Adrian Morgan
CRAFTSMANSHIP
W
e get our character traits from our parents,
and in this case it must be my grandmother’s
influence that impels me to try and mend,
glue together, fix and sometimes employ inspired
bodgery to get inanimate objects animated once more.
Grandma’s Rockingham china service had never been
animate unless moved by a poltergeist, which I am pretty
sure never happened. No, the damage was all down to
the removals men and the house shifting that comes with
being the wife of a Naval lieutenant commander. There
might have been some bomb damage too, when they
lived overlooking Portsmouth harbour during the war.
Later, living alone in a retirement flat in a seaside
town, the valuer was called to assess her effects (or
defects that should have been). His eyes must have lit up
as he espied the pristine golden china set, complete to the
last cup and saucer, dinner plate and soup bowl,
illuminated in the Victorian corner cabinet.
Nose against the glass, the truth was shattering,
literally. Every piece bar two (dinner plates that are now
on the wall of the family home) had hairline cracks,
many showing the orangey traces of that old fashioned
fish glue with the great smell they used to mend crockery
with back then, and which gave me my first intoxicating
experience of substance abuse.
Aside from the two plates, the Rockingham was
worthless. But the compulsion to mend stuff is ingrained.
On a long-ago voyage in paradise, the portable generator
broke down. The starting cord and recoil system had
shattered. Several tubes of Araldite and some wire later it
was humming away. When we hit Barbados, the
Portuguese vine poles with which we had boomed out
the twins had been spliced and fished too many times to
count. The rubber boat we carried had, by the time it
was stolen in Tortola, more patches than rubber.
These days it is only the owners of old wooden boats
who retain the skills my grandmother would have
classed as ‘make do or mend’. The joy of owning a boat
like mine, 1937 and still going strong, is the scope she
affords for making incremental ‘improvements’. A coat
hook here, or a length of bungee there, my only rule for
Sally being the minimum of damage to the structure: i.e.
no unnecessary screws. There is enough evidence of
gadgets bought, screwed on and ripped off again already.
Look, there on the cockpit bulkhead, I bet those
stopped holes once held an old Walker log repeater. Old
glassfibre boats will be peppered with gelled-over shot
holes, attesting to decades of experiments with
gadgets promoted at London boat shows.
Des Sleightholme, the editor of Yachting
Monthly, had a boat called Tinker Liz for more
years than he should have, given his
reputation as one of the foremost
yachting writers of his generation.
He should have been sailing
something befitting his status, but
no: Des loved tinkering, and Tinker
Liz was a tribute to his tinkering skills. Not so much a
cabinet of curiosities, Tinker Liz seemed to me when I
first went aboard more like a devilish series of gins and
spring traps, designed to catch not vermin but nervous
young yachting writers.
Single bunks shot out under the force of powerful
elastic to make doubles. Flaps dropped down to make
tables. Echo sounder and log sprang on hinges at you
from behind cupboards. It was the result of years of
Sleightholme sleight of hand; magical in some ways, but
woe betide if you pressed the wrong button. Like the
unfortunate Kenneth Williams in the Tony Hancock
sketch ‘The Test Pilot’, press the wrong one and you’d
find yourself ejected, and sitting on the tail, so to speak.
Tinker Liz was an extreme case of Heath Robinson-
ism. But every classic boat, or old boat owner worth his
salt will have the (defective) gene that makes him itch to
improve. Not for him the trashy novel in the corner of
the cabin; at anchor you will find him, yet again,
rearranging the lockers or finding what is euphemistically
called ‘a better solution’ to this or that. And what joy, at
the end of hours of fiddling when his companion
(traditionally described as ‘long suffering’) hears the
cheery cry: “Darling, come and see this. I may have
found the perfect solution to how we stow the wok.”
She knows from past experience that there will never
be a final solution to the wok problem.The art of tinkering
Bodging, my foot! It’s all about improving the breed
“These
days only
owners of
wooden
boats
make do
or mend”