Anyone Remember Rosie Swale ?

fiddler

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Any salt old enough to have been afloat in the early seventies will probably remember a cruising couple, the Swales, whose voyages in an O'Brian catamaran seemed to be all over the national broadsheets at one time. They disappeared off the radar after a while, but I recently heard that Rosie Swale (now Swale-Pope) has not only just finished RUNNING around the WORLD for charity, but is now going on a Eddie Izzard style multi-marathom fund raising bash. Details on www.rosiearoundtheworld.co.uk
 

srm

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Read the book, as we had a Bobcat at the time. Also, saw her in the 80's opening a fete in the lake District. Good to hear she is still active.
 

BurnitBlue

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I remember some years ago I read in a newspaper that she was in court accused of doing away (killing) an ex-lover in collobaration with a current lover. This was before the running stuff.

I didn't hear of any subsequent events or the judgement.

I have mentioned this story to other Catamaran owners to see if I had read the story wrong or I was confused and mixing up different people. Only one owner of a similar catamaran confirmed the story but also had no details of the outcome.

I am still fascinated by Rosie and Colin Swale and their sailing of what is a top heavy motor sailing catamaran round Cape Horn with two young children.

Anybody else heard this court case story? Did I dream it?
 

willie4646

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I own a Bill O,Brien Oceanic catamaran, and it was due to the Swales adventures that persuaded us to go for the Oceanic. I also have read her books, I think one of the funniest parts was her teaching the children to walk on terra firma. Blue Two; I dont know where you get the idea that the Oceanic is top heavy, because my boat has got two heavy diesel engines and the lower hull has heavily laid up fibreglass.
Willie
 

BurnitBlue

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Tried to answer my own question using google. Lots of stuff about the court case. Found this.

Feb 17 1981.
Two women, of Pen-fford, Dyfed, had been charged with administering poison with intent to injure, aggrieve or annoy (a Keith Vincent), and with attempting to pervert the course of justice and with perjury. Ten months earlier magistrates had dismissed ‘with intent to endanger life’ for the first charge. The other counts were to do with a falsely sworn affidavit in an attempt to get Mr. Vincent jailed for breaking an undertaking not to harass them.

One of the women was Rosie Swale, ‘ex-model and round-the-world yachtswoman’, whom I had been introduced to in 1974 when we produced the paperback version of her book Rosie Darling – ‘Tony made sure we had the right paper at the right time’ – ‘Oh, thank you’ (not specifically for Rosie darling I confess; the production manager was embarrassed to be kissed for similar functionality). She was lovely, warm. She had also published Children of Cape Horn describing how she, her husband and their children, Eve aged two and Mario aged six months, took their catamaran Anneliese from Gibraltar to Sydney and back to Plymouth via the West Indies, Panama Canal, Pacific Islands outwards and round the Horn back (little Mario now two).

At some time after my part in her story Rosie became estranged from her husband and formed what by any reckoning must be considered an unfortunate attachment to Tracey Stamp, fourteen years her senior. Tracey had been, twenty years earlier, Bernard Stamp, a merchant seaman. Keith Vincent had been Tracey’s lover and had been ill while part of a ménage à trois which Tracey and Rosie, self-proclaimed witches, had decided to end. (The senior witch, Vincent claimed during the trial, had put a curse on an old man she had argued with by pinning a wreath purloined from Vincent’s grandmother’s funeral on his door.)

The first count referred to their dosing his food by putting laburnum seeds in the pepper grinder and his drink by making an infusion of them (while chanting, ‘Hubble [sic], hubble [sic], toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble’ – really). The second and third referred to plan B when the witches arranged for a wreath to be sent to Miss Stamp with card: ‘Love to my wife Tracey, from Keith’.

Before the trial, the prosecution revealed, Rosie Swale had attempted to kill herself having written, ‘“As a woman driver is always blamed for an accident, so a witch is blamed for being a poisoner. Because she is a witch much higher than I am, Tracey has been accused with me” in an attempt to shield and protect Miss Stamp’.

