Classic Boat — February 2018

26 CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2018

BETTY II

‘coaming’ attached with butterfl y nuts, in preparation

for his crossing to Saint-Malo, Brittany, in 2016,

because he had been warned about the boat being

swamped. From the end of his planked hatch he had

designed a stiff piece of tarpaulin with a hole in it so

that he could emerge from the centre to steer.

I ditched the hatch in Gosport and so far have

resisted wearing the peep-hole tarpaulin as I am wary

of offering myself up to Neptune as a human sea-

anchor.

Four years ago I approached Ben and asked him to

give me fi rst refusal if ever he thought of selling Betty

II. “I am selling her,” he said, “as soon as I have

celebrated the 50th anniversary of the OGA.”

Now, at last I had a date: August 2013. But the

month passed and Ben did not make contact. By

mid-September that year I contacted him. “I can’t fi nd

any boat which suits me as well as Betty,” he said.

Crestfallen, I bought my second boat on the

re-bound: Wendy May, a Maurice Griffi ths-designed

26ft (8m) gaff cutter. Lovely boat though she is, she is

too deep to keep on a drying mooring within walking

distance of my home: another of the key reasons Betty

II has spent so much of her long life on the Thames

Estuary shoreline.

Finally in August 2017, Ben decided he wanted a

fi breglass dayboat to take his grandchildren sailing

and he agreed to sell Betty II to me, on the condition

he could keep her until the last OGA race of the

season on 29 September.

In the event, Ben did not compete in the race,

although he was keen for his Solent competitors to get

the chance to say goodbye to the boat few could beat

and so we visited Yarmouth and the Royal Solent

Yacht Club, to share a bevvy. We then sailed to

Portsmouth and left the boat at Haslar Marina while I

awaited a weather window. Mark Hickman sailed

Tarifa across from Bembridge: “Do you mind if I join

you for dinner?” he asked as I prepared to sail east. “I

want to say goodbye to Betty,” he added.

A few days later off Osborne’s cockle shed at

Leigh-on-Sea we picked up a spare mooring near

another Cole Wiggins & Wiggins-built boat, the newly

restored Endeavour, the gaff-rigged cockle boat that

lifted hundreds of soldiers off the beaches at Dunkirk

and which appeared in the recent fi lm of the same name.

My crew Glum and I rowed ashore for our ritual

plate of cockles and were met by Betty Smith’s neice,

Sheena Schmidtchen, who owns two watercolours of

Betty II by Edward Wigfall, which hang on the wall of

her Leigh-on-Sea home.

She brought with her another picture: a sepia

photograph of her mother Phyllis and her Aunty Betty

as children. It now hangs in the cabin of her aunty’s

namesake.

As the tide ebbed and a cacophony of gargling

brent geese – the fi rst of the winter – fought to get at

the emerging eel grass, Betty II lay her starboard bilge

gently down on estuary mud. She was back where she

belonged.

Above: Launching of Betty II at Leigh-on-

Sea in the Thames estuary in 1921, and her

new mooring back in Leigh

BETTY II

LOA

32ft (9.75m)

LWL

22ft 8in (6.9m)

BEAM

8ft (2.4m)

DRAUGHT

2ft 7in (82cm)

centreplate up;

4ft 8in (1.3m)

centreplate down

DISPLACEMENT

3.5 tonnes

SAIL AREA

437 sqft

(40.6m²)