The Corinthian Yachting Narrative

If the leaders in industry and manufacturing and their supporting professions were to be attracted to yachting, it had to be congruent with their core beliefs and values. Since Corinthian sailing is so central to the yachting narrative till well beyond the Second World War, I will first describe it and then examine it from a number of angles, such as its leading exponents, educative texts, and the implementation of class boundaries.

The origins of the application of the term ‘Corinthian’ to sport are somewhat vague but in A Manual of Yacht and Boat Sailing by Dixon Kemp, published in 1878, the author defined ‘Corinthian’ as:

The Corinthian spirit is well described in Cowper's introduction to his pioneering five-volume pilot for yachtsmen, published in1892:

This passage includes most of the key values of Corinthian yachting – the small boat, manned exclusively by amateurs; a hardy activity which refreshes the soul; the soul being gender specific, since only men would be strong enough to undertake it; and also makes links with a glorious seafaring tradition and brotherhood of god-fearing, yet fearless, men.

Britain and its allies had won the War, and the British empire had expanded still further, with the handing over of German East Africa and Mesopotomia (later Iraq), Palestine and part of Greater Syria from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire. It now owned 30 per cent of the world's surface and controlled 25 per cent of its population; so winning the war could be judged, from that perspective, as a success. But this expansion was rendered problematic, as it required yet more troops and administrators to rule at a time when the British economy was much weakened by the colossal cost of the war effort in lives and money.

Figures vary slightly concerning the carnage of the Great War, but, approximately, of 5,397,000 men mobilised, 703,000 were killed, and 1,663,000 wounded, giving a casualty rate of 44 per cent. Ten per cent of the British male population under 45 was dead.

In the early part of the war, officers led their men ‘over the top’ (of the trenches) at the Front, wearing a different uniform and carrying a pistol, not a rifle. This made it easy for the German soldiers to carry out their orders to take out the officers in order to increase the chaos and demoralisation among the men. The average length of time before becoming a casualty as an officer in the trenches was six weeks.

The war was followed by the 1918–1920 pandemic of Spanish Flu, which killed some 40 to 50 million worldwide, and around 250,000 in Britain.

By 1920, many, many yachtsmen, and potential yachtsmen, were dead or invalided. I can find no figures for yachting, but in the neighbouring field of rowing, a quarter of the membership of Bradford Amateur Rowing Club on the River Aire were killed on active service. The huge losses of men and their families’ grief made enjoying leisure seem disrespectful into the mid-1920s. There was little sailing in Swansea Bay, for example, till 1922, when its first post-war regatta was held.

FICTIONAL SUICIDES FROM the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. One assumption seems to be that suicide in GDR fiction was primarily a direct reflection of real suicides in GDR society. Several scholars and critics who have dealt with this issue have maintained that view.1 Further, conversations I have had while working on this project, both with scholars of German literature and with interested nonacademics, have revealed that many people assume that suicide in GDR literature must represent some realistic reflection of politically motivated suicide in the GDR. Such assumptions seem fair on the surface. It might seem that suicide was rampant in the GDR, given the regime's attempt to hide suicide rates. The quantity of major works of GDR literature, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, with suicide as a major theme might also cause one to surmise that suicide rates in the GDR were anomalously high. It might seem too that writers used literature as a secret code to communicate about the real problem of suicide. And Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen only reinforces these assumptions. However, such assumptions about the nature of suicide in GDR literature are mostly false. While suicide was a taboo topic in the GDR, the fictional suicides do not primarily reflect a problem of suicide in GDR society, perceived or real. These fictional suicides are much more complex. Above all, they are literary. Read closely, they reveal a wealth of literary devices and theorizations of literary problems. Taken together, they form an interesting literary history, one that is situated among other developments in GDR literature, including, for example, the movement from socialist realism toward a belated modernism, the toying with taboos following Erich Honecker's 1971 assertion that there were to be no taboos in GDR literature (with the problematic caveat that the writer must write as a socialist), and the movement of intertextuality from the notion of cultural and literary heritage (Kulturerbe) as an antidote to fascist aesthetics toward the use of intertextuality as a method of reevaluating and eventually eroding literary heritage.

