CLASSIC BOAT NOVEMBER 2017 75DAVID BOYD
While Boyd would doubtless have welcomed more
orders, it seemed that he could do no wrong and his
boats just became better and better.
It wasn’t just racing yachts; Boyd applied his design
skills to all manner of powered craft. Skadi, an
innovative, transom-sterned 46-footer (14m) to his
design, was built by JW Miller and Sons of St Monans in
Fife in 1956. He had previously produced the plans for
Eilean Shuna, a 76ft (23.2m) seine-net trawler for the
east coast yard of JG Forbes back in 1947. Skadi was
built to a yacht finish for John Clark of Clarks Shoes and
registered as a bona fide fishing boat in Oban.
David Boyd achieved his boyhood dream in 1957
when he was one of four British designers invited to
submit proposals for a new 12-Metre to challenge for
the America’s Cup. Nothing of this scale and technical
complexity had been attempted in Britain since the
Second World War, but the recent success of Boyd’s
offshore 12-tonner Bagheera in successive Giraglia
regattas in Italian waters, and the dominant performance
of Titia in the USA, after she won the Seawanhaka Cup
for Canada the previous year, were grounds for
optimism.
The work included two sets of lines at the outset and
grew to encompass design innovations, new marine
products and specialised equipment. In order to cope
with the demands of this commission, Boyd secured the
services of gregarious polymath James McAuley. With
Sceptre, the two men created a masterpiece of integrated
product design. But the radical hull form option, which
had prevailed in the test tank, was a disappointment.
Interviewed by Iain McAllister in his retirement, Boydconceded that he always favoured his more conservative
alternative, which was well-developed and embodied 30
years of careful design progression. In 1968, after
extensive tank-testing, he redesigned the underbody for
Eric Maxwell, but the rebuild was shelved.
In the aftermath of the Sceptre challenge, Boyd
reflected on what went wrong; he studied the work of his
US contemporaries and every aspect of Columbia’s
successful campaign. There was also some comfort in the
fact that, even as the Sceptre debacle unfolded, Stug
Perry had taken his 1955 6-Metre Royal Thames to Le
Havre and beaten the best of Olin Stephens’ crop to win
the One Ton Cup.
Boyd recovered quickly from the setbacks of the
Sceptre campaign, mainly because it soon became
apparent that his recent hard-won 12-Metre experience
was now a priceless asset. At the same time, he assumed
greater responsibility for the overall management of
Robertson’s Yard as managing director. Then, over the
winter of 1961-62, he began preparatory work on a new
America’s Cup yacht for Tony Boyden. In sharp contrast
to 1957, he now had access to the latest technologies and
the time and money to develop and refine his ideas for
this second challenge. Boyd visited New York regularly
over a period of 18 months to tank-test his evolving
design ideas at the Stephens test tank.
Sovereign was the final set of challenger lines to be
tested in the USA before access was denied to competing
designers from overseas. Allan Murray, the Stephens
Institute director, said that, “David Boyd’s model testing
was very good, an equal in many ways to the wonderful
work done here two years ago by Alan Payne ofAbove: Titia at
the 1954
Olympics in
Vancouver,
Canada“Nothing of this scale and technical complexity had been attempted in
Britain since World War II”DAVID BOYD ARCHIVE
CB353 Boyd pt2.indd 75 26/09/2017 15:13