‘He came here because of Anne [Lady Chichester] marrying Johnny [Sir John Chichester]. Johnny was a sideways uncle of sorts. You know the Chichesters, all somehow remotely related!
‘Sheila rather ruled the roost. She was strong woman, powerfully built too. She was a very avid vegetarian, and he loved a bit of fish when she wasn’t looking. She was very strict about this and I remember having him to lunch at Palace House and he fairly wolfing down the fish with a naughty look of pure pleasure. Sea bass from our river, probably. Later she always said she cured his cancer with her avid diet.’
I asked if she had eaten on board any of the Gipsy Moths.
‘Oh yes, and one always offered to bring the picnic. One had to be frightfully careful not to have meat anywhere near it. No inadvertent ham sandwiches, we used to say. You always knew when you went on board it would be only vegetarian food cooked.’
‘And who cooked?’ I ask.
‘Oh, Francis. I don’t think she was very interested in cooking; eating yes, of course, as long as it was vegetarian.’
‘In his accounts he was always frying up down below in even the most terrible storms’, I recall.
Two unrelated spaniels yelp and paw for the digestive I’m dipping in my coffee. The canary strikes up; must have seen one of the cats. ‘Oh, do shut up!’ Belinda encourages the assembled throng.
‘And what was he like as a skipper?’ I ask.
‘Oh, very easy going, very relaxed. Didn’t shout or even raise his voice. I always felt it was a real honour to be asked to sail with Francis.’
‘And Sheila, how was she on board? I’m mean about taking orders.’
‘Funnily enough, she was fine. Sheila knew it was his realm.’
‘Role reversal.’
‘Yes, it was. She was captain on land, he at sea. So they sailed for fun too?’ Belinda asks.
‘Oh yes, very much for fun when out together. Francis alone was a different matter. It seems that for him sailing alone was always a trial, an ordeal. Always pushing himself. Something to be mastered rather than enjoyed. But with Sheila or Giles on board he relaxed.’
The 1957 season started with the Cowes to Dinard Race. Unusually, Sheila was one of the crew. Francis remembered:
There was a fresh wind with a choppy sea, and I was cutting the corner fine at Guernsey, standing in as close to the rocks as I dared in the hope of avoiding a tack and the loss of time that it would cost. Mike [Jones, one of the crew] did not like being in so close, because he had been wrecked on these rocks in another boat, and Sheila was gossiping with him below about social nothings because, she told me afterwards, she thought the atmosphere was too tense. I barked harshly at them [a sure sign that the skipper is too tense himself] because I wanted to be ready to tack at a second’s notice.
At that moment I saw a column of water shoot 20 feet straight into the air, where a wave had hit a submerged rock a cable’s length [about 200 yards] on the beam. I said nothing to Mike, because I thought he would have a fit, but I laughed to myself and carried on – if the rocks were going to show up as clearly as that, I need not worry. We managed to scratch past without having to tack.
Sheila was presented with a cup by the handsome commodore of the Dinard Yacht Club, and I think nothing could have given her more pleasure.
In fact Sheila’s pleasure at being presented with a cup was so great that she suggested to Francis that he should have a new boat, much as suggesting that he might want a new suit. She said: ‘If you can win prizes pushing along this old thing, you ought to do well with a new one.’
‘We haven’t got the money to pay for it’, Francis replied.
But once Sheila had made up her mind… ‘It’s a terrible strain on you with this one. I’m sure something will turn up if you order it. Have faith, and go ahead’, she said.
Francis wrote:
I sketched on the back of an envelope the hull that I should like to have. This was passed to Robert Clark, who designed Gipsy Moth III for us. Jack Tyrrell’s boatyard in Arklow, Ireland, started building it. Throughout the year, worried about my business, I alternated between bouts of despair at the liability of the new boat, and waves of enthusiasm for it.
