I’m also not going to spend too much time on the voyage home back across the Atlantic, now Gipsy Moth III’s fourth crossing, except to note that Francis and Sheila were joined by Giles, by now sixteen and on summer holidays from Westminster. Both Sheila and Giles were uncomfortable and seasick for much of the voyage in heavy weather up to Force 9. Francis of course loved every moment, especially the quick time: ‘As we crossed the line of Plymouth breakwater it was five seconds past noon GMT and we had made the passage from Pollock’s Rip in 26 days, 12 hours 14 minutes. Even from west to east it was a fast passage short-handed’. And once Giles had got used to the rigours: ‘Before the end of the voyage he was a first-class foredeck hand. Giles had started the voyage as a boy, but finished it a self-reliant man.’
It was at this point in his life that Francis wrote his autobiography, The Lonely Sea and the Sky. It became a bestseller and has never been out of print. It finishes with these words:
Now I am impatient to return to the Beaulieu River and start my sailing trials. All my new ideas must be proved right or wrong before the spring of 1964. The single-handed race across the Atlantic starts on 23 May, and I believe that there will be a formidable entry for it. It seems to have fired the imagination of many yachtsmen, and so it should, if it is the greatest of all yacht races. I feel sure that my rivals will all be out after my title. However, I believe that with luck Gipsy Moth can go a good deal faster yet, and I look forward to a thrilling, fascinating race. What is more, I shall take my green velvet smoking jacket again, hoping that my new handling methods will be efficient enough for me to dine in style one night while keeping Gipsy Moth racing at her full speed.
Which neatly brings us on to his next and final race across the Atlantic, but not before I finally get to meet his favourite yacht, Gipsy Moth III.
It took some detective work to discover what had happened to Gipsy Moth III since 1963, when Francis took delivery of Gipsy Moth IV. Her story from glory to neglect to glory involved her being rescued by her current owner, Piers Le Marchant, from a rough life in Plymouth and brought to her current surroundings, in pride of place on her mooring outside his villa in the lovely Kouloura Bay in north-east Corfu.
When Piers’s wife, Silvia, learned that we were sailing in Greek waters she immediately invited us to sail over to Corfu, anchor in their bay, join them for lunch and have a look around what she calls ‘one of Piers’s moments’. Thus three months later Gillian and I find ourselves anchored in turquoise waters alongside a very satisfied-looking Gipsy Moth III lying to moorings. First we notice this plaque hanging off her stern:
GIPSY MOTH III
Designed by Robert Clark and built in 1959
By John Tyrrell of Arklow, Ireland for
SIR FRANCIS CHICHESTER
In 1960 he sailed her to victory in the first
Transatlantic Race for Singlehanders
Between 1960 and 1964 he crossed the Atlantic
Ocean six times, setting a new record for
Singlehanders in 1962 and taking second place
in the Singlehanded Race of 1964
‘I put that up to ward off the endless questions’, says Piers. ‘And sometimes to remind myself what she has done.’
My first impression on board is how small she is. Today’s yachts are so much more voluminous than those of fifty years ago because now they have to fulfil two roles: passage-making and holidaying – and often the passage-making is not much further than to the next marina. In Gipsy Moth III’s day, passage-making was all that counted; firstly, there were no marinas and secondly, the concept of yachting for leisure rather than racing had not yet arrived.
She also feels cramped because two months ago I sailed Gipsy Moth IV in the Solent and IV is so much larger than III, yet IV feels it is the right size for single-handing – maybe I’ve just got used to bigger boats. A look around any anchorage will show that the average size for a yacht is now 40 feet, the same as III, whereas in the early 1960s III would have been much larger than the standard length of 32 feet.
