MoodySabre
Well-known member
In a Facebook Group I belong to somebody is trying to find information about this boat to help the person in Scotland who is trying to restore it. Anybody know of this boat?
That would be appreciated. Thanks.I know the builders grand daughter & can ask if she has anything but I dont think it likely now.
Odd that a yacht was built in 1940. She appears in the Lloyds Register first in 1948 with the designer as being F W Brighting. Sometimes an unknown designer could be the first owner, but as there were no LR's after 1939 until 1946 (which itself seems to be amendments to the 1939 Register) & no real reporting in yachting magazines during the war, it might be difficult to get further info. In 1948 her owner was T A Gatrell but no home port noted, by 1950 her owner was L H Plant and home port of Dartmouth.
Suttons boatyard at Potton (wakering) used to be suttons and wiggins boatyard. They have a few old fibreglass moulds there so they must have built boats once. Steve Adams manages it now.
Lindsay is still there with her German shepherds.They most certainly did build boats once...
About ten year ago I did some research into Sutton & Wiggins boat builders for a Wiggins family member who was compiling a history.
I think the W. Wiggins (recorded as building Idler in 1940) was probably Walter Wiggins who originally worked with his brother Charles at Cole & Wiggins in Leigh-on-Sea. They seemed to have moved to Wakering and continued their boatbuilding at Millhead in a former brickworks building. In all probability this is where Idler was built.
Bill Sutton married Charles Wiggins' daughter Gladys and started up his own boatbuilding business in a large barn on the site of what later became Morleys Nurseries, Wakering. This was not near any water and it was quite tricky getting the finished boats out onto a trailer and thence to Burnham where they were usually launched.
Bill's first boat was the centreboarder Amaris built for Jack Silk in 1952 (she was a sistership to my dad's Blue Shoal). She was followed by three Guy Thompson designs including Calliope; the centreboard ketch Cee Jay (for CJ Morehouse, owner of The Kursaal in Southend); and in 1958 Kudoso, the first of many Alan Buchanan designs. In the early '60s Bill built Bonnet Rouge (now in Norway), Capella of Burnham , Vae Victis, Vendetta (for Medway sailor David Clarabut), and Cavalier of Kent – these were all to Buchanan's famous Vashti design.
During this time Bill moved nearer to the water, to the yard beside the old wharf at Potton Creek. The business was now known as Sutton & Wiggins. Another Buchanan design Scorpion of Wyke was built in 1965, she went to Bridlington and then back to Suffolk where she was alive and well up until recently. In the 1970s several of the Mapleleaf and Oakleaf (23ft and 28ft centreboard class) were built. I believe these would have been the last wood boats built here, although restorations and re-builds still happened.
Some of my dad's boats and ours were laid up at Wakering every winter in the '80s, after Bill had retired and the yard was then run by Ivan and Lindsay (and the parrot) but that's another story...