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The history of the OCC does not fall neatly into chapters, but the year 1976
was one of change and consolidation and does make a convenient break. The
Club had a new Commodore, Peter Carter-Ruck and, after a spell of eleven
years, Howard Fowler gave way to Peter Pattinson as Secretary. The RTYC
had become the permanent London gathering place for meetings and dinners,
while overseas flag officers in Australia and on both coasts of America were
similarly establishing a pattern of Club rallies, both social and sailing. Membership
had reached 1000, spread over 30 countries, and qualifiers alone represented
more than two million miles of sailing. In his annual report that year the
Commodore described the Club as ‘without frontiers or equals’. Perhaps the
most singular milestone was that Hum, at 75, had started to act his age by
confining his cruising to the Mediterranean after fifteen years of annual Atlantic
crossings, which had brought his total to 20 and Mary’s to six.
Peter Carter-Ruck had taken only eight years between qualifying in 1968 and
becoming Commodore in 1976. He was yet another keen ocean racer, owning
a series of boats named, most appropriately for a lawyer, Fair Judgment. Also
in that year of change both the Vice and Rear Commodore were replaced,
Harry Jonas being promoted to Vice while the irrepressible Bill Howell moved
into the Rear Commodore’s slot. Together with Peter they made a formidable
team with many thousands of ocean cruising and racing miles under their keels.
The outgoing Secretary, Howard Fowler, was not qualified for membership
when he took on the job, but from the outset he had taken the Club’s interests
to heart. His four predecessors in the first ten years of the Club’s existence had
never served long enough to get on top of the job but, to be fair, they were all
volunteers or working for nominal honorariums, and were not able to devote
the hours necessary to serve the ever increasing membership. Howard was
unfailingly friendly and helpful to members, and put the administration onto a
sound footing which did much to bind the Club together. However, at the age
of 70, he too found it too much so decided to retire for the second time.
His replacement came with a sound pedigree. Not only was he a farmer but
he also ran the Welsh Cruising School and was an ambitious ocean cruising
man. He qualified in 1972 with a passage to the Azores and back, but prior to
that he had circumnavigated Iceland on his way to Jan Mayen Island at 71°N.
While ashore there a sudden blow put his Nicholson 32 Courante on a dangerous
lee shore. Peter graphically described the assistance given by the Norwegians:
‘On the shore they had 30 foot steel dories which were mounted
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Peter Carter-Ruck, Commodore 1975–1982,
at the helm of Fair Judgement
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Brian Stewart, Commodore 1968–1975, at the helm of Zulu
(see page 110)
on 60 foot trailers. We were put on one of these with four of the
boatmen, and a huge caterpillar tractor backed the dory into the
breaking surf. The 100hp engine was running at full speed and
as one huge breaker came thundering towards us, the lashings
were let go, the engine was put in gear and we shot vertically
upwards. It was very frightening for those who haven’t done this
sort of exercise before.
With remarkable skill, the Norwegians were able to bring the
dory alongside Courante and stay just long enough for one of us
to jump. The first to go was Jim who made a perfect landing, the
next was Keith who landed in a mess, then Nicki who landed
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very neatly, followed by me. I did the splits from which it took
three days to recover. Last was Anna who, standing on the
bulwarks ready to jump, suddenly lost her nerve. Fortunately,
one of the Norwegians, as a farewell gesture, pinched her behind
which launched her with a shriek to land in a heap on Courante.’
The nimble Nicki had gone on to more ambitious things, becoming the first
woman to cross the North Atlantic singlehanded and non-stop in 1971.
Peter had only just got himself established as Secretary when, in 1978, he
had a near-fatal accident that set him and the Club back a great deal. He was
struck down at night by a motorcyclist, suffering a fractured skull and other
injuries from which he took months to recover and which left him with
permanently impaired senses.
