Tag: racing

Thames Festival Classic Rally at St Katharine Docks, 2009

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Jim Vandenbos’s mobile phone photos of the 2009 inaugural Thames Festival Classic Rally. If anyone else has photos they’d like to share, please email me at gmatkin@gmail.com

The first Thames Festival Classic Rally at St Katharine Docks, London last weekend was a success and seems likely to be be repeated next year.

I couldn’t make it for reasons not unconnected with my broken ankle, but my pal Jim Vandenbos dropped by to see Lord Boris’s Thames’ Festival after the cricket at Lords finished early.

Among other things he was keen to see the rally at St Katharine’s Dock and beetled over to take a look. When pressed for numbers he guessed that there were something over 30 classic boats in the dock, including Arthur Ransomes’ Nancy Blackett as seen in the novel We didn’t mean to go to Sea, and a very nice Uffa Fox Fairey Marine yacht. He also says there were a good number of visitors strolling around the dock.

If Jim’s right, I’d say 30 boats was a good, healthy number.

Event organiser Ian Welsh told intheboatshed that the rally had been a success. ‘It went very well indeed, the entrants loved it and so it seems did the St Katharine’s people – so fingers crossed we’ll do it next year again. We already have lots of ideas for next year.’

More photos have been posted by the organisers on their website.

The rally also made The Times – see the story here.

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Griff Rhys Jones meets gunpowder barge Lady of the Lea on London’s other other river

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GRJ on the Lea

TV presenter, TV clown and old boat enthusiast Griff Rhys Jones’ series Rivers this week follows the River Lea.

If the Thames is also known as the London River and the Medway is often called London’s Other River, then the Lea must at least claim to be London’s Other Other River.

True to the form of the other programmes in the series it included some fabulous photography interspersed with some comical rubbernecking by GRJ and some interesting historical stuff – and I have to say it was easily the most interesting of the series so far.

I lived for years on the banks of the Lea and frequently used it to travel around – though by bicycle on the towpath in those days rather than by boat, but the programme makers introduced me to several aspects of the river that I hadn’t known anything about, including the large gunpowder works on its banks and the barges that used to carry the dangerous stuff away.

Anyway, the programme included a jolly sequence in which the last remaining gunpowder barge (and incidentally, the last sailing barge to be launched in the heyday of barge building), the Lady of the Lea, came up the river for the first time in a decade, and then had some trouble turning around in the river, which we learned is silting up slowly.

There are a couple of links to share one shows a nice photo of the old boat, while the other gives her main details.

If you’re in the UK, the River Lea episode will be available on the BBC iPlayer for some days to come.

King George the Fifth, the king who was first yachtsman in the land, and his love for a boat

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King George the Fifth at the helm of Britannia, taken from the Wikipedia

I’ve just bought a copy of Frank Carr’s book The Yachtsman’s England, published in the spring of 1937. Carr could write carefully turned and well researched material, but on this occasion he seems to have been employed to provide lots of colour with special emphasis on the Empire and old socks school of writing, and he certainly included some fine sentimental stuff in this one!

Writing about the yachtsmen of England, he has this to say:

‘It requires,’ said a writer in the London Review over seventy years ago, ‘a combination of those attributes which distinguish a modern Briton to make a racing-man or genuine yachtsman.’ What was true in 1862 is equally true today; and no-one can think of those fine qualities which go to make a great yachtsman without remembering first the man in whom they were so perfectly combined – our late sovereign, His Majesty King George the Fifth. He who so dearly loved the sea, who by his subjects was so dearly loved, had won a place in the hearts of all of us who know the ways of little ships, not as our King alone, but as the First Yachtsman in the land. Most of us knew him only as a slight figure on the deck of the splendid old Britannia; or from the happy photographs taken of him at the helm, or hauling on a halliard, or looking up at a sail to see with a master’s eye that they were all well set and drawing. But we knew that he was a sailor as well as a King, who could see with a sailor’s eye and feel with a sailor’s understanding. We knew that he felt the power of a little ship to win the love of those who sail her, and we loved him for the love he bore Britannia.’

Many of us who enjoy sailing can get pretty misty eyed about our boats, perhaps particularly when they’ve seen us through a trying passage, but King George V’s affection for Britannia seems to have been a bit extreme. Perhaps it was from jealousy that anyone else might sail his yacht or maybe it was to avoid the sad effects of decay and decline that have afflicted other great racing yachts, but his dying wish was for his yacht to follow him to the grave. And so in 1936, probably just weeks before Carr sat at his desk to write, Britannia’s stripped hull was towed out to deep water near the Isle of Wight, and sunk.

To many of us now it seems like a big and unnecessarily wasteful gesture, but it turned out to be more than that – for it also marked the end of big yacht racing in Europe.

For more on Britannia at the Wikipedia, click here.

For Uffa Fox’s view, click here.

For more on Britannia at intheboatshed.net, including film clips, old photos of her racing and news of a revitalised Alfred Mylne company, click here.

For more on Frank Carr, click here.