The Start of the Industrial Revolution and Yachting's First Golden Period

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones (1749) sailed from London to Lisbon, in the vain hope of a cure for his jaundice and dropsy. As his ship sailed down the Thames in August 1754, he recorded in his journal:

Fielding was proposing a greater take-up of yachting. He also wanted a greater, more ostentatious display of wealth along England's most important trading river, the symbol of English greatness and history. He may well have had in mind how Capability Brown (1716–1783), the great landscape gardener, was defining how a country mansion and its parkland should look. So, Fielding imagines vistas of Georgian mansions along the lower Thames, with the owners’ yachts lying alongside their private quays. This was certainly happening to some extent, since an engraving of 1751 shows Mr Baptist May's yacht under sail in front of his house.

Within a few years, Fielding's aspirations were to come true. Britain and her allies won the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which resulted in France losing most of her colonies. The war ended with the thirteen British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America and the British possessions in India secure; and with Canada, Florida and many Caribbean islands acquired. Britain was now the leading maritime power in the world, thus fulfilling what Thomas Arne and James Thomson had seen as the national destiny when they penned their ode ‘Rule Britannia’ in 1740: ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves’.

In the lake region of Ethiopia, the 25 years from 1917 – like the quarter century that preceded it – were marked by both the retrenchment and growing maturity of a pastoral way of life and of livestock production along previously existing and new lines. While that continuity was important, this period permitted also the slow expansion of crop production in certain parts of the region. The major promoters of this had been two groups of farmers that traced their origin from different places. To the first group belonged the farmers relocating from some of the nearby highlands, of which Arsi, Gurage, Silti and Shewa were probably the most important for this period. The populations belonging to the second group were different from that because of their small number and their places of origin, which were Addis Ababa and Italy. Setting these two groups of populations apart were not only their number and their different places of origin. More important were, rather, the different methods that they used to gain rights of access to farming land in their new sites of settlement and occupation. If the populations belonging to the first group relied on socially constructed rules and practices, what worked the most for the farmers of urban origin, namely those originating in Addis Ababa and Italy, were the state-sanctioned rules and regulations governing access to farming land. Also different was their objective in farming, which drew its inspiration from Addis Ababa's fledgling food market. Like the provisioning method that preceded and accompanied it, Addis Ababa's food market was a product of political factors. Interestingly, the lake region was one of the many places where struggles over the capital's evolving politics of food were fought and lost, and then won after 1917. This chapter focuses on these points. Its primary object is to understand the factors that contributed to continuity and change in that region's agriculture and environment in the two-dozen years ending in May 1941.

In 2001, the Uganda Electricity Board, the public monopoly, was unbundled, creating the Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (UEDCL), the Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (UETCL), and the Uganda Electricity Generation Company Ltd (UEGCL). As UEGCL's main functions were the operation and maintenance of the two hydroelectric generating stations in Uganda, the company was based in Jinja – the location of Uganda's first large hydroelectric dam, Owen Falls dam (now Nalubaale), and an extension to the Owen Falls dam, called the Kiira Power Station. In 2003, under the auspices of the country's privatization strategy, Eskom Uganda Ltd, a subsidiary of South Africa-based Eskom Enterprises, was awarded a twenty-year generation concession to operate the two hydroelectric facilities. Up until 2003, AES Nile Power (AESNP) – the company originally scheduled to build the Bujagali dam – also had a main office on the perimeter of the Jinja town centre. At this location, AESNP coordinated onsite activities for the proposed Bujagali dam, which was to be constructed about 10 km northwest from the town, and about 8.5 km from the Nalubaale dam complex.

I visited the AESNP offices in May 2003 to meet with the company's ‘Community Interaction Officer’. The purpose of the meeting was to learn about the responsibilities and activities of the team in the lead-up to the construction of the dam – then still on track to be built in the coming year. On the morning of my meeting I made my way to Kampala's Old Taxi Park to take the Kampala-Jinja commuter bus. As the bus pulled out and made its way eastward on Jinja Road, I began speaking with the man sitting cozily beside me. Our conversation started with simple pleasantries. My companion explained that he permanently lived in Jinja but often commuted to Kampala for work. He then asked why I was in Uganda. After explaining that I was studying the reforms to the electricity sector, our conversation became livelier. My companion wanted my opinion on two issues: why does Uganda have load-shedding when it has so much potential for electricity generation; and, given the existing and available potential supply of hydro-generated electricity, why is the price of electricity so high?