At least one member of the jury was perturbed by the secret, black, and midnight hags and sent a note to the judge to the effect that Miss Stamp was menacing a witness. The trial was halted while her counsel explained that such muttering as had been seen were Miss Stamp at prayer and counsel for Mrs Swale added that she had remarked that Miss Stamp’s countenance in repose did tend to be forbidding, also that she’d had a bad night.

It was today that the judge had his little outburst against the press, specifically the People which had paid Vincent £2000 for his story and the Mail for prejudicial pre-trial coverage. ‘I won’t say what the press deserves,’ he said, and then did, ‘except that they deserve boiling in oil’.

Three days of entertainment at the end of which the jury was discharged from giving a verdict on the first count against Stamp (who was eventually acquitted in October) but found Swale guilty and she was given a nine-month prison sentence suspended for a year. Both were found guilty of perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice and conditionally discharged for twelve months.

The weird sisters’ escapades were not over (Rosie informed the press, after Stamp’s second trial, that they were to sail round the world twice). In January 1982 they were found guilty of burgling their local village store (still in Pen-fford, they were now living in Cape Horn Cottage). They had stolen food, drink and cigarettes ‘from local people who had befriended and trusted them’ in different robberies. Rosie Swale got 15-month suspended (why the poisoning suspended term was not invoked when the ciggie raids took place well within the one-year term I have no idea) and Tracey Stamp 3-month suspended.

At some time in the next year Rosie Swale fled the coven and began to lead what became a fruitful and no less adventurous life. Her first quest was to sail across the Atlantic (alone) to raise funds towards a CAT scan for the Royal Marsden. She left Pembroke in July 1983 in a small boat (‘a 17ft cutter, which I had found in a cowshed’) for a 79-day 4,800 mile voyage by way of the Azores and the Caribbean to Staten Island.

Thereafter she ran in an extraordinary succession of fund-raising endurance activities, running vast distances in Romania, across the Sahara, through the Balkans, across Cuba, round Iceland and shorter, the London marathon, the South African Comrades Race. As I write this she embarks on perhaps her greatest challenge, the Trans-Himalayan trek ‘across the roof of the world’.

No, Rosie, thank you.
 

Colvic Watson

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rosie-returns_795802c.jpg
 

casss

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I adored Rosie Swale and her life adventures starting as a child in Ireland. I went on to read all her sailing stories. I was an inland dinghy sailor all my life. Never went to sea myself (got too seasick) however my brother had many years in the Caribbean and then later, after a spell back in Zimbabwe, put his wife and 2 babies in a 34' and went around the world.
 

Beneteau381

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Any salt old enough to have been afloat in the early seventies will probably remember a cruising couple, the Swales, whose voyages in an O'Brian catamaran seemed to be all over the national broadsheets at one time. They disappeared off the radar after a while, but I recently heard that Rosie Swale (now Swale-Pope) has not only just finished RUNNING around the WORLD for charity, but is now going on a Eddie Izzard style multi-marathom fund raising bash. Details on www.rosiearoundtheworld.co.uk
Ive got her book as well. What amazed me was the utter reliance on catching rain water for fresh water use.
 

KompetentKrew

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Didnt she write stories for playboy magazine? in the 70s seem to remember her posing naked quite a bit.
Vintage Erotica Forums have a thread with a few pics. I'd better not link, but easy to google.

"Rosie celebrates her return from an epic voyage by posing in the April 1984 Fiesta dressed (and undressed) as a mermaid"

Her wikipedia bio is very glowing, and mentions no controversies (such as the poisoning trial).

In the early 70's, during the round-the-world voyage, she is reported as having two young children - the amount of adventuring she was doing in the 80's must have strained their relationships.
 

Mark-1

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My copy of CoCH. Only got a third of the way through. Unusual for me, I'm a martyr who always finishes book once I've started but I read it at quite a busy time.

Should probably give it a second chance.

Glad to hear she was still going strong 10 years ago, and presumably still going now.

20250101_114647~2.jpg
 

Sea Change

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I picked up a copy a few years ago in a secondhand shop in Poolewe. It's a good read. She's utterly mad, but it was an impressive feat. I'm not entirely surprised to read that the rest of her life has been somewhat... unusual.
 
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