture were all stripped down, to be refinished with oil and traditional varnish, the work producing plenty of thinking time. The difficult work involved dealing with two major structural cracks in the hull planking, combined with numerous associated broken frames. I was a bit worried in case this damage had occurred through normal sailing but it seemed more likely to have happened on shore, as Swedish clubs usually operate their own storage facilities and accidents do happen. Subsequently some discreet enquiries suggested that this was probably the cause, which was reassuring.

spot the eight replacement frame pieces

Juni was relaunched in June 2012 and there followed a couple of weeks of anxious pumping while she took up after about ten years ashore. She has proved to be a lively little seaboat, behaving in some ways like a much larger yacht but also very fast and responsive. She'll be ideal for day-sailing around the sheltered sea-lochs of mid-Argyll.

The lang skiffs are here

Only twelve hundred years or so after the Norsemen introduced the inhabitants to the sport of competitive rowing fleets of long narrow double-ended boats are appearing all round the coasts of Scotland.

An idea that sparked somewhere near the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther three years back has caught on, with over eighty kits of identical parts cut on a computer-controlled router and turned out by Alec Jordan from his workshop in Kirkcaldy, to date. As fleets turned out for regattas throughout the summer the project started to spread like a very benign virus, combining communities and their collective woodworking, organising and rowing skills.

Diverse groups are forming in rural and island communities, some already together through existing clubs and schools, others uniting through the love of boats and rowing. The idea is spreading abroad too, with several boats building in other parts of Europe such as England  and the Netherlands, also some in the United States and Australia. The first Skiffie Worlds will be held in Ullapool next July.

There are various formats to organise a build, but most seem to adopt the historic model of financing the boat through 64 shares, typically costing £60, then operating the finished skiff via a club. In truth very little organisation is required once the build has been done, most setting up a website for communications and booking the use of the boat.

In my corner of the West coast the Seil Skiff is well advanced and we hope to have her launched before the year is out. We adopted the sixty four share model to finance her and the community decided not to seek out charitable funds, something we're pleased about. You can follow the build on her website here:- www.seilskiff.org.uk

I feel privileged to be involved in an exciting and absorbing local venture, bringing people together in a productive way and hopefully leading to many happy days on the water.

The regattas to date have shown that these boats are very fast and seaworthy indeed. Races typically take place over a course of a couple of miles, with heats for different age groups. They also provide a huge impetus to local economies, the larger events attracting hundreds of participants and spectators.

For full information and plenty of photographs and more visit www.scottishcoastalrowing.org

The image at the top is by Paul Kennedy inspired by the Portobello skiff Jenny Skylark.

St Abbs Returned

 

Eight years after leaving Edinburgh College of Art Paul Kennedy is now well established in his studio in Glasgow's Merchant City. To date much of his work has been inspired by the city, depicting a narrative between the people and their surroundings. 

 

 

For the new work in his latest exhibition Paul has revisited St Abbs, a favourite holiday haunt of his family for generations, not only on trips finding new images but remembering those from his own childhood and also reconstructing and imagining a few scenes from the past caught in his Grandparents old black and white snapshots.

 

A recent change of emphasis from mainly figurative work to expressive painting has given him greater freedom to explore his use of colour. The old images being black and white allow him an unconstrained palette.

'Everything has its own story. I like the idea of bringing history into my painting in more ways than one. For me this exhibition is the start of a new direction, a discovery of something that has always been there and just brought to light not too unlike finding my Grans photo album'.

The exhibition is now on at the Billcliffe Gallery in Glasgow city centre. Paul can be contacted via facebook and his website is  www.paulkennedyart.com.

 

 

 

More Mystery Yachts

 

Another intriguing image has come my way, courtesy of David Bradshaw, who has been going through old family albums. 

David believes that the above image was taken at Helensburgh and I'm inclined to agree, as we can see a Clyde steamer at the pier to the left and the distant landscape opposite looks about right. It's obviously been regatta day, as the Firth is littered with the little livery boats beloved by generations of Scots Doon the Watter, many turned out by the Bute Fyfes.

