Why Gipsy Moth IV Had To Be Saved

Book Extract

Why save a boat rotting away in dry dock for 37 years that drove her skipper to despair and needs hundreds of thousands of pounds spending on restoration?’ many people have asked. 

Even Sir Francis Chichester, the partowner of Gipsy Moth IV, who sailed her solo round the world to a triumphant homecoming, said: ‘She has no sentimental value to me at all. Now that I have finished, I don’t know what will become of her. I only own the stern, while my cousin (Lord Dulverton) owns two thirds. For my part, I would sell any day. It would be better if about a third were sawn off. She is cantankerous and difficult and needs a crew of three – a man to navigate, an elephant to move the tiller and a 3ft 6in chimpanzee with arms 8ft long to get about below and work the gear!’

When Yachting Monthly launched the campaign to save Gipsy Moth in September 2003, one curmudgeonly correspondent wrote: ‘What Gipsy Moth IV needs is a gallon of paraffin and a box of matches!’ Another said: ‘Not worth preserving… she was built for a stunt with no intention of durability. Burn her. Spend the money on something worthwhile, like the Cutty Sark.’

A few weeks later, some vandals did try to set fire to Gipsy Moth, but were thwarted – unlike the Cutty Sark incident, which followed in the summer of 2007.

Even in Greenwich dry dock, Gipsy Moth IV inspired people. But beneath the surface, her timbers were rotting away, thanks to deck leaks and rainwater.

The fact is, Gipsy Moth is one of the world’s most famous small boats. She warmed the hearts of the most hard-bitten modern racing sailors and grizzled old seadogs and she was, and is, a vital part of Britain’s maritime heritage.

When Gipsy Moth’s keel was laid in 1964 she was to be the ‘best yacht money could buy’. No expense was spared and there were no statutory regulations governing design, construction or equipment.

She was the first custom-designed yacht for fast solo sailing around the world – hoping to achieve a passage target of 100 days from Plymouth to Sydney, Australia. She was the Open 60 of her day and Sir Francis was the pathfinder and pioneer. No one had designed a boat which could be close-winded, fast and light-displacement, yet strong enough to stand up to a knowndown in the Southern Ocean.

Designer John Illingworth later said they could have designed a heavier, beamier boat which would have sailed more upright, but she would have been much slower. 

True, others had sailed singlehanded round the world before Chichester, like Joshua Slocum (1895-98). But theirs were leisurely cruises, often taking years. Chichester’s was a defiant, harrowing race against the clock, in a bold attempt to beat the time of the Victorian clipper ships, including the Cutty Sark. Gipsy Moth IV was then the biggest boat conceived for solo sailing – a 53ft ketch for a man aged 64! 

In nautical terms, she was like a Battle of Britain Spitfire – inextricably a part of Britain’s finest hour at sea. Chichester’s record-breaking circumnavigation inspired many of today’s sailing stars – including Dame Ellen MacArthur, Sir Robin Knox Johnston and Sir Chay Blyth, all of whom followed in his illustrious wake as solo round the world record-breakers. As a schoolgirl Ellen MacArthur would take the best-selling book, Gipsy Moth Circles the World, out of the library and re-read it with the same sense of excitement that today’s teenagers have for the Harry Potter books … and the Southern Ocean could prove just as malevolent as Lord Voldemort.

In nautical terms, Gipsy Moth was like a Battle of Britain Spitfire – part of Britain’s finest hour at sea.

‘Wild horses could not drag me down to Cape Horn and that sinister Southern Ocean again in a small boat,’ wrote Chichester after his voyage. ‘There is something nightmarish about deep breaking seas and screaming winds… I had a feeling of helplessness before the power of the waves came rolling down on top of me.’

Between 27 August 1966, when Chichester sailed from Plymouth, and 28 May 1967, when he returned, via Cape Horn, after one stop in Sydney, Australia, he effectively re-wrote the Guinness book of ocean sailing records. But more than that, his solitary, heroic feat was said to have restored the illusion of British mastery of the Seven Seas. He was the new conqueror, like Scott of the Antarctic or Hillary of Everest – for his voyage was the sailor’s Everest.

A quarter of a million people lined Plymouth Hoe on a spring evening to welcome home the man who had sailed faster than anyone before him. On the way, he’d celebrated his 65th birthday with a champagne cocktail wearing his green velvet smoking jacket. ‘My only ‘slip-up is that I left my bowtie behind…’ he wrote in his logbook. 

This was the era of the Swinging Sixties, with hippies, drop-outs, flower power and free love and one commentator wrote that ‘Sir Francis stood as a living refutation to the seedy claims of sex, drugs and rock and roll.’

