the surfing tribe A history of surfing in Britain
by Roger Mansfield
edited by Sam Bleakley and chris power
A glassy peeler rolls into Great Western Beach, Cornwall, with Chris Jones in the slot, August 1967. Photo: Doug Wilson.
the surfing tribe A history of surfing in Britain
by Roger Mansfield
edited by Sam Bleakley and chris power
Orca Publications
St Agnes surfer Martin Wright lays down a bottomturn at Porthleven, circa 1983. photo alex williams.
the surfing tribe A history of surfing in Britain
The Surfing Tribe A history of surfing in Britain By Roger Mansfield Edited by Sam Bleakley and Chris power
Copyright © 2009 Orca Publications Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. ISBN 978-0-9523646-5-8 Published by Orca Publications Limited, Berry Road Studios, Berry Road, Newquay, TR7 1AT, United Kingdom. 01637 878074 www.orcasurf.co.uk Project Directors Chris Power, Mike Searle publishing editor / photo editor Chris Power associate editor sam bleakley Design David Alcock sub editor / Proofreader Kat Dawes editorial consultants steve england, Louise Searle printing garnett dickinson global, Printed in shenzhen, China.
The Surfing Tribe is dedicated to all those people who have shared my life within surfing. Above all it is dedicated to the blue-eyed beauty who showed up for a surfing lesson – my wife Hilde. Without your emotional support and patient understanding, I could not have researched and written this tale about my own spiritual ocean tribe. Thank you. – Roger Mansfield
FRONT COVER: Jersey Surfboard Club, 1959. Photo: John D Houiellebecq/Roger mansfield collection. BACK COVER: TOP Newquay pro Russell Winter, slotted in Scotland. Photo: alex williams. MIDDLE LEFT On the road, ’70s style. Photo: PETE BOUNDS. MIDDLE RIGHT Sixties superstar Rod Sumpter. Photo: Doug Wilson. OPPOSITE: Dawn Patrol, Pembrokeshire, 1979. Photo: Pete Bounds.
6
the surfing tribe
DT
contents
An international rendezvous at La Barre in Southwest France, August 1965. Britain’s Rod Sumpter (far right) greets American and Aussie surfers including Greg Noll’s brother Jim (far left), and Dennis White (third from left). Photo Doug Wilson.
FOREWORD PREFACE
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
010 012
PART ONE FIRST CONTACT
THE SEEDS OF BRITISH SURFING 016
PART TWO
Captain Cook watches surfers in Hawaii • Bellyboarding: Britain’s original wave-riding pastime • Duke and the prince go surfing • A present from Hawaii? • Papino ‘Pip’ Staffieri: Europe’s first surfer • Surf lifesaving clubs and the first travelling surfers
LOCAL FLAVOURS – THE STORY OF BRITISH SURFING UNTIL 1990
THE CHANNEL ISLANDS DID IT FIRST
030
Jersey: where the British surf scene was born • Gordon Burgis: Britiain’s first champion • Guernsey: Island style • Dave Grimshaw: the architect of British surfing
CORNISH GOLD RUSH
046
St Ives: surfing gets cool • Newquay: surf city UK • Bill Bailey: the father of British surfing • Rod Sumpter: the king of the malibu
KERNOW’S CORNERS
072
Sennen and the south coast: way out west • Mid and North Cornwall: the Badlands to the borderlands • Tiger Newling: counter cultural icon
DEVON TAKES OFF
088
England’s oasis • South Devon: laid back locals • Tim ‘Tiki’ Heyland
WALES ON BOARD
096
The dragon stirs • Pete ‘PJ’ Jones: a passion to be the best • Carwyn Williams: surf hard, party hard
ENGLAND’S ENCLAVES
114
Brighton, Bournemouth and the Isle of Wight: South Coast surf fever • From Kent to Cromer: finding waves in every corner of the Isle • Riding the Severn Bore
NORTHERN LIGHTS
124
Edging into the cold: the North East • Nigel Veitch: North Sea wave warrior
SCOTLAND’S BEAUTIES
130
Searching for hidden treasure • Andy Bennetts: Scottish surf pioneer
PART THREE
Exploration, equipment, equality and culture
EXPLORATION
138
The quest for the perfect wave • Vive la France! • The magic of Ireland • Rob Ward: underground explorer
GIRLS IN THE CURL
154
Jumping the gender gap • Linda Sharp: Welsh wonderwoman
BOARDS FOR BRITS
160
The shaper: feeling the foam • Matters of size: the shortboard revolution • Stepping forward: the longboard renaissance
TOP GEAR
172
Surfwear: image is everything • Wetsuits and leashes: keeping warm and hanging on • Skateboarding: the street child of surfing
COMMUNICATION SKILLS
178
Celluloid sliding • Writing style
LIVING FOR SURFING AND SURFING FOR A LIVING
182
Getting paid to surf? You must be joking! • Brits on the global scene
SURFING THE NEW WAVE
194
Greening the green room • History is the future
CODA
202
APPENDIX BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT THE AUTHOR INDEX
204 204 205 206
foreword Riding waves has always been my passion and I have lived my whole life as a surfer. I have also been fortunate to meet many other remarkable