As to the date and the design of the two interesting little yachts in the foreground I've got some ideas but don't want to spoil the fun.

To date we've had a 100% success rate in finding the mystery yachts (see She's a Herreshoff  and  She's a Fife  ) so let's see how it goes this time.

On the Clyde with Spratt and McGlurg - A Story from the Past

Looking back today, with only a few months until with any luck a grateful government will start to pay my pension, 1995 seems like yesterday. It was the year the troops came out of Northern Ireland, Nick Leeson broke the bank (the first of many to do so) and team NZ won the Americas Cup for the first time. In 1962, when the events I'm about to describe took place the main characters Spratt and McGlurg must have had the same feelings about the end of the war in Europe (they always addressed each other and the world by surname only and I will do likewise). To me that was prehistory, my mother having kindly delayed having me until a year or so after my father got back from the Far East.

To the fourteen-year-old me Spratt and McGlurg were human dinosaurs, with their heavy harris tweed jackets, faded checked cotton shirts, the frayed collars held together with thin regimental ties, wide bullet-proof corduroy trousers and ancient brogue shoes. Going sailing the only concessions were the addition of tattered yellow oilskin jackets when the seas started coming over, a yachting cap and of course  the shoes. The latter got changed for faded porous deckshoes with treacherous "non-slip" soles guaranteed to slide you over the side in an instant and moth-eaten uppers bleached through years in the open. As I was to learn, in order to leave all grit and sand behind they only got changed in the tender, a highly varnished clinker-built rather tippy shell, adding an interesting dimension to the risky enough operation of getting aboard. Looking back these survivors from a former age were probably approaching fifty.

I blame my parents for my obsession with boats, as from the earliest age I was deposited at St Abbs for a summer month and there was nothing else to do but go on the water (I was actually there in utero, but recreational options are limited in that soggy environment). It was also one of the tragedies of my early life that my parents quite forgot to manage my condition by acquiring a yacht, or indeed any other kind of floating object. I was reduced to watching with envy as local boys went to sea in their tiny home-built square-riggers, about which I've already written here:- learning-about-sea-at-st-abbs

 

Back home I would scour papers and magazines to find affordable ways of getting afloat, cut out the advertisements and leave them lying around as rather unsubtle hints. One such clipping which depicted an ugly bulbous inflatable contraption made from rubberised canvas with a tiny sail hoisted on an aluminium tripod surrounded by a smiling suntanned superfit family about to climb aboard, photographed on some lake in the Black Forest, was selected only on the basis that it seemed  very affordable. Leaving this out on the kitchen table proved a serious mistake when I got a lecture on how Britain was missing out on the Wirtschaftswunder.

My nagging eventually did get a result. Probably through some business connection of my father's Messrs Spratt and McGlurg got to hear of my existence and must have decided to assess my potential value as an item of foredeck fodder. They were co-owners of a pre-war racing machine, the Griselda, which lay half a mile offshore at the entrance to a sea-loch twenty miles from Glasgow. As they had not tangled with Emperor Hirohito their respective children were a few years older than I was. This had enabled them to stage a mutiny, leaving their fathers somewhat crewless and sparking their interest in me.

Thus early one grey Saturday morning I walked round to McGlurg's grand residence. Soon we left the West End in his Rover, picked up Spratt and travelled westwards, me sitting in the back clutching a luridly bright brand-new pair of navy blue sandshoes with white "non-slip" soles as described above. Plainly my mother wanted me back alive. Apart from this my attire was precisely the same as normal shoreside, namely "short" trousers that descended to just above the knee, fabricated by Mother on her hand-driven Babcock machine from some heavy-duty grey flannel to a prewar pattern, knitted hose rising to the knee, shirt from some similar fabric to the "shorts" but marginally lighter, school tie and sweater. Of course in those days no-one even contemplated wearing any form of buoyancy aid.

During the journey Spratt and McGlurg conversed on sundry matters, ignoring my presence but occasionally referring to me as "the boy". We travelled at great speed, the trip punctuated by near accidents with other vehicles, eliciting occasional outbursts of strong language. (I did discover, however, that McGlurg had learned at some stage not to mess with the Glasgow tramcars, then in their last days. One of those would have made easy meat of the Rover.)