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.

Once again, yachtsmen had played a significant part in the war. Dunkirk is often represented as the high water of their involvement – when 700 ‘Little Ships’, working with the Navy, rescued more than 338,000 British and French soldiers off the beaches between 26 May and 4 June, 1940. In fact, these vessels were mainly motorsailers from the Thames and the South Coast, volunteered, or requisitioned by the Government, and manned by Naval personnel. Less well known is ‘Little Dunkirk’, the evacuation of British troops and personnel from St Malo by nineteen yachts, mostly sailing vessels, out of St Helier, Jersey in June 1940, for which the St Helier Yacht Club was uniquely granted a defaced ensign for ‘battle honours’.

A Board of Trade Yacht Master's Certificate was an advantage for a candidate seeking a commission in the RNVR (the Wavy Navy – the RNVR officers’ stripes were wavy, while RN officers’ were straight). Captain OM Watts, later famous for his upmarket chandlers in Piccadilly, trained many yachtsmen at Burlesdon; and the Little Ship Club, London did likewise.

By the end of the war, there were approximately 30,000 ratings and officers in the RNVR. Griffiths received a George Medal for his mine recovery work. Monsarrat was appointed to the new Flower-Class corvette Campanula in August 1940, experience he drew on when he wrote the first great maritime novel by an English-born author – The Cruel Sea. He used himself as the model for Sub-Lieutenant Lockhart, a yachtsman and the son of a surgeon. After two years as an engineer on inshore anti-submarine patrol, Eric Hiscock was medically re-assessed and discharged due to his poor eyesight. Later, he joined the Admiralty Ferry Service, which was set up to deliver old and new naval vessels around the coasts to wherever they might be required, and which developed into quite a flourishing branch of the merchant navy.

The eighteenth century is usually characterised in yachting histories as a period of inactivity. McCallum, for example, evidently drawing on such sources as Phillips-Birt's The History of Yachting, writes that ‘records show that in 1812 there were about 50 pleasure yachts afloat in Britain’. In fact, there is clear evidence, which this chapter will present, of an increasing level of yacht ownership and activity across the eighteenth century.

This increasing visibility of yachting was due to a number of factors, including the need of the Hanoverian monarchs and their families to ‘commute’ between England and Hanover, and the widespread use of yachts on state business. I will discuss these in the first part of this chapter before moving on to the growth of yachting as a leisure sport, most obviously in Cork Harbour, in the South of Ireland, and later on the Exe in Devon. The growth of seaside resorts, at the expense of the inland spa towns, then led to the development of yacht regattas.

The Industrial Revolution's dates are usually given as 1760–1830, but by 1760, it already had a clear momentum. Pioneers had been working on the inventions that underpinned it from much earlier. For example, Thomas Savery had a steam engine to raise water in mines working in 1698. Abraham Darby smelted iron using coke at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire from 1709. A long beam (steam-powered) ‘atmospheric’ engine was built by Newcomen in 1712, the first practical use of steam, with the engine being used in Cornish mines. Newcomen's engine was much improved by James Watt by 1769. However, the first mills relied on water-power and were therefore built in the countryside, along fast-flowing streams and rivers, upstream of harbours and ports. These harbours imported the raw materials the mills needed for the production of their goods, and exported the finished products. So, wealth was coming into ports and harbours from the early eighteenth century.

