My father Walter is 86 years old. He was born in 1936. He is almost as old as Wood Rose: a classic, hardwood, 24’ Gaff-rigged yacht, built and launched the year before at Hunter’s yard in the Norfolk Broads.
The Broads is a series of medieval peat-workings that flooded, despite wind-powered pumping, as sea-levels gradually rose. The opportunity that these new ditches and broad, open lakes provided for navigation was soon realised, and many attempts were were made to link them to the navigable rivers and to the North Sea. Wherries (gaff-rigged cargo sailboats) were still transporting goods up and down the Broads until 1912.
Wood Rose, like the other boats at the yard, was built for pleasure. She has a self-tacking jib and a very large mainsail [Alix: we could have had a self-tacking jib on Missy Bear, but Skipper said it wouldn’t be proper sailing]. A large mainsail equates to lots of power: the gaff, when raised, lifts the head of the sail high, even above the top of the mast; the boom is very low and timely head-ducking is essential (especially for me); and the boom is so long that it almost overlaps the transom. This all maximises mainsail area. A large mainsail means lots of power to accelerate the boat quickly from a standing start, so as to achieve enough speed to tack in a short space of time.
The mainsail’s head also needs to be set high to raise the canvass above the scrubby, waterside vegetation that can obstruct the wind from crossing the water. In the days of the wherries, part of a boatmen's job was to keep the banks free of vegetation to allow the wind through to power the sails.
If the wind failed – and there were no tow paths for horses as far as I am aware – each boat would have carried long quant poles. The boatmen would ‘punt’ the boat forward by pushing a pole into the shallow muddy or gravel bottom. He would push the boat forwards as he walked towards the stern along the narrow side-deck, with the pole’s top secure under the crook of his armpit. A sharp twist of his hand and forearm would then free the sticky end from the goo, and he would raise the quant, walk forward to the bow and repeat.
As Wood Rose has no inboard or outboard engine – thank heavens – prior punting skills (acquired at Oxford) was definitely advantageous when the wind died [Alix: but what about the Pimms?]
The other obstacle to navigation is the low, medieval bridges that span the rivers. They were certainly not designed with sail boats in mind. I’m pretty sure that the large wherries didn’t manage to get under theses stone-built, arched beauties. The Hunter’s boats, however, are smaller and have a counter-weighted mast: large lead weights fixed to the bottom of the mast below a fulcrum point. When the yacht approaches a bridge, you lower the gaff onto the boom, and then lower the top of the mast backwards to rest on wooden props on the transom (rear). These props are just low enough for you to ‘shoot’ under the central arch…
…if you have got the tides correct!
If you try too early on the ebb, or too late on the flood, you’ll likely hit the arch or get wedged under it. Definitely fun for the tourist onlookers, but perhaps hugely embarrassing for the skipper? [And “No”, it’s never happened to me.]
We novices always moor up on the bank before a bridge to take down the sails and the mast. But more experienced racers (Charles and Amanda?) will drop the sails and mast, shoot the bridge, and re-raise the mast and sails without stopping!
I have been sailing the gaffs on the Broads a couple of times with a group from Cirencester. (The last time was in May 2021, just before Alix and I left for France to collect Missy Bear.) The boats are obviously old, but very lovingly maintained, with shiny, varnished mahogany and crisp tarpaulin on the liftable coach roof. Up until last year they were lit with gleaming brass gas-mantles, but now they have electric lights, which is a shame, albeit cleaner, and probably a little healthier?
The saloon/cabins are low and snug (hence the lifting coach roof). The longest berths are only 6’, which is certainly tight for a 6’2” modern chap like me. You have a two-ring gas stove and if you want water, you must carry it aboard in a plastic jerry can. There is a ‘heads’ (the loo) but it is so tiny I can’t get into it. So, number one is over the side, and number two is at the next pub, after a pint. The twin heads and holding-tanks on Missy Bear are simply palatial by comparison. But Wood Rose is 'fit for purpose'.
