There is a huge amount of research and study still needed into yachting history, which should be rewarding, because, as I hope I have shown, yachting holds up a mirror to its society and has been an important part of this nation's social history for centuries.

I am all too aware of the many unanswered questions in this text, unanswered because the data was not there. There is an additional urgency for two reasons. Many of the original shipwrights who built wooden yachts, and many of the sailors who cruised and raced in them, are now getting on in years. A second, more recent, overlapping watershed concerns those who sailed by compass, log and sextant, before the advent of Global Positioning Systems, that started coming into civilian use in the late eighties. There is so much yachting history that urgently requires recording and researching.

In a book of this length, covering such a long period of time and so many types of sailing, there are bound to be factual errors, misunderstandings and misinterpretations. If you spot one, please contact the publisher who will pass your comments on to me. Thank you.

Mike Bender

The Corinthian Yachting Narrative

If the leaders in industry and manufacturing and their supporting professions were to be attracted to yachting, it had to be congruent with their core beliefs and values. Since Corinthian sailing is so central to the yachting narrative till well beyond the Second World War, I will first describe it and then examine it from a number of angles, such as its leading exponents, educative texts, and the implementation of class boundaries.

The origins of the application of the term ‘Corinthian’ to sport are somewhat vague but in A Manual of Yacht and Boat Sailing by Dixon Kemp, published in 1878, the author defined ‘Corinthian’ as:

The Corinthian spirit is well described in Cowper's introduction to his pioneering five-volume pilot for yachtsmen, published in1892:

This passage includes most of the key values of Corinthian yachting – the small boat, manned exclusively by amateurs; a hardy activity which refreshes the soul; the soul being gender specific, since only men would be strong enough to undertake it; and also makes links with a glorious seafaring tradition and brotherhood of god-fearing, yet fearless, men.

Britain and its allies had won the War, and the British empire had expanded still further, with the handing over of German East Africa and Mesopotomia (later Iraq), Palestine and part of Greater Syria from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire. It now owned 30 per cent of the world's surface and controlled 25 per cent of its population; so winning the war could be judged, from that perspective, as a success. But this expansion was rendered problematic, as it required yet more troops and administrators to rule at a time when the British economy was much weakened by the colossal cost of the war effort in lives and money.

Figures vary slightly concerning the carnage of the Great War, but, approximately, of 5,397,000 men mobilised, 703,000 were killed, and 1,663,000 wounded, giving a casualty rate of 44 per cent. Ten per cent of the British male population under 45 was dead.

In the early part of the war, officers led their men ‘over the top’ (of the trenches) at the Front, wearing a different uniform and carrying a pistol, not a rifle. This made it easy for the German soldiers to carry out their orders to take out the officers in order to increase the chaos and demoralisation among the men. The average length of time before becoming a casualty as an officer in the trenches was six weeks.

The war was followed by the 1918–1920 pandemic of Spanish Flu, which killed some 40 to 50 million worldwide, and around 250,000 in Britain.

By 1920, many, many yachtsmen, and potential yachtsmen, were dead or invalided. I can find no figures for yachting, but in the neighbouring field of rowing, a quarter of the membership of Bradford Amateur Rowing Club on the River Aire were killed on active service. The huge losses of men and their families’ grief made enjoying leisure seem disrespectful into the mid-1920s. There was little sailing in Swansea Bay, for example, till 1922, when its first post-war regatta was held.

The Start of the Industrial Revolution and Yachting's First Golden Period

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones (1749) sailed from London to Lisbon, in the vain hope of a cure for his jaundice and dropsy. As his ship sailed down the Thames in August 1754, he recorded in his journal:

Fielding was proposing a greater take-up of yachting. He also wanted a greater, more ostentatious display of wealth along England's most important trading river, the symbol of English greatness and history. He may well have had in mind how Capability Brown (1716–1783), the great landscape gardener, was defining how a country mansion and its parkland should look. So, Fielding imagines vistas of Georgian mansions along the lower Thames, with the owners’ yachts lying alongside their private quays. This was certainly happening to some extent, since an engraving of 1751 shows Mr Baptist May's yacht under sail in front of his house.

Within a few years, Fielding's aspirations were to come true. Britain and her allies won the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which resulted in France losing most of her colonies. The war ended with the thirteen British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America and the British possessions in India secure; and with Canada, Florida and many Caribbean islands acquired. Britain was now the leading maritime power in the world, thus fulfilling what Thomas Arne and James Thomson had seen as the national destiny when they penned their ode ‘Rule Britannia’ in 1740: ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves’.

