GELYCE
pleasure boat pier to await her arrival. And so it is that
on a warm day late in 2017, under a thick sky, a shape in
dark green appears in the distance from behind an island
in the Thames off Chiswick in leafy west London.
It’s hard to describe what Gelyce looks like in this
setting. The shape is so confidently elegant, so flamboyant,
that it’s hard to imagine she sprang from the English
imagination. It begins to make sense when you
remember that when she was built, Britain ruled a
quarter of the world. Every metal fitting, inside and out,
glints like gold, and that’s because it is: 18-carat Welsh
red gold to be precise, just as original. You expect to see
Cruella de Vil on the helm. It’s not though – it’s Colin
Messer, with brother Stephen and partner Jane Percival:
Classic Restoration Services is a family affair.
She comes up alongside the Thames river cruiser
Queen Elizabeth, four years older than the Gelyce, but a
rough character with real tideway credentials. Her crew,
similarly tough-looking, take Gelyce’s lines, engaging in
some good-natured mockery at this pedigree arrival with
its whining bowthruster, then Wint and I jump aboard.
Photographer Peter Zabek shadows us from the bank,
snapping away, then suddenly we part company and
we’re in an impromptu Top Gear-style race, creaming
along nicely, while Peter scuttles off to our destination of
St Katharine Docks to try to photograph our arrival. The
rules of our race allow Peter to use any form of overlandtransport he likes. He opts for a train to Waterloo and a
taxi from there. We have Gelyce, top speed 28mph.
Colin opens the throttle on the 175hp, 1960s-vintage
Rolls-Royce car engine and the revs climb to 3,000 as
the ebbing tide starts to gather force: the race is on.THE BIRTH OF A J-CLASS TENDER
In the small aft cockpit, Stephen Messer, whose roles
include yard historian, goes through the boat’s history.
She was built in 1931 by Camper and Nicholson to a
Charles Nicholson design of 1912, and she remained
under Nicholson ownership until 1936. In that year she
was sold to a Mr Nuttall, who owned her for only a year
before she returned to her maker. It was during the
1930s that she was used as a tender and support vessel
to Shamrock V and Endeavour in the Solent, both of
them J-Class yachts designed and built by Nicholson,
both of which challenged for the America’s Cup, and
both of which failed, the latter gloriously, coming about
as close to winning as any attempt in history. She never
accompanied her giant charges to the hallowed waters
off Rhode Island to support them in their bids for the
‘Auld Mug’, unsurprisingly, as both sailed there on their
own hulls, a stipulation of the race at the time. There is,
however, some 1934 Pathé footage showing her with
Endeavour, as she left Portsmouth to sail to America,
“carrying the good wishes of the whole nation”.