In one way 1976 started badly. Great Britain was experiencing an economic
crisis with prices of goods and services increasing almost daily, which forced
the Club to make a substantial increase in its subscription. Two issues of the
Journal alone were absorbing most of the Club’s annual income, so, in an
attempt to recoup some of that cost, it was proposed to sell Flying Fish to the
public at 50p per copy. However there is no evidence of the success or otherwise
of this initiative. Having missed the opportunity to put the question of raising
the subscription at the 1976 AGM, the Committee felt it could not wait a year
so called a Special General Meeting in November when a resolution was passed
raising subscriptions from £2 to £4.50. At the same time the fall in the value of
the pound was recognised, and the dollar alternative was calculated at 2:1 instead
of the previous 3:1. Again this had very little adverse effect on membership.
However the squeeze was being felt all round, almost doubling the cost of the
annual dinner in only two years.
In retrospect, 1976 saw only the beginning of the Club’s financial problems.
While the bold step of more than doubling the subscriptions provided a temporary
palliative, it did not last long as inflation continued to erode its value at an
alarming rate. It is one of the problems of an international organisation that if
the headquarters country experiences a financial crisis it affects the entire
membership, despite the innocence of the majority. Also, the success of the
Club in attracting so many new members was at once its strength and its
weakness. The cachet of membership was still sufficiently appealing to attract
many ‘one-off’ ocean sailors, who paid their first subscription and then took
no further part in the Club – including not paying their dues. This led to the
decision in 1980 to alter the Rules to enable the Club to levy an entrance fee,
should the Committee consider this necessary to deter the casual member.
Unfortunately funds were so low in 1979 that no Flying Fish was published
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during the entire year, and again in 1982 the first issue had to be delayed until
sufficient members had paid their dues for the printer’s bill to be paid. The gap
in 1979 is particularly regrettable, as it was the Club’s silver jubilee year and
very little of the activities were placed on record.
While it is clear from the obituaries of notable early members contained in
Chapter VII that many of the old guard were swallowing the anchor permanently,
at the same time a new generation were joining who were to represent the Club
in many senior positions over the next 30 years. By 1971 five of the six
Commodores who were to serve over the next 24 years were already members,
and other names who are still very active today were appearing. The evergreen
Betty Lindsay-Thomson was first on the Committee in 1974, as was Mike
Butterfield. Martin Walford seems to have been a committee member for
years, starting as early as 1972, by which time Bill Wise was serving his third
term. Names still familiar today started to appear in the Journal.
Andrew Bray, currently a Rear Commodore and editor of Yachting World,
but then on the staff of Yachting Monthly, first wrote in 1977 on singlehanded
systems after his qualifying passage in the 1975 Azores and Back Race (AZAB).
Another YM journalist and our present Membership Secretary, Colin Jarman,
wrote a strong riposte to the Vice Commodore’s criticisms in 1978, proposing
a library of information on foreign ports which became the basis of the system
in use today. Again in 1977, the young journalist Libby Purves treated us to
one of her pungent yarns now familiar to YM readers, describing a very Irish
race out of Schull which bore a lot of resemblance to the OCC Smith’s Cove
‘bang and return race’ of more recent years. Libby goes on:
‘The Commodore announced the result in the bar after the race,
“There has been an unforeseen disaster. The computer was
accidentally blown off the starting boat into many fathoms of
water due to the violence of the explosion of the starting gun.
Your committee has therefore decided to draw the names out of
this hat in which it just happens that we have written ...” ’
From a rather hesitant start with the first Club rally in Gibraltar in 1971, sailing
meets gradually took off so that within ten years there was a greater frequency
of small rallies than there is today. After a series of short local meets, the next
ambitious one was in the Azores in 1977, organised by Giles Chichester (son
of Sir Francis) and Mike Butterfield. In the event Giles was the only one to
arrive, but he went ahead with the Club’s planned entertainment, ably assisted
by Peter Azevedo who by this time was acting in loco parentis to any passing
OCC boat. Mike failed to get there due to the late completion of his new boat,
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Long-serving Secretary Peter Pattinson
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an occurrence which continues to dog him to this day. Peter gave Giles a
beautifully polished whale’s tooth engraved with the Club burgee, asking that it
be used as a trophy. It was subsequently decided to award it to the crew who
had completed the longest non-stop voyage during the year. It was resolved to
buy a stock, up to an amount of £250, but there is no record of this being done.