I first crossed tacks with Mike Bender back in 1982. He was studying for the RYA Yachtmaster examination at the National Sailing Centre, West Cowes. I was playing truant from my job there as an examiner. More specifically, I was preparing for a voyage in the wake of the Vikings from Norway to North America in Hirta, my Bristol Channel pilot cutter. Mike remembers that, for some reason now lost in the mists of time, I was dragging Hirta's huge flax mainsail through the main building with a couple of ‘willing volunteers’. My four-year-old daughter danced ahead clearing our passage, announcing to any who would listen that the deadweight of canvas was going to take her across the Atlantic.

Many tides have ebbed and flowed since then. Today, we can look back on the 1970s and 1980s as halcyon days in British yachting. We sail in leaner, more worrying times for our favourite sport and, as is so often the case, the best we can do to secure its future is to learn what we may from its past.

It is a lifetime now since histories of yachting were published by such luminaries as Peter Heaton and Douglas Phillips-Birt. This book is different. The old texts generally concentrated on big racing yachts with large professional crews, owned by the landed aristocracy or, at a pinch, captains of industry. Whilst undoubtedly important, this glamorous approach was incomplete. It tended to see yachting as a discrete subject outside the general flow of history. Always excepting the colourful arrival of Kaiser Bill before the First World War, wars tended to feature mainly as inconveniences that held up design development for a few years. Mike Bender's New History of Yachting places the subject in a fuller historical context. His story involves far more than political events, taking in industrial and technological revolutions as well as changes in transport systems, such as the boom in yachting havens created by the railways. He even discusses how the arrival of the motorway system has opened up hitherto distant waters.

The traditional big-yacht approach to history often sets aside much of the hands-on reality enjoyed by many over the decades. By far the commonest vessel for leisure sailing is the dinghy, operating often on reservoirs and rivers with heroes like Jack Holt rather than Watson or Fife.

Once again, yachtsmen had played a significant part in the war. Dunkirk is often represented as the high water of their involvement – when 700 ‘Little Ships’, working with the Navy, rescued more than 338,000 British and French soldiers off the beaches between 26 May and 4 June, 1940. In fact, these vessels were mainly motorsailers from the Thames and the South Coast, volunteered, or requisitioned by the Government, and manned by Naval personnel. Less well known is ‘Little Dunkirk’, the evacuation of British troops and personnel from St Malo by nineteen yachts, mostly sailing vessels, out of St Helier, Jersey in June 1940, for which the St Helier Yacht Club was uniquely granted a defaced ensign for ‘battle honours’.

A Board of Trade Yacht Master's Certificate was an advantage for a candidate seeking a commission in the RNVR (the Wavy Navy – the RNVR officers’ stripes were wavy, while RN officers’ were straight). Captain OM Watts, later famous for his upmarket chandlers in Piccadilly, trained many yachtsmen at Burlesdon; and the Little Ship Club, London did likewise.

By the end of the war, there were approximately 30,000 ratings and officers in the RNVR. Griffiths received a George Medal for his mine recovery work. Monsarrat was appointed to the new Flower-Class corvette Campanula in August 1940, experience he drew on when he wrote the first great maritime novel by an English-born author – The Cruel Sea. He used himself as the model for Sub-Lieutenant Lockhart, a yachtsman and the son of a surgeon. After two years as an engineer on inshore anti-submarine patrol, Eric Hiscock was medically re-assessed and discharged due to his poor eyesight. Later, he joined the Admiralty Ferry Service, which was set up to deliver old and new naval vessels around the coasts to wherever they might be required, and which developed into quite a flourishing branch of the merchant navy.

The eighteenth century is usually characterised in yachting histories as a period of inactivity. McCallum, for example, evidently drawing on such sources as Phillips-Birt's The History of Yachting, writes that ‘records show that in 1812 there were about 50 pleasure yachts afloat in Britain’. In fact, there is clear evidence, which this chapter will present, of an increasing level of yacht ownership and activity across the eighteenth century.

This increasing visibility of yachting was due to a number of factors, including the need of the Hanoverian monarchs and their families to ‘commute’ between England and Hanover, and the widespread use of yachts on state business. I will discuss these in the first part of this chapter before moving on to the growth of yachting as a leisure sport, most obviously in Cork Harbour, in the South of Ireland, and later on the Exe in Devon. The growth of seaside resorts, at the expense of the inland spa towns, then led to the development of yacht regattas.

