Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  Sheila was staying with one of her more doughty cousins nearby and when she reported all this she was urged to get a divorce immediately; but, as Francis remembers, ‘she decided to defer that’. Sheila had her sail the next morning, a particularly idyllic one, thank heavens, and she enjoyed it enormously. She was soon redesigning Florence Edith’s interior. Together ‘they rebuilt the cabin, making berths for six, which cost as much as the boat’. Francis renamed her Gipsy Moth II after the brave little biplane that had taken him half-way round the world. Two Gipsy Moths later he would complete the journey.

  Now change was in the air for the Chichesters. The east coast sailing meant that time in westerly Wiltshire was harder to find. More importantly, Giles was now seven and needed to go to a ‘proper’ school. Neither Francis nor Sheila had much truck with boarding schools: Francis’s experiences were only forty years behind him and the scars were still sore; the homeopath in Sheila thought that parent-child separation barbaric. And then there’s the seven-year itch; time for a change. And change they did.

  Sometime between the unsuccessful Baltic cruise and buying Florence Edith, Francis stepped out of no. 9 St James’s Place, turned right, then quickly right again and walked the few yards up the cul-de-sac of St James’s Place to nos 19 and 20, the clubhouse of the Royal Ocean Racing Club. He asked about ocean racing and how to start. It was agreed that a young member, presently busy but free soon, would come to no. 9 in an hour to tell him all about the club and yacht racing. That young member then is my neighbour now, John Roome. John went on to become the Commodore of the RORC and an internationally influential figure in the world of ocean yacht racing. We are both members of the Royal Cruising Club and the Royal Yacht Squadron, as indeed was Francis and is Giles. Now in comfortable retirement next to the Solent, John is kind enough to delve deep into his memory of all things Chichester.

  ‘He only lived around the corner and so I knocked on the door, introduced myself as being from the club. We chatted for an hour or so about racing, how to get started, who to crew for, crewing on the club boats, what boat works best, all that sort of thing.

  ‘I remembered pretty soon that a few months earlier he had put a notice up on our board looking for a navigator’s berth. Another member had told me that he was in fact an air navigator. Now air navigators were never very popular as they had a reputation for wanting to go from A to B in a straight line, putting members on the rocks. Probably unfair, but that was how it was.

  ‘I think that’s what prompted him to buy what became Gipsy Moth II, the fact that he couldn’t find a berth of his own.

  ‘To qualify as a member he would’ve had to sail 500 miles offshore. Same as now. He did a couple of channel races, crewing on our club boat Griffin.’

  John shakes his head and laughs when I ask him about Griffin. ‘Oh, she was an appalling boat. She had been given to the club by some members. She was incredibly heavy. Gaff cutter. She had no engine. Impossible to handle in light airs. Used to come a day late in most races, you know. But she was ideal as a club boat in many ways. She had twenty lines off the mast and she kept everyone busy. The tradition was to take twelve beginners. The captain could choose his two mates, the rest were beginners or miles builders. But she did a wonderful job of starting people off because there was always something to do. Of course there was no way to keep warm or anything resembling creature comforts. Paraffin stove cooking, so primitive, but hot and hearty, as we used to say.

  ‘The worst was the 1956 Channel race when we had two gales. There was one wave she fell off and she never really recovered from that. We had to pump the whole time. Safe harboured in Newhaven of all places. As a result of that we retired her. Luckily Owen Aisher, amongst others, gave us Yeoman III, which was a suburb yacht and she became Griffin II. We continued with successor Griffins until the Fastnet of ’79, when we lost Griffin VI in the middle of that terrible night.’

  John has been kind enough to delve into the RORC archives and dig out some of the race programmes from the 1950s.

  ‘This looks like Francis’s first race’, he says. ‘The 1954 North Sea Race. Started on the fourth of June. Seems like he came practically last, poor chap. Mind you, he had the smallest boat. Class C, we’d only just introduced it.’

