WINDSWEPT
BUILT
1936 by David
Hillyard at
Littlehampton,
England
WRECKED
1 August, 2003,
Island of Panarea,
Italy
LOA
54ft (16.46m)
LWL
47ft 8in (14.53m)
BEAM
13ft 3in (4.04m)
DRAUGHT
5ft 9in (1.75m)
DISPLACEMENT
31 tonsAbove: Jeanne
Moreau; with Orson
Wells filming The
Deep in 1967;
Windswept
in 2003C/O TECNOMARSternpost
F
or the first four months of the Second World
War, a bookish, half-French schoolgirl lived
aboard a 54ft Hillyard ketch on a deep water
mooring in the River Arun in West Sussex.
The bilingual 11-year-old would one day be described
by Orson Welles as “the greatest actress in the world”.
Jeanne Moreau, who died in Paris last year at 89,
never forgot the ketch, Windswept, or the name of the
little fishing boat, Wagtail, used by her English
grandfather Granville Buckley as a tender to his yacht.
Buckley was a former sailing trawler skipper. He had
sold his own 58ft jigger smack Alicia FD60 at Fleetwood
in 1905. In the summer and autumn of 1939 he sheltered
Jeanne with her mother and her baby sister aboard the
hefty boat that David Hillyard’s men had
built in mahogany on oak at the Ropewalk in
Littlehampton in 1936.
The future star of Louis Malle’s film Lift to the
Scaffold, of Jules et Jim for François Truffaut and three
movies for Orson Welles, was the unexpected and
sometimes unwanted daughter of a 20-year-old
Lancashire girl.
The first words ever delivered by Jeanne Moreau were
spoken in Lancashire-accented English on a summer
holiday at her grandfather’s house in Oldham. He called
her Chatterbox.
Fifty years later, after marriages and affairs with
actors and directors that ranged from Pierre Cardin to
Lee Marvin, after a dramatic Hollywood separation
from the director of The Exorcist and after being named
as a co-respondent by Vanessa Redgrave, ‘La Moreau’
was asked if she had ever loved an Englishman. “Yes,”
she said. “He had the impossible name of Granville. He
was my grandfather.”
She told the French novelist Yvonne Baby that her
grandfather was “mad about Joseph Conrad... I think he
once met Conrad. He wrote articles for the maritime
journals, acquired himself a boat with the magnificentname Windswept and rented himself out with the yacht
in summer, giving courses in navigation.
“There were books by Conrad in his library and I
read them all in English. I am totally bilingual. I went to
school in England during the war.
“I was 11, captivated by voyages and a life at sea
discovering islands.”
Describing the art of film-making to a Canadian
photographer in 2012, Moreau said: “Filming is
concentration. Just as writers very rarely say they jump
around with joy when they are in front of a blank page,
there can be a passion and you can feel you’re on the
right track. It’s a very strange world. For somebody with
nothing to do on the set, it’s like somebody who’s
seasick, who doesn’t know what it is to sail. The only
thing you can do with that person is ask him to go
downstairs and vomit, or whatever. But don’t be on
deck. I learned how to sail with my grandpa. My
grandpa in England was a sailor.
“He taught me how to repair the nets and things. He
kept me busy. He would say: ‘There’s water. Pump.’ Or
‘Today is clear. Maybe we see the coast of France.’”
A tourbillon did for Windswept on 1 August, 2003,
flying the Italian flag in the Aeolian volcanic islands
north of Sicily. After surviving wartime government
ownership and seven different British owners between
1947 and 1978, Windswept had been restored as a
major prize-winning project by the Tecnomar yard on
the banks of the River Tiber at Fiumicino near Rome.
Disaster struck five months after presentation of a
2003 restoration of the year trophy to the Italian
craftsmen for their work on the boat.
Emiliano Parenti of Tecnomar said recently: “She had
been completely restored. I took her on the sea trial and
the owners were delighted.
“She was caught in a fierce thunderstorm off Panarea.
She just exploded on the rocks of the island. It is very sad
because she was a magnificent boat.”Andrew Rosthorn on the nautical roots of French actress Jeanne Moreau
Her world was a Hillyard