50 CLASSIC BOAT AUGUST 2016
the proud if by then rather impoverished owners of the
Fife ‘Sheevra’ ex Clio, whose restoration had been noted
and admired by Obrist). Along with the skills of the
workforce at Southampton Yacht Services, a benchmark
project was completed, restoring her as closely as
possible to her original condition. Under Goss and then
Steve ‘The Dog’ Hammond, Altair became the standard
bearer for a revival of interest in classic yachts in general
and in Fifes in particular.
Obrist was just getting started with Altair though. He
had a vision of restoring Fifes just as he had Ferraris;
with no compromise, authentic in every detail. He and
Duncan Walker established Fairlie Restorations in the
back of a large hanger at Hamble Yacht Services in 1990.
They recruited two of the key members of the SYS team,
shipwrights Nick Bowyer and Kevin Jepp, and formed a
small team dedicated purely to restoration of Fife yachts.
Obrist employed a young yacht broker at Camper &
Nicholsons, William Collier, who had a passion for the
classics, to seek out and buy him examples of Fife’s
work; and in 1991 Duncan (with the help of a return to
the Clyde of Altair), managed to buy the bulk of the Fife
archive of drawings from Archie MacMillan.
The fi rst project was the 15-Metre, Tuiga. Spotted in
the small ads for sale in Cyprus, Walker nursed her back
to the Hamble and the team of about half a dozen set to
work, with Obrist as the patron. Obrist’s attention to
detail was extraordinary. At one stage he was said to be
investigating buying land in Egypt to grow the correct
type of cotton to replicate her original sails; that didn’t
happen in the end, but Ratsey & Lapthorn (her original
sailmakers in 1909) were persuaded to replicate theTop: Ducan
Walker (left) and
Paul SpoonerOpposite,
clockwise from
top left: Altair,
the boat that
started it; aft
cabin on
Mariquita; joinery
on the Shemara
project; Fairlie 53
under sail; Fairlie
55 in buildI
t was a sad day when Duncan Walker and Paul
Spooner fi nally shut up shop in Hamble and put
Fairlie Yachts into liquidation at the end of
February 2016. Many readers will know that
running any boatbuilding company has been very hard
work over the past few years in particular, but it will be
no consolation to list the other casualties that Fairlie
joined in the sector. Looking back over the quarter of a
century of boatbuilding fi rst as Fairlie Restorations and
latterly as Fairlie Yachts, the team was responsible for
some great projects; but there were always challenges.
The story started almost exactly 30 years ago. In the
late 1980s a Swiss businessman called Albert Obrist
owned an incomparable collection of Ferraris. What
marked his collection out as one of, if not the, fi nest in
the world was the quality of the restoration work that
Obrist undertook. In a world already known for
accuracy and high standards, Obrist raised it to another
level. It was said that if the original leather used for a
seat came from a particular breed of cows, Obrist would
insist the restorers used the same, preferably from the
descendants of the very same herd.
Despite having disposed of most of the collection in
the early 1990s, the fact they were ‘Obrist’ Ferraris
means the cars are still sought after today. In December
1985 Obrist bought a rather tired schooner, and his crew
nursed her from Italy to Southampton. What they did
with her has passed into classic yacht legend, and helped
start the whole classic yacht revival.
The schooner was of course the 1931 Fife Altair, and
her crew was Paul Goss, Duncan Walker, Donn
Costanzo, Jeff Law, and Olive Adshead (the latter threeWe look back at the transformative work
of Fairlie Yachts, after the company
closed its doors earlier this year
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