by Jonathan Coe
Well now.
If I am to make you understand what the figure of Donald Crowhurst meant to me, when I was an eight-year-old boy, then I must take you back – back more than thirty years, to the England of 1968 – a place, and a time, which already seem unimaginably remote. I’m sure that the mention of that year summons up all sorts of associations for you: the year of student radicalism, the counter-culture – anti-Vietnam rallies and The Beatles’ White Album and all of that. Well, that only tells part of the story. England was – and always has been – a more complicated place than people would have us believe. What would you say if I told you that, in my memory of things, the great hero, the defining figure of that era was not John Lennon or Che Guevara, but a conservative, old-fashioned, sixty-five-year-old vegetarian with the looks and bearing of an avuncular Latin master? Can you even guess who I might be talking about? Does his name even mean anything any more?
I’m referring to Sir Francis Chichester.
You probably have no idea who Sir Francis Chichester was. Let me tell you, then. He was a yachtsman, a mariner – one of the most brilliant that England has ever produced. And in 1968 he was a celebrity, one of the most famous and talked-about people in the country. As famous as David Beckham is today, or Robbie Williams? Yes, I should think so. And his achievement, although it might seem pointless, I suppose, to today’s younger generation, remains, in many people’s eyes, much greater than simply playing football or writing pop songs. He was famous for sailing around the world, single-handed, in his boat Gypsy Moth. He completed the voyage in 226 days, and most incredibly of all, during that time he made only one stop, in Australia. It was a magnificent feat of seamanship, courage and endurance, performed by the most unlikely of heroes.
I had the enormous good fortune to grow up next to the sea. I think you’ve visited the town where your mother and I grew up, haven’t you? Shaldon, it is called, in Devon. We lived in a large Georgian house close to the water. Shaldon itself, however, is built around a relatively modest saltwater inlet, and to get to the seafront proper you have to go half a mile up the road to neighbouring Teignmouth. And here you will find everything you might want from a seaside resort: a pier, beaches, amusement arcades, miniature golf, dozens of boarding houses and, of course, down by the docks, a lively marina, where yachtsmen and boaters of every description would gather every day, and the air was always alive with the whispering noises of masts and rigging as they creaked and shifted in the breeze. From an early age – ever since I can remember – my mother and father used to take me down to the marina to watch those comings and goings, the ceaseless ebb and flow of maritime life. Although we never sailed ourselves, we knew plenty of people who did: by the age of eight I was a veteran of several modest ocean voyages aboard yachts belonging to my parents’ friends, and had developed a deep schoolboy fascination for all things nautical.
No wonder, then, that Francis Chichester and his accomplishment loomed so large in my consciousness. Although we never actually made the pilgrimage along the coast to Plymouth to see him make his return landing in May 1967, I vividly remember watching coverage of the event – along with millions of others – live on BBC television. If I remember rightly, the normal schedules had even been cleared for the purpose. Plymouth docks and the area surrounding them were covered with swarms of well-wishers – hundreds of thousands of them. They cheered and applauded and waved their Union Jacks in the air as Gypsy Moth glided into the harbour, surrounded by launches carrying journalists and TV camera crews. Chichester himself stood on the deck and waved back, looking tanned, serene and healthy – not at all like someone who had spent the last seven and a half months enduring an extreme form of solitary confinement. It had been an occasion which made my heart swell with uncomplicated patriotic pride – something I cannot remember feeling very often since. And after that, I began keeping a scrapbook, full of cuttings about Chichester’s voyage and any other boating-related stories I could cull from the newspapers my parents favoured.
Those newspapers, I seem to remember, were the Daily Mail on weekdays, and on Sundays – along with at least half of the nation, it always seemed back then – the Sunday Times. And it was in the Sunday Times, on 17 March, 1968, that I read this electrifying announcement:
£5,000
The £5,000 Sunday Times round-the-world race prize will be awarded to the single-handed yachstman who completes the fastest non-stop navigation of the world departing after 1 June and before 31 October, 1968, from a port on the British mainland, and rounding the three capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn).
