CLASSIC BOAT NOVEMBER 2017 65I
t was a very British affair. A fl eet of largely open boats
travelling slowly together up Salcombe Harbour – in the
driving rain. At a certain point opposite the town, above the
wind and torrential downpour, horns and sirens could be
heard tooting their respect.
Sheltered on the quay, one man stood quietly, a mixture of
pride and surprise on his face, memories fl ooding back of the
boats he’d built over a fi ve-decade career – a career that those in
the town’s maritime community wanted to acknowledge.
“It was lovely and quite humbling,” says Mike Atfi eld
afterwards, at a reception in Salcombe Yacht Club. “You never
think, when you’re doing your job in a little shed down in the
town, that you’re making an impact on anything.”
When Atfi eld closed the doors of his Island Street workshop
for the last time in July, he also did so on a tradition of wooden
boatbuilding in the town going back generations, to the days
when early 19th century Salcombe shipwrights built fruit
schooners for voyages around the world.
An Atfi eld creation is a more modest thing – more likely a
rowing boat, a launch or one of the Salcombe yawl fl eet – but no
less handsome. The remarkable success of his
career is defi ned in one comment he makes:
“From 1974 to when I retired, I only had one
day when I never had a boat to build.”
That was in 1991. The next day someone
walked in and commissioned a new yawl.
Atfi eld was born in Yorkshire, the son of
a steel worker and a housekeeper who
moved to Salcombe for work. Atfi eld left
school aged 15 and got a fi ve-year
apprenticeship at Edgar Cove Boatbuilder in
Island Street, Salcombe.
“It was a very different sort of place back
then,” Atfi eld recalls of his early days in the
town. “There were fi ve boatyards in Island
Street alone. People would retire here and they would always
seem to have a wooden launch, a tender and a yawl.
So there was a lot of work.”
Edgar Cove’s was the biggest yard in the area (by that time
run by Cove’s son Edward) and won contracts with the
Admiralty and RNLI, not that Atfi eld saw much of that work. “I
spent several years just building pram dinghies, one after the
other. I always wanted to build a rowing boat, something with a
stem. You’d go and see the boss and ask: ‘What next?’ and he’d
say: ‘Another pram!’ One day I went in and said: ‘What now,
another pram?’ He said: ‘No, you can build a rowing boat now.’
The reverse psychology worked!”
Being an apprentice in those days involved paying your dues.
“At the end of my fi rst week I came home and said: ‘I’m not
going back there.’ You were the lowest of the low. Then someone
else would come in and you’d move up one,” Atfi eld recalls.
“But it gave you a really good foundation. There were always
boats on the go. It’s a shame there aren’t many yards around
now where you can be an apprentice in the same way.”
Atfi eld set up on his own aged 21, in 1974. His fi rstcommission was a 16ft (4.9m) launch, then an 11ft (3.4m)
tender, then the fi rst of what became 30 Salcombe yawls.
“I enjoyed talking to the owner and fi nding out what they
wanted – starting with nothing and building it up from there.
The other day we had a customer come in saying having his boat
built, all those years ago, was one of the best experiences of his
life. He compared having a boat built to buying a Maserati,
where you just go to the garage and buy the fi nished product. To
have something built for you is a more fulfi lling experience.”
Everything was done traditionally in the Atfi eld yard: “[Yacht
designer] Ian Howlett once said to me: ‘There’s a lot to be said
for a pencil!’ When you draw it out, you get a feel for it, more
than you do on a computer screen.”
And Atfi eld recalls advice passed on by Edward Cove on
valuing ‘the eye’ as much as any other tool in the box: “You’ve
measured it but it still looks wrong. Then you odds things a bit
here and there and it starts to look as if it was meant to be.”
The yard was very much a two-person show, Jean joining him
in the seven-day-a-week routine as ‘chief painter and varnisher’,
not her husband’s favourite task. Salcombe regatta fortnight
would often see them work most of
the night to ensure boats could sail again
the next day.
They were surprised in 2011 when
they were given notice that ‘a member of
the royal family’ had expressed a wish to
visit them. “I thought it must be a wind
up,” Atfi eld recalls.
The visitor turned out to be Prince
Charles, who with the Duchess of
Cornwall arrived one morning and spent
some time chatting about sustainability of
timber supplies. The Prince was
complimentary, too, of Atfi eld’s cannon
carriages, which he made for Britannia
Royal Naval College and HMS Excellent in Portsmouth.
He and Jean suffered a personal tragedy nine years ago when
their son Nick, then aged 31, was killed in an accident as he
helped unload a fi shing boat alongside the fi sh quay. He was a
popular man in the town and his death shook the Salcombe
community. Today, Atfi eld says: “Nick would never have taken
on the yard – working with the fi shing fl eets of Salcombe and
Dartmouth was his fi rst love.
“There are still people in Salcombe who can build wooden
boats, but building a boat is a long-term thing. Over the same
time you can probably get a better income doing repairs and
restorations. I have always said to young people that they have
to build one boat, so people can see their work, then the work
will follow. People still want traditional boats.”
Atfi eld’s fi nal tally, he reckons, is 128, including 30
Salcombe yawls. Rare things. Those who have one know they
keep their value. Atfi eld may have been operating in a different
sphere to some of the big name builders of the classic world,
but those in that rainy parade down Salcombe Harbour knew
they were saluting a master craftsman.“From 1974
to when I
retired, I only
had one day
when I never
had a boat
to build”CB353 Mike Atfield_Interview.indd 65 26/09/2017 12:54