Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  Lying there helplessly as Gipsy Moth V was careening dizzily through the storm, he could only wait for the inevitable: within five minutes he was upside down and being poured onto the cabin ceiling now beneath him. All around, the contents of the cabin were flying this way and that. He landed badly on an edge and was soon in fresh agony from what he thought was a burst kidney. (‘Having only one kidney, I was concerned. If that one burst I would be poorly placed in an hour or two’s time’.)

  Events now moved quickly. Gipsy Moth V was out of control, sailing far too fast and soon to capsize, twice, again. Down below, in agony and helpless, in near-darkness and surrounded by the detritus of the capsizes. Francis decided to send out an SOS. For him of all people, the exemplar of self-reliance, it must have been a desperate decision. But again events conspired against him: the knockdown had let sea water into the bilges, some sloshes of which had flooded the batteries.

  There was nothing to do but hang on and hope. In the early light he could write:

  The seas are the danger: they are terrific. Like Cape Horn, but steeper and shorter with more frequent breakers. I feel depressed and frightened. How many hours of this before Gipsy Moth sank? I was deeply sad. There is so much in Life. It is dreadful for death to tear me away from all the people I love. But it looks as if this is it. I reckon this was one of the tightest jams I’ve been in: I was deadbeat with sheer fatigue, fear, tension and depression.

  Then it got a whole lot worse. By now in daylight, he noticed that she was leaking – and seriously. The water in the hull was a storm in itself, washing around the cabin floor, making finding the source of the leak below the waterline impossible. Desperately, he summoned up the strength to fill a bucket, walk it over to the cockpit, pour it onto the cockpit floor and let it drain through the scuppers. It seemed hopeless, yet it was his only hope. Bending down hurt enough, hauling a bucket of water across the heaving cabin hurt twice as much, then pouring it into the storm-bound cockpit twice as much again. After two dozen buckets, his spirit broke: he saw that the source of the leak was not below the waterline but in the corner of the cockpit, where he had been pouring the water. All those buckets, all that agony, had been spent on sending the water around in circles.

  There are many instances in Francis’s life that could be called heroic but what follows, for me, tops the list. Cold, wet, frightened, in deep pain – and, in fact, dying – he cut out a piece of Tupperware, of all mundane life-savers, and nailed it over the leak. He could for now ignore sailing; the yacht’s sails had been torn asunder by the hurricane winds and three capsizes; she was out of his control and now in her own control, a floating, crippled piece of wood with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Down below, bucket by bucket, shards of pain coursing through his every movement, Francis emptied the hull. He would later write: ‘I carried 341 buckets of water. It may not sound much, but carrying a full bucket 20 feet in a boat is a long way in a rough seaway…’, He had saved his boat and his own life, for now.

  But storms go from whence they came and hour by hour, then day by day, the seas died down just as Francis was dying down. Amid the tidying up he found a bottle of champagne. The brandy had survived too; he made himself a champagne cocktail. His spirits rose. Ten days later he wrote:

  I passed the great breakwater across Plymouth Sound just as my beloveds, Sheila and Giles, came to meet me in the Flag Officer’s launch. Soon after midnight we were all eating scrambled eggs at the Royal Western Yacht Club while I was telling my tale.

  Five months after the knockdowns in the Western Approaches and the scrambled eggs in Plymouth, on 17 September 1971, Francis was in Greyshott Hall health farm celebrating his seventieth birthday and reflecting on his life. He had just finished his best and last book, The Romantic Challenge, about his adventures on Gipsy Moth V. Being Francis, he had made heavy weather of it, rewriting through the night, driving himself as hard at the desk as he did on deck. He was constantly exhausted, so much so that a month earlier he was admitted to King Edward VII’s hospital in London for an enforced three-week rest. Greyshott Hall followed, on doctor’s orders.