The author on board the revived Gipsy Moth III in Corfu
I suppose it’s also because I have spent the last two months on Vasco da Gama researching and writing this chapter, mostly, it seems, about Francis’s heroics in the endless Atlantic gales. When he describes hanging on as the counter (at the very stern of the boat) rises and falls 20 feet, I had an image of him standing, bracing himself and hanging on to something solid like a rail or post; in fact the counter is so small that he could grab it with both hands. At first this scaling down somehow diminishes his heroics; then, when the image of him hanging on the gale-swept counter is applied, it magnifies them.
Piers has restored Gipsy Moth III to her specification of 1964, when, as we shall see, Francis came second in the second transatlantic race. Down below, he has kept the original heads and galley and most of the layout except for the navigation station, which has been modified for today’s electronics. Everything you cannot see has been replaced and made modern: all the electrics, plumbing, tanks and power train. What is surprising in view of the narrow hull is the headroom at 7 feet; they had deep and heavy keels fifty years ago – again a boon in a rough going but a pain – almost an impossible pain – when trying to manoeuvre in a modern marina. On deck he has simplified the sail plan for ease of handling, just as Francis should have done.
Over lunch we chat about how all this came to pass.
‘It was as simple as seeing an advertisement in Classic Boat. I had my first sights on retirement and thought that at that stage I would like sailing trips. My son Edward is a wonderful sailor and of course I wanted to encourage him. Something we could do together’, he says.
‘But you chose the hard way, restoring a classic rather than buying new fibreglass.’
‘I just have always been into classics. Done a lot of classic car racing. And I just about grew up with the Chichester era, so it was connecting history in a way, I suppose. I couldn’t resist. I had what Silvia calls one of my moments. It was an impulse buy but a considered impulse, if that makes sense.’
‘So how long did it take? When did you start?’ I ask.
‘The restoration took nine years, I’ve had her sailing three years, so I must have bought her twelve years ago. 2002.’
‘So you sailed her here directly from there?’
‘No’, Piers replies, ‘I still have a day job’. He is high up at JP Morgan. ‘We tried at first keeping here in the UK, on the Beaulieu River near you. But then we did the maths of keeping a boat in England and the Med. I don’t want to sound skinflint, but…’
‘We did the maths too’, I agree. ‘The difference in mooring fees pays for an awful lot of easyJet flights. So a crew sailed her down.’
‘Yes, I was a grown man crying when she rounded the point and sailed into the bay.’
After a long lunch we somehow take the dinghy back for more photographs in better light. It is wonderful to see Gipsy Moth III live and alive after so many words and imaginings, to pull the tiller – still too heavy! – to haul on the rigging, which Francis grappled so enthusiastically, to kick back in the saloon where Sheila and Giles crossed the Atlantic too. What is so fine is that she has been so sensitively restored, so that she is not yet a venerable old lady floated out for show, rather a good old soul who can still put in good watch, but now has the pleasure of a family besporting themselves on and off her decks in ideal waters.
The 1964 Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race was a very different animal from the first one of 1960. The first race, with only four entrants, had struggled to catch the yachting and public attention until it actually started. The 1964 race drew fifteen entrants: eleven were British – including all four from 1960, two were French, one was Danish and there was one Australian. Whereas the 1960 race had been positively Corinthian, by 1964 sponsorship was everywhere – including on Gipsy Moth III. The Guardian had agreed to sponsor Francis in return for daily radio reports, the technology of which had also advanced t
o the point of reliability during the intervening four years.
Francis never said so, but I suspect he knew the game was up the moment he saw the French yacht Pen Duick II at Plymouth. If not then, then when he first saw her skipper, Éric Tabarly. Although Pen Duick II was the same size as Gipsy Moth III, she had been specially designed for this race; philosophically she was Jester writ large. Her mizzen mast was actually in the cockpit, so relieving her skipper of half his deck duties. Her foresails were permanently rigged on their stays. She carried no heavy long-range radio – and therefore no obligation to spend time composing and sending reports. She looked as if she had won the race before it even started. Then there was Éric himself, a serving French naval officer with official French government support, thirty-two, trim, fit and muscular – and already a well-known yachtsman.