A race! And a race that would top Chichester’s achievement by subjecting the competitors to an even more extreme test of survival – a non-stop circumnavigation. Quite apart from the trial of seamanship involved, could anybody survive such an ordeal, psychologically? As I said, I had already sailed in one or two yachts. I knew what the cabins were like: surprisingly cosy, sometimes, and surprisingly well equipped, but above all tiny. Even smaller than my little bedroom at home. The fact that Chichester had lived in such a confined space for so long was, to me, almost his most impressive feat. It seemed incredible that these men were prepared to live like that for so many cramped, waterlogged months.
Who were these masochists, in any case? Already, after reading a few of the Sunday Times reports, I had concluded for myself that the strongest contender was a French yachtsman called Bernard Moitessier. He was a fabulous seaman – lean, sinewy, and totally dedicated to the life of the lone explorer. He had already sailed his 39-foot boat Joshua through the fearsome waters of the Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn, encountering (and surviving) terrifying storms in the process. It appeared that he was reluctant to enter the race, but under its rules, he had no choice: the Sunday Times had cleverly arranged things so that any sailor who set off round the world between June and October was a contender for the prize, whether they wanted it or not. I pinned my colours to Moitessier and even persuaded my parents to buy me an expensive hardback copy of his book, Sailing to the Reefs, for my eighth birthday. The writing was rather too dense and poetic for me to enjoy, but I pored for hours over the black-and-white photographs of the muscular Moitessier powering his boat through the waves and swinging effortlessly from rope to rope amid the rigging of his yacht like a nautical Tarzan.
The other entrants to the race, announced one by one, failed to capture my imagination in the same way. There was Robin Knox-Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old English merchant marine officer; Chay Blyth, a former army sergeant, one year his junior; Donald Crowhurst, aged thirty-six, a British engineer and manager of an electronics company; Nigel Tetley, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, and four others. None of them seemed in Moitessier’s league. One or two of them, from what I could gather, had barely been to sea before. But then something happened to change my mind, and my allegiance. My father came in from work one day with a copy of the Teignmouth Post and Gazette and showed me the front-page story – which announced, amazingly, that one of the entrants to the race, Donald Crowhurst, had now decided not just that he was going to set sail from Teignmouth, but that he had even agreed to name his yacht Teignmouth Electron. (In return, as it later emerged, for a number of local sponsorship deals.)
The name of the man who had persuaded Crowhurst to bestow these benefits on a town with which he otherwise had no connection was Rodney Hallworth: a one-time Fleet Street crime reporter, now Devon-based press agent and assiduous promoter of anything and everything that might raise the profile of Teignmouth in the eyes of the wider world. From the stories which he now began to feed to the local and national newspapers, I began to build up an image in my mind of Donald Crowhurst as a kind of yachting superhero: the dark horse of the race, and therefore its most intriguing and alluring competitor. Not only was he an accomplished seaman, apparently, he was an electronics wizard, and a designer of genius, who despite making a late entrance into the race was going to snatch it from under the noses of his rivals by setting sail in a sleek, modern, ra
dically innovative vehicle which had been built to his own specifications – a trimaran, no less, with a unique self-righting system which would activate in case of a capsize, and which was controlled (here was the clincher – the word which, in 1968, set everybody’s pulse racing) by a computer.
Instantly, Donald Crowhurst became the focus of all my interest and admiration. He was due to arrive in Teignmouth in only a matter of weeks – and I, for one, couldn’t wait.
A support committee had now been formed, and one of my father’s sailing friends was a keen member. In this way we were drip-fed pieces of information. Crowhurst’s boat was finished, we were told, and he was already sailing it from a boatyard in Norfolk round to the Devon coast. He would be with us in a matter of days. As it turned out, this forecast was optimistic. Teething troubles dogged that maiden voyage, which took four times as long as it should have done, and it was mid-October by the time Crowhurst and his team made it to Teignmouth. On the Friday afternoon after his arrival, my mother picked me up from school and took me down to the harbour to catch an early glimpse of my hero and to watch some of his preparations.