Soon we were parked outside the enormous stone exterior of the Royal Something Yacht Club, home to hundreds of lovely models (of yachts I mean) and oil paintings of past lovelies (more yachts). I got a glimpse into a dark, wood-panelled bar where a couple of denizens were contemplating the day over a post-breakfast gin.

The tender was launched, Spratt took the oars and pulled us out against a stiff easterly setting up a nasty short chop. The shoes were changed, then we climbed aboard the Griselda, a slender rule-beater from the early days. I knew nothing of the history then and no-one enlightened me, she was just a little floating world apart, a living thing still pretty despite her brightwork being not-so-glossy, and her metalwork rather green.

Any interest in the condition of the Griselda or her provenance soon vanished. Spratt and McGlurg were deep in animated conversation about "some ******* fool" who had left the main halyard at the top of the mast and how it could be recovered. Firmly gripping the shrouds it was possible to squint upwards and catch a glimpse of the mast truck swinging widely as the Griselda rolled, every movement at deck level magnified about thirty times at a height of forty feet, the errant shackle flying to and fro in crazy arcs against a backdrop of clouds scudding past. Within a minute or two the discussion turned to "the boy" and my hosts decided send me up for it.

Even bloggers must sometimes tell the truth and I cannot say that this was the day of my self-discovery as a top-mast man. In fairness I did make a few, rather feeble attempts, getting a foot on the boom, but hadn't a clue how to rise further. To make matters worse I was always hopeless at gym and have never had a head for heights. This probably saved my life, because so tragically wanting were my efforts that Spratt and McGlurg were soon discussing alternative plans, including towing the Griselda to a naval base some miles away, where there was a suitable dock.

Then inspiration struck and one of my tormentors announced "Jonny Brinkman will have arrived at the Club by now, let's get one of his boys to fetch it." Off went Spratt in the tender, rowing like an olympian and a little while and doubtless a couple of shoe changes later returned with a boy a couple of years older than me, built like an ape, who heaved himself up like it was part of his normal morning's exercise (and it may have been, for all I know), then sliding back down. When Spragg prised the shackle from his teeth he was able to give me a rather patronising sneer.

By comparison the rest of the day didn't feel too fraught with danger, although it could hardly be described as sedate. It was probably the first time I experienced that mild sense of panic before one gets underway as the sails whip and flap and the wind seems much stronger than it really is. Once freed from her chain the Griselda was off like the old thoroughbred she was, lying over and slicing the waves, spray and occasional lumps of solid sea coming over as the day progressed and the wind got up.

My second and thankfully final terror of the day was being ordered forward to catch the mooring, with a warning as if I needed it that the aforesaid denizens, no doubt now on their twentieth or thirtieth gins and suitably critical, would be watching. Suitably terrified I crawled forward along the foredeck and managed somehow to hang onto both yacht and mooring bridle long enough for Spratt to recover it and bring our adventure to a safe end.

Post Script

Strangely I did get invited back a few times and eventually got to like Spratt and McGlurg quite a lot. Spratt had been to the States a few times in the thirties with the Scottish sixes, but I didn't know that in time to ask him about it. Nor would either ever speak about what he'd done in the War and as they're both long dead now we'll never know. There's a lot of recent history that is in serious danger of being lost for ever if we don't take steps to preserve it, which is one of the reasons for this blog.

The image at the top of this post is by my talented nephew Paul Kennedy, whose website can be visited here, www.paulkennedyart.com

The smallest Gallery in the World, a very small Island and an Abundance of Progue

Today Easdale Island with its strange scenery and lovely wee cottages is a haven for artists and craftspeople and it's where the enterprising picture-framer Jan Fraser has just opened The Bothy, which may qualify for the title of the smallest art gallery in the world. Nephews Paul and Adam were among various well-known artists represented at the first show.

One of Adam's ship pictures has pride of place

The Editor and the Brother in 1954

Thomas the Lifeguard, serene in his perch

 Prints of the above and many more are available from The Bothy.