They battled it out across the Atlantic but unless she sank Pen Duick II was always going to win. And she did, in twenty-seven days. It would likely have been twenty-three or twenty-four days had not Éric lost his self-steering after eight days. Francis at least came second and had the satisfaction of achieving his goal of breaking the thirty-day crossing – by three minutes – an amazing achievement in itself for a 63-year-old recovering from cancer sailing a yacht designed to be sailed fully crewed.
The purpose built racer Pen Duick II, Gipsy Moth III never had a chance
The archives from the Guardian don’t make particularly informative reading, as the daily reports only ever mentioned those yachts with radio equipment, the only ones able to report their position. Thus it seemed as if Francis was going to win again until the day before the finish, when the US Coastguard spotted Pen Duick II and it became clear that all the headlines had been guesswork. The conditions had been the most favourable yet; the gods still threw in the odd gale as a sop to Francis but the times were fast and the crossings, by comparison, uneventful. Francis’s own reports to the Guardian don’t reveal much that we didn’t already know: he was happiest in what most people would consider hardship and danger and unhappiest when conditions were balmy and undemanding. The final sentence of Gavin Maxwell’s review of The Lonely Sea and the Sky comes to mind: ‘I can feel nothing but admiration for his intense vitality, no matter what he’s trying to prove to himself’.
But the implications of the race are more interesting than the race itself. In 1964 France was going through one of its grumpiest periods: the aftermath of the loss of Algeria was still divisive, as was guilt from the Second World War capitulation, the economy was stuck, the gloire of France lost in the modern world. There was open talk of a military coup d’état. Yachting as a sport or pleasure was élitiste and hardly existed; Britannia, it seemed, still ruled the waves, big or small.
Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a French officer in a French boat won a famous French victory and it was if someone, somewhere, had flicked a switch. The newspaper Paris Jour led with ‘Thanks to Éric Tabarly, it is the French flag that triumphs in the longest and most spectacular race on the ocean, which the Anglo-Saxons have long considered their special domain’. General de Gaulle immediately awarded Éric Tabarly the Legion d’Honneur and he and Jean Lacombe – by now in a 23-footer – returned home to a hero’s reception.
The purpose built racer Éric Tabarly, Francis never had a chance
Pen Duick II’s victory fired a nation into yachting. Since then, long-distance ocean racing has been dominated by French boats and sailors, many of them superstars in France – even the exception, Ellen MacArthur, was based in France, speaks good French and has become a héroïne. Moreover, the French yachting industry now produces nearly half of all production yachts in the world and France is the biggest marine market in the world outside the US. French yacht designers are the most prolific and respected in the world. It seems that every French port and harbour has a marina, often subsidised locally, and crammed full of yachts, many of them British, escaping rapacious marina fees back home.
If Pen Duick II’s victory inspired the French yachting boom, Gipsy Moth III’s loss seems to have heralded the start of Britain’s yachting decline. In 1964 most yachts in UK waters were still locally built. British designers like Francis’s duo Robert Clark and John Illingworth, as well as Laurent Giles, Peter Brett, Arthur Robb and C.E. Nicholson were the most famous yacht designers in the world. But their traditional customers could afford the low-volume or one-off designs; when yachting became popular and the demand for volume grew, the British boatbuilders simply could not compete with the French – let alone the Germans or Americans.
The result is that whereas France claims to have eight million active sailors today, Britain has less than two million. In sense this is just as well as there is hardly anywhere affordable to keep a boat. Marinas are few and absurdly expensive – the reason why many British yachtsmen keep their boats cross the Channel and one of the reasons we keep Vasco da Gama in Greece. Like Piers le Marchant, we have done the maths and the 50–75 per cent savings of keeping a boat outside UK waters more than pay for the cheap flights out there.
Britain needs a new Francis or Éric – step forward Sir Ben Ainslie – but without affordability, yachting will never become a popular pastime in the UK as it is in France.