  The ‘Romantic Challenge’ started with the words: ‘I love Life; this great, exciting, absorbing, puzzling, adventurous Life’. He now had all the trappings of a successful life: a long and happy marriage; a beautiful yacht on a beautiful mooring; money to pay for it all; a successful business; and a knighthood, bestowed on him by his Queen, with Drake’s sword on his shoulder, for being a hero. No schoolboy could dream of more. But family aside, he saw the trappings for what they were: traps, detracting from his lodestar to life: happiness lies in striving for perfection.

  For Francis the striving for perfection didn’t always mean breaking records or pushing oneself to the limits. Perfection could equally be the way he stroked a cat, talked with the milkman, helped a friend in need. His single-mindedness when pursuing a goal was all-absorbing, to the point of sometimes appearing rude or uncaring to those on the periphery or not involved at all in his expeditions. Like all monomaniacs on a mission, he had a switch that blanked out all distractions from the task in hand. When not on a monomaniac’s mission, he made the seemingly mundane, day-to-day dealings with life and its protagonists missions in themselves, to be carried out with meticulous care. Mission Francis was selfish and self-absorbed, stonehearted; mundane Francis was warm and generous, open- and warm-hearted.

  He took the news of his final, spinal cancer stoically, as one would expect. Diagnosed in Reading Hospital a month later, he didn’t mope or moan. It was inoperable; with steady rounds of blood transfusions he could expect to live for two more years if he slowed down and took life easy.

  Of course it was hopeless advice. Francis didn’t do ‘easy’. Life for him was a series of heartbeats: one was allotted that number and then had the responsibility to make each one chime. A chimeless heartbeat was a wasted heartbeat and he only had so many left. Luckily for him, the perfect final challenge, really the last hurrah, was just around the corner.

  Quite why Sheila let him race in the 1972 OSTAR we will never know. Previously, when he was recovering from cancer courtesy of her nature cures, she felt a solo sail against his own odds would be the final part of the cure. And she was right; it had been. But this time he was clearly in seriously bad shape.

  He had been reacting poorly to the blood transfusions, to the point of crying off from the last one before leaving Buckler’s Hard in June 1972. Sometimes he was barely able to stand; always he was heavily dosed with painkillers. But as usual, his determination overrode all objections.

  The race and life afloat had changed beyond imagination since he and Blondie Hasler had rounded up two other Corinthians to enter the first OSTAR eight years ago. There were now fifty-two entrants and most of them, like the French 128-foot schooner and race favourite Vendredi 13, not Corinthians at all. Technology, especially communications technology, was upgrading so rapidly that Francis was signed up by the Sunday Times to file daily reports of his voyage – and in the expectation that they would reach home.

  Students of disasters know that it is seldom a catastrophic failure that causes trouble but a series of small, seemingly unimportant and unrelated incidents that conspire to cause the calamity. On Gipsy Moth V it was the radio. It would receive but not transmit, with calamitous consequences; and calamity is the only way to describe Francis’s 1972 OSTAR.

  He was never really in the race in his own terms. In constant pain, he would lie in his bunk rather than tend to the boat and, as he knew better than anyone, the only way to win was by continuously maximising the sail trim. What had finally brought him to his senses and convinced him to retire was regaining consciousness after anaesthetising himself with a near-overdose of morphine. The pain was no longer localised but spread agonisingly through every bone and marrow of his body, surpassing his oral tablets’ ability to cope. Unable to bear the pain any longer, he had resorted to the strongest solution in his emergency medical bag, the hypodermic needle and its morphine solut
ion. He passed out peacefully, slept and slept, but for how long had he been gone? It was still daylight, but which day?20 His mind befuddled by meds, his body anaemic to the point of uselessness, he made the only sensible decision he had made in weeks. He headed Gipsy Moth V back to Plymouth; he had retired honourably.

  When he was later criticised for taking part in the race at all, he wrote a letter to The Times from his Royal Naval Hospital bed, from which:

  Unfortunately the cancer presented two particular problems. It made me become anaemic because the bones which were involved with the tumour could no longer do their normal job of making blood: and secondly, as the bones were increasingly affected they became increasingly painful.