Easdale is so tiny that Hamish Haswell-Smith doesn't really rate it as an island, describing it in his book as a "broken-off outlier" from Seil, which in turn he doesn't see as a proper island, since the old ferry at the Tigh-an Truish inn was replaced by a bridge 220 years ago. As everyone probably knows already the inn got its name, which translates as "The House of the Trousers", because after the second Jacobite rising wearing the kilt became illegal, so islanders would stop there to borrow a pair of trousers for their visit to the mainland.

Easdale is smaller today than it was originally, as for several centuries it was populated by squads of diligent miners who blasted and chopped huge holes, hundreds of feet deep, bringing out millions of tons of slate that at one time roofed the World. 

 

 At its peak there were about five hundred residents on Easdale alone, with many more on the neighbouring islands. It's hard to imagine what life must have been like in these places, particularly on tiny outcrops like Belnahua, where bad weather could cut the workers off for months in winter. They lived in  slate cottages built by themselves and grew their own vegetables in miniature walled gardens, the very earth created by the workers by harvesting seaweed, bracken and dung, identifiable today from the lush weeds that flourish on what's left.

In such a slatey, tree-less environment it must have been seen as a gift from the gods when the sailing ship Norval, laden with a cargo of Canadian timber struck rocks on nearby uninhabited Insch Island in thick fog on the shortest day, 20 December 1870. A few weeks earlier she had left Montreal bound for Glasgow and would have been heading for the Mull of Kintyre, about thirty miles South of where she struck. Captain Taylor would have known from soundings and the fog that he was near land and may have been trying to give Ireland a wide berth. The entire crew got safely off and rowed the short distance to Easdale. Two days later the owner, Walter Grieve of Greenock, sent the steam tug Flying Meteor to attempt a rescue, but the Norval was found to be badly holed on a rock and on 5 January 1871 she broke up.

I've written before about the ancient art of The Progue. We can assume that the Lorn proguers were out in force as thousands of deal boards floated North past Oban and into the Sound of Mull, while Grieve's men tried to salvage as much as they could. By February the Glasgow Herald was carrying advertisements for the contract to transport the salvage to Glasgow for auction.

Walter Grieve was one of a family of diligent Scots, from Perthshire originally, who established themselves around 1837 in the cod fishery in St Johns, Newfoundland, then moved from 1855 into sealing and whaling. He commissioned numerous ships, the Norval being a large three-master being built by A McMillan & Sons at Dumbarton, on the site latterly occupied by the distillery, in 1864. His brother James Johnston Grieve was the resident partner at Greenock. He was prominent in promoting the development of the harbour and various public works in the town, was Provost four times and represented the town in Parliament from 1868 to 1877. In common with most incomers he found that his efforts weren't entirely welcomed in some quarters, but the effects remain and Grieve Road is named after him.

These mid-Victorian Scots were an astonishingly resilient, enterprising tribe of risk-takers as one can see from Walter Grieve's quick response to the wreck. Later his family suffered a financial ship-wreck as the records show that they were all sequestrated at Greenock Sheriff Court in 1895. Incredibly for the times they clawed their way out of bankruptcy in little over two years.

Back to our story, on Easdale the islanders seized the chance to acquire the main mast of the Norval, together with sufficient timber to construct a new hall for the training of the local militia. For the same purpose part of the old harbour was filled in with quarry waste to create a level drill field, the present-day village green.  .

Ten years after the wreck a storm burst through the thin curtain walls and the quarries flooded, drowning the machinery. The men survived but their livelihood was largely gone. Industry limped on with slate being chopped out of the accessible areas until the 1950s. By 1961 the population was down to 16, but it has gradually recovered and today stands at about 60, with many of the cottages also in use as holiday homes. The story can be found on www.easdale.org.

Today visiting Easdale, accessed by a two minute ride on a little ferry crewed by a three-legged dog, is a unique experience. Apart from the artists the island now has its own local history museum, the Puffer pub and restaurant and numerous curious relics of our industrial past. The old proguing habit survives too, as the recycled telephone box shows.

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.