While Gipsy Moth III was being designed and built in Ireland Francis raced hard through the 1957 season, at the end of which he concluded: ‘At the end of Gipsy Moth’s fourth racing season she had started in sixteen RORC races and I had learned a lot about sailing; perhaps more important, I was aware how much more there was to learn’.
Jack Tyrell’s yard in Arklow
Francis had high hopes of being the winning crew in the last race of the season and of the Admiral’s Cup series, the Fastnet Race, on board Figaro, another famous yacht of the period. Eventually they came third, well behind their sister ship White Mist. Francis was by now even more competitive than the famously competitive Americans and rather huffily put their poor showing down to the crew having been up all night in Cowes celebrating their victory in the New York Cup, causing them to be late and presumably rather groggy over the starting line. Worse, when Francis called for an offshore tack into the Channel, the captain overruled him for a less swelly tack inshore, costing them dearly. Worse still:
Another drawback was that the yacht was stuffed with experts. Everyone tended to exercise his own special expertise. One wanted to demonstrate his latest methods of jibbing, which cost us time unsnarling the spinnaker and repairing the damage. Another liked to harden in the foresails, unconsciously demonstrating how strong they were. They were marvellous sails, but often hardened in too flat for the best speed.
The Fastnet finishes in Plymouth, and Bill Snaith needed to fly home to make some more money. He asked Francis to stay on as part of the crew to take her to the Port of London. Francis would, he said, as long as Sheila could come along for the cruise. Some cruise. It was freshening up to Force 6 then Force 7 westerly as they left Plymouth for a very fast run down the Channel. Past the Isle of Wight it blew up even further and Sheila remembered it as
The most terrifying storm I had been in up to that time. All that night we ran up the Channel on the bare poles. There was nothing much I could do so I got into my bunk hoping for the best. It really was a terrible night with the noise of the screaming wind and crashing waves. Next morning I woke up and looked out. ‘Goodness,’ I said to Francis, ‘How green the cliffs look!’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, ‘those are waves you are looking at’.
Cliffs or waves seemed to be the least of his worries as he sailed into that autumn. The map and guide business was in that limbo land that all entrepreneurs have to pass through: not profitable enough to employ fresh arms and legs and minds and needing all his energies to keep it as profitable as it was. But now he had other worries: Gipsy Moth III was being built in Ireland and had to be paid for on top of the costs of visiting the yards; Gipsy Moth II was proving hard to sell, as out-of-date racing yachts are; and to cap it all, he wasn’t feeling too well within himself.
And so in early 1958 we come to Francis’s cancer, although actually I think this whole cancer-and-cure story began four years earlier, when Sheila started attending her Open House faith healing and prayer groups. Francis’s cancer no doubt had ideas of its own; but then it hadn’t reckoned on meeting Sheila’s wall of faith. In retrospect the cause became clear. Francis:
Every weekend I went down to the Beaulieu River and worked on Gipsy Moth II, trying to tidy up the mess after the season’s racing. I worked feverishly by myself, feeling that I could not afford to pay a boatyard to do the work. Sheila said this was nonsense. Bitterly, I accused her of failing to help me, and came down by myself. I worked furiously while the yacht swung to her mooring in the grey swirls of autumn mist on the glassy water. There always seemed so little time for work on the yacht, after I had cooked my meals and done the boat’s housekeeping.
One of my jobs was to remove some old paint on the forecastle sole [floor] with a strong chemical paint-remover, to dissolve the old paint. I worked on m
y knees, doubled up over the stuff on the floor, and the forehatch was closed above my head, because of the cold. I believe that the fumes burnt my lungs, and that my lung trouble started then.
Bill Grindey: ‘He was always working on Gipsy Moth II. If you think yachts need a lot of attention now, you should have seen them back then. We didn’t know exactly what he doing down below as he was shut in. So many jobs, anyhow.
‘Later we knew he had been stripping paint off the forecastle sole with Nitromors or something similar. But everyone did then, we never knew about that, asbestos, all these health things we know now, even smoking. The fumes down there caught his chest and that was that.’