When the Queen knighted him at Greenwich, with the same sword that Elizabeth I used to knight Sir Francis Drake in 1580, thousands watched on TV in pubs and homes across the country. ‘People found something to celebrate in themselves,’ wrote Jonathan Raban in his introduction to Chichester’s classic book of his voyage, Gipsy Moth Circles the World. ‘Their new stooped, short-sighted knight reminded them of the salt in their veins, their brave historic past, their English mettle.’

Britain had a new sporting super hero to celebrate. You could say, perhaps, that Chichester was the David Beckham of his day – even if he was old enough to be Beckham’s grandfather!

In the 21st century, the reverberations of Chichester’s achievement still stand the test of time. Others half his age set off to break his record, often in greater comfort and with better equipment. But Chichester will always be the first. After his voyage, Gipsy Moth was exhibited at the London Boat Show in Earls Court in January 1968, and then offered by Lord Dulverton to the Greater London

Council, who undertook to put her on display to the public at the river-side Cutty Sark Gardens as a permanent memorial to the epic voyage and her bid to beat Cutty Sark’s 100- day record. A public appeal was launched so Sir Edward McAlpine’s firm, which built the dry dock for Cutty Sark, could now do the same for this doughty ketch. Thus Gipsy Moth was ‘embalmed’ in her concrete tomb. For many years she was open to the public and continued to inspire visitors.

Chichester knighted by the Queen at Greenwich with Sir Francis Drake’s sword in July 1967.

But in August 2001, on one of many visits to Greenwich, I stood alongside the landlocked ketch and saw her peeling paintwork encrusted with bird droppings. A lager lout’s beer can lay on the sidedeck and burger containers had been lobbed into the cockpit. It seemed nothing less than the desecration of a maritime monument. I felt a special affinity to the Moth, since she had been ‘born’ in my home town of Emsworth, Hampshire, where her designers, John Illingworth and Angus Primrose, had an office at 36 North Street.

Boats like Gipsy Moth belong in the ocean. Rainwater rots them. They are meant to be sailed, not entombed or exhibited in museums. A wooden boat is a living entity, imbued with the spirit of those who built and sailed them.

Seven years earlier, in 1995, I had seen Gipsy Moth restored to a pristine state. The Maritime Trust, her owners since 1973, had arranged for her to be taken by road to the Maritime Workshop in Gosport, where shipwrights lovingly restored her. Two decades in dry dock with London’s polluted air and acid rain lying in puddles on the deck and in the bilges, plus thousands of tourists tramping feet stepping aboard, had left their mark on her.

I went to Gosport to report for Yachting Monthly on the  30,000 refit being funded by the Trust and Nauticalia, a company which sells maritime artefacts, including models of Gipsy Moth IV.

Gipsy Moth leaves Greenwich, after almost 20 years, for her first re-fit in 1995.

A new plywood deck had been made and the cold-moulded Honduras mahogany hull, coachroof and cockpit were being refurbished and repainted. I discovered letters had arrived from nautical souvenir hunters as far away as America, asking for pieces of her old deck. I was given a piece myself by Bill Puddle, Managing Director of the workshop, which I kept on my desk in pride of place. Appropriately, Bill had begun his apprenticeship as a boat-builder aged 15 at Camper & Nicholsons, less then two miles away, where Gipsy Moth was built. Many of Camper’s shipwrights who had helped to build her stopped by to re-examine their craftsmanship. The new deck was covered with a layer of hi-tech epoxy saturated matting to keep the London rain from rotting her when she returned to Greenwich in the spring.

Now, six years later in 2001, she was back in a sorry state once again, with rot in her coamings and the aft part of the cockpit. It would be a tragedy and a scandal if this relic of Britain’s maritime heritage rotted away.

In September 2001, we had reported on a proposal to get Gipsy Moth IV sailing again as a ‘flagship’ for the International Sailing Craft Association (ISCA), making passages to its collection of historic craft at various sites around Britain.

But months on nothing had happened. The London Borough of Greenwich was demanding that the yacht couldn’t be moved until a guarantee was given that the dry dock basin was filled in – at a cost of some  60,000! The Maritime Trust and ISCA simply didn’t have the money. It was an impasse – and Gipsy Moth was the innocent victim.

Captain Simon Waite, Superintendent of Ships for the Maritime Trust and Master of the Cutty Sark, said Gipsy Moth was deteriorating because his workforce was so small. ‘Apart from washing down her decks and airing her out occasionally, little is being done to look after her,’ he admitted. There wasn’t even any money for a part-time ‘curator’ so paying visitors could tour the ketch. It had been years since a member of the public had been below Gipsy Moth’s cracked decks. It had cost the Trust 10,000 a year to open the yacht to the public with only 5,000 gained in revenue.

 

Taken from Gipsy Moth IV: The Legend Sails Again by Paul Gelder.

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