  Francis’s first RORC offshore race

  Francis rightly thought he hadn’t done too badly for a near-beginner in one of the smallest boats: ‘I had been in only one race before, and was the only member of the crew who had been in any. She was only 8 tons and 24 feet on the waterline, the minimum length permitted to enter for RORC races’. He added, rather touchingly: ‘Sheila had so much faith in me as a navigator that she expected me to win, and was most disappointed when I telephoned from Rotterdam to say that we had come nearly last.’

  A month later Francis was in the Solent for the Cowes to La Coruna Race. All we learn from John’s records is that Gipsy Moth ‘gave up’; Francis makes no mention of the race either, perhaps because, as Sheila recalls, they were dismasted off Guernsey and she took the opportunity to fly down there for a mini-break on board.

  Two weeks later he was back in Cowes for the Dinard Race and some eerie excitement:

  Unfortunately there was a weakness in the new masthead fitting which had been specially designed for her, and the top of the mast snapped off in the middle of the night in some dirty weather west of the Channel Islands. From the cabin it sounded like the crack of doom, and when I darted up into the cockpit there was a tangle of shrouds, halyards and wires wherever I shone the torch over the boat or in the water. Then one of the crew dropped the torch overboard with the light still shining, and as it sank getting fainter and fainter, it looked like a ghost leaving us for a better world.

  Francis set up a watch system to get them through the night and awoke for his own turn to find the pre-dawn ‘graveyard’ watch fast asleep. In the daylight they cleared up the mess of shrouds and stays and lines from the broken mast, set a small staysail and headed for Guernsey. With this minimal sail and a strong current they were being taken towards the rocks. Francis noted:

  One of the crew was a very devout Roman Catholic, and I noticed his lips praying nervously as we were being carried towards the rocks. We cleared the point, sailed into St Peter Port and tacked up to a mooring buoy by carrying from one side of the deck to the other the boom to which the staysail was attached.

  In that race Gipsy Moth really did come last – but in the next one, from Brixham to Belle-Île, did one better: sixteenth out of seventeen.

  Francis was typically matter-of-fact about his new sport: ‘In my first season I sailed that boat 2,510 miles, including three races. Our racing record was one of the worst in the club, but I was learning.’

  The 1955 season started with the Southsea to Harwich Race in May. Gipsy Moth II finished ninth out of fourteen in forty-four hours; the winner, Foxhound, only took ten hours less. No longer last, or nearly last, Francis really was learning.

  ‘You see here’, John says, handing me the programme, ‘The Southsea to Harwich was won by Foxhound. She was a sister ship to the famous Bloodhound. She was skippered by our most glamorous member, the Hon. Ray Pitt-Rivers, who was also a famous actress; most people knew her as Mary Hinton. Eventually she became Vice-Commodore. A very striking figure she was.’ John smiles at a particularly vivid memory. ‘She lived in a big house to the north as you enter the Beaulieu River. I expect you know it?’

  ‘Lepe House, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Maybe that’s why he came to Beaulieu in the first place? A lot of RORC boats were berthed there for the Solent races.’

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t the reason’, I reply. ‘He had close family connections in the area. His first cousin Sir John Chichester, who would have been the eleventh baronet, had married Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s eldest sister, Anne. Sir John and Anne lived there and of course introduced him to the Montagu family.’

  Rare photograph of Gipsy Moth II, off Cowes

  The line continues t
oday as Sir John and Anne’s son and the twelfth baronet is my friend and neighbour Jamie Chichester, who was only just born when Francis completed his first race. He attended the knighting ceremony at Greenwich on day release from Eton a dozen years later.

  Actually the most fruitful Beaulieu-Chichester connection is not family but another neighbour, the ex-Buckler’s Hard harbour master Bill Grindey. Bill lived for most of his working life in one of those picturesque shipwrights’ cottages in Buckler’s Hard that line the gravel slipway down to the Beaulieu River. Retired now for twenty years, he lives in rather the opposite, a modern bungalow in the modern town of Dibden Purlieu, just outside the New Forest limits. He and his wife Rene are clearly making up for all those years without a garden as a horticultural miracle awaits the visitor at the back of the house. To one side stands the smartest garden shed in Hampshire, complete with Union flag on a varnished pole and a Harbour Master nameplate above the door. As all about the Grindeys is so present and correct, I suggest that in this land-locked context the Union flag could be called the Union Jack; Bill remains unsure of taking such liberties with naval tradition.