The Industrial Revolution's dates are usually given as 1760–1830, but by 1760, it already had a clear momentum. Pioneers had been working on the inventions that underpinned it from much earlier. For example, Thomas Savery had a steam engine to raise water in mines working in 1698. Abraham Darby smelted iron using coke at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire from 1709. A long beam (steam-powered) ‘atmospheric’ engine was built by Newcomen in 1712, the first practical use of steam, with the engine being used in Cornish mines. Newcomen's engine was much improved by James Watt by 1769. However, the first mills relied on water-power and were therefore built in the countryside, along fast-flowing streams and rivers, upstream of harbours and ports. These harbours imported the raw materials the mills needed for the production of their goods, and exported the finished products. So, wealth was coming into ports and harbours from the early eighteenth century.

State Uses of Yachts

This chapter describes, how, in contrast to the slow growth of yachting in the United Kingdom during this period, there was a more rapid diffusion of the sport in Ireland and the colonies.

The Development of Yachting in Ireland

The number of yacht clubs in Ireland formed in the first part of the nineteenth century is remarkable, as it is almost as great as the number in England.

Ireland, till its independence in 1922, was, of course, part of the United Kingdom. Yet, if we equate colonising with occupation, Ireland, with its desire for independence and its frequent, albeit unsuccessful, revolts, was effectively a colony. Rebellion in Ireland was feared throughout the nineteenth century and Ireland had to be heavily occupied by garrisons and patrolled by the Navy. Ireland could not be given independence, partly because of the fear that it might welcome a foreign power, and because it proved impossible, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to get ‘Home Rule’ through the two houses of Parliament.

The need for the Crown to defend Ireland led to the building of the road from London to Holyhead (the A5), a remarkable feat of pioneering engineering across the Welsh mountains, by Thomas Telford. The road was completed by the building of the Menai Suspension Bridge in 1826. The breakwater at Holyhead, begun in 1845 and completed in 1871, is 1.7 miles long, thereby providing excellent shelter. The early dates of the founding of the Royal Dee at Chester, 1815, guarding the entrance to North Wales and a route to Holyhead, and the Royal Welsh at Caernarfon, 1847, may be, at least in part, due to the need for local suppliers and contractors.

This book is about yachting, which is usually understood as leisure sailing, in which wind power is the major form of propulsion. So, this history covers all forms of yachting, including dinghy and keelboat sailing. It does not include motor yachts nor windsurfing, since this sport seems to relate more to the use of boards rather than boats.

Yachting has played an important part in this nation's leisure. It has long been a major, socially significant leisure activity. It proffered status, signified by yacht ownership and membership of yacht clubs. As part of our cultural and social history, leisure sailing can illuminate the wider society of which it is part – its values, its beliefs and its paradoxes.

Additionally, yachting has a much wider range of literature than other sports. Tom Cunliffe, introducing his In the Wake of Heroes puts it well: ‘Those of us who go down to the sea, whether for leisure, war or commerce, are incomparably blessed with good reading matter. Indeed, I believe no other sport or form of transport is so richly endowed.’

Other sports have their ‘How to’ books, autobiographies and biographies, but yachting has also generated thousands of accounts of passages and voyages, as well as some major fiction. More than other prestige sports, it has been represented in other media, such as painting and music.

Why a New History of Yachting is Needed

There has not been a history of yachting published for many years. The standard yacht histories, such as Heaton's Yachting: A History (1955) or Phillips- Birt's The History of Yachting (1974) are now some fifty years old.

Theirs was the ‘big history’ approach: important, rich owners, often public figures, owning large racing yachts, designed and built by the top yards, with large, professional crews, taking part in prestigious yacht races, being organised by the long-established ‘royal’ yacht clubs for large, silver cups, in one of the major yachting centres, such as Burnham-on-Crouch, the Clyde or the Solent, especially Cowes.

Charles II introduced yachting into this country and the sport was taken up by a few high prestige individuals outside the Royal family, such as Sir William Petty and Roger North.

Charles II and His Yachts

Up to the end of the eighteenth century, the word ‘yacht’ had much wider definitions than being only a leisure craft. As early as 1599, an Antwerp dictionary defined ‘jaght schip’ or ‘jaght’ as ‘a swift, light vessel of war, commerce or pleasure’. This definition reflected the use by the Dutch of yachts for transport and business on Holland's shallow lakes and inland seas. These uses of yachts were introduced into England by Charles II in the middle of the seventeenth century.

In 1646, when his father was losing the Civil War, his son, the future Charles II, fled from Falmouth to the Scillies, and thence to Jersey. He passed the time learning to sail in these locations and, in the summer of 1646, had a boat built at St Malo, borrowing the money from the Governor of Jersey. He then left for France where his mother was living. In 1648, he moved to the Hague, Holland.

As already mentioned, yachts had an important place in Dutch political and economic activity. Heaton wrote:

For the Dutch, by the middle of the seventeenth century ‘a yacht was a normal possession of a person of wealth and rank’, an ostentatious way of demonstrating that status, but also ‘an essential of life in a country where water was always nearby’.

