DISCOVER LONDON
³
A
home, a teacher, a fast and graceful competitor,
a free ticket to Australia, a museum. Witness to
the humdrum of pea soup suppers and tobacco
chewing, and the setting for mutiny, murder
and suicide. Cutty Sark, the world’s only surviving tea
clipper ship, has seen a lot. Today she can be found on
the river in South London, part of the UNESCO World
Heritage Site of Maritime Greenwich, unmissable thanks
to her main mast shooting up 153 feet into the skies over
London. The three levels of the ship can be explored, and
a glass-roofed visitor centre surrounds the hull and houses
a fascinating museum. If you stand to her south, the sleek
towers of London’s financial district, Canary Wharf, in all
its gleaming glory, are her backdrop.
This year marks 150 years since her launch. Built in
1869 on the River Clyde in Dumbarton, Scotland, Cutty
Sark was a masterpiece of ship design by Hercules Linton.
She was owned by John Willis, known as “White Hat
Willis”, a former ship master who took over his father’s
existing business of owning ships. The Willis Tea Fleet
was, as the name suggests, in the business of bringing
the new season’s tea back from China to sell in England,
where a thirst for the stuff had been growing since the
17t h cent u r y.
The ‘tea race’, as it became known, was annual
- and the stakes were high. Slug ships were not an option
because the first batch of tea back to England would fetch
the highest price. While Cutty Sark was built for speed
(the term “clipper” refers to “clipping off the miles”)
- and was as fast as she was beautiful – reaching speeds
of 17.5 knots or 20mph, she never won the tea race. She
is, however, the last of her kind and now attracts some
273,000 visitors each year, allowing them to access every
nook and cranny. They can even stand underneath her,
looking up at her magnificent copper hull.
“There’s a romanticism attached to the age of sail and
to the drama of it all,” says Hannah Stockton, curator
of Cutty Sark. “There is a daredevil element. We know
that even the people who served on the ship in the 19th
century didn’t like to work on steamships because they
felt it was a completely different experience. Cutty Sark
feels both familiar and rare – people have seen them a lot
in films and yet there aren’t many of them around. Cutty
Sark is one of only two surviving clippers in the world.
The other is in Australia.”
Although she was first and foremost a tea clipper,
Cutty Sark spent a relatively short period of her life
fulfilling that purpose. Steamships soon rendered clippers
redundant. The Suez Canal opened in the same week that
Cutty Sark was launched, allowing steamships to pass
through, which in turn enabled them to bypass clippers
as the most quick and efficient way to transport tea.
However, Cutty Sark continued to transport all sorts
of other goods – coal and wool, for example – and spent
plenty of time “tramping”, which meant traveling from
port to port picking up and delivering whatever she could.
Cutty Sark’s name has Scottish roots, like many of the
ships in Willis’ fleet. It is inspired by Tam o’Shanter, a
1791 poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns which depicts a
TRAVEL PIX COLLECTION/AWL IMAGES LTD/VISITENGLAND/VISIT GREENWICH/SELWYN/ALAMYfarmer, Tam, being chased by a beautiful witch, Nannie
