6 CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2019
FARIDA
Above left: tiller
rises out of the
king plank on the
aft deck; owner
John Richardson;
a new ash block
T
he effect that Farida has when you first see
her is hard to explain. Even at her mooring
in Gosport’s Haslar Marina on a hot day
early last summer, there was a buoyancy
and purpose and... oh, forgive me, god of
clichés... elegance to Farida that compelled the eye to
return over and over again. The mysterious allure of this
yacht is made all the harder to understand when you
consider her designer, Jack Laurent Giles (1901-1969).
Now, Laurent Giles was, without any serious doubt, one
of the most innovative British naval architects of all time,
a designer who, in his heyday of post-war Britain, knew
for many years what it was to stand on the shoulders of
the world. His technical brilliance is well documented,
and its effects are still with us today. Among his
(debatable) firsts were the coachroof-stepped mast, and
doghouses for smaller yachts (as on the 30ft/9.1m LWL
Etain drawn in 1931).
The names of some of his light, fast racing yachts are
household names these days – in the right households of
course. Among them are Myth of Malham (with John
Illingworth), Gulvain, Sopranino and Lutine. Despite
this slew of radical yachts, he is remembered these days
mostly for the stout, traditional little Vertue Class, much
as NG Herreshoff is most remembered for his H12.
dinghy; never has Norman Skeen’s great, if terribly sober,
truism “originality is rarely the key to success” seemed
so true. As much as anything though, Laurent Giles is
known today as a designer who pushed the edge of
aesthetic sensibilities – many of his designs are divisive.
Whooper, for instance, the 37ft (11.3m) Bermudan
sloop of 1939 that has arguably won more races than
any other yacht in the classic yacht revival of today
(she’d have to share that imaginary podium spot with
Dorade), is imbued with a clarity of purpose, but is not
picture-postcard pretty. The little Sopranino, while a
startling boat of innovative gestation (a dinghy with a lid
to ride the great waves of the ocean blue, essentially)
fulfilled her brief brilliantly, but these days is poignantly
dated, her reverse sheer and curvy lines a portrait of the
misplaced optimism of a now-forgotten future.
Farida is different from anything else out there. Her
near-plumb sawn-off counter, tumblehome at the stern
and lovely doghouse (Laurent Giles certainly knew how
to draw doghouses that didn’t look like Thomas the
Tank Engine) work together to form an arresting,
handsome silhouette. Her name describes her well. It’s
an Arabic word that appears in its native language as
a lovely calligraphic squiggle that must reach its English
translation through some sort of cultural, as well as
linguistic, transliteration because no two definitions
are the same. But the words that crop up most often are
‘unique’, ‘precious’ and ‘beautiful’. Farida is all three.
I hopped on, careful and shoeless, and tried to look
proprietorial, while waiting for the real owner, John
Richardson and photographer Lester McArthy to arrive.
This was to be one of her first shakedown sails after a
comprehensive, six-year restoration. Farida was built,
optimistically you might think, the same year as
Whooper, and launched at the start of World War Two
in 1939 by RA Newman and Sons of Poole in Dorset,
possibly for Mr Newman himself. He is registered as
the owner from launch until 1948, but whether it was
for personal use or perhaps built speculatively in yard
downtime, is not known. Mr Newman’s address at the
time – 76 Chesterfield House, London W1, an elegant
apartment block in Mayfair – suggests either was
possible. After 1948, Farida went through the usual
succession of owners and cropped up in two Beken
photos in 1951 and 1952, in the Solent, swooshing along
in black and white, with an old-fashioned symmetrical
spinnaker flying from the mast. She was owned, at that
point, by a Cecil E Donne, of Cowes, Isle of Wight.
FARIDA AND THE GULF WAR
Half a century after she was launched, Farida had not
changed much but warfare had. You will remember, no
doubt, the endless footage of green lights strobing the
sky as one Iraqi Scud missile after another was chased
and downed by American Patriot missiles, the footage
of bombs being laser-guided through air vents in the tops
of buildings, General Schwarzkopf (“it’s hammer time”)
those wide, low American Humvees, stealth bombers
and Saddam Hussein’s moustache. Of course, war
is never trivial, but the iconography of that conflict
is so powerful because this was the first war that was
broadcast live to the world. And out there in the desert,
covering it all for ITV, was Michael Nicholson. “I covered
that war with an old wooden boat to savour in the few
quiet moments between shelling and it was the thought
of her and what I was going to do with her when I got
back that kept me sane,” Michael told CB years later.
Michael had bought Farida on a very rainy New Year’s
Day in 1991, the day before he left for the Middle East.