  I had been given painkillers to use as necessary and I had to take them at times in order to get some sleep. In spite of their help, continued buffeting during the first part of the race made the pain more and more intense and I feared that if I did not get some sleep I would be unable to go on. So I gave myself an injection of one of the emergency painkillers. It certainly stopped the pain but I soon realised that, under its influence, my mind was no longer functioning normally. I could not think clearly and in particular could not rely on my calculations. There was a danger that my navigation would become inaccurate, and I was heading towards the Azores, a difficult area of currents and variable winds.

  It was then that I decided to give up, not because of hazard to myself, but because of the risks to others if I passed out, which seemed probable, so I put about heading for home.

  I did not want any help then and I certainly did not ask for any.

  Meanwhile, back on land, the lack of radio contact was setting its own hares running. Francis was the most famous yachtsman in the race and the race was now the most famous yachting race in the world. All the other competitors were reporting their positions except Francis, who couldn’t, and the skipper of the favourite, Vendredi 13, who wouldn’t. No-one knew where Francis was or how he was doing. Into this news vacuum the newspaper headlines stirred up Daily Mail-style fear and loathing. Worse still for Francis, he could hear all these rumours and conjectures perfectly – the receiving half of the radio was working, he just couldn’t reply or report.

  If the semi-redundant radio was the first of the conspiring incidents, the second soon hove into view over the horizon. SS Barrister, a merchant ship, happened across Francis halfway between the Azores and Land’s End. While not specifically searching for Gipsy Moth V, her crew were aware of the mystery caused by the radio silence. They duly reported Gipsy Moth V’s position to the world, adding that she was in fine shape, that they had seen Francis waving from the stern and that they were both heading north-west towards New York, albeit with reduced sail. Of course they weren’t; Francis had put her on a starboard tack, which temporarily put him on a northerly heading when SS Barrister happened to pass close by. The reduced sail was merely the result of Francis deciding to cruise rather than race home. The radio operator on SS Barrister took Francis’s northing to be north-westing and the reduced sail to be a sign of gear failure.

  This set the headlines wagging with fresh frenzy. His reported position and heading were interpreted as meaning that he was last in the race to New York, by hundreds of miles, as a result of sail problems, rather than the reality: that he was cruising all the way back to Plymouth. On board, Francis was becoming increasingly distressed by all these wrong conclusions, which he could hear all too clearly but do nothing about. Francis never appreciated doing nothing about something.

  Now that the world knew where he was, thanks to the SS Barrister, it wasn’t long before the third conspirator hove into view, this time a Nimrod from the sky. The RAF routinely carried search and rescue exercises over the Atlantic and now had the added fun of having a real live target on which to practise. Buzzing Francis several times, they mistook his vigorous waves for greetings rather than annoyance; but at least they knew about navigation and reported that he was, in fact, heading home. Cue more overwrought headlines and misplaced speculation.

  By now it was clear to everyone that Gipsy Moth V’s radio could not transmit; what was not clear was whether it could receive. Ever ingenious, the RAF sent in its next Nimrod with an Aldis lamp. This was a powerful spotlight used by the Navy to signal Morse code from ship to ship, or ship to shore, when radio silence was needed. Being of that era, Francis knew his Morse code and had an Aldis lamp on board. Gipsy Moth V and the Shackleton tried to signal to each other but only with partial success; the Aldis is intended for slow-moving or stationary vessels, not low-flying aircraft with views hindered by a yacht’s swaying masts and rigging. After an hour Francis grew tired and signalled: ‘Weak and cold. Want rest’. In a kind of tragicomic Morse version of Chinese whispers, the RAF reported that he was ‘weak and cold and going to Brest’.

  So the watching world thought he was now heading for Brest and therefore must be in trouble; enter sea right our next troublemaker, and – as it later transpired – the real villain, the French weather ship France II. When Francis first saw her he was mildly annoyed at yet another intrusion and flashed a message: ‘No aid needed. Thank you. Go away.’ But France II came closer and closer on to him and he started to worry: the captain seemed not to know the basic rules – or even courtesy – of the sea. Far too close already, her captain swung her round to starboard and Francis watched, horrified, as Gipsy Moth V, still on autopilot, headed straight for her amidships. Frantically and in piercing pain, he kicked off the self-steering and swung the tiller over. But it was too late; the mizzen mast and rigging had fouled on France II’s superstructure. Even now the crew could see nothing amiss, shouting offers of help at Francis; the air turned as blue as the sea as Francis hurled abuse back at them.

