64 CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2018
As the Cowes yard marks its 150th birthday, we look at how it
widened its reputation post-war and built many seminal yachts
WORDS CLARE MCCOMB
A
fter Sidney Clare died in 1945, the future
direction of Lallow’s yard was uncertain:
businesses were gradually detaching
themselves from years of war production,
and veterans had returned to work in a different
world. For some clear-sighted individuals, post-war
gave an opportunity to ring the changes and Clare
Wilhelm Lallow, Sidney’s son, had exactly that kind of
vision: by 1947 he had bought out both Uncles Arthur
and Harry: the yard was his own.
His key idea was the development of the centre of
operations at Medina Road, site of the famous 1907 fire.
Lallow’s own employees built new slipways from
second-hand railway tracks laid on concrete columns,
alongside a wooden pier constructed on piles driven deep
into the mud. Today, seen from the river, these structures
are still in use and have hardly changed. Clare designed
them to last. Turning away from family traditions of
local political and community service, he now began to
promote the Lallow name to a very different audience- by personally racing his own boats against the best out
there, and beating them hands down.
From the very start he and his wife Sybil had shared
‘sailing’; She was a natural at the helm and pre-war, the
newly married couple were Island Sailing Club members,
around the time Lallows was building six Nicholson-
designed Island 14s, including ISC 1 and ISC 2 and two
for TR Ratsey and F Beken. Over the years Clare served
on the Cowes Town Regatta Committee, as chairman,
and played a key role on the racing committees of the
Island SC. With the launching of the Dragon Blue Skies,
in 1949, the yard became respected for what its yachts
could do, more than who its customers were.
Clare knew Johan Anker’s elegant, award-winning
Dragons well; his own Island SC had famously presented
Bluebottle to Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth as a
wedding present in 1948. When the class achieved
Olympic status the same year, its international profile
was established. Blue Skies was shared with Ratsey
family member Franklin Woodroffe, the arrangement
being that Lallows constructed the hull while Ratsey’s
provided rig and sails. Franklin had served his
apprenticeship during the 1930s and, like Lallows, its
firm was working hard to survive in the post-war
climate. He was a more public figure than Clare,
belonging to a string of yacht clubs and often quite
outspoken, but the two Cowes men, who had cut their
racing teeth in pre-war competition with each other, now
became a celebrated and winning team.
Anker designed Dragons as both cruising and racing
boats, so the spec allowed you to fit the yacht ‘as
required’. Clare raced Blue Skies without the weight of
any unnecessary innards. No rule was broken but
eyebrows were raised as she clocked up victories, most
notably winning the inaugural Duke of Edinburgh
Challenge Cup (the first National Dragon Class
championship) in August 1949.
Soon sideways mutterings turned to copycatting as
other owners stripped out fittings to ensure they could
compete. Then the Russians came calling, with their
eyes on the forthcoming Olympics, and left taking
Clare’s Dragon and a couple of others with them.
Lallow’s quality had proved itself, and the
winter of 1952 found the yard building two 11-ton
cruising yachts for Franklin Woodroffe and F Gilham,
while fitting out Dragons, Tom Thornycroft’s 5.5 metre
and “numerous Island Sailing Club scows”.
A longstanding customer, 89-year-old Royal Yacht
Squadron member Professor Donald Longmore,
remembers Lallow’s ‘Rolls-Royce’ service in the 1950sLALLOW’S
A HISTORY
Below: Blue
Skies, the
Dragon in which
Clare Lallow
made his name
as a racing
sailorPART 2