State Uses of Yachts

In Ethiopia, agriculture had been historically the exclusive prerogative of smallholder farmers. When seen from that angle, the changes that started to take place in the two decades after 1954 were remarkable in that they permitted the organization of large-scale commercial farms on a hitherto unprecedented scale. First to succeed in that endeavour were the small number of European agribusiness companies that came to specialize in sugar, tobacco and cotton production, with the aim of supplying in large quantities both the domestic and international markets. More important to my discussion in this chapter were, however, the second type of commercial farms that Ethiopian nationals started to organize after 1968. As the evidence from the lake region reveals, the pressure that the expansion of commercial farming exerted on smallholder farmers was considerable. Yet rather than succumbing to that pressure local farmers, most notably the share tenants, were able to come up with a set of tactics and strategies that enabled them to stay on the land and to succeed in farming all over again. Their new-found interest in specialized farming and their willingness to negotiate new (higher) terms of rent with their oldest and latest protagonists, namely the absentee landowners of the previous two decades and the newly arriving group of commercial farmers, were products of that factor. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the impact that these developments had on the evolution of the lake region's agriculture and agrarian politics in that period was profound.

FARMING BIG IN THE LAND OF SMALL-SCALE AGRICULTURE

One of the most enduring themes in the history of Ethiopian agriculture pertained to the pre-eminence of small-scale farming. Indeed, it was only in the course of the twentieth century that medium- to large-scale commercial farms were able to grow in Ethiopia for the first time. Even then, such farms had difficulty enduring and thriving in Ethiopia to any meaningful degrees before 1950. This was mainly because of political factors. For example, the assault that the pioneering group of commercial farmers faced from the Italian colonial administration's nationalization policy in June 1936 was direct. Consequently, the farms that they had organized in the previous two decades in certain parts of the country, including the lake region, fizzled out prematurely as a result of that assault.

This chapter describes, how, in contrast to the slow growth of yachting in the United Kingdom during this period, there was a more rapid diffusion of the sport in Ireland and the colonies.

The Development of Yachting in Ireland

The number of yacht clubs in Ireland formed in the first part of the nineteenth century is remarkable, as it is almost as great as the number in England.

Ireland, till its independence in 1922, was, of course, part of the United Kingdom. Yet, if we equate colonising with occupation, Ireland, with its desire for independence and its frequent, albeit unsuccessful, revolts, was effectively a colony. Rebellion in Ireland was feared throughout the nineteenth century and Ireland had to be heavily occupied by garrisons and patrolled by the Navy. Ireland could not be given independence, partly because of the fear that it might welcome a foreign power, and because it proved impossible, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to get ‘Home Rule’ through the two houses of Parliament.

The need for the Crown to defend Ireland led to the building of the road from London to Holyhead (the A5), a remarkable feat of pioneering engineering across the Welsh mountains, by Thomas Telford. The road was completed by the building of the Menai Suspension Bridge in 1826. The breakwater at Holyhead, begun in 1845 and completed in 1871, is 1.7 miles long, thereby providing excellent shelter. The early dates of the founding of the Royal Dee at Chester, 1815, guarding the entrance to North Wales and a route to Holyhead, and the Royal Welsh at Caernarfon, 1847, may be, at least in part, due to the need for local suppliers and contractors.

To the lake region's small-scale farmers, most notably to the share tenants – the majority – the outbreak of the Ethiopian revolution in September 1974 was a welcome development. This was mainly because of the opportunity that the major land-reform edict that the incumbent military administration (the Derg) promulgated in March 1975 gave them to enjoy almost inalienable usufruct right on the cultivated fields already under their control. In addition, the same edict outlawed private ownership of agricultural land and the land market, the organization of individually owned medium- to large-scale farms, and the exaction of agricultural rent altogether. Yet the fact that this edict put all landed properties under ‘public’ or state control meant that now as before the rules and practices governing access to agricultural land had to be constantly debated, acted upon and negotiated. The result was the propagation and retrenchment of small-scale farming across the lake region and most other parts of the country on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

‘LAND TO THE TILLER’ AND THE TILLERS’ RESPONSE

It took the Derg only six months to promulgate a major land-reform edict in Ethiopia in March 1975. When promulgating that edict, the military administration was responding proactively to the notion of ‘land to the tiller’ that the student harbingers of the revolution had embraced since the mid-1960s. Interestingly, some of these former students and their closest supporters were among those that had been active in drafting that edict a decade later. If dismantling what the students had referred to as the social, economic and political foundations of the ancient regime was one of the reasons that made ‘land to the tiller’ their movement's rallying cry in the first place, that was also what the land-reform edict was able to accomplish on their behalf when it became law that year.