I was reminded of the Broads for one reason. It was as we sailed past Poros on Missy Bear in May this year as I was reminded of the Henry Miller quote:
“…when suddenly I realized we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land. Coming into Poros gives the illusion of the deep dream. Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there is no egress."
This wonderful experience in Poros reminded me of sailing through Potter Heigham on the Broads! It does really feel like you are sailing down the village high street, because the properties come right up to the water’s edge. If you are tacking against a head-wind, you have to judge the tack just right: not too early so you lose boat speed; but not so late that you career head-long into someone’s immovable timber quay.
If you are running with the wind astern – so the end of your boom is way, way out over the beam - you have to ensure that the boom-end doesn’t snatch the washing from someone’s rotary washing line on their lawn!
So, Wood Rose and my father are roughly the same age and born just before World War II: the war that most people of our generations still call, ‘The War’.
Whereas Wood Rose was stored in a shed for the duration of The War, young Walter would have been ushered into the air-raid shelter in my grandparents’ (Fred and Jennie) back yard, as Hitler’s Luftwaffe droned overhead enroute to bomb the steel plants of Sheffield. The returning German bombers would sometimes dump their unused payload over the countryside in order to save fuel for their return flight to Germany. It was in their huge craters, that pocked the fields near Bolton-on-Dearne, that my dad would later play. But at some time during that child-hood freedom he got septicaemia.
All his internal organs malfunctioned, and he would have surely died had it not been for a massive dose of penicillin. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it was not until 1940 that the method for mass production was devised at Oxford by Howard Florey and a German-Jewish immigrant called Ernst Chain. It took half of the first mass production in 1942 to treat just one patient for streptococcal septicaemia. By 1944, 2.3 million doses had been produced just in time for the Normandy landings, and soldiers who would have previously died from septicaemia now survived. My father says that, as a teenager, he was probably one of the first civilians to be treated with a heavy dose of this new wonder drug.
Through all our posts, either last season or this, it may seem strange that we have managed not to mention The War. We even managed to sail through the Ionian islands without mentioning ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’. So, why do we mention it now? The answer lies at Portolago on the Greek island of Leros.
Missy Bear has just arrived at Leros from the Cyclades, having passed between sentry-like cliffs and into the largest deep harbour in this part of Europe. This harbour was coveted by rival naval powers seeking to gain control of sea routes through the eastern Mediterranean.
At Lakki (the Greek name for Portolago) we seem to have sailed into some Fascist Italian 1930’s movie-set, albeit with no actors. This new Italian port-town is about as far from sugar-cube Greece as you could imagine. It simply feels weird!
The Italians occupied Leros – along with the rest of the Dodecanese - after they had defeated the Ottomans in their the war of 1911-12. This success sparked the First Balkans War (1912-13) when emboldened Balkan states sought independence from the declining Ottoman empire. After the First World War (1914-18), the Italians had promised to hand over these twelve islands to Greece. But Greece had subsequently fought the Ottomans to try and reclaim historic Byzantine territory – known as the ‘Great Idea’ (1919-1921). But they failed stupendously. So, the Italians reneged on the deal to avoid the islands being handed back to the Turks.
The Italian Dodecanese then became - along with their African possessions - a colonial Fascist plaything for Mussolini, who wanted his own ‘Great Idea’, i.e., to recreate a Roman Empire.
The Duce sent a couple of Italian architects in the 1930’s to drain the swampy land at the head of the bay, and to build a new town called Portolago (‘Port of the Lake’). They set out a geometric street plan with wide boulevards and two huge squares, one by the waterside.
And they set about designing and erecting a series of buildings in a style that has since been termed ‘Rationalist’ or ‘Fascist’. I would describe the buildings as unique – or ‘neo-classical meets Art-Deco’. There are lots of plain, unadorned and sweeping curves, arches and occasional columns. I read that Lakki has the greatest concentration of Art Deco buildings outside Miami.
Building of Portolago’s avant-garde cinema commenced in 1936 almost concurrent with the creation of Wood Rose in Norfolk, and Walter Crooks in a mining village in South Yorkshire. Three designs from very contrasting parallel universes.
