POLYMATH OF POTTERING

THE POLYMATH OF POTTERING

Francis B Cooke owned 19 boats which spawned 34 books, hundreds of articles, and the founding of a sailing club and a yacht insurance business. He counted Uffa Fox, Thomas Lipton and Major Wykeham-Martin among his friends. Now, 150 years after his birth, Dick Durham takes a look at the unpublished autobiography

He watched Britannia sail her first race in the Thames Estuary in 1893; observed Kaiser Wilhelm II board Meteor off Cowes in 1906 and reported on the challenge for the America’s Cup by Sopwith’s Endeavour in 1934. Yet Francis Bernard Cooke never sailed a boat bigger than what he himself described as a ‘pocket cruiser.’

FBC, as he signed off his 100s of articles, pontificated on ocean passage-making; deep sea cruising and the Fastnet Race, yet he spent his 76 years cruising mostly between Harwich and the Thames and competing in handicap races on a few miles of the upper Crouch in Essex.

Cooke wrote with great authority on the evolution of the modern yacht; singlehanded cruising and the luffing rule yet was equally at home advising on how to poach an egg on board, preventing a dinghy nosing your stern and placing a pig of ballast in the right place.

If ever anyone epitomised the valuable training that sailing on the East Coast provides the small-boat novice, with its shoal waters; fast-running tides and shifting sandbanks it is Francis B Cooke.

Apart from the yachting press and every national newspaper in the UK, and some from the USA and Europe, editors from every journal in Britain called upon FBC’s expertise. From The Tatler, Country Life and The Spectator, to the Pall Mall Gazette, Sporting Life and Blackwood’s Magazine, they kept his Blick typewriter ribbons rolling.

It is no wonder his late son-in-law, Sandhursttrained Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Miller, said of him: “He lived a sort of cocooned life; he spent his day in his study writing into the small hours. He made periodic visits to the post box at the end of the road and he appeared for meals. He indulged in no social life… and he seemed to erect a wall of isolation.” And, as an unpublished typescript handed to Classic

Above left: Portrait of FB Cooke with pipe

Above right: Tiercel is dismasted by a Thames barge

Boat magazine by his granddaughter, Faith Egan proves, Cooke kept writing well into his centenary.

My Early Years At Sea, which FBC describes as a 10-year ‘apprenticeship’ was, Faith tells me, bashed out in his 100th year.

FBC was born, one of seven children to Alfred and Harriette in a Georgian house on St George’s Terrace in London’s Regents Park on 12 June 1872. His father was a lobby correspondent for the Daily News and a devout churchgoer.

A self-taught clarinetist and composer of music, FBC attended a concert in London by the global phenomenon Franz Liszt in 1886, but it was sailing that captured his soul.

The young Francis swapped a broken rollerskate, catapult and pet mouse for a model schooner that he sailed on Kensington’s Round Pond until it sank. He had little better luck with his first boat, Fat Boy, a 12ft (3.6m) lugsail dinghy which he and a school pal capsized off Kingston-Upon-Thames, when he was 17.

His first cruise was in March 1890 aboard a pal’s boat, Tiercel, a 30ft (9.1m) converted ship’s lifeboat moored at Hole Haven, Canvey Island in Essex which, in those far-off times was connected to the mainland only by ferry which was ‘rather like an enlarged shooting punt.’ Once on the island side of Benfleet Creek, they had a three-mile walk to Hole Haven carrying stores over an ice-bound road. They did not reach the Lobster Smack Inn until after closing time, but the landlord had left bread and beer for them on his doorstep.

“Hole Haven struck me as a curious place, strongly reminiscent of Holland. It was bounded by massive sea walls, from the top of which could be seen several little round houses built in the Dutch style. Small windmills on the marshes buzzed round merrily in the breeze, pumping water off the land. To heighten the illusion, several Dutch vessels, with long streamers flying from their mastheads, lay at anchor in the creek… laden with eels for Billingsgate Fish Market.”

The first cruising boat FBC owned was Two Sisters, a converted Faversham oyster smack that he shared in a syndicate with three others.

It was aboard her that he realised “events” – in the form of small calamities – provide the best fare for yachting yarns and he recounted groundings, a collision, severe leaks and becoming marooned on a ship’s buoy while trying to moor up.

These escapades mostly took place in just a few miles from The Swale in Kent and into the London River which he described thus: “In those times, sailing vessels were still much in evidence and the waters of the estuary were flecked with the canvas of little collier brigs, coasting schooners and barquentines. Sometimes, if lucky, we saw some great full-rigged ship, or four-masted barque proceeding up the river in the wake of a fussy tug, while the crew, aloft on the yards, put the finishing touches to a harbour stow.”

