Alec Rose: Lively
Lady’s weight and
sail area suggest
his achievement
was all the greaterWho really designed her and would they have
wanted the credit anyway?
THEO RYEW
hen Alec Rose bought Lively Lady in
1964, her entries in Lloyd’s Register of
Yachts started to give her designer as
Frederick Shepherd. Before then, under
the ownership of her original builder, no designer was
listed, and when you examine the yacht and compare it
to the original design, it’s fairly clear why. This raises an
interesting question: how far do modifi cations to a
design have to go to render it an orphan?
She was designed by Shepherd before the war for
T Teasdale, but failing sight prompted Teasdale to give
the design to his friend, Sydney JP Cambridge.
Cambridge studied yacht design and construction while
on active service, and eventually built her in Calcutta in
- He modifi ed the design in several signifi cant
respects; Shepherd’s drawings indicate a lead keel with a
drag aft (so the heel was the deepest section) and
Cambridge redesigned it so the keel was level, and of
iron instead (as that was what was available). The
Burmese teak hull planking was supplied over thickness
at 1^3 / 8 in instead of 1in, and doubled grown frames (of
the Paduak timber from the Andaman Islands) were
substituted for bent timbers.
Some changes were also made to the deck layout,
making her fl ush decked rather than with a long
coachroof. The topsides were also raised about 6in; it
was said to get the headroom back in the absence of the
coachroof, but it is at least feasible that it was also in
part because she was going to come in overweight.
Analysis of Shepherd’s original lines plan gives her
design displacement as 7.9 tons, a design waterline length
of 26ft 6in and LOA of 36ft, beam 9ft and draught 5ft
6in. By the time she was launched it would probably have
taken a long hard look to recognise her as Shepherd’s
work at all (which may be why Cambridge never
registered her as such); she was obviously much heavier,
with a draught (from Lloyd’s) of 6.2ft (1.87m) and a
waterline length of 27.2ft (8.28m). Some of the extra
weight of her scantlings was offset by the thicker
planking adding to her displacement; but even so she was
at least a ton overweight at launch – probably a lot more.
As designed her displacement/length ratio was 425,
well into the ‘heavy’ department, but typical for Shepherd
who specialised in cruising designs. With 550sq ft
(51.1m^2 ) of sail area, her sail area/displacement ratio as
designed was a fairly conservative but respectable 139.
Rose bought her in 1964 with a view to doing the
Transatlantic Race that year, and immediately had
Illingworth & Primrose redesign the rig, but curiously
her sail area remained the same. In a windy race she did
very creditably, fi nishing fourth, but she was still
evidently under-canvassed. Back again to Illingworth &
Primrose, this time they added a mizzen mast and 4ft to
the main mast. The mizzen was a curious object; there
was no room to set a mizzen sail aft of the mast (because
of the large Hasler self-steering vane); it was intended to
allow Rose to set a mizzen staysail forwards.
The mainsail (285sq ft) set with a working jib (182sq
ft) and genoa staysail (122sq ft) still gave only 589sq ft,
with the option to set larger (400sq ft) genoas off the
wind. If the plan developed for that rig is reliable as to
how she was fl oating, by that stage Lively Lady was
something like 13in down on her original lines,
representing about 5.2 tons. This remarkable amount of
added weight agrees with Phillips-Birt’s draught (6.6ft)
and estimate of displacement (13.75 tons) on a waterline
length of 31ft given in My Lively Lady; she was barely
recognisable as the boat Shepherd had designed. If those
fi gures are accurate, her displacement/length had slipped
to 462, and her sail/area displacement was a pitiful 103.
Had those facts been more fully appreciated at the
time, Rose’s achievement in circumnavigating in a
perfectly creditable time would have been even more
fêted than it was; she must have been gruesomely hard
work to keep moving in light conditions, especially
upwind. More recently her unusual motion at sea has
been commented on by many of her crew (not least by
the CB editor in CB241); Rose made no comment in his
book, but then he had little to compare it to, his only
previous yachting being on an ex-lifeboat that he
converted himself. Lively Lady’s quirky behaviour is
certainly no refl ection on the original design, so far
removed was the end result. Shepherd’s reaction to
Rose’s accomplishment is not known; Shepherd was a
very old man when the voyage fi nished in 1968 and died,
aged 100, the following year. My guess is he would have
applauded the seamanship, but I am not sure he would
have wanted any credit for the yacht design.LIVELY LADY
FREDERICK SHEPHERD
CLASSIC DESIGNS