Classic Boat – July 2019

(lu) #1

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
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