Adrian Morgan
CRAFTSMANSHIP
CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2018^33P
age 297 is perhaps my favourite, ‘Folding
lavatories’, and No 2702, if Sally had the room,
would suit her admirably: ‘Made in mahogany,
polished. Bevelled mirror. Chromium-plated pump. Price
£8 15s 0d...’ I am referring, of course, to that bible of
the classic yachtsman (although in 1938 this was not so
much classic as state of the art), the Simpson-Lawrence
catalogue of yacht equipment, all 336 pages of brass
and chrome, mahogany and porcelain, including the S-L
Standard model, catalogue No 396 (£7 18s 6d), which
has been in use in Sally’s forepeak since 1937, and has
never – at least in my ownership – lost a beat, or whatever
the term is for a gunmetal and chrome yacht’s loo.
Leafing through those pages my eyes will recognise
many bits of Sally’s inventory from the locker catches to
the turn buckles, although I do hope they are not the
originals. Even the forehatch looks familiar, but if you
asked your shipwright for a forehatch in 1937 he would
simply make you one just like the first he was taught to
make as an apprentice.
In those days you would need look no further than
S-L’s latest catalogue for anything from a cast iron skillet
to a teak side accommodation ladder (No 2800) for a
75ft schooner, a bargain even in 1938 at £16 18s.
Marine glue, hinges and hasps, a brass or iron rudder,
made in S-L’s factory to your specification; flagpole
sockets; chain pipes; cabin and deck lights; electric fansand blowers; fire extinguishers;
stoves; clocks and barometers;
compasses, from hand bearing at £7
10s 0d (Sally has one just like No
987) to a standard steering compass,
Kelvin pattern, binnacle in best teak,
with corrector magnets and
clinometer (No 974), at £51 10s 0d.
In fact I have two catalogues, the
second of which, hardback, dates
from 1940 from the receipt I found
tucked inside its pages. It reads that
on 9 September 1940 the company
received the sum of “2/- ...in
payment of catalogue from Sub
Lieut Storrie RNVR HM Yacht
Golden Gleam c/o GPO London”.
This was three months after the
Dunkirk evacuation. Who was
Storrie? Yachtsman almost certainly
turned temporary RNVR sub
lieutenant, in charge now of a
requisitioned yacht, or perhaps
fishing trawler. Storrie appears on
20 July 1940 Navy Lists as the
skipper of the Golden Gleam,
although I can find no trace of her in
the Lloyd’s of the time.
If a yacht, could it have been the
one featured in a home cine film in
1938, held at the National Library of Scotland, taken
when she was chartered by the Bowser family for a
cruise in the Western Isles, having changed their plans of
going to France ‘due to the political situation’? And what
was Sub Lieut Storrie doing with a copy of the S-L
catalogue a year into the war? Fitting her out for her
war-time role, or as bedside reading, dreaming as so
many naval officers must have done of when the conflict
would end and they could fit out a vessel of their own
for cruising in the Western Isles again.
Storrie would not have known that he faced another
five years of war before he could place his order with
S-L’s head office in St Andrew’s Square, Glasgow, even
if he did have a yacht to fit out. More to the point,
if he was destined to survive. From a slip of paper in
an 80-year-old yachting catalogue such stories are
made, or rather imagined.
As to the catalogue, with page after page of solid
British engineering, cast and fashioned and polished in
Simpson-Lawrence’s Kentigern Works in Glasgow, it
speaks of a time of teak, bronze and Bakelite. When
lifejackets were filled with kapok and buoyancy tanks
were brazed up in brass. It was undoubtedly a heavier
world. What has not changed is the perennial fascination
we yachtsmen have, magpies all by nature, with leafing
through catalogues of shiny stuff. I wonder what took
Sub Lieutenant Storrie’s fancy in July 1940?A fascination with boat kit is one thing that never changes
“Dreaming
of when
the conflict
would end
and he could
fit out his
yacht”CHARLOTTE WATTERSA real page-turner