Every child, I imagine, has a defining moment at some point in their lives, when the meaning of the word ‘disappointment’ becomes cruelly apparent to them. A moment when they realize that the world, which they had hitherto conceived as being ripe with promise, rich with infinite possibilities, is in reality a flawed and circumscribed place. That moment can be devastating, and can linger in the mind for years afterwards, much stronger than the memory of early joys and infant excitements. And in my case, it came that grey Friday afternoon in mid-October, when I had my first sight of Donald Crowhurst.
This was the man who was going to win the Sunday Times round-the-world yacht race? The man who was going to defeat Moitessier, the brilliant, experienced Frenchman? And this was Teignmouth Electron, the ultimate in modern boat design, which was going to skim across the massive waves of the Southern Ocean, every nuance of its fleet-footed movement tempered and adjusted by the latest in computer technology?
Frankly, both of these things seemed hard to credit. Crowhurst cut a poor, diminished figure: after all the bravado of his newspaper interviews, I had been expecting someone with an aura of confidence about him, some sense of derring-do – a presence, in other words. Instead, he seemed ineffectual and preoccupied. I have the impression (in retrospect, of course) that he was alarmed, even terrified, by the spotlight that had been turned upon him, and the weight of expectation that came with it. As for the much vaunted Teignmouth Electron, not only did it look puny and fragile, but the preparations around it were shambolic. The boat itself seemed to be still under construction, with a succession of workmen trooping on and off it every day, performing endless repairs, while on the quayside bewildering numbers of supplies were steadily accumulating in messy piles – everything from carpenter’s tools to radio equipment to tins of soup and corned beef. In and around all this chaos, Crowhurst himself pottered aimlessly, posing for the omnipresent camera crew, quarrelling with his boat-builders, popping into telephone kiosks to remonstrate with would-be suppliers, and every day looking more and more obviously sick with apprehension.
Well, the great day came at last. 31 October 1968. A drizzly, overcast and altogether dismal Thursday afternoon. There wasn’t a great throng at the quayside – nothing to compare with the crowds who had come to Plymouth to welcome Chichester the year before, that’s for sure – maybe about sixty or seventy of us. Our teacher had given the whole class permission to leave early if we wanted to go and watch, and of course most of the children had taken advantage of this, but wherever the others went, it wasn’t to wave goodbye to Donald Crowhurst on his round-the-world voyage. I was the only child of school age who made the effort, of that I’m fairly certain. My mother was with me, my father must still have been at work, and as for your mother – I don’t know where she was. You would have to ask her. I remember the mood among the crowd as being sceptical as much as it was celebratory. Crowhurst had acquired a fair number of detractors in Teignmouth over the past few weeks, and he didn’t do much to assuage them when he turned up for his grand departure in a beige V-neck sweater, complete with collar and tie. Hardly the outfit Moitessier would have chosen for his send-off, I couldn’t help thinking. And things got worse after that: Crowhurst set off at three o’clock exactly, but almost immediately got into difficulties, was unable to raise his sails and had to be towed back to shore. The crowd became even more derisive at this point, and many of them went home. My mother and I stayed to watch. The problem took nearly two hours to put right, by which time dusk was falling. Finally, he set sail again just before five: and this time it was for real. Three launches went with him – one of them containing his wife and four children, wrapped up tightly in the duffel coats that were considered essential fashion items for youngsters at the time. Despite the fact that Crowhurst was cutting such an unimpressive figure, I can remember envying them for having him as their father: being at the centre of attention, being made to feel so special. Their launch followed his yacht for about a mile, after which they waved goodbye to him and turned back. Crowhurst sailed on, into the distance and over the horizon, heading for months of solitude and danger. My mother took me by the hand and together we walked home, looking forward to warmth, tea and Thursday-night television.
What were the forces operating upon Donald Crowhurst during the next few months? What was it that made him act as he did?
Most of what I know about the Crowhurst story – apart from my early memory of seeing him off from the harbour, that is – comes from the excellent book written by two Sunday Times journalists, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, who had access to his logbooks and tape recordings in the months after he died at sea. They called their book The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, and in it they quote something that he said into his portable tape recorder not long after leaving home: ‘The thing about single-handing is it puts a great deal of pressure on the man, it explores his weaknesses with a penetration that very few other occupations can manage.’
