He pauses, tap-tap-tapping the pencil on the paper, and gazing into the middle distance.
‘It is complicated,’ he says, slowly. I swear he glances at my hands. ‘But it is possible. I mean, clinker is the most beautiful way to go, but it is also the most complicated . . .’
Possible. He said it was possible. And that it was the penance way to go.
There must be something about my quixotic project that intrigues Gus. After all, he’s a busy man and the last thing he needs is to waste time like this. But waste it he does. He’s out of his chair and rummaging around in a pile of old timber offcuts. In fact, he announces, pulling out what looks like some kind of template, ‘these are moulds, used to shape the hull of a clinker-built boat. This is one of Sam’s,’ he says casually, holding up what looks like a profile of half a champagne saucer, fashioned out of scraps of wood fastened together. Sam, the son of Harry King, played a walk-on part in literary history. In 1938, the yard built a 35ft cutter for the author Arthur Ransome, who had chosen Pin Mill as the setting for his 1937 children’s book, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. Into the water with Selina King went a 10ft clinker-built tender, built by Sam, which Ransome christened Swallow. Sam made dozens of these little boats, mainly by eye.
Gus explains that, depending on the size of the boat, a boatbuilder might usually make five or six moulds, which are fixed vertically at right angles along the length of the keel. The overlapping planks that form the hull are bent around each of the moulds in turn and fixed to the stem and the stern. When all the planks are in place, and the hull complete, the moulds are removed, either to be discarded or used again for another boat.
But Sam, it seems, only ever made one half of a single mould when he was building the dinghies for which he was famous – such as Selina King’s tender. Sadly for me, he also never felt the need to commit any of his designs to paper. ‘He built so many boats in his time, he knew exactly what shape and curve the planks should have,’ says Gus. ‘Occasionally he would just hold this mould in place, to make sure all was fair, then flip it over to check the other side, but generally he just worked by eye.’
Gus leads me outside and down to the pontoon that sticks out 100 yards or so into the Orwell. Tied up alongside is a small clinker-built boat and Gus kneels down and points out something I’ve never noticed before. Although the planks overlap along most of their length, at the stem and the stern the overlap gradually diminishes until, in the last few inches, the planks all lie flush with each other. It occurs to me that this must be a difficult trick to pull off. Looking back, this actually would have been a fine moment to reconsider the whole plan, but at this stage my ignorance remains blissful.
‘This is the sort of boat you’re looking at,’ says Gus, and it is. ‘It’s a real classic. I’m helping my son to restore it.’
His son, Tom, is fifteen and about to start a shipwright’s apprenticeship at the Pioneer Sailing Trust in Brightlingsea, Essex. ‘I’d have liked him to go and do A-levels or something clever and earn some money, but he’s determined,’ says Gus. ‘He’s in love with boats and he’s also very talented at it. He annoys the hell out of me.’ It’s very moving watching this father trying hard not to burst with pride.
Tom’s 14ft clinker-built boat, planked in thick oak, was built in 1882 as a lifeboat for a Norwegian paddle steamer called Skibladner, named after the ship Skíðblaðnir of Old Norse mythology. The name, dramatic and romantic to the ear of an English speaker but in reality disappointingly descriptive, means only ‘assembled from small pieces of wood’. Nevertheless, according to various Nordic poets Skíðblaðnir was ‘the best of boats’, owned in turn by the gods Freyr and Odin.
Gus tells me about the first clinker-built boat he made, as a newly trained shipwright back in the ’80s. ‘It was the first one I’d built all by myself, with no one looking over my shoulder,’ he says. It was only a 10ft sailing dinghy, ‘but it was the best feeling in the world. I’d do it all day every day, if I could, but sadly no one is going to pay me to do that.’ These days he’s lucky if he gets to make one every couple of years.
Then Gus looks right at me. ‘If you go ahead and build a clinker boat, you’ll love doing it,’ he says, as though suddenly realising I need all the encouragement I can get. ‘If you pull it off you’ll have a tremendous sense of achievement. Of course you’re daunted now. But if you weren’t, if you knew damn well it was going to be easy, then you’d never do it, would you?’
