I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he flicks over one or two of the pages before the book joins the others under his arm. I make up my mind that if he starts towards the shop door I will step forward and beg him to let me have the book, which is clearly meant for me. Fate can do only so much; sometimes you have to go the final yard yourself.
Minutes tick by, during which more books are added to my rival’s collection. I rummage around in the box in front of me and feign interest in a surprisingly clean second-hand copy of Get Started in Pig Keeping. ‘Pat yourself on the back,’ I read, ‘if you are one of those people who realise that a pig, more than almost any other animal, gives more than it takes . . .’ But before I can be drawn further into the wonderful world of pig husbandry, my neighbour suddenly straightens up, reaches into his jacket for his wallet and takes out a £10 note. This is, evidently, all the money he has on him. He gazes up and down the street, perhaps looking for a cash machine, then sighs and starts to put back some of the books. When he comes to Clenched Lap or Clinker, he pauses, apparently reluctant to let it go, but eventually he slips it back into the box.
I strike with indecent haste.
Returning to the beachfront, I find a vacant bench and open my prize. More a heavily bound pamphlet than a book, it’s only thirty pages long, and I read it from stem to stern, right there and then.
Clenched Lap or Clinker was published in 1972 by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London, to celebrate the art and history of this form of boatbuilding. This process was ‘one of the oldest skills of North European man’, writes Basil Greenhill, the museum’s director, in his introduction. There had, he adds, been ‘few objects of everyday use more beautiful than some clinker built boats’. The great clinker-built boats of the Saxons and the Vikings ‘have been described, with perhaps permissible enthusiasm, as the major technical achievement of the age before the building of cathedrals’.
But although written as a celebration of an historic boatbuilding technique, in tone the monograph reads more like an epitaph. Within a decade or so, Greenhill predicts, the clinker-built wooden boat will be ‘an expensive rarity’. The author of the pamphlet is Eric McKee, a renowned maritime expert and the museum’s consultant authority on boat structures, and he’s no more upbeat about clinker’s prospects. The past twenty-five years, he observes ruefully, have ‘seen the introduction of more new boatbuilding materials and methods than the previous twenty-five centuries’. Marine plywood, synthetic glues and glass fibre ‘are rapidly replacing timber as a boatbuilding material and are making the old methods of working wood obsolete’. The number of people now capable of building a clinker boat, he adds, was ‘already small, fewer and fewer apprentices are being trained, and the time cannot be far off when the building of a boat by this method will be looked upon as an extravagant eccentricity’.
Absurdly, I begin to feel rather special.
By describing how a simple clinker boat might be built, McKee hopes to restore the fortunes of a boatbuilding method that ‘has been treated as something of a mystery, too difficult for the amateur’. The enthusiastic reader, he insists, ‘if he is . . . able to use the more common hand tools . . . could confidently build a boat for himself’.
Clearly, I think, he means me. Well, minus the bit about familiarity with common hand tools.
To show just how simple the whole process might be, McKee has included a ‘straightforward’ cut-out-and-build scale half-model of a clinker-built boat, printed on a removable section of card. With mounting excitement, I flick to the centre of the book and discover that the card is still there, a little faded, but intact – whoever has owned the book in the forty-five years since it was published had resisted the challenge.
But before I reach for scissors and glue, to say nothing of saw and chisel, I need reassurance. Can a smooth-handed son of modern life possibly master the skills necessary to create a clinker-built boat? I honestly have no idea, but I do know a man who might.
5
RED BOAT
‘Ignorant of the craft of boats and any kind of carpentry, and swimmer rather than sailor, I never fathomed the skills of my forebears, which James Dodds has so brilliantly acquired. But we both love the look and feel of vernacular vessels. We honour them for fun and function in the waterland where we live. And then still more for their poetic symbolism to a world where humankind, all six billion of us really in the same boat, often seems all at sea.’