As a fledgling - and now lapsed - Urban Designer myself, I find Portolago’s urban design flawed in one key way: the ratio of building height to the street width. The streets are wide – perhaps good for jack-booted military parades or for rolling tanks. But the buildings are mostly limited to two-storey - neither grandiose, nor tall enough to cast any shade across the street for much of the day. Was the design 'fit for purpose? A few street trees would have helped. But, the buildings simply needed to be taller town-houses IMHO.
The new town was zoned into residential and commercial quarters, and there were also barracks. It is said that Mussolini also had a mansion, but I’m not sure where it is, nor if he ever lived there or even visited. Elsewhere in the south of the bay the Italians seriously beefed up their naval base.
At the start of The War, the Italian naval forces in Leros formed part of The Axis powers. The Allies had lost Crete and coveted a good Mediterranean harbour. But it was only after the Italians swapped shirts in 1943 that this goal seemed achievable. After the Italians signed the Armistice of Cassibile, there was a mad-scramble for the islands. Britain got there first, arriving swiftly from Malta.
But the Germans soon caught up and eventually took control after some bloody battles. In the case of Leros, the Italian forces had stayed to help the British fight the Germans. But the island’s fate had been decided by the Allies’ prior loss of the nearby island of Kos with its airbase. Without Allied aircover, the Germans controlled the skies above Leros and could bomb Allied targets uncontested. The allies eventually surrendered. (Some Italian officers were then executed by the Germans for having fought against them. Sound familiar?)
As you walk from the marina into town on the bay-side road, you can’t miss the White Ensign flying beside the Greek national flag above a war memorial. The memorial is in memory of:
“…those sailors who died here in Port Lakki at the sinking of the British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Intrepid by enemy aircraft on 26th September 1943 at the beginning of the Battle of Leros.”
I looked up HMS Intrepid and discovered that it was one of nine I-Class destroyers built in the 1930s. More interesting, she was laid-down (the keel was placed), built and launched all during 1936. My father and Wood Rose have both survived a good deal longer. But then, they never came face-to-face with the Kriegsmarine or a Ju 88 aircraft.
Even more interesting, perhaps, was that before heading to Malta and then Leros, HMS Intrepid had participated in the pursuit and destruction of the German battleship Bismarck. Bismarck had also been laid-down in 1936. But she was not launched until 1939, only commissioned in 1940 and then christened by Adolf Hitler in 1941.
It was not all that heavy armour-plating that made her so time-consuming to complete. In fact, she had a serious design flaw: she was not very manoeuvrable! On a twin-screw boat, if you put one screw (say starboard) ahead and the opposite screw (port) astern, the boat should make a tight turn to port. Bismarck struggled to turn, even at full power. To be fair, Bismarck’s steering gear had been damaged in the fatal attack by the Royal Navy in 1941, and she was a sitting duck. She was already listing heavily when she was scuttled. She had taken five years to build and commission, yet took part in only one offensive in her short 8-month career before her demise.
Bismarck had been extremely difficult to sink, but was she 'fit for purpose'? If there’s one key lesson I have learned from military history, it is this: no matter how big you are and how heavily armed you are, if you can’t quickly put yourself in the right position then you can’t offer an effective offense or defence. It was true of the Argentinian fighter-jets shot down by the Sea Harriers of the Royal Navy Fleet Arm. It was also true of the bulky Spanish galleons sunk by the smaller and more nimble British men-of-war. And it was also true of Xerxes’ larger ships in 480 BC, that were out-manoeuvred by the Greek triremes at Salamis.
Wood Rose is certainly nimble; she must be in order to allow the skipper to tack up ditches that may be less than 50’ wide. She turns on a sixpence and, if you lose too much way in a bad tack, she will accelerate quickly from being dead in the water, giving you back control.
Wood Rose is a fine example of an object that has designed perfectly to fit its environment. And for Alix and I, Missy Bear also fits the bill perfectly for our Mediterranean cruising.
She is now lifted out of the water for the summer, but we are looking forward to an autumn of fun and adventure in the Dodecanese and south-west Turkey.
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