“I could see what great skill was going into her
restoration and I now know the boat inside out myself,
having watched the procedure step by step”32 CLASSIC BOAT OCTOBER 2016LADY OF HAMFORD
E
very time David Butcher went off afloat
in his Bavaria 34 he found himself
looking at prettier boats. While waiting
for the waters of Birdham Pool lock to
drop to the level outside, the 60-year-old
businessman regularly performed a
double-take at his neighbours’ craft, and always
they were timber.
“They all looked so beautiful,” he said, “but I kept
being told: ‘Don’t buy a wooden boat, you’ll be
shooting yourself in the foot!’”
And so David, a member of Chichester Yacht Club,
continued cruising his Bavaria, eventually moving her to
a new berth in the local marina where there were fewer
aesthetic distractions. But still he pored over the websites
of classic yacht brokerages, until the unexpected death of
a friend provoked him into action. “He had dreamed of
owning a wooden boat, but sadly never lived to realise
that dream. I decided I had to do it for him,” David said.
The Bavaria went and David, who lives in Arundel,
West Sussex, sought advice from Peter Gregson, of
Dartmouth-based brokerage Wooden Ships.
“He was very helpful, very knowledgeable,” said
David, “and then, one day, I saw Lady of Hamford and
thought: ‘Oh my!’ I fell in love with her lines...I thought
she was drop-dead gorgeous.”
Lady of Hamford is certainly a class act, her
thoroughbred lines are thanks to the unerring eye of
naval architect Alan Buchanan, who designed her as one
of his six successful Vashti class ocean-going cruiser-
racers. Vashti herself, launched in 1958, built by Priors
of Burnham-on-Crouch, enjoyed an illustrious racing
career, winning many RORC races. Others wanted to
share in the boat’s success including World War Two
hero David Clarabut, a sub-lieutenant in the RNVR who
was awarded the DSC for bravery after a successful
bombing raid on the German battleship Tirpitz.
Clarabut, a member of the Medway Yacht Club,
and a director in the well-known coasting barge firm,
London & Rochester Trading Company, was a keen
racing sailor. He had represented Britain against
Denmark in the Dragon Class Edinburgh Cup, coming
second, when the Dragons had been trans-shipped to
Denmark aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia for the
Queen’s state visit in 1957. In the early 1960s he
ordered a Vashti class racer, Lady of Hamford, then
named Vendetta.
She was built in 1962 by Suttons of Great Wakering,
Essex, who planked her up in Honduras mahogany,
copper fastened on steamed Canadian rock elm timbers.
The exception were the four planks each side of the keel;
they were of African teak afrormosia.
Her stem, stern post, and horn timber were iroko
and her deadwood of a timber now ‘extinct’ from theEnglish countryside: elm. Clarabut was not
disappointed with his new boat; in one year alone, 1967,
he won the Queen’s Cup at Cowes, the Ramsgate Gold
Cup and was first overall in the East Coast Offshore
Racing Association.
Fifty-four years after her launch, David Butcher had
the boat surveyed and was told she was a ‘solid boat
with a few issues’. He paid £50,000 for her and went to
Harbour Marine Services, in Southwold, Suffolk, the
company which had also restored Vashti, and asked
them to deal with the issues.
“My biggest worry, still, was that we should need to
chop out dead wood,” said David, who has commuted
once a week since October 2015 from his home to the
yard, to confer with the yard’s MD John Buckley on the
boat’s restoration.
David said: “I could see what great skill was going
into her restoration and I now know the boat inside out
myself, having watched the procedure step by step.”
“We started by cleaning off the anti-foul on the
outside and stripping out the furniture on the inside.
After 50-odd years the whole boat needed cleaning off
and re-painting and you cannot make a proper job of
that without taking out the inside,” said Buckley. But the
work confirmed the surveyor’s findings: Lady of
Hamford was sound.
Having a shell internally also meant that she could be
upgraded and custom-designed to suit David’s needs.
Her strap-iron flooring was unbolted and found to be
good, testimony to Alan Buchanan’s original
specification that all ironwork ‘be hot dipped galvanized
after drilling and before fitting’.
It did require re-coating with zinc paint, and a few
timbers in the switchback run of her long, sawn-off
counter needed replacing where they had cracked.
One reason she was in such good condition was that
she had been kept ashore in a boatshed during the winter
months for the last 45 years. Also the Achilles’ heel of
wooden boats, the laid teak deck, had been replaced in- All the teak deck planks had been laid over a
plywood subdeck which itself was screwed and glued to
pine deck beams.
However, John discovered one important factor which
had been overlooked when the new deck was laid; that
the plywood subdeck’s end grain was exposed to the
water. He addressed that by gluing on a spline piece.
The only problem with the deck was the covering of
Coelan treatment, which gave the boat an unhealthy
liverish look. “She looked like she had been
Tango’d,” joked David.
That has all been cleaned off and the teak now has a
honey glow once more. Although the hull required some
re-caulking, John was impressed with the way the
underwater planking had been step-jointed/‘joggled’ into
Above:
David Butcher.
Facing page
clockwise from
top left: rudder
foot and
deadwood;
coveline; new
gas oven;
running rigging;
the teak deck
was cleaned off;
original
mainsheet
fittings;
Andersen sheet
winch; fittings
on new wooden
mast by Collars