In Crowhurst’s case, there were the obvious pressures of living alone at sea – the cramped conditions, the constant noise, motion and dampness, the terrible privacy of his tiny cabin – but there was also pressure coming from other sources. Two other sources, to be precise. One was his press agent, Rodney Hallworth; the other was his sponsor, a local businessman called Stanley Best, who had financed the building of the trimaran and was now its owner, but in return had insisted upon a contract stipulating that, if anything went wrong with the voyage, Crowhurst would have to buy the boat back off him. This meant, in effect, that he had no option but to complete the circumnavigation: anything else would reduce him to bankruptcy.
The pressure coming from Hallworth was slightly more subtle, but no less insistent. Hallworth had spent the last few months building Crowhurst up into a hero. A man who was essentially little more than a ‘weekend sailor’ had now been chosen to take on, in the eyes of the newspaper-reading public, the role of the lone, audacious challenger – the embodiment of Middle English backbone and resilience, a plucky David battling it out with the yachting Goliaths. Hallworth had done (and continued to do) a brilliant if totally unscrupulous job. It’s hard not to see him as a prototype ‘spin doctor’, before that term came to be so prevalent. In any case, Crowhurst had certainly been made to feel that he could not let this public down, and he could not let his press agent down after all the work he had put in. There could be no turning back.
He was not long into his voyage, however, before something became all too painfully obvious: there could be no going forward either. It took little more than two weeks for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation to be revealed as a complete fantasy.
‘Racked by the growing awareness,’ he wrote on Friday, 15 November, ‘that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision – to chuck it in at this stage – what a bloody awful decis
ion!’ Teignmouth Electron’s electrics had failed, her hatches were leaking (the port forward float hatch had let in 120 gallons in five days), Crowhurst had left vital lengths of pipe behind in Teignmouth – making pumping out water almost impossible –his sails were chafing, there were screws constantly coming loose from his steering system, and as for the ‘computer’ which was supposed to self-steer the yacht and respond to its every motion with exquisite sensitivity – well, he had never even got around to designing or installing it. The cat’s cradles of multi-coloured wires running so visibly all over the cabin were connected to nothing at all. In other words, Teignmouth Electron was barely seaworthy – and yet this was the vessel in which he proposed to sail across the Southern Ocean, the most dangerous sea passage on earth! ‘With the boat in its present state,’ he wrote in his logbook, ‘my chances of survival would not, I think, be better than 50-50.’ Most people would have said that even this assessment was optimistic.
So, there was no going forward, and no turning back. Deadlock. What, in these circumstances, could Donald Crowhurst possibly do?
Well, this is what he did: he hit upon a solution worthy, you might say, of our very own Prime Minister. For – just like Mr Blair, faced with the twin undesirables of free-market capitalism and state-heavy socialism – Donald Crowhurst decided that there was another possibility: a ‘Third Way’, no less. And it was, even his critics would have to admit, an extremely daring and ingenious one. He decided, in fact, that if he could not make a voyage around the world, single-handed and non-stop, he would do the next best thing – and fake one.
Remember, Poppy, that these were the 1960s. All the technologies which are now becoming available to us – the email, the mobile phones, the Global Positioning Systems – were yet to be invented. Once Donald Crowhurst set sail from Teignmouth harbour and drifted into the high seas he was about as alone as it’s possible to imagine a human being could be. His only means of communication with the wider world was a hopelessly unreliable radio system. For weeks, even months at a time, it was quite likely that he would not have the slightest contact with the rest of humanity. And during that time, it was equally likely that the rest of humanity would not have the slightest idea where he was to be found. The only record of his route would be the one that he himself made in his logbooks, in his own handwriting, taking positions using his own equipment. So, what was to stop him giving a completely false account of his voyage? He didn’t need to go round the three Capes at all. He could wander down the coast of Africa, then tack over to the west, hang about in the mid-Atlantic for a few months, and tuck in quietly behind the genuine racers after they had rounded Cape Horn and were heading back towards Great Britain. He would come in a decent fourth or fifth – in which case, no one would be interested in scrutinizing his logbooks too carefully – and honour would have been saved.