Exactly. Go the penance way.
I’d half-expected Gus to laugh me off the premises. Instead, he says he’ll be happy to help me out anytime I get stuck.
It’s pretty humbling and I come away a little stunned. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this level of support and encouragement. I’d met the alchemist and found him trapped in a world in which his magic is deemed too expensive to be practised. Perhaps Gus Curtis forgot all about the clueless journalist and his quixotic mission the moment we parted. Regardless, even though I’d only just met him I already felt that this was not someone I wanted to let down.
6
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
‘It was painted blue outside and white within, and was just the size for two animals; and the Mole’s whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did not yet fully understand its uses.’
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
22 SEPTEMBER 2016
Deciding that a clinker-built dinghy or winkle brig is the perfect type of boat to build for Phoebe is one thing, but finding the plans for one is proving to be something else. And by now I know enough to realise that I must have plans if I am even to attempt to build a boat – even though I still have no real idea of what I mean by ‘plans’.
And then serendipity throws me a line. One of the advantages of working at home is that one is both boss and staff, so when I suggest that what we need is an inspirational team-building awayday I jump at the chance. My natural inclination is to head off again to Aldeburgh where, gazing out to sea, I find I do some of my best blue-sky thinking. But some of the team think we should give somewhere new a try, so I propose a trip to Wivenhoe, the picturesque and historic waterfront village on the east bank of the River Colne in Essex that, for good reason, is home to Red Boat artist James Dodds.
Idling along the quay, drooling over the collection of old boats berthed on the muddy riverbank and wondering whether I can justify a round of drinks for the team in the waterfront Rose and Crown, my eye is drawn to an old building, two doors down from the pub, that looks as though once upon a time it might have been a sail loft. I’ve never heard of the Nottage Maritime Institute and I stroll over to take a look.
It’s closed, but I press my face to one of the glass panels in the twin barn doors. It’s dark inside but I can just make out two lines of small boats, in various stages of construction, stretching away into the gloom at the back of the building. They are made from wood and, I realise as my eyes adjust, they are clinker-built. It occurs to me that if this little boat is being built in such numbers, then someone, surely, must be in possession of the plans.
Back at home, I make some calls and learn a little about the boat I’ve seen, the Nottage dinghy, but work intrudes and it will be the new year before I can return to Wivenhoe. This makes me nervous – I am, after all, on a clock that starts ticking on 1 January. On the other hand, I realise that once boatbuilding begins in earnest I will have less time to sit in front of a computer – exactly how much less, I can’t at this stage even begin to imagine – and so I am loath to pass up any opportunities to earn money towards next year’s mortgage payments while I still can.
And I make some progress in another direction. Tracking down the plans for a suitable boat to build is, of course, a vital part of my scheme, but fairly pointless unless and until I find somewhere to build whatever it is I’m going to be building. In November I launch a determined effort and, after several weeks of knocking on farm doors within a 3-mile radius of hom
e, by the end of the month my search is at an end.
We are a one-car family and, as that car disappears pretty much every day with Kate and Phoebe, I need somewhere I can easily cycle to. I hit pay dirt in a former fruit farm at the edge of a neighbouring village, bang in the centre of the peninsula and only a fifteen-minute bike ride from home. The farmer, John, is retired and already lets out a couple of the outbuildings in his yard to a sculptor and a ceramicist. One outbuilding remains vacant and I rather like the idea of becoming part of a creative community. Luckily for me, John is a lifelong sailor, who only recently has been obliged by poor health to give up his beloved 27ft clinker-built motorsailer and is tickled by the idea of seeing a clinker-built dinghy take shape in one of his disused sheds.
With electricity (pending), a toilet just across the yard and double doors for that magical moment when a boat might have to be dragged out into the world, the 20×20ft shed seems ideal, and big enough to handle anything I might choose to build in it.