NOTES:
15. Still going strong with the fifth generation of Tyrrells, John and Billy, and now called Arklow Marine Services Ltd.
I hate being frightened, but, even more, I detest being prevented by fright.
CHAPTER 9
Gipsy Moth IV
A few days shy of New York, when it had become obvious that Tabarly in his specially built Pen Duick II was going to beat Francis to win the race, two other Chichesters shared a phone call. One was Sheila; the other was a cousin, Lord Dulverton, grandson of Sir Edward Chichester, the ninth baronet of Youlston and heir to the W.D. & H.O. Wills tobacco fortune. Tony Dulverton was very rich and equally sporting and a great philanthropist of imaginative projects.
‘Look here’, he asked Sheila, ‘why didn’t Francis have a new boat to beat this ghastly Frenchman?’
‘Two reasons, Tony,’ Sheila replied, ‘time and money.’
‘Well, the French are backing their chap all out. If British industry won’t back Francis, I jolly well will! Tell him I will provide him with a suitable vehicle for the next race. I want you to tell him that I want to come round and see you both.’ Click, one imagines.
But during those long and lonely transatlantic days and nights Francis’s thoughts had turned beyond the next OSTAR – and on to something far more ambitious: a record-breaking solo circumnavigation of the world. He mused on following the old eastabout clipper route around the capes of Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn. The tales of rounding Cape Horn in particular intrigued and scared him in equal measure: ‘Of the eight yachts I knew to have attempted it, six had been capsized. It not only scared me, frightened me, but I think it would be fair to say that it terrified me’. Then he added, tellingly: ‘I hate being frightened, but, even more, I detest being prevented by fright’.
Lord Dulverton, distant cousin and closer sponsor
While being nursed back to health from his cancer by Sheila and her prayers, Francis became inspired by reading about the Australia-bound voyages taken by nineteenth-century wool clippers. He began to collect stories for what would become his next book, Along the Clipper Way. The clippers took an average of 123 days to make their passage, so Francis set himself the target of making the passage in a hundred days. At first sight this would seem impossible. The maximum speed of a yacht is directly related to its length in the water: a sailing boat for the attempt would be around 50 feet (16 metres) long, whereas a clipper ship such as Cutty Sark is 212 feet (65 metres). And there’s the small matter of one old semi-sick man as crew versus several dozen strapping hearties working watches.
I decided that when the time came I would give out that I was trying to equal 100 days, a good round number, which people could understand. What I was really after was a voyage round the world faster than any
small boat had made before; but I did not want to say anything about this; I still had the feeling, inherited from the early flying days, that disclosing a particularly difficult objective was to invite failure.
What was the best time that I could hope to do this in? In 1964, in the second solo race across the Atlantic, I was beaten by Lieutenant Éric Tabarly of the French Navy, who had a boat specially built for the race; his speed was 105½ miles per day for the east-west crossing of the Atlantic. On the west-east passage home after the race I had my son Giles with me, and we averaged 126 miles per day. I reckoned that the clipper way would be more like the west-east passage across the Atlantic than the east-west. On the other hand, a passage of 14,000 miles was a very different proposition from one of 3,200 miles. However, I reckoned that 125 miles per day was a fair target, at least one that I could aim for, and hope to hit.
On his cancer recovery Fastnet sail on Stormvogel in 1961, Francis had sailed with the racing yacht designer John Illingworth. Illingworth’s own Myth of Malham had been its own revolution and Illingworth himself was at the height of his reputation. After the Fastnet he had redesigned Gipsy Moth III’s mast for the 1964 OSTAR and as they got to know each other he showed Francis a sketch for what amounted to a British Pen Duick II: a purpose-built single-handed racer Illingworth and his partner Angus Primrose called New York Express. Nothing had come of it; Francis was the only realistic customer and there wasn’t time, let alone money, to build and commission her before the 1964 race. But still, Francis reflected as Gipsy Moth III pounded her way towards New York, New York Express could be the basis of a Gipsy Moth IV.
Never Fear Page 26