Sheila only knew: ‘That winter my husband became very ill with bronchitis, pneumonia and goodness knows what. After Christmas he had X-ray tests which showed a most unusual condition superimposed on the sub-acute asthma’.
For the next four months Francis went through the conventional medical mill: one X-ray after another; two bronchoscopies; specialists; consultants with their students prodding and poking him; long coughing nights and endless bedsore days, ‘suffocation by a thousand deaths’. Still the results were uncertain: pleurisy, asthma, pneumonia and bronchitis were all candidates for the cause.
All of us who have or have had cancer will always remember the moment they were told they had the disease. Mine came from an aloof and expensive doctor in South Kensington. A few months earlier he had told me rather breezily, as he was syringing my ears or some such, ‘Of course I always think that cancer is a sign of failure’. I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, I hope I don’t get cancer, I would not like him to think me a failure’. Now he was telling me I have failed. ‘The results are in. I’m afraid you have cancer.’ Not just the words but the image of the occasion will always be a striking memory. (Prostate cancer, by the way, currently zapped into abeyance.)
For Francis it happened thus: one day as he was leaving the hospital he ran into the doctor who had done the latest bronchoscopy. He had heard that the doctor was antipodean and so knew that there might finally be a chance of some straight talking. What did the doctor reckon?
‘Cancer’, he replied.
‘You can’t be sure, can you?’ Francis hoped.
‘We are making these examinations all the time, and cannot possibly be mistaken.’
‘I don’t believe it. How can you tell?’
‘I not only saw it, but cut off a piece and sent it off to the laboratory to be examined.
‘What can be done?’ asked Francis.
‘I think it’s already too late to operate’, said the plain-talking Aussie. ‘Your only possible hope is to remove one lung immediately.’
Reading Francis’s account of his new finite reality also brought me back to a sense of déjà vu. For me it was a walk home through Hyde Park with a newly intense feeling of inclusion in all of nature, a feeling that life would never be the same again. But at least I knew there would be life. For Francis, sixty years ago, when lung cancer meant certain death, the feeling was much more intense:
When I emerged from the hospital it was a fine spring morning in April. As I walked along, the sun shone in my face. I heard the gay spring-song of birds. Young pale-green leaves were beginning to tint the trees. Life had never seemed more wonderful – a priceless, desirable thing to lose. I had read about this sort of thing happening to other people; somehow I had never imagined that it would happen to me. I walked along slowly, wondering how long I had got before I was snuffed out from this lovely fresh spring of life.
Back home it was time to tell Sheila and he did so with ‘desolate sadness’. Of course she already knew and had been praying silently the while.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘I have done what they told me to do – booked a room for the operation next week’, Francis replied.
Sheila was having none of that! ‘How can you be so feeble as to agree? It’s the wrong thing to do. You are too ill to make a decision.’
‘Dammit’, Francis replied, ‘first of all the radiologist says he is examining pictures all the time, and can’t possibly be mistaken. Then the surgeon says he has not only seen the cancer, but removed a piece of it. Then the chief surgeon said it was cancer. What else can I possibly do but agree to the operation?’
‘It’s wrong to operate’, Sheila insisted, ‘your lung is in such a state that you are bound to die if they operate.’
Sheila organised another opinion from a leading consultant in respiratory medicine. This specialist duly agreed with the others: lung cancer, operate urgently. By now five different doctors, surgeons or radiologists had given the same opinion. In spite of Sheila’s protests and sympathy for her nature-cure ideals, Francis decided that he had to go with the majority of experts and re-booked himself into hospital for the operation a week later.
On his way there he rather ghoulishly went into the RORC clubhouse for a last drink. Talking to his friends in the bar, he felt intensely lonely and doom-laden. He did not say where he was heading, least of all why, so as not to spoil this one last moment of conviviality before he died. In this frame of mind he saw a notice on the club board that would change his life, and inspired him in the dark year ahead to fight for his life. It was posted by Lieutenant Colonel H.G. ‘Blondie’ Hasler DSO, OBE, RM, a popular war hero whose real-life story had inspired the 1955 film The Cockleshell Heroes.14
SINGLE-HANDED TRANSATLANTIC RACE
The object of the race is twofold: (a) sport and (b) to encourage the development of suitable boats, gear and techniques for single-handed ocean crossing under sail.