John will become an enthusiastic supporter and much more than a mere landlord. Despite his advancing years, he retains much of the fitness that comes from a lifetime of working the land and, over the coming months, I would find myself shamelessly calling upon him for help whenever I needed a hand with something I couldn’t quite manage on my own.
A gentleman farmer of the old school, there is very little John doesn’t know about nature and the seasons and he delights in alerting me to the latest bird sightings, expressing only mild dismay at my inability to distinguish swifts from swallows. Whichever species they are, the birds take to swooping through my shed when the doors are open and before long – and before I have even settled on a boat to build – I have adopted Swift as the working title for Phoebe’s boat. Swallow, of course, is already taken.
In the search for that boat I return to the Nottage. The institute, I learn, owes its foundation in 1896 to the untimely demise of one Captain Charles G. Nottage, a Victorian gentleman-adventurer, soldier and yachtsman who hired professional sailors from the Colne and Blackwater rivers to crew his racing yachts. Upon his death at the age of forty-two, Captain Nottage left behind a trust fund for the creation of an institute at which Colnesiders could ‘improve themselves in navigation primarily, or make up their skills generally’.
More than 120 years later, the institute continues to thrive, though no longer in the service of the working sailors and fishermen Captain Nottage intended it to benefit, but mainly middle-class professionals seeking a retirement hobby, or qualifications to improve their recreational yachting. Today, the Nottage runs the usual shore-based Royal Yachting Association courses, from Day Skipper to Yachtmaster Offshore, as well as offering instruction in a range of other skills of less obvious function in the modern world, from making a scale half-model of a Brightlingsea fishing smack to mastering decorative rope work.
But it’s the institute’s ‘popular and unique flagship course’, as it’s advertised on its website, that seizes my attention. Under the guidance of experienced shipwrights, students ‘learn and use traditional skills during the construction of . . . their own Nottage clinker dinghy’. The entire ground floor of the building is ‘given over entirely to teaching the construction of traditional timber, clinker dinghies’, and these were the boats I’d glimpsed. The current course is full, and there is a four-year waiting list, but I’m not interested in a place on the course – it’s the plans for the boat I’m after.
Eventually I track down Fabian Bush, one of the two instructors on the course, and in a brief telephone conversation explain my plan. The course, which runs alternate Saturdays, is now on a break for Christmas, but he invites me to come along when it reconvenes in the new year.
The first thing that hits me inside the building is the evocative smell of freshly sawn timber – larch, as it turns out. This will become as familiar to me as the smell of Phoebe’s hair when she was a baby. For a while, I just stand by the door, entranced by the beauty of the boats laid out in front of me in various stages of construction. There are nine in all, progressing at different paces. One is little more than an inverted keel, an exposed spine with only the first three or four planks in place, but most of the others are somewhere between half-built and all but complete.
Though I have only spoken to Fabian on the phone it doesn’t take long to pick him out, a diffident guru drifting from boat to boat, offering advice here, pointing out a pitfall or error there. When he spots me hovering by the door, he comes across and shakes my hand. Whip-thin and wiry, he appears to be in his sixties. It’s cold, inside and outside, and Fabian is wrapped in several layers of clothing, including a once smart shirt, each of which appears to bear the scars of many years of boatbuilding. On his head is something more closely related to a tea cosy than a hat, behind his right ear a yellow pencil is lodged and around his neck hangs a pair of reading glasses, suspended on a length of old, repurposed string. His hands are rough and marked by constant interaction with wood, tools, glues and varnish, but his voice, easy manner and patrician features combine to create the impression of a slightly eccentric and timeless gentleman pursuing some arcane hobby.
‘Well, here it is,’ he says, with a sweep of the arm taking in both the entire scene and the nearest boat. ‘Come in and have a look round. Have you got some time to spare? I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’ He strolls off towards a group of three men gathered with perplexed expressions around a length of timber.