FBC wanted a ship of his own and so bought the Euryanthe next, a 24ft (7.6m) gaff cutter. She was as rotten as a pear, sank three times in his six-week ownership period and was finally run down and sunk permanently by an unknown steamer. He then bought the

Above left: Francis Bernard Cooke, aged five

Above right: FBC marooned on a ship’s mooring buoy while trying to get a turn from Five Sisters

Below: Hole Haven as it is today

aforementioned Tiercel and in her was dismasted when he collided with a sailing barge and then partly dismasted for a second time when he collided with a moored barquentine.

Tired of hiking across Canvey Island to his Hole Haven mooring, FBC moved Tiercel round to Burnham-on-Crouch.

“In those days Burnham was a little waterside village, of which the staple industry was the cultivation of oysters dredged from the bed of the river by a small fleet of smacks – handy little cutters of about 12 tons. The old-world quay, with its red brick buildings, mellowed by the hand of time, was extremely picturesque. As the branch line from Wickford had not long been opened few yachtsmen had discovered Burnham and there were not more than a score of yachts in the anchorage.”

He joined the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, “one of the most palatial in England” and managed to beneap Tiercel up river near Bridgemarsh Island for four months where the “cows stood on the sea wall gazing at her” until a trench was dug, a kedge laid out and ballast removed before, on a spring high water in February, they managed to float her once more.

Then in the summer of 1894: “We ran up to Fambridge, with the idea of spending one night there. I stayed there for more than 50 years.”

“The journey from town [London] was shorter than to Burnham and the fare rather less. It was a straggling little village with a population of less than 200 and the only buildings consisted of the old Ferry Boat Inn, a few small timber-built cottages and an old barn.”

In 1898, FBC founded the Fambridge Yacht Club, which organised four handicap races and whose flag officers met in the Ferry Boat Inn.

The club suffered a tragic blow in its early months when the first commodore, George Beavis and his three crew, were drowned when Beavis’ powerful 10-ton cutter, Vesta, was run down and sunk in the vicinity of West Rocks off Harwich.

Cyril Ionides, who became famous for his book, A Floating Home, (Chatto & Windus 1918) about living aboard a sailing barge, became the next commodore. Tenure at the Ferry Boat Inn was short-lived: “Our room was frequently invaded by trippers, who became such an intolerable nuisance that we had to look for other premises,” and a corrugated iron shack was erected on the marshes.

The coming of World War One saw the demise of the club as many of its members failed to return from the hostilities. It was not until 1973 that the club was reconstituted as the North Fambridge Yacht Club – as by then the ferry between North and South Fambridge had ceased to operate. Founding member and trustee of the club, Richard Walsh, well known as the publisher of Chaffcutter Books and himself a classic boat sailor who with wife Mary sailed Cirrus, a centre-board Alan Buchanan design and who later re-rigged the sailing barge, Kathleen, kindly loaned me FBC’s sailing logs and the biography written by Peter Miller.

FBC’s seventh boat was a piece of flotsam washed up on the East Coast: the 16ft (4.9m) skiff from a collier brig wrecked on the notorious Gunfleet Sand.

On one of his first passages in Wave, FBC continued his experiences of narrow escapes when a sailing barge berthing alongside the grain wharf at Stambridge Mills at Rochford one night failed to spot the fact that the berth was taken by two sleeping yachtsmen aboard the cockleshell ship at the head of the River Roach and almost crushed them.

Then, one February night sailing alone, FBC lost his bearings and put Wave ashore in a snowstorm on the Buxey Sand. It shook him badly and he sought a more seaworthy craft than a “rise-on,” a converted dinghy, and he bought Snipe, a 2.5-ton canoe-sterned sloop built at Teignmouth in 1895 by Pengelly and Gore. She proved to be the boat he loved best and provided three years of exploring all the creeks and rivers between Lowestoft and the Thames.

