Classic Boat – July 2019

CYNTHIA

Left to right:

with her original

gaff rig; Dick

Ritchie sitting

on Cynthia’s

coachroof; on

the beach in

Falmouth

CYNTHIA

LOS

50ft (15.2m)

LOD

41ft 6ins

(12.6m)

LWL

36ft (11m)

BEAM

9ft (2.7m)

DRAUGHT

7ft (2.1m)

DISPLACEMENT

9 tonnes

T

he Getting Afloat page in the June 2012

issue of Classic Boat featured a boat called

Cynthia, a centenarian which was described

as “still sailing and still largely original,

although in want of a good ‘tidy up’”.

Among those who read this was Peter Lucas who had

first seen Cynthia when he was a schoolboy on holiday

with his parents on the Isle of Wight. “We used to go

religiously to watch the start of the yacht racing on the

Squadron line,” he told me, “and I used to see this

strange green boat with really nice lines.”

Some years later in 1978, Peter started a Dartmouth-

based rigging business. In the early 1990s, he was

awarded the contract to rig and service the 10 boats built

to compete in Chay Blyth’s British Steel Challenge round-

the-world race. As a result, he sold his company – and

investing the proceeds in boat storage facilities, one

on the banks of the river Dart where he built a covered

wet dock, and the other at nearby Stoke Fleming – and

worked for Blyth for the next three editions of the race.

But memories of “the strange green boat” never

really left him. About 30 years ago he tried, albeit

unsuccessfully, to contact the owners through the Cowes

harbourmaster, but as soon as he saw the CB piece

• which said “the owner invites offers from would-be
  owners capable of looking after Cynthia properly”


• it seemed like the opportunity he had been looking for.
  Cynthia was designed by WT Jacket as an engineless
  gaff cutter based on his 1904 design, Flamingo, and built
  by his family company in Falmouth in 1910. She was
  commissioned by Henry S Norton – a serial boat owner,
  it seems – who entered her for various races in the
  Falmouth area, including the newly-revived Royal
  Cornwall Yacht Club’s Regatta on 29 August 1910
  and the club’s Corinthian series the same year, in
  which he won the first prize of £3.
  In 1912, he sold Cynthia to Mrs CP Foster who was
  elected as a member of the RCYC around the same time
  and won the “7-15 tonnes inclusive” class in the club’s
  regatta soon afterwards. She and her husband Claude –
  who had been invalided out of the Boer war and owned
  a 170-tonne yawl – seem to have been active members of
  the RCYC, both afloat and ashore. She presented a cup

for a Ladies’ race and, according to CJH Mead’s book

History of the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club, “very kindly

made loose covers for the chairs in the Ladies’ Room”;

while Claude presented the club with a stuffed pike and

a flagstaff to replace one that had become unserviceable,

and also became the first Sunbeam class captain when

the first boats arrived in Falmouth in 1924.

NEAR MISSES

Having enjoyed her share of racing success, Mrs Foster

sold Cynthia to George J Marvin in 1927. Not much is

known about the boat’s history over the next decade, but

it is likely she spent much of it laid up at Marvin’s yard

in Cowes. She was then owned, for just a year, by Sydney

Graham CBE before he sold her, in 1938, to Dick

Ritchie. It was around that time she was converted

from her original gaff cutter rig (with a sail area of more

than 1,200sq ft) to a Bermudan cutter and then, soon

afterwards, to a Bermudan sloop (with just 850sq ft).

She was also modified for “cruising and offshore

purposes” according to The Yachtsman, which

reported that “she now sleeps five in comfort”.

Cynthia’s first offshore race was probably the 1938

RORC Channel race although she nearly didn’t make

it past the start having been involved in a collision with

HMS Vanguard’s anchor chain. “We nearly sank,” Dick

wrote many years later, due to “weak garboards made

worse by the collision”. But they managed to make some

temporary repairs and finished the race four hours ahead

of the next boat. A year later they won it again “but only

by a margin of two hours!” wrote Dick.

In September 1939, Dick was sailing Cynthia back

from Brittany with his friend Joe Trevor – who would

later become a co-owner – only to discover on arrival

in Falmouth that Britain had declared war on Germany

three days earlier. Cynthia spent the duration of the

hostilities laid up in a mud berth in Cowes where she

was lucky to survive an incendiary bomb which went

through the hull of the neighbouring boat. Her spars

and sails, however, which were stored elsewhere, were

destroyed in another bombing raid.

Immediately after the war she was refitted at Camper

and Nicholson in Gosport where Charles E Nicholson