  Bill’s earliest memories of Francis are from 1954. He had started working in the old Agamemnon boatyard as an apprentice in 1948 and then in 1952 he was sent to Egypt on National Service with the Parachute Regiment. He came back in 1954 and found Gipsy Moth II in the yard. ‘I remember her in the yard as the engineers had to make a new stem shoe as he raced her so hard. She was an eight-tonner. He was a hard sailor.’

  Francis rather whimsically recalls that time in the yard too:

  I changed her from sloop to cutter rig. With her mainsail, staysail and yankee she carried 540 square feet of sail. I had one brilliant idea after another for speeding her up. For example at great trouble and expense I streamlined her sharp-edged iron keel with a false wooden keel, bolted on below. It made not the slightest difference to her performance.

  A week later Bill and I meet again at Buckler’s Hard marina. Bill has commandeered the harbour master’s launch for a tour of Francis’s Beaulieu River moorings. On a mooring opposite lies Bill’s own boat. ‘Only two people have been given the Freedom of the Beaulieu River’, he says, ‘Sir Francis and me. I was harbour master in ’58, 24 years old. Fifty years I served.’ We motor for half a minute upriver, around the first bend to where the river twists west again.

  ‘This is where Gipsy Moth II lay’, Bill says, slipping the launch into neutral as we hover around the spot. ‘He liked working on her on his own, could be down here for days on end. He used to row up to the hard: the marina was twenty years coming.’

  ‘No outboard?’ I ask.

  ‘There was a British Seagull, but he could never get it started. No one could, those things.’ We both laugh at the memory of recalcitrant British Seagull outboards and flaying starter strings and fraying tempers.

  Bill’s memories of Francis and Sheila cover thirty years, from Francis’s lung cancer, likely caused from paint-stripping Gipsy Moth II, right here where we are floating, to the glory days of Gipsy Moth III – ‘Sir Francis’s favourite yacht, his most personal one’ – to the trials and tribulations and eventual triumph of Gipsy Moth IV, to the last British waters passage of Gipsy Moth V. For now, he gives a passing memory of Francis and his time on Gipsy Moth II: ‘He saw me passing by one day on the river. I don’t normally drink during the day but we polished off Lady Chichester’s sherry, which she never forgave us both for first time it happened. Happened more than once too. He used to say ‘Drink up, Bill, Sheila will be descending upon us at any moment!’

  The 1955 season finished with Francis’s first Fastnet Race. He was climbing up the rankings with every outing, this time finishing tenth out of twenty in six days and eight hours, only thirty-six hours behind the winner, the American Dick Nye in his much larger yacht, Carina. But the constant stresses and strains on his fifty-four year-old body and the way he was continually pushing himself harder and harder were starting to fight back. At the end of the Fastnet he had to be helped out of the cockpit and went off to see a specialist. He was diagnosed with chronic arthritis. Visiting the hospital to be treated with the other arthritic patients only made him more distressed. After two months of this, Sheila insisted he see her nature-cure doctor, Dr Latto, who said: ‘Ask your fellow patients how long they have been receiving this treatment and then decide yourself whether it seems likely to cure you.’ Francis reflected:

  That made me think hard, and as a result I underwent a severe course of nature cure treatment at Enstone. Fortunately the treatment succeeded; it seemed to take a long time, but by the next spring I was a fit man. I started a hard season’s racing in Gipsy Moth II.

  Actually, the first race of the 1956 season wasn’t so hard; not only that, but he won it! How so? Francis explained:

  The first race of the season was the 220-mile race from Southsea to Harwich by way of the Hinder Lightship in the North Sea. Gipsy Moth II won this race outright. It sounds terrific, but the truth is that the going was very slow in light airs as far as the Dover Straits, and many of the other competitors gave up. One of our own crew said we must stop racing and put him ashore. I said, ‘There’s the shore; you can swim for it if you wish, but Gipsy Moth is racing on’.