That same year Peter Pattinson organised a Club rally at Baltimore, Southern
Ireland, which did slightly better with three boats arriving in time for the party.
These included that frequent transatlantic commuter Bob Ayer in his beautiful
wooden yawl Premise, whose launch in Bremen in 1974 was mentioned at the
end of Chapter 4. As on that occasion, Bob was again crewed by the ‘young,
strong and salty’ Toby Baker, our current Rear Commodore USA North East.
In Flying Fish 1977 we read of member Simon Richardson’s intended
expedition to Smith Island in the Antarctic. He had a team of eight including Bill
Tilman who, at age 79, had tired of his annual sorties to the Arctic and grown
wary of wooden boats, having lost two in the ice, so chose to go with them in
the seemingly bullet-proof steel converted tug En Avant. They victualled in Rio
and left bound for the Falklands at the end of 1977, but nothing was ever heard
of them again.
Tilman’s passing was the end of a most extraordinary life which spanned
many demanding activities, any one of which would have been counted an
outstanding achievement in lesser men. He won the Military Cross with bar on
the Western Front in the First World War, later taking up coffee planting in
Kenya – where he spent his leave cycling 3000 miles across Africa, living off
the land. He started climbing with Shipton on Mount Kenya and went on to
make some outstanding climbs in the Himalayas, including leading the 1938
Everest Expedition. In 1939 he rejoined the Royal Artillery and served throughout
the Second World War, being awarded the DSO for his service with the Italian
partisans. On one occasion capture was avoided when the guerillas smuggled
him out from under the Gestapo’s noses in a coffin. They buried him in the
local cemetery, resurrecting him later that night.
After the war Tilman took up sailing as a means of reaching unclimbed peaks,
and enthralled members with his beautifully understated yarns in many letters
to the Club. He took risks, and consequently achieved things which more
cautious sailors would not dare to attempt. In Mischief he penetrated Lancaster
Sound ahead of the first ice-strengthened supply ship, and in Baroque he sailed
further into the Arctic than any yachtsman in history when he reached 80º 04'
North. Despite the daring nature of many of his exploits he only lost one man
during all his many expeditions.
That he always had difficulty recruiting crew is not surprising – there were
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simply not enough men available with the stamina to undertake the rigours
expected of them. About one Arctic passage he wrote, ‘I regret that some of
my crew adopted the unseamanlike habit of wearing gloves at the helm’.
Tilman’s achievements were not all physical. He wrote fourteen books, not
mere expedition logs but well-crafted writing which endures in its own right.
He was awarded a Doctorate of Laws by St Andrews University in recognition
of the breadth of his scholarship. The loss of En Avant with all her crew was
a sad and untimely end for the young members of the expedition, but for Tilman,
who had flirted with that sort of danger for so long, it seemed almost a fitting
finale. Perhaps his life is best summed up by the epitaph:
‘Life for him was an adventure; perilous indeed, but men are not
made for safe havens.’
In the same (1978) issue of Flying Fish the loss of another boat is recounted,
but without such tragic consequences. Nick Skeates had designed his 7 ton
wooden cutter Wylo and qualified on the first leg of an intended circumnavigation.
