72 CLASSIC BOAT NOVEMBER 2017DAVID BOYD
shoot at the head of the Holy Loch. Only the most
passionate wildfowlers aspire to the electrifying modus
operandi of the ‘gunning punter’. David Boyd was up for
the challenge. He designed and built a punt gun and a
punt to carry it. There was a strong connection between
the sports of sailing and wildfowling in the old days, as
described by writers from Dixon Kemp to Keith
Shackleton. Yachting books from the turn of the century
often contained sections on building punts, and extolled
the vicarious pleasures of stalking ducks among the
reedbeds in the early morning mists of quiet backwaters.
Boyd spent the war years of 1939-45 supervising the
build of fast, prefabricated warships to standard designs
for the Admiralty. There wasn’t much new conceptual
design work but there were endless detailed design
problems to solve. Pleasure craft were mothballed or
requisitioned and the sport of yachting put on indefinite
hold. Many Clyde yachtsmen took their small-boat skills
and local knowledge to war in the coastal defence vessels
of the Royal Navy and the RNVR.
The conflict brought a halt to most new yacht work
through to 1946. This long ‘dry spell’ without a major
design commission was bracketed by two unbuilt David
Boyd designs, both rather beautiful: Caledonia – an
elegant 12-Metre design proposal of 1938, later published
in Uffa Fox’s Thoughts on Yachts and Yachting, and a
successful Yachting World competition entry for a slim
30ft (9.1m) dayboat in 1946. In 1947, work again began
to materialise; Circe was still the top boat on the Solent,so there were orders for new 6-Metres. In this optimistic
but difficult economic environment, the Robertson
family sought to re-establish its business as a ‘centre of
excellence’. David Boyd became a director of the firm in- That year, he acquired the 6-Metre Alana. In the
immediate post-war period there were good numbers of
keenly sailed Metre boats on the Clyde. At the 1947
Hunters Quay Regatta, there were 10 yachts entered in
the 6-Metre class (including Boyd’s newly launched
sister-ships, Marletta and Thistle) and nine in the
‘ex-6-Metres’ – mainly older Sixes, some of which sailed
with handicaps.
This latter fleet included the Boyds' Alana (ex-Priscilla
II drawn by Boyd in 1929 during his Fife incumbency),
the Lorimers' Suzette (ex-Lucille, a 1928 Fife design also
likely drafted by Boyd, but built by McGruer) and
McGruer’s Tystie (Ex-Saskia III, a 1935 Mylne design
built by the Bute Slip Dock). Vorsa (Mylne 1931) was
sailed by Tom S Black, the Greenock sailmaker whose
son John ran Mackenzie of Sandbank, the local sail loft.
So a real battle of the yards, then, but not in boats
ostensibly designed or built in-house, and revealingly
fought in the second division. Clearly, a new state-of-the-
art Six was beyond the means of the middle-class.
The early post-war years were perhaps Boyd’s most
successful period as a designer. His 6-Metres were among
the very best in the world and all were quick to a degree,
so too were his designs to the new IYRU 5.5-Metre class
and the quirky and rather wonderful Windermere 17s.
Above: the Boyd
family sailing its
6-Metre Alana
at the Hunters
Quay Regatta
in 1947“Zigeuner established the Boyd/Robertson combination
as a potent formula for ‘design and build’ on the Clyde”DAVID BOYD JR COLLECTIONCB353 Boyd pt2.indd 72 26/09/2017 15:12