on tour From Fairey With Love 26
DOUGAL
ALL AT SEA MAY 2021
Solent based dinghy sailor David Henshall is a well known writer and speaker on topics covering the rich heritage of all aspects of leisure boating.
ast month we re ected on the ery eginning of the Fairey story and followed the twists and turns that led us to the 1948 Olympic regatta at Torquay and growing export success. We take up the story again as the boat builder navigated the heady days of the 1960s.
T
hankfully, the austere years of the 1950s were giving way to a new decade of hope in the ‘60s and Faireys were right at the forefront of the growth in consumerism. Their first venture into the world of powerboats produced an instant classic, the 23ft Fairey Huntress. Initially the design was based on the thinking of American designer Ray Hunt, who was a leader in the development of the ‘deepvee’ hull form. Even with the combined experience of Faireys and Hunt, the first iteration of this boat as an open launch was something of a failure, as it utilised a heavy metal centreplate, similar to that on a sailing dinghy. At speed, water was forced up through the plate case under pressure and risked flooding the cockpit. Once the plate had been dispensed with, a cabin was added and the Huntress was developed showing that the hull had amazing seakeeping qualities.
a wet ride in a seaway. Designer Alan Burnard addressed this problem with not one but two beautiful boats, the 33ft Swordsman and a stretched Huntsman 31, though the latter was an all-new hull that employed Burnard’s beautifully curved bow. These and other newcomers would swell the Fairey range further, but Fairey had also been looking to break into new markets for commercial craft. One project was to build ships’ lifeboats with a hot-moulded hull, with considerable investment going into the construction of a new mould and the preparation
for the rigorous and exhaustive tests demanded by the Board of Trade. The new Fairey Lifeboat passed all of these with flying colours, only to find that, just as with the leisure market, shipping companies were now showing a marked preference for the low maintenance of GRP construction. The prototype Lifeboat hull would become something of a fixture around the Hamble and the Solent as it was pressed into service as the ’workboat’ for the factory, whilst the ‘waste nothing’ mindset saw the lifeboat hull mould reused as the basis for
the Fairey Fisherman motor sailor. probably working bothEurope sides would of the In the end the nations ofon northern Until now all of the boat construction come law, as Hamble at least one together to defeatproduced the Barbary Pirate menace, had been centred around the traditional ‘special’, had a fantail exitAlgiers for the and whenwhich an Anglo-Dutch fleet shelled hot moulding process, but in time Fairey exhaust that reduced characteristic thousands of slaves wouldthe finally be released. would move with the times and look ‘burble’Image: of theEverett twinCollection/Shutterstock diesels to no more to start the move to GRP construction, than a murmur as the boat came back with the resulting boats, such as the into the Hamble River at six knots. Fantôme and Spearfish, quickly being What the boat was used for nobody marked out as the next in line for knew, though from fuel usage plus ‘modern classic’ status. departure and arrival back times, nighttime trips to the back of the Island Commercial focus seemed the logical conclusion! Although the Fairey range from Hamble would continue to be a success, Military ties elsewhere far larger problems in The new look Faireys would also other divisions would see the parent reconnect strongly with the military, company falling into financial troubles, though much of the work was for the and in 1975 the Fairey Group ended up export market. Breaking away from the in Administration. traditional thinking of naming Fairey The marine arm continued, albeit with boats after their old aircraft, the Dagger a much stronger focus on commercial was a military version of the stretched craft, an area that Fairey were already Swordsman 37, with a number of extra active in, as their boats were in service features, such as a reinforced foredeck with a number of Police Forces as fast to take a machine gun mount. With patrol boats. Fairey powerboats were a big military trade fair scheduled for
The location of the Fairey Factory made it a great marker for the mouth of the Hamble and here it is put into perspective with a hot moulded Fairey Firefly, the first boat to go into mass production at Hamble Point. Image: David Henshall
The Name’s Fairey…
From the outset there was a need for a bigger twin engined version of the boat and Fairey’s in-house designer, Alan Burnard, soon developed a second classic, the Huntsman 28, and in the first ever Cowes to Torquay powerboat race in 1961 Charles Currey nursed his boat Diesel Huntsman all the way down channel to successfully complete the course and take a number of prizes, including third overall. The two boats received an extra media boost when they were used in the 1963 James Bond film, From Russia with Love, starring Sean Connery. For the purposes of filming, the waters around the west coast of Scotland were pressed into service, doubling as an area of the Adriatic. With a Fairey team on board, a number of Huntress and Huntsman all played their part in the film. The rack to hold a number of extra fuel drums (which would play a big, if improbable part in Bond’s escape) were prefabricated at the Hamble yard and tested a number of times out on Southampton Water to check that they would all roll off the stern of the boat without assistance. For the scenes in which the ‘baddies’ in their pursing boats got destroyed, the close call scenes involved large underwater sacks of petroleum jelly that could be remotely detonated, but there were some close calls and when the boats returned from Scotland, the first task was to rub down and repaint the blistered hulls.
Fairey newcomers
The Huntress and Huntsman were not just iconic but hugely successful, with more than 350 boats built, but if they had a failing it was that they could give
A Modern Classic... Just like the E-Type, an icon that shares many of the same performance and aesthetic values, the Fairey powerboat, from the Huntress, through the Huntsman, Swordfish on to the Spearfish and the Fantome are today rightly considered true classics. Yet, just as with the E-Type, many of these boats hail from the 1960s and are now requiring keel up restorations and increased maintenance, yet at the same time, even with the best of modern upgrades, are still very much examples of the thinking, albeit some of the best thinking, that was available at the time. The idea, therefore, of building on the original concepts that fused ‘form and function’ in harmony, creating new boats, using state-of-the-art construction techniques, could well see boats such as the latest Spearfish 32, from builders Supermarine, at their Northshore Shipyard on Chichester Harbour, becoming a true modern classic. Following on from our historical overview of the Fairey story, here at All at Sea we have been following the exciting developments as work on the Spearfish 32 has moved from completion to on-the-water testing, and we will be reporting in more detail very soon. All images: Andrew Wiseman