During one of these cruises, he sailed into

Above: Euryanthe is holed and sinks under FBC’s feet

FB Cooke’s boats

1889: Fat Boy, 12ft centreboard, balanced lugsail dinghy 1890: Two Sisters, 25 ton Faversham Oyster smack. 1895: Euryanthe (left) 24ft gaff cutter 1897: Tiercel, 30ft converted ship’s lifeboat 1897:Sleuthhound, 15ft DIY built yawl 1897: Wild Duck, six-ton cutter 1898: Wave, 16ft converted ship’s lifeboat 1899-1901: Snipe, 18ft canoe-stern sloop 1900: Irex, part-owned 1902-1904: Seabird, 28ft canoe-sterned, gaff-rigged converted ship’s boat 1905-1906: Arrow II, 15ft sloop 1907-1908: Maid Marion, five-ton yawl 1909-1910: Opal, five-ton cutter 1911-1914: Coryphee, two-ton sloop 1930-1931: Spray, five-ton cutter 1932-1934: Forsitan, five-ton cutter 1935-1937: Fancy, Falmouth Quay Punt 1938-1939: Iolanthe, Blackwater sloop

He also raced Mynah, a 9ft one-design dinghy.

Clockwise from top left: FBC in characteristic pose; Fambridge with Fambridge Yacht Club HQ left; Wave; Maid Marion; Fortisan; Snipe

Photos this page: Courtesy Faith Egan

PHOTOS: COURTESY FAITH EGAN PHOTO: GRAHAM GULLICK

Felixstowe Dock and finding no room to moor, rafted up against a 35-ton yawl, Zayda, which proved to be pilot book author Frank Cowper’s latest boat.

“After dinner he invited us on board and told us of his adventures in Lady Harvey, cruising round the British Isles collecting data for his Sailing Tours.”

The next day, Snipe followed Zayda towards the Walton Backwaters. Zayda grounded on the Pye Sand, and ‘Mr Cowper rowed in his dinghy to warn us, a sporting gesture which was hardly necessary, as Zayda was already sufficient warning.”

Invariably FBC’s yachts were not fitted with an engine and row-towing his boats in and out of port, or using a sweep, was all part of the ‘corinthian’ – unpaid or amateur – experience afloat in his time.

Occasionally he came unstuck like the time he left Felixstowe Dock in his next boat Seabird, a converted ship’s boat, when the tide pinned him against the entrance pier.

Seabird proved to be the last boat of his ‘apprenticeship’ and the final craft mentioned in My Early Years At Sea, but as you can see from the list on page 40, he still had eight boats to own and sail. None of them ever matched the boats he coveted, including those drawn by Harrison Butler, Norman Dallimore, Gilbert Laws, Albert Luke and Harry Smith among others the line drawings for which he included as end papers in his books.

He ends his autobiography, thus: “Having completed 10 years as an owner, my apprenticeship to yachting was, I considered, at an end. I do not suggest that I had no more to learn, but I had at least acquired the rudiments of seamanship.”

And he did go on, founding the East Coast Mutual Yacht Insurance Association, being elected an honorary member of the Cruising Association, reviewing books.

In 1948 he sold his last boat Iolanthe, a Blackwater sloop, but his final sail was with the well-known ocean sailors and authors Peter and Anne Pye aboard Moonraker, their 29ft (8.8m) Fowey-built gaff cutter.

FBC spent his last years reading Somerset Maughan and his own yarns “which not infrequently caused him to indulge in fits of laughter.” He still dressed in collar and tie and tweed jacket every morning until the age of 102. He died on 3 November 1974.

Above left: Iolanthe Above: FBC in later years Above right: Peter and Anne Pye’s Moonraker

DICK DURHAM Dick Durham has sailed in FBC’s wake for the last 55 years to and from every river and creek on the East Coast. His current boat, Betty II, a 25ft (7.62m) centreboard ga er was built in 1921 at his home port of Leigh-on-Sea on the Thames Estuary and designed by one of FBC’s most admired naval architects: Harry Smith of the Burnham Yacht Building Company. “It’s been quite eerie reading through FBC’s unpublished memoir,” he says. “At times I felt as though I was reading about myself!”

FB Cooke’s granddaughter

During visits to his home, FB Cooke’s granddaughter Faith Egan remembers him as ‘desperately Victorian. He was austere, distant and rather grumpy.’

Faith explained to Classic Boat that his obsession with writing was to pay the medical bills for one of his four daughters, Kathleen, who su ered from osteoarthritis, and also to meet the school fees for his other children.

Faith recalls her mother, Barbara’s daily warning: “Be quiet, father’s working.” He had interests in bone china, motorcycles and photography as well as sailing and wrote about those, too. As a result of his self-imposed workload, he was a man of strict, ritualistic discipline.

“My bed was made up in the front room and he would come and wind the grandfather clock up at the same time every night, and I dreaded the peals as they woke me up,” Faith said.

Faith has a large archive of her grandfather’s work, which is kept in her home in the Derbyshire Dales where she lives with husband, Colin.