individuals, at home and on foreign shores, united through this single link of going surfing. Many of these great characters feature in this book. Immersed in wave-riding since the early ’60s, I watched British surfing evolve as I grew up. I was both participant and observer in a new and unique way of life. Surfing gripped my soul. At peak moments it was so intense that it bordered the spiritual. It was like a form of worship that upheld the wave, a spiralling pulse of natural energy, as its dominant focus, worthy of praise. The essence of membership of the surfing tribe was each individual’s desire to ride waves in the spirit of fun. This was the magic glue that bound us all together as if a tribe. It was exhilarating, intoxicating and quite addictive. It still is. For the committed surfer, the invariable cost of this activity was the thousands of hours spent sitting in the sea waiting for waves – often a significant percentage of one’s life. This devotion becomes a communion with another element, the life of the worlds’ oceans. To meet dolphins, whales and even sharks in their own territory are among the many gifts that such a life can offer. On land, surfers adapted their unique identity to fit in with the simple reality of making a living. The artisan became the surfboard builder or wetsuit maker. Other surfers were channelled into competition, while others capitalised on the growing commercial niche in shops and surf fashion companies. After more than 40 years in the waves it seems like quite a journey. I always thought someone would write it down and tell the story of the many adventures of this modern tribe along the way. Some tales were caught in magazine articles or films, but the big story was drifting away as significant members of the tribe started to pass on. We reached a critical moment in British surfing. A history of it had to be put together, so I marshalled my own memories, researched old magazines and films, listened to the testimonies of many of my lifelong friends, then started talking to other surfing acquaintances and their significant friends. The openness and willingness of all concerned to talk was obvious. They too had noticed the void in recording what we all had shared and loved. So this is it – The Surfing Tribe. I can only say to the tribe for which I speak that if we have forgotten you, or an event you think was important, our apologies. It was not intentional and this is not a perfect work, in the same way that so many waves do not peel with perfect shape, yet they still get joyfully ridden. Roger Mansfield
Doug Wilson.
preface Silhouetted against a setting sun, a 23-year-old lone surfer paddles into the third
below When Pip Staffieri began surfing in 1941 he could never have imagined how popular the sport would become by the end of the century. photo: unknown/roger mansfield collection.
wave of a clean three-foot set, the faces brushed by a crisp offshore. He climbs to his feet, finds control, gains speed and a beautiful sound emerges as the wave unzips behind him. But he does not hit the lip or launch an air or even walk to the nose. He remains still and upright, with an elegant stance. No wonder, his board is 13'6". He has no language to describe what he is doing, no surfer-talk to capture his ‘turn’, his ‘trim’, or his evident ‘stoke’. No wonder, it’s 1941. This is Europe’s first stand-up surfer, Papino ‘Pip’ Staffieri, an ice-cream seller, testing his newly designed four-inch fin on a hand-built hollow board at Great Western Beach, Newquay. Pip could not have imagined that half a century later his beloved Newquay beaches would become ‘Surf City UK’, and the ocean would be dotted with surfers riding miniscule fibreglass boards. Today, the surfing lifestyle and industry embraces tens of thousands of people strung out along our extensive coastline. The British Surfing Association estimates that the island hosts as many as 300,000 surfers. But, until now, the history of British surfing was an untold story. The Surfing Tribe is the first comprehensive history of British surfing. It can never be definitive, as history conceals as much as it reveals, but this snapshot of Pip Staffieri will at least alert surfers to the fact that surfing in Britain has deeper roots than most people imagine. From these roots has grown a sport that is perhaps better described as a lifestyle and a culture. Once it grips you, it never lets you go. Surfing will take you to places you would never otherwise visit. And once there you’ll meet like-minded people with whom you can instantly trade stories about magic dawn sessions, encounters with dolphins, heart-stopping wipeouts and time-defying tube rides. There are still plenty of surfers around who can remember having to round up friends so that they would not be surfing alone, when there were no such thing as crowds. This book is for them, the trailblazers. But, most importantly, this book is for the future of
12
the surfing tribe
surfing, because we can only track where we are going by recounting the past. British surfing has a rich yet largely untold past. There were few photographers around to document the early days, and very little media coverage. The original ’60s scene was even lampooned in the American magazine Surfer in an infamous StonerGriffin article, ‘Surfing in the United Kingdom’. As a consequence many Californian surfers probably imagined that everyone in Britain wore beefeaters or bowler hats, and that every building in Scotland was a castle. In fact, the article was written without a visit ever being made – it was pure fiction. Early ’60s British surfers chuckled at this stereotype. We didn’t surf in bowler hats. We had good waves and a vibrant surfing culture built along miles of coastline, some of it as stunning as anywhere in the world. Yet records and