We are indebted to the contemporary diarists, John Evelyn (1620–1706), and, especially, his lifelong friend Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) for much of our information about Charles’ yachts. Sadly, Pepys, usefully positioned as Secretary to the Naval Board, only kept his diary for nine years (1660–1669), before, fearing he was going blind, taking his doctor's advice to stop his record.

ON 3 September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. As an imperial power, Britain, like France, Germany and Japan, expected to use the resources and ‘manpower’ of each colony and territory for the war effort, making the war truly global. As Ashley Jackson points out, the ‘[British] Empire and Commonwealth was the world's largest political, economic and military unit, and it went to war as one’. Millions of colonial and dominion troops fought and millions more produced uniforms, exported foodstuffs and military material, served as medical and nursing personnel and provided homes for child evacuees, servicemen and women stationed on their shores. Home fronts around the world were transformed and militarized for use by, and for, the imperial power. Civilians were conscripted as agricultural labourers, workers in munitions factories, shipbuilders and aircraft builders. They would work alongside military personnel. Henceforth, home fronts throughout the empire experienced increased policing, shortages of consumer goods and food rationing, underwent the pressures of Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and lived with curfews, censorship and curtailed travel.

As a scholarly topic of investigation, the British home front during the Second World War has received considerable attention, especially in areas documenting the experiences of women, children and refugees and the work of men and women codebreakers. As Linsey Robb argues in this volume, women's wartime work experience is largely celebrated but, at the same time, the masculinity of men in reserved occupations came under scrutiny, since the ideal masculine image was the man in uniform. This was particularly the case for the men of the Royal Air Force, whose image was immortalized in national memory after the Battle of Britain. Indeed, the Battle of Britain, the devastation of the British home front during the months of bombing and the way civilians and officials responded continue to be the subject of new studies. In this volume, Mark J. Crowley illustrates the ingenuity and technological innovations that allowed the Post Office to continue functioning and even to improve services during the bombing.

WHEN Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939 it simultaneously – and unilaterally – committed India to the conflict. The Indian National Congress (INC), which had maintained a consistent anti-Fascist stance throughout the 1930s, insisted that, for India to support the war effort, Britain must loosen its imperial stranglehold on the country. It asked Britain to commit to a post-war constituent assembly that would determine the political structure of a free India, while establishing immediately ‘something like a genuine responsible government in the centre’. Britain's response was underwhelming. Almost a decade after the INC's pürna swaraj (complete independence) declaration of 1930, Britain only reiterated earlier offers of dominion status, to be granted sometime in an indefinite future. Indian nationalists stressed the obvious contradiction between Britain holding India as a colony while fighting a global war, premised on the issue of self-determination. The British raj, however, remained unaffected. Thus, refusing ‘any responsibility for India's war contribution’, INC members resigned from the several provincial ministries to which they had been elected in 1937.

Like those of Britain's other colonial possessions, India's human and material resources were swiftly commandeered in support of Britain's war effort, and India was transformed into a home front. Consequently, both contemporary and scholarly analyses of India during the Second World War have focused on parsing the extent and variety of India's contributions to the Allied war effort. These contributions were substantial. Over two and a half million South Asians served in the war. Yasmin Khan estimates that over 50,000 enlisted in the first eight months and almost 20,000 a month were joining up by late 1940.

REFLECTING on her experience hosting Allied troops in Cape Town during the war, Lucy Bean described a whirlwind of social activities and romance:

Bean was one of the founders of the South African Women's Auxiliary Service (SAWAS), which organised more than 60,000 volunteers to host visiting Allied troops. Her account captures the heightened atmosphere of wartime Cape Town and its often-overlooked strategic role in the Allied war effort. Like many other Anglo-South Africans, however, Bean's reminiscence of this time before the isolations of apartheid is nostalgic, glossing over the social conflicts caused by the arrival of so many Allied troops during the war.

Though often seen as peripheral to the war effort, the Union of South Africa became a transportation hub, a centre for military training and the staging ground for the invasion of Vichy-held Madagascar. The war brought millions of Allied servicemen to South Africa, along with thousands of refugees, prisoners-of-war and civilians. With the Mediterranean route largely closed to the Allies owing to the threat of the Italian fleet, German U-boats and land-based Axis bombers, the port cities of South Africa saw a tremendous increase in shipping for three years from 1940 until the invasion of Italy in 1943. More than 400 troop convoys carrying six million Allied servicemen en route to destinations including North Africa, India and the Pacific and close to 50,000 Allied ships passed through South Africa during the war. South African ports also served as repair stations for Allied ships, especially after the loss of Singapore, repairing more than 13,000 vessels.