Someone has left a set of plans draped across the inverted and almost completed hull of the boat nearest to me. It’s only when I read the legend in the box at the bottom of the large sheet of paper that I realise that, in addition to being the boatbuilder running this course, thirty years ago it was Fabian who designed the boat at the centre of it for the institute. And, it now seems, for me. About 10ft long, the broad and clearly stable dinghy can be rowed or sailed and would surely be perfect for a young child and her daddy.
I squat down in front of one of the almost completed boats, which is resting on a pair of trestles. From this angle, it is the living manifestation of Red Boat. It isn’t a winkle brig, of course – it’s too small, for one thing. But the design echoes many of the elements of the traditional boat, and the graceful lines of its planks are every bit as aesthetically seductive as Dodds’ artwork.
And, equally important for the aesthetic of my ambition to build Phoebe a traditional boat, in Fabian Bush I’ve stumbled upon a living link with a past world that has all but vanished. Nothing symbolises this so much as Fabian’s own workshop and home, which he shares with his wife and family, near the waterfront at Rowhedge.
In 1987, Fabian moved to Rowhedge from Osea Island, where he had been building boats for five years, and in 1990 took over a property on the edge of a former boatyard, now mostly lost to housing. Fabian’s outpost, at least, survives, a surrounded boatbuilding Alamo holding out against the odds.
Not only is the Nottage dinghy seemingly tailor-made for me and Phoebe, but in boatbuilding circles, I was to discover, Fabian was something of a legend – ‘the man whose name is central to the revival of British boatbuilding’, according to an article in Classic Boat magazine in 2015. I knew nothing of this when I embarked on my project, which was just as well; I might have baulked at the prospect of brazenly trying to recruit such a figure as my guru.
Fabian grew up around wooden boats and, in 1978, three years after leaving university with a degree in social science, gave up struggling to find a career that interested him and decided to try his hand at building them. It was, he says, an idea that even at the time ‘seemed ludicrous to most in the business in the real world’, in which the use of wood was rapidly giving way to glass fibre. But he was ‘lucky to find a yard nearby run by a similar sort of nut’, and that nut took him on as an apprentice in his yard at Heybridge Basin, near Maldon.
After four years spent learning his craft and living on a yacht he had restored, Fabian met Iain Oughtred, a like-minded Australian-born boat designer and
builder who was, he says, ‘even further off the scale’ than him. On the basis of a small order Oughtred gave him in 1982, Fabian struck out in business on his own on Osea, a small island downstream from Maldon in the River Blackwater.
In 1983, the two men came to the attention of Peter Spectre, a journalist on the American magazine WoodenBoat, who had been sent to England to see ‘if the English might be having a wooden boat revival similar to the one that had been under way in America since the 1970s’. They weren’t. As Spectre wrote in the preface to a 2008 biography of Oughtred, he found England in the 1980s in the grip of ‘nautical despair’, a land where ‘fibreglass was king’. Then, in Maldon, he met Fabian, ‘a type not uncommon at that time in America, but an anomaly in England; a university graduate with a predilection for working with his hands’, and, through him, Oughtred, ‘another anomaly’.
Both Bush and Oughtred, as Spectre would later recall, were living in semi-poverty on Osea, where they were building two Acorn skiffs, a newly designed boat ‘that would make Iain’s reputation’. They were also, as Nic Compton put it in A Life in Wooden Boats, his 2008 biography of Oughtred, two young men in pursuit of an ideal that many would have dismissed, even at the time, as hopelessly romantic.
Their ethos, Fabian told Compton, was informed by the socialist ideals of William Morris, the Victorian poet, designer and novelist, and ‘the idea of producing fine-quality things for the masses. We were moving into a period of mass production, with bad craftsmanship and bad materials. We wanted to show that you could still hand-build wooden boats with good craftsmanship and good materials. We wanted to build beautiful boats for the masses.’
Unfortunately, the masses had other ideas. As Fabian later told me, ‘We discovered fairly quickly that the wooden boat market did not want, on the whole, the sort of boat that one might equate with Shaker furniture, but wanted boats that looked pretty much like old boats, but using plywood.’
How to Build a Boat Page 6