accounts of the early days were scattered, and just how surfing evolved across Britain remained a mystery to many. Thankfully there are still plenty of the ’60s surfers around who can provide a reliable oral history, and many of them still surf. This book is their testimony. The surfing cultures of Australia, South Africa and America deeply influenced our own surfing tribe as it grew from a minor cult into a national identity in just 50 years. But we have been reticent to fully articulate the rich and varied regional surf identities, the local flavours. Although united in the quest for ‘the perfect wave,’ Britain is a patchwork surfing nation, deeply influenced by each coastline’s cultural and social history, whether Welsh, Cornish, Scottish or whatever. Geography has also shaped our waves, from frigid Scottish barrels to crystal Jersey peelers. Region by region this book looks at the developments in performance and equipment, and the iconic personalities who have pushed the art of wave-riding forward. Britain’s neighbours, France and Ireland, are interwoven into the story but they each have their own unique histories. Ireland is a treasure trove of surfing potential with a fascinating past, but we have not included Northern Ireland in the regions section of the book; instead we’ve considered Ireland as a whole
(see Chapter 10) because, as surf legend Barry Britton explains, “Surfing in Ireland is a cross-border sport, in the same way that Irish rugby is.” Hopefully the brief overview here might inspire a separate book examining the full history of Irish surfing.
The Surfing Tribe is a collection and distillation of a thousand different tales. The story starts with Captain
Cook’s first encounter with Hawaiian surfers in 1778, then jumps forward to the birth of stand-up surfing in Britain in the 1940s, which was inspired by photographs of traditional Hawaiian wave-riders. The core of the book celebrates half a century of surfing from 1940 to 1990. It was during this period that surfing evolved from the pioneering days to become the ‘cusp of cool’ in Britain. We track how the rip ‘n tear shortboarding of the contemporary era was established, how the thruster became the dominant species of board, and how the British surf industry was born and boomed. Along the way surfers rediscovered ‘style’ and longboarding returned from the grave to supply a breath of fresh air to an otherwise punkinfested aerial-infused youth driven surf market. The gender balance also changed as the decades passed; the average lineup tended to be ‘men only’ in the ’60s and ’70s, but by the ’90s there were plenty of women surfers out there enjoying the waves.
Every book has to end somewhere, and we decided on a 1990 fade out, with two significant exceptions. The pair of chapters at the end of the book, which discuss professional surfing and contemporary British surfing, build a bridge from past to present and place surfing in the here and now. The post-1990 era saw surfing spin off in many new and varied directions that will hopefully be tracked in detail in later editions of this book. ‘New School’ surfers took their ultra-thin performance boards through lightening fast tailslides and aerials. While the power surfing generation that went before them wanted to carve heavy moves on the face, the new breed wanted ledging hollow tubes and wedging sections. In Britain, Russell Winter singlehandedly redefined the achievements of European professional contest surfers, while a newer generation of Brits began to make a living from free-surfing and the associated media exposure. Finally, in the last five years, jetski assisted tow-in surfing has taken British big-wave riding to a new level. While the last two chapters highlight important contemporary aspects of British surfing, this story is primarily about what made them possible, and the fun that was had along the way. It’s a celebration of the people, the places and the events that made and defined British surfing.
Sam Bleakley
below A triumphant Russell Winter wins the 2002 Rip Curl Boardmasters pro contest at his home break, Fistral Beach in Newquay. photo: al nicoll.
the surfing tribe How did a sport practised in Hawaii find its way to the chilly Atlantic shores of Britain? How did a photo in a 1929 encyclopedia inspire a Newquay ice-cream man to become Europe’s first regular surfer? How did the British surf industry grow from a handful of backyard board builders into the multi-million pound industry it is today? The Surfing Tribe tells the full story of the history of surfing in Britain. It explains how a quirky seaside pastime transformed itself over seven decades into a phenomenally popular sport and lifestyle. From Newquay to Newcastle and from Jersey to Swansea, the origins of Britain’s separate surfing tribes are revealed. All the top British surfers from the various eras are profiled, including Rod Sumpter, Gordon Burgis, ‘Tigger’ Newling, Pete Jones, Nigel Veitch, Linda Sharp, Nigel Semmens, Carwyn Williams and Russell Winter. The book also charts the evolution of British surfboards, and looks back at the films and magazines that have portrayed British surfing over the decades.
proudly supported by
carve S
U
R
F
I
N
G
M
A
G
A
Z
I
N
E
£24.99
ORCA Publications www.orcasurf.co.uk