– Ian Collins, James Dodds: Tide Lines
16 AUGUST 2013
When it comes to marking or even recalling important anniversaries I am, I concede, usually rubbish. But though I say so myself, in August 2013 I played an absolute blinder.
Just as well. The first anniversary of our marriage fell on a Friday, followed two days later by Kate’s fortieth birthday, so clearly something a bit special was in order. I’d ignored the advice of friends – ‘Paris will be so hot/empty/closed in August’ – and booked us on the Eurostar for a long weekend in the city of light. As luck would have it, the city was delightfully warm and uncrowded and all the bits we cared about were open.
But Paris was just the half of it – Kate’s real birthday surprise, waiting for her return home on the Monday, was a large woodcut of a boat, hanging on the wall of our riverside apartment in Mistley.
Kate and I had got married in 2012 in the Dickensian annexe of the Pier Hotel at Harwich, partly for the views over the confluence of the rivers Stour and Orwell and partly for the fabled fish and chips, which they served up for our small wedding party. When we’d visited the Pier to finalise arrangements a couple of months before the big day, Kate had seen and fallen in love with two large oil paintings of wooden boats that hung on the hotel’s walls.
Both were by James Dodds, a boatbuilder-turned-artist from nearby Wivenhoe in Essex. During a four-year apprenticeship at a shipbuilding yard in Maldon, Essex, that finally closed its doors in 1992, Dodds had worked on Thames sailing barges, fishing smacks and winkle brigs, tough little clinker-built Essex working boats. Via Colchester art school, Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, Dodds traded up his intimate knowledge of the boatbuilder’s craft to develop a unique style and flair for capturing the mesmeric shapes and lines of the traditional wooden boats that he had played on as a child and worked on as a young man. The result was a portfolio of striking prints and paintings that prompted the viewer to recognise that, beyond the oil and the canvas, the boats themselves could be considered works of art.
A piece by Dodds, I decided, would be the perfect gift to mark the twin occasions of Kate’s fortieth birthday and our first anniversary. Not only was she taken with the beauty of the lines of a traditional boat, especially as captured by Dodds, but her appreciation of the real thing had been enhanced the previous summer by our joint purchase of a yacht.
Though perhaps ‘enhanced’ wasn’t the right word. Or ‘yacht’.
Still relatively flush with cash following my tax-free sojourn in Dubai, we decided to buy a boat in which Kate could learn to sail and invested about £3,000 in a Vivacity 21, a small glass-fibre sloop built in 1973. It was, in other words, exactly the same age as Kate, but I was heartened by my selective reading of the survey I commissioned (on the boat, not Kate). Being a journalist, I naturally cut straight to the conclusion: ‘For a vessel of her age, she is in surprisingly good condition, and quite suitable for sailing in the various local rivers. And at the price she is on the market for, she is an ideal first boat.’
Just 21ft long, the compact, tiller-steered cabin cruiser was dwarfed by the large, modern yachts with which she shared berthing space at Woolverstone Marina on the Orwell. Nevertheless, she somehow exuded a kind of chipper menace that seemed to caution against shortening her absurdly grandiose name – Lucifer – to the seemingly more appropriate Lucy. Plus, changing a boat’s name is deemed unlucky. I never paused to consider why someone might have named such a fun little boat after the original fallen angel, but as it turned ou
t ‘Lucifer’ proved pretty apposite. Kate did learn to sail in her, and in record time, but the boat ensured she had a devil of a job in the process.
With or without a favourable wind, getting out of a tightly packed modern tidal marina without rubbing the neighbours up the wrong way demands the use of an engine. Lucifer had one, a 9.9hp Mercury outboard, which appeared to be in very good nick but in fact never, ever failed to let us down, and always chose to do so at the single most inopportune moment. Mid-river, with boats bearing down upon us from every point of the compass, we learnt an awful lot, very quickly, about panic-servicing an outboard, whipping out and clearing filters and cleaning and gapping spark plugs in record time. On occasion we had to resort to paddling our way out of disaster using the oars of the inflatable tender, much to the amusement of the lawn-lounging members of the neighbouring Royal Harwich Yacht Club. Kate became adept at scampering forward to hoist the jib in a desperate bid to whip up sufficient headway to give the rudder a chance of steering us out of danger. Much salty though not strictly nautical language was exchanged during these stress tests.