Called and mobilized by the Derg under the banner of the National Development through Cooperation Campaign, better known by its Amharic term zamacha, the same group of college students and their high school counterparts were among those that directly partook in the edict's implementation in rural Ethiopia in the following year.

On 24 January 2002, crowds gathered for a celebration on the banks of the Nile River. Just north of the town of Jinja, in the east African country of Uganda, diplomats, bilateral and multilateral agency representatives, citizens, Members of Parliament, and the President of Uganda all congregated for what was thought to be the beginning of the construction of a new 250-megawatt (MW) hydroelectric dam – the Bujagali dam.

The location of the ground-breaking ceremony held historical significance. In 1907, a young Winston Churchill, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Colonies, stood about ten kilometres downstream and reflected on the potential for Uganda to become an industrial force if the waters of the Nile could be harnessed for electric power (Churchill 1989 [1908]). By 1954, the colonial authority saw the first phase of its Ugandan hydroelectric-vision fulfilled when the Owen Falls Dam (now named the Nalubaale dam) was inaugurated in a ceremony presided over by Queen Elizabeth II. The vision of Uganda becoming a regional electricity superpower has not yet materialized, however. The Nalubaale dam remained the only major source of electricity in the country until 2012. Six decades later, despite years of effort to improve electricity access and to reform the sector, Uganda had the unenviable reputation as having one of the lowest levels of access to electricity in the world (IEA 2011). Accordingly, the inauguration ceremony for the Bujagali dam in 2002 was supposed to represent a turning point in what had been a painfully long period of poor and unreliable access to electricity in the country. Between 1971 and 1979, the period of Idi Amin's reign in Uganda, the number of electricity consumers dropped from 69,500 to 60,950 (Uganda Electricity Board 1996; 1999). During the height of civil conflict in Uganda (1979 to 1986) the number of individual consumers increased to over 105,000, but two years after President Museveni took power in 1986, the country had only 80,795 consumers.

President Yoweri Museveni was the last of the dignitaries to speak at the inauguration ceremony. While other presenters praised Museveni's leadership, persistence and vision in executing the dam, Museveni had sat sternly, showing little emotion. It turned out he was in no mood for celebration or praise.

THE French Otinel tradition is represented far more sparsely than Fierabras in the corpus of manuscripts: only one continental and one Anglo-Norman witness survive as more or less complete manuscripts, and there are significant lacunae in the continental version. There are also two fragments, the longer of which (known as the ‘Mende’ fragment) is Anglo-Norman; it is difficult to ascertain the dialect of the shorter fragment, which runs to a mere four lines. Still, evidence of the reception of the narrative through adaptations, imitations and allusions in insular Charlemagne-related texts points to a wider circulation than this sparse corpus might suggest. The little critical attention the chanson de geste has received has not been generous to the text. The rather dismissive evaluation of its editors was that ‘Il n'y faut chercher aucune de ces beautés natives qui éclatent dans les plus anciennes chansons de geste. C'est une oeuvre de la décadence.’ The only major study of the poem, by Paul Aebischer in 1960, is more concerned with its origins than its literary value. A few more recent studies have seen some merit in its use of intertextual echoes and its treatment of some specific themes.

Otinel opens with the Saracen messenger, Otinel, arriving at Charlemagne's court. There he announces that his king, Garsie, has attacked Rome and aggressively calls upon Charlemagne to convert. Otinel challenges Roland to individual combat, and during the subsequent fight between them, as representatives of their respective religions, God sends His Holy Spirit to convert Otinel, who is baptized and subsequently betrothed to Charlemagne's daughter Belissant. Otinel joins Charlemagne's army as they set off to make war against Garsie. Roland, Oliver and Ogier capture the noble Saracen Clarel in a skirmish but on their way back they are attacked by 1,500 Saracens, who rescue Clarel and take Ogier prisoner, putting him in the charge of Affamie, Garsie's daughter. Meanwhile, Otinel has set out in search of the missing peers and engages in battle. He fights with Clarel, whom he defeats and kills. A general battle follows and Ogier, who has escaped from his captors, joins in. Otinel takes on Garsie, who is defeated and taken prisoner. Finally, Otinel marries Belissant and becomes king.