66 CLASSIC BOAT OCTOBER 2016BRITANNIA AGROUND
was. He said: “Everyone on board was greatly pleased
with the progress and lunch had just been suggested
when the accident happened.
“We were passing the West Shoebury buoy and I had
a feeling myself that we were taking too wide a swerve. I
was standing up glancing at the buoy when I suddenly
realised we had stopped. Mr Kirby, a Leigh fisherman,
with a wonderful knowledge of the sandbanks
hereabouts, was piloting. He was at Major Hunloke’s
elbow the whole of the time and it was on Mr Kirby that
the skipper was relying for his direction. Apparently to
Mr Kirby it was a question of picking up minutes.
Probably he went out of his course only a couple of feet,
but in that small distance he managed to find a sandbank
and there she was.
“It was very bad luck for Kirby, bad luck for Leigh.”
She was 100 yards northwest of the West Shoebury
buoy and on a falling tide. While there was water for a
bawley to cheat the tide inside this mark, for Britannia
there was not.
As Britannia’s sails were stowed, the ebbing tide
lowered her 154 tonne, black hull over to a 45 degree
angle, although as she drew 15ft there was still enoughwater for the shoal-draught trip boats, including the
London Belle, which was there when it happened, to
bring out their ogling passengers. “Kirby, I know was
very upset about it,” the mayor added.
But not as upset as the flag officers of Southend’s
Alexandra Yacht Club, organisers of the week, who had
been trying, unsuccessfully, for years to acquire royal
status for their HQ, and were puzzled at the continued
rebuttals. Now, at least, if future requests for the royal
prefix were turned down they had someone to blame:
Alfred Kirby.
The club’s current vice-commodore, Linda McKay,
told Classic Boat: “Older members used to tell us that
the King was due to visit the Alexandra Yacht Club but
due to the incident this did not happen. We were told
that the ‘lack of the tack’ that day lost the club the title
of The Royal Alexandra Yacht Club, because if the King
had stepped foot inside the club she would have been
made a royal.”
Her husband, Gary, a past commodore added: “The
club was like one of those grand old ladies, the belle of
the ball, the spinster who never got married. It always
felt as though she’d been overlooked.”
But the King was not in the town on the day Kirby
put her ashore. Moreover at the Yacht Racing
Association meeting, held in November at the Royal
Thames Yacht Club in Knightsbridge, London, to
determine the fixtures for 1924, the only reference to the
grounding was made by the chairman in a jocular
manner. He told the members of the Yachting Week
Committee, as it was announced that Britannia would
return to Southend in July: “I hope you will move some
of the mud away.”
Yet the mud was never ‘moved away’ from Alfred
Kirby’s name. The pilot’s grand-niece, Janet Kirby, whose
then boyfriend was a member of the Alexandra Yacht
Club, was told during a visit in the late 1960s: “It’s
thanks to your lot we never got the royal title.”
So to lay the ghost, I went to The National Archive in
Kew, southwest London, where a restricted file on the
subject, which originally had been closed until 2035, has
undergone an ‘accelerated opening’.Nyria and
Britannia (right)
off Southend Pier
with HM yacht
Victoria & Albert
in the
background.
Below: Alfred
Kirby of Leigh
(left) piloted the
King’s yacht