After a season of this one-sided battle, during which the farthest we ventured was Wrabness on the Stour, Kate declared herself a fully fledged sailor and generously suggested we offer someone else the chance to enjoy this instructional little boat. It was only when the yacht-broker hauled her out of the water to put her up for sale that it was discovered that Lucifer’s plywood cabin roof was rotten and on the verge of collapsing, taking the mast with it. It was only now that I looked to the detail of the survey I had commissioned the previous year. Many parts of the boat, it advised, needed urgent attention, though ‘none of it is beyond the scope of a reasonably competent DIY owner’. If the work were carried out by a professional, the surveyor added, ‘the cost would be more than the vessel is worth, and out of all proportion’.
We had, it seemed, dodged by a sail’s width the spectacular coup de grâce in Lucifer’s campaign to do us in. In the end the broker did find a buyer and we got £200 for her, though the broker’s fee, by pure chance, also came to £200. Taking into account the marina charges and insurance, we ended the season down only about £5,000. Not for nothing did Edward Heath, a onetime British prime minister and enthusiastic yachtsman, compare sailing to ‘standing under a cold shower tearing up £5 notes’.
All in all, it seemed that having a picture of a boat might prove a whole lot less trouble than owning the real thing. I swiftly discovered that any painting by Dodds would be beyond my meagre means, but I hoped I might be able to stretch to one of his linocuts. I mentioned this in an email to him and to my surprise he invited me to his studio, just down the coast in Wivenhoe, to have a look round. That’s when I first saw Red Boat, a stunning 4ft/sq woodcut of a 15ft winkle brig, a traditional type of Essex workboat, capable of being rigged for oar or sail, on which Dodds had just finished working. Liberated from foreground, background, sea or sky, the bare but beautifully detailed clinker-built hull surges towards the viewer with all the dramatic, ghostly presence of the Viking longships from which it is directly descended.
The linocuts were all beautiful, and much cheaper. But this woodcut, with the grain of the timber from which it had been carved vividly clear, was something else – bold, striking and evocative. I had to have it and happily parted with a month’s mortgage, there and then. I felt certain that when Kate first saw it she would agree that we couldn’t afford not to have this soul-stirring thing in our lives.
And she first saw it when she walked through the door on the day of her fortieth birthday, upon our return from Paris – Dodds had agreed to come round to the apartment in our absence and hang the framed print, number four in an edition of fifty, on the wall. It occurred to me as we sped home through the Channel that an uncharitable observer might consider the purchase of Red Boat – and, indeed, of Lucifer – to have been as much for me as for Kate, but luckily it also proved to be love at first sight for her.
In time, Red Boat, too stunning and too compelling for even a baby to ignore, would gain another admirer. Later, when she started to speak, our daughter would point at it and say, presciently, ‘Phoebe’s boat’.
It was only three years later, after I had made the decision to build Phoebe a boat and was casting around in increasing desperation for plans, that I learnt from Dodds that the winkle brig that had inspired Red Boat had also served as the model for Boy Building a Boat.
So that settled it. Solid, dependable, traditional and with a local pedigree, this, or something very much like this, was clearly the boat I was meant to build as my inspirational gift to my daughter, who had, after all, already pretty much claimed it for her own. All I needed now were some plans.
If traditional boatbuilding were a religion, Gus Curtis, a master of skills handed down through generations, would surely be one of its high priests.