He and girlfriend Dorothy wandered on across the Pacific to New Zealand,
where they spent Christmas refitting at Whangerei, before turning north to fill
in some gaps left from their westbound passage. En route from Tonga to Suva
they ran into heavy weather, with frequent showers and constant overcast
making sights impossible. Since dead reckoning suggested that they would
arrive in darkness they decided to heave-to rather than risk a night approach to
a strange harbour, but suddenly a slight clearance showed them surrounded by
white water with Wylo surfing in onto reefs. She was driven high onto the coral
and quickly pounded a hole through the side. They calculated that they were
most likely on North Astrolabe Reef, which had a lighthouse in the centre of the
lagoon, and this was confirmed when they got a brief glimpse of the light
through the mist; just sufficient to get a bearing. There was no hope of getting
Wylo off so they packed as much survival gear as they could into their fibreglass
dinghy and struck out in the direction of the light. Nick describes rowing away
from their little home:
‘Wylo was getting smaller now, and so was our world. There was
just Dorothy, me, and the dinghy on a choppy grey lagoon. I
looked at Dorothy, her face framed by her yellow anorak against
the greyness.
“I’ll marry you,” I blurted out.
The sea got choppier but the lighthouse looked good. It was a
proper solid smoothly tapering one.’
It was unmanned but open, so they spent the night inside, and next day rowed
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back to Wylo but it was too rough to board. Nick poignantly describes the
approach to his stricken boat:
‘As I got there I rowed past charts, letters, odd pages of books,
and horribly familiar wooden parts of the hull and accommodation
drifting across the lagoon. I knew she was finished. She was still
heaving on the reef, but completely awash, and I couldn’t even
get aboard in that surge. Grabbing a bunk cushion I rowed slowly
away in a daze, picking up bits of flotsam, things I knew, and
absent-mindedly dropping them back.
I stared at the wreck of my Wylo, and wept.’
Nick’s impulsive proposal was accepted, so the two of them returned to
Whangerei and set about replacing their lost boat. The result was Wylo II,
designed and built entirely by them in the space of two and a half years, including
stitching the sails. She was very much a one-off to meet their particular requirements,
but several sets of drawings were sold and many are still to be seen.
A new name in the List of Members 1978 was that of Tim Severin, who had
just made a northern transatlantic passage in his leather boat Brendan. She was
designed by the ever-versatile Colin Mudie, who has drawn yacht lines for
construction in virtually every known material, including straw. Brendan’s lines
were taken from those of the Irish leather curraghs, which had been sailed out
of the west of Ireland for centuries and are still in use on the Shannon. Tim
sailed her to Newfoundland as part of his research into the legends of early
travels by St Brendan in the 6th century. He wished to show, in the way that the
Kon-Tiki voyage and David Lewis’s Pacific travels had done, that ocean
crossings in those days were perfectly feasible with the craft known to have
been in use at the time. They built the Brendan with an ash frame covered by 49
cow hides, heavily steeped in wool grease. Tim remarked that during building
they became so saturated themselves that they couldn’t stop the dogs following
them to the pub. A wonderful bit of Irish back-handed humour was overheard
at the launch: “Sure they’ll make it! But they’ll need a miracle”.
They did make it to Newfoundland, taking the ‘stepping stone route’ via the
Hebrides, Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland, and did much to reinforce the theory
that the likes of St Brendan could have visited the North American mainland
with the materials and techniques available to them. Tim was the speaker at the
1978 annual dinner and apparently kept his audience spellbound.
However, the inexorable rise in the cost of the dinner had reduced the attendance
to a mere 60. Clearly the charge of £10 was stretching members too far, so the
Committee set about finding a cheaper venue than the Royal Thames Yacht
Club. It was reported in the minutes of the next committee meeting that the
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Secretary had booked a room at the Great Western Hotel for the Jubilee dinner
at a cost of £7.50, but that is the last one hears of the suggested move down-
market.
In the event, the Jubilee dinner in 1979 was held at the RTYC and was well
attended despite the cost of £10. It was also much enhanced by the presence of
the Admiral and Mary. The guest of honour was, most appropriately, the
Commodore of the RCC and old friend of Hum and Mary | 
