Foreword by Tom Cunliffe

Summary

I first crossed tacks with Mike Bender back in 1982. He was studying for the RYA Yachtmaster examination at the National Sailing Centre, West Cowes. I was playing truant from my job there as an examiner. More specifically, I was preparing for a voyage in the wake of the Vikings from Norway to North America in Hirta, my Bristol Channel pilot cutter. Mike remembers that, for some reason now lost in the mists of time, I was dragging Hirta's huge flax mainsail through the main building with a couple of ‘willing volunteers’. My four-year-old daughter danced ahead clearing our passage, announcing to any who would listen that the deadweight of canvas was going to take her across the Atlantic.

Many tides have ebbed and flowed since then. Today, we can look back on the 1970s and 1980s as halcyon days in British yachting. We sail in leaner, more worrying times for our favourite sport and, as is so often the case, the best we can do to secure its future is to learn what we may from its past.

It is a lifetime now since histories of yachting were published by such luminaries as Peter Heaton and Douglas Phillips-Birt. This book is different. The old texts generally concentrated on big racing yachts with large professional crews, owned by the landed aristocracy or, at a pinch, captains of industry. Whilst undoubtedly important, this glamorous approach was incomplete. It tended to see yachting as a discrete subject outside the general flow of history. Always excepting the colourful arrival of Kaiser Bill before the First World War, wars tended to feature mainly as inconveniences that held up design development for a few years. Mike Bender's New History of Yachting places the subject in a fuller historical context. His story involves far more than political events, taking in industrial and technological revolutions as well as changes in transport systems, such as the boom in yachting havens created by the railways. He even discusses how the arrival of the motorway system has opened up hitherto distant waters.

The traditional big-yacht approach to history often sets aside much of the hands-on reality enjoyed by many over the decades. By far the commonest vessel for leisure sailing is the dinghy, operating often on reservoirs and rivers with heroes like Jack Holt rather than Watson or Fife.