Gus Curtis runs Harry King & Sons, a boatyard in Pin Mill that dates back to 1850. Even though I’d once lived almost next door to the yard, I’d never met Gus. But I knew him by reputation and wanted to look the alchemist in the eye, to tell him all about my ridiculous scheme to build a traditional wooden boat using the old skills (none of which, I would freely confess, I possessed) and then watch carefully for his reaction. Perhaps, deep down, I was hoping that he would tell me that I was being ridiculous, that I should quit before I started. And, if that were the advice of a man such as this, who was I to ignore it? ‘Oh well,’ I could tell myself, and anyone else who cared, ‘I gave it my best shot. If Gus Curtis says it’s impossible, then it must be.’
But fortunately – or unfortunately; I wasn’t yet clear on that – that isn’t what Gus Curtis says.
I watch Gus oversee the unstepping of a mast from a large yacht, and now he’s marching towards me, sea boots crunching on the gravel of the yard. He is, I suppose, in his mid-to-1ate forties, with dark, thinning hair and the lined and tanned face of someone who has spent much of their working life outdoors. He seems a little taken aback when I reach out to shake his hand and he hesitates for a moment, first wiping his palm on his shirt. His hand is rough and his grip absurdly firm. Belatedly I try to toughen up my own limp-wristed grasp but mistime the manoeuvre and succeed only in effecting a slightly camp squeeze. Presenting myself as a wannabe boatbuilder, I am painfully aware of just how soft and unworked my own hands are.
‘Let’s go into the office,’ Gus says, ducking through a small door to lead the way into the interior of the yard’s workshop. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘We’re just getting ready to bring another boat in for some work.’
Mess? I stop short inside the cavernous, double-height workshop. This isn’t mess, it’s a boat enthusiast’s heaven.
Sawdust, discarded pieces of planed wood, tools ancient and modern . . . and that smell. An evocative blend of – what? Fresh-sawn timber, varnish, oil, epoxy resin, paint, caulking cotton, rusting chains and saltwater-pickled ropes . . . all are in view, and in the air.
Now Gus is bounding up a set of acutely angled iron stairs at the back of the workshop that must surely have been cannibalised from a ship. Kicking up sawdust, I hurry across the workshop to clamber up after him and find myself on a small mezzanine floor that really ought to be picked up and transported in its entirety for display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Again, ‘Sorry about the mess,’ Gus says, sweeping dust from two old bentwood chairs. I get the impression that no one sits around much here. Somewhere there’s a desk, its surface submerged beneath a sea of papers, nuts, bolts, tools and various mysterious bits and pieces. It faces a small window through which, were it not for the thick lace curtain of cobwebs, one might have a commanding view of the waterfront and the flotilla of yachts moored on the river beyond, each one under Gus’s care as manager of the 100 or more moorings at Pin Mill.
I sit down. Gus is rummaging about for a piece of paper and a pencil. ‘So what do you think?’ I say. ‘Is it rashly optimistic of me to think I could
possibly make a clinker-built boat?’
This is the moment when pride could perhaps be persuaded to let me walk away from this madness. Just say the word, Gus, and I’ll be off. But at first he doesn’t say anything at all. By now he’s located his paper and pencil and he starts drawing his answer.
‘You’ll start with a very basic stem, either a grown or laminated shape,’ he says, sketching away, ‘and on the back of that you create a scarf, like that – you just cut that out.’
Scarf? It’s a term with which I will become familiar, but for now I just nod, as though I have some idea of what he’s talking about. But although his words have little meaning, I realise that he’s drawing a three-dimensional sketch of the backbone of a boat – the keel, and so on. I’ve come here for a general chat about possibilities and now I find myself being treated to Boatbuilding 101 by one of the acknowledged masters of the art. Brief panic. Could it be that he’s mistaken me for somebody else?
‘Then your keel,’ Gus is saying, ‘will obviously be scarfed onto it like that, and you’ll put the fastenings through there . . .’
It pains me to do so, because I know there are boat enthusiasts out there who would gladly poke out at least one of their eyes for this masterclass, but I interrupt him. It’s confession time. ‘Gus, you’re losing me already,’ I say. ‘Seriously, am I being utterly ridiculous? Could someone like me possibly do something like this? Build a clinker boat?’
How to Build a Boat Page 5