  What is becoming clear by now is how much time Francis was spending on his yacht racing – and so how little time running the map and guide book business. It’s all very well racing from Southsea to Harwich but then one has to get back from Harwich to the Solent. What with the day or two of preparation before the race, the race itself and the ceremony at the end, the voyage back and the packing away, a simple RORC 220-miler like the Southsea to Harwich would take the best part of eight days, light airs notwithstanding. But Francis took even more time off than this: the Southsea to Harwich was only the first leg of the North Sea Race from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Gipsy Moth II came twentieth out of fifty. Even pressing on, Francis must have taken twenty days off; and this was still only May.

  He made up time back in the office in June and July but took most of August off for the Cowes to San Sebastián Race, then a week in Spain followed by the second leg, San Sebastián to Belle Île. The plan was for Sheila and Giles to join him for a leisurely cruise back to the Beaulieu River. Neptune, however, had made another plan. As Sheila recalled:

  It was one of my most frightening passages, partly because Giles was involved. The weather was so rough that we had to wait and in the end the rest of the crew went off, leaving Francis, myself, Giles and our crew Stormy Nichol to get the boat home. We left with a very bad weather forecast but Francis seemed frantic to get away. I could never argue with him and he just sailed. A friend of ours saw us leave and said ‘That man wants his head looking to, sailing with the wife and child aboard’.

  It soon blew up very, very nasty weather. We were out in the Bay of Biscay, water was coming over, and I felt very sick. Giles started being sick every few minutes which worried me very much: it is bad for a child of only eight.

  Francis wanted to stay out to sea but as concession to his crew made for Concarneau. Sheila again:

  The seas were running so high that whole place seem swollen. We were wet through and through. Giles was marvellous; I did admire the child.

  Next day I told Francis I was going to leave him and Stormy to bring the boat up to Dinard: Giles and I would meet him there. By great good luck I not only got a nice room in a hotel but a bathroom too. ‘Very extravagant to have a bathroom’, Francis said. I went out for a walk. When I came back, to my great amusement, there in my hotel bedroom was Stormy asleep on the bed and Francis wallowing in the bath, both very happy.

  Stormy then had to depart for work, leaving the three Chichesters to bring the boat home. For Sheila ‘It was a ghastly business getting into St Peter Port, Guernsey. When we finally reached it, people said they were thinking of sending out the lifeboat. Finally Giles said, “I want to fly home, Mummy, I don’t think I can go on.” Sheila agreed: neither could she. ‘A
lthough Francis said we were disgusting to desert him and were a rotten crew, I stuck to my point that we must leave the boat. There are times when one must be disciplined and admit defeat.’ A very Sheilaish statement, that one.

  So that summer was work mixed with play, weekdays in London and weekends on the Beaulieu River. By now his family friendships had led Francis to be a frequent guest of the Montagus at Palace House in Beaulieu, as frequent entries in the Visitors Book confirm. I sought out another friend and neighbour (sorry about all the friends and neighbours) Belinda, Lady Montagu, Lord Montagu’s wife during the Chichester years and mother of more friends and neighbours, Ralph and Mary. Belinda now lives on a farmhouse in the heart of the New Forest, a few miles north of the Beaulieu River and the Beaulieu Estate. We meet on a lovely summer’s morning, her enthusiasm for plants and flowers flowing from the garden to the conservatory to the sitting room. And pets: ‘I’m always looking after other people’s pets’, she says as we wade through scurrying dogs and cats. The canary in the brass bell cage tweets in agreement.

  ‘So many memories’, she smiles. I mention that Edward has shown me the numerous Francis and Sheila entries in the Palace House Visitors Book. ‘Yes, they used to come to Palace House all the time. Of course his Gipsy Moths were always on the River. Edward gave him a free mooring and later the Freedom of the Beaulieu River.