Start from Cowes on Saturday 26 July 1958
Finish at City Island, NY, by any route, but leaving Long Island to port.
Entries may be sponsored
800 mile qualification run required in 2 parts
Yachts may be of any size and type
For more details ask member H.G. Hasler
Francis thought, ‘That would be a terrific race, shame the only other race I am likely to take part in is that with old Charon across the Styx’.
An hour later he was in hospital. He recalled: ‘I was resigned to my fate. Not so my wife; she was now really in a fighting mood, and went into action.’ Look out, world!
As we have seen, Sheila always had an intuitive interest in healing through faith and prayer. On her return to London from Wiltshire four years earlier she had enrolled with a prayer study group called Open Way that met every Wednesday evening in Harley Street. Lecturers included the famous Buddhist pioneer Christmas Humphreys and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in this pre-Beatles era. She had also become involved with the Churches Council of Healing, so by the time of Francis’s diagnosis she had little faith in the medical doctors’ prognosis and a lot of faith that, with others, she could pray his cancer away. She had never forgotten how, in her view, over-zealous doctoring had killed her mother; one thing for sure, over-zealous doctoring was not going to kill her husband.
A few days after Francis was admitted she made an appointment to see the surgeon. She was ‘guided by some inner force; I had clear knowledge that this operation must not take place. I was scared to be opposing the decision of this very eminent man, but I could not change my destiny.’ Or Francis’s.
Sheila laid out her case: her nature-cure doctor had told her that statistically this particular operation had only a 10 per cent chance of long term success; her husband was so ill that the operation would certainly kill him; and above all – the clincher – he so liked flying and sailing that to remove a lung would be like removing a wing from a bird. In short, she would not consent to it. Never.
‘Many people live with only one lung’, the surgeon shot back.
‘But not for long. His lungs are so septic it will kill him. I refuse to allow that.’
‘You are the most extraordinary woman and you are wasting time.’
‘I apologise, I realise you are a busy man’, said Sheila.
‘No, I mean the patien
t’s time.’
But Sheila stuck to her guns and the surgeon had to agree to a further – final – test. Sheila had won time and set about organising the prayers that would replace the knife. Francis summed the Sheila/surgeon meeting up thus: ‘I suppose that he, like me, had never met a woman like Sheila – someone who would carry the responsibility of refusing to allow an operation against the overwhelming weight of medical opinion.’
Sheila’s study of prayer had led her to believe that praying was not about asking but about surrender – and hope and faith. That is to say, prayer is not asking God to change what is, but making Him aware of what is – and once He is aware, His grace will flow from that awareness. Prayer does not then mean claiming that grace as one’s own but sharing it with others; and the greater the sharing, the greater the power. Her favourite muses were written by Brother Lawrence in 1666 in his The Practice in the Presence of God:
All things are possible for him who believes, but they are less difficult for him who hopes, and still more easy for him who loves, and still more easy for him who perseveres in the practice of these three virtues.
And from the Gospel of St Mark:
All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them and ye shall have them.
For Francis God was an Englishman. For Sheila, if God was not literally an Englishman, he certainly had all of an Englishman’s virtues – from what little I know about her God, a not unreasonable proposition.
Sheila now set about praying for Francis on an industrial scale. She had two strategies, praying next to him in the hospital and praying for him around the world. For the former she sent in the Jesuit Father Kelly, who, apart from Jesuit fathering, was writing a book about the early navigators; his Order had sailed with them as they were there only ones who could read and write. For the latter she had a prayer typed on index cards and sent them to family friends and prayer groups around the world. Luckily, another friend and neighbour, Joyce Rowlston, has kept one she found in her mother’s trunk of papers:
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