5 minute read
SALEROOM
Right: In 1877 iron clipper Coriolanus made the run from the Scilly Isles to Calcutta in 69 days, a record never surpassed in the era of sail. Display model sold for £1,860.
CHARLES MILLER LTD How clippers lost the race against time
CHARLES MILLER LTD
Above: Builder’s half-block model of the Maitland, built 1865, reveals the composite build with traces of internal criss-cross iron framework; model sold for £3,100
Right: The composite Sir Lancelot would be more celebrated today if she’d set o earlier in 1869 Great Tea Race. She set a new record of 89 days, but Thermopylae arrived fi rst after 91-day passage; watercolour sold for £496. The survival of the Cutty Sark is all the more remarkable when you consider that most clippers had short, precarious careers often ending in calamity. Such was the price to pay for prioritising speed over cargo capacity, as with their massive spread of canvas, clippers were driven hard and often over-pressed in e orts to secure best market price for their precious freights.
The average life of the six clipper ships represented in Charles Miller Ltd’s most recent marine sale was just 31 years. Three of the six were lost at sea, but the overall average active working life is much reduced when you consider that those that survived into obsolescence spent years, even decades, languishing as hulks before being broken up.
The composite-built tea clipper Maitland (1865) survived just nine years before being wrecked on a coral reef o China. Sir Lancelot, also built for the tea trade in 1865, survived for 30 years before she was lost in a cyclone bound for Calcutta; by then she’d been reduced to carrying a low-value cargo of salt. By contrast, the 1876 Coriolanus, often considered one of the most beautiful all-iron clippers, ended her days as a migrant ship running from the Azores to the USA in the 1920s, before being broken up in 1936. The brief glory of the clipper era was ended by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the rise of steam. By then consigned to history by simple economics, they fi nished their sailing lives scrabbling for cargo as stately but tattered tramps of the seas.
Charles Miller Ltd’s next sale: 2 November, London
HISTORICS Italian style and English speed
HISTORICS
There’s no doubt automotive styling and engineering enormously infl uenced the evolution of post-war speedboat design, but the inspiration for the Italian fi rm Riva and the small British Albatross outfi t came from vastly di erent well sources.
When Carlo Riva went on a trip to the USA to negotiate engine supplies, he also brought back the design motifs that would become a Riva signature in glamorous wooden craft garnished with bedazzling chrome fl ourishes, glittering dials in a car-type dash, curved windscreen and fl amboyant two-tone upholstery. Adopting the American terminology, the 5.7m Riva Junior (above left), with white-painted wooden topsides, was classed as a “utility,” but was much more than utilitarian. And of course, at its heart was a General Motors automotive-derived 180hp V8. This very extensively restored 1967 example was estimated at £55,00066,000 at the Historics’ 17 July classic car sale.
Meanwhile the ethos of aluminium-hulled Albatross (above right) came straight out of Lotus sports cars and founder Colin Chapman’s mantra of “add lightness.” Moreover, at the heart of this restored early 1960s Series A sports and race boat is the famed Coventry Climax engine that propelled the original Lotus Elite to giant-killing feats on the race track. Series A Albatrosses with Coventry Climax FWE race engines could easily hit 45mph, and this example with engine bored out to 1440cc and twin Weber carbs must surely exceed that. That’s a lot of performance in a lightweight 3.9m two-seater, and with an estimated of £18,00023,000, a fraction of what a road-going Lotus Elite would fetch.
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