  Fortunately sanity was about to enter the story in the shape of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Salisbury. She was sailing past Brest on her way home to Plymouth and was tasked with seeing if Francis needed help. Harold Evans, then Editor of the Sunday Times and in charge of Francis’s media contracts, decided that Giles should be part of any rescue attempt. He arranged for him to be helicoptered out to HMS Salisbury as part of the ‘rescue’ story.

  Soon the crew on HMS Salisbury were joined by three volunteer seamen from the nearby HMS Ark Royal. Commander McQueen hailed Francis: ‘Good morning Sir Francis. Can we send a launch across to see how you are?’ Already impressed by the complete contrast with his previous encounter with the French weather-ship, Francis was delighted to accept. Soon the expert crew of five had Gipsy Moth V sailing as well as her broken mizzen would allow and they were back to Plymouth so quickly that the press missed their arrival, much to Francis’s delight and schadenfreude.

  The sorry tale had its comic moments but was to end in drama and tragedy. On her way back to Brest, France II ran into and sank the yacht Lefteria. Of the eleven souls on board, seven were drowned. The press already knew that France II had been involved in the ‘rescue’ of Gipsy Moth V. Now someone at Agence France Presse put out a bulletin that Lefteria was searching for Gipsy Moth V too and drew the conclusion that the mission to search for and rescue Francis had led to the death of eight fellow yachtsmen. Other outlets picked up the story and it became common currency around the world within days that Francis’s foolhardiness and poor seamanship had caused this terrible tragedy.

  Francis, of course, was totally distraught at the mere thought of the misinterpretations. He had never needed ‘rescuing’; he had never asked to be ‘rescued’; the whole ‘rescue’ operation was imposed on him, often by nincompoops. Predictably, a completely witless Labour MP, William Price, asked in Parliament how much the whole ‘rescue’ operation had cost the taxpayer. The answer was practically nothing, as the Nimrods were out there anyway, but now the press had a new angle: not only did Francis’s poor seamanship cause the death of eight fellow seaman but it cost the hard-pressed British taxpayer £3,000.

  Clearing up all this misinformation became a consuming part of Francis’s dying days. Yes, we are at that pa
rt of his life. After disembarking at Plymouth he was readmitted to the Royal Naval Hospital there and, for once, needed no persuasion to take a complete mental and physical rest. He knew he was unwell; he knew, of course, that he was dying. After a month he was released to spend more recovery time at the Meudon Hotel on the Helford River in Cornwall. What he really needed was a hospice, not a hotel. A week later he was back at the Royal Naval Hospital.

  While Sheila was nursing him as comfortably as she could, Giles was working successfully to clear up the misapprehensions over the France II sinking the Lefteria being related in any way to his father’s actions.

  They were both by his side when he died, on 26 August 1972. When the end came it came decisively, as if Francis had shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Enough!’

  For his family and the world his body may have died but his spirit lived on through dozens of obituaries and three church services. On 31 August, Devon’s finest attended the funeral at St Andrew’s Church in Plymouth, his coffin carried by Giles and the flag officers of the Royal Western Yacht Club. Outside thousands lined the streets for the cortège. Later he was buried at St Peter’s Church at Shirwell, the churchyard overflowing with well-wishers for their most famous son. Villagers still remember the church bell tolling, not doleful and sad but triumphant and homecoming. For those who were not there, BBC News broadcast the service around the world.

  The memorial service at Westminster Abbey was, of course, a much grander affair. Everybody who was anybody from the seafaring world was there. He may have been the worst Prime Minister until Gordon Brown, but Edward Heath gave a moving and powerful address, part yachtsman to yachtsman, part underdog to underdog. It fitted the new meritocratic age perfectly.