Tilman and 'En Avant'

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Frank Holden

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Information on 'En Avant' seems rather sparce but my curiosity finaly got to me the other day.
This is one of only two photos of her after conversion that I have found.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gbHqwt_w...lfJQbaJqElLTBPfrxnX0gCLcB/s1600/09_tilman.jpg
and a little bit of detail can be found here
Bill Tilman: Turning the page once again on old adventures.
Further searching has turned up this photo... the little bit of raised bulwark frd is a bit of a clue.
" uit den ouden doosch " - EN AVANT X | Tugspotters.com

If this is indeed her she seems a remarkably poor choice of conveyance into high southern latitudes.

Does anyone know?
 
I knew Simon.

I never heard anything about “slave labour” - the En Avant X had been owned by Mullers of Terneuzen who were/are a perfectly respectable Dutch tug owning family business whom I also knew slightly. Wim Muller was a bit careful about being associated with the project but I think that was just a normal shipowner’s caution about mad yachties.

I’ve forgotten how Simon came by the hull but he worked on her pretty much single handed at the Belsize Boatyard. He might have bought her there. She was just the stripped steel hull of an old harbour tug.

Simon added a ballast keel which I think took the form of two welded plates with iron and concrete between them. Mast was a steel tube. I don’t know what checks if any were made on stability. The sail area was pretty modest, but as you can see it wouldn’t take much to put the deck edge under, and she must have been very wet.

Simon invited me to join but he needed a stake of £1,000.00 which I didn’t have, so I didn’t go.

As is recorded in the biographies of HWT, he wrote from Rio de Janeiro saying the boat was OK and the crew were the best that he had sailed with. That is where the Colin Putt remark cited in Footless Crow comes from.

The En Avant sailed from Rio bound for Port Stanley where they planned to pick up two more crew. Presumably climbers. She never arrived.

Note the oil sidelights in the shrouds. Tilman like many others of his era assumed probably correctly that nobody ever saw a yacht’s oil side lights and never bothered to light them when off soundings. I am sure Simon would have done the same.
 
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This gave me a jolt, something I have long since put to one side.

I was 'footloose' and saw an ad in the paper (Evening Standard?) looking for crew for a South Atlantic voyage, Smith Island etc.

Of course I was interested and went down to Southampton to see, I think, Richardson. He was personable but with a very far away, even scary, look. Well I thought so anyway.

At the time I was working on a converted lifeboat so was used to awful boats. This boat was truly awful. I remember a huge ancient diesel and its compressor and lots of bits of scaffolding. Pretty much empty inside and almost a shell with water sloshing around in the bilges. The rig scared me, particularly the boom which appeared to be steel and would have swept all before it, including the mast, if gybed. The attitude seemed to be let's get on the way down there and sort things out as we go along.

I remember he later on he offered me a place and wanted £1k which I didn't have. By this time I was terrified, declined and trundled back to London where I went to see the guys at Adventure Overland in Earls Court Road (remember them?). Declined that too and went and got a proper job.

Some years later I read that the boat was lost with all hands. For me it wasn't a case of 'there but for the grace of...' more that it was, from a boat point of view, all madness.

I apologise if this upsets but it is my memory of the thing, I could well be wrong.
 
I used to sail and climb with Simon in the early 70's and was invited to go to Smith Island on En Avant. I didn't go because my wife was pregnant with my first child. Simon took my ice axe which I had purchased in Norway. Simon was extraordinarily capable. Tilman didn't really take to many men but he took to Simon for this reason. Nobody knows what happened. I suspect that, as is so often the case, it was a cumulative series of issues which led to them being overwhelmed. En Avant was a steel tug that, apparently had been sunk in the war. Simon did work on her pretty much on his own and she certainly wasn't a beauty! I can thoroughly recommend the Quest of Simon Richardson which includes Simon's diary of his trip up North with Tilman. Simon was a wonderful man - I still miss him now even after all these years. He would be 67.
 
Thank you all for the fascinating information.... it has filled something of a void for me... previously it seemed to be a single sentence ending to the life of a remarkable man...' sailed from Rio, posted missing, the end.'

On old steel tugs... about 20 years ago I used to take the steam tug 'Wattle' out at weekends with loads of punters. She had been built during the '30s.... shortly after I stopped doing it she was drydocked for the first time in years... the amount of shell plating that had to be replaced was truly frightening.
 
I read a book by Tillman many years ago, sparked my interest in sailing. Interesting character.
Simon I believe was a young man he hired as a cook on his voyage to the artic on his Pilot Cutter.
The book had a the epilogue both lost on a voyage to the Antarctic. Interesting some of you knew them.
 
Kukri said:
I suppose there are at least three ideas of what happened:

Collision with a ship, at night.
Hove down by a pampero until she filled
Seam or plate in the hull let go.

I don’t think she carried an H/F radio or a liferaft.
Click to expand...


I have just re-read the last chapter of Tim Madge's biography of Tilman and it has about 10 pages concerning the final trip. It says there was a 7 man liferaft - insisted upon by Board of Trade officials.
As you say, I doubt there was a radio.

Interesting stuff. I recall there was some criticism of the biography but can't remember why. The only thing that jars with me is Madge referring to Tilman as "Bill" throughout. As far as I know he never met him and I feel that the Major would not have approved.

.
 
I do not approve of Tim Madge! In his account of Baroque’s run up the North Sea in 1974 he claims that a trivial episode in which HWT announced that we were too far to the east to sight the Smith’s Knoll light ship, when in fact it had been passed a few hours earlier, caused some sort of collapse in crew morale.

It didn’t. It had no effect at all. Madge wasn’t there. I was. Paul, Alan and I were all used to the art of coarse yottigation, and similar things had often happened to us (mind you, Paul and Alan had sailed a Wayfarer to St Kilda, which was pretty good yottigation!) HWT was just making a joke at his own expense.

I addressed HWT as ‘Sir’. The idea of calling a decorated veteran of both world wars by his Christian name never entered my head.
 
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Yes I had forgotten about that I’ll fated voyage,was I t one of the last Voyages in the true British tradition of gentleman adventurers doing it on a shoestring.........modern voyagers seem so well equipped and in contact that there seems no doubt of their success these days.....
 
Well coming to this thread a few years late, courtesy of a hint from Kukri in a rather less erudite forum, let me add a few more pictures to your 'En Avant' collection Frank.

En Avant 1.jpg
The first shot shows her rigged, at the dockside on the Itchen River.
En Avant 2.jpg
The second shows her motoring out through Hurst Narrows, taken from Hurst Castle by the W.G. 'Sandy' Lee.
En Avant 8.jpg
Another of Sandy's photos here shows HWT standing port side, midships.

With regard to the Hurst Narrows viewpoint, it was Sandy's habit to wish the skipper well at the Berthon Boatyard before setting out for Hurst on his trusty pushbike, Leica slung round his neck. I can only assume that he drove rather than cycled from Southampton down to Hurst to see En Avant off.

Here - and I'm biased - is an altogether finer picture of a real boat, taken by the same photographer from the same spot in June 1970 in which the Skipper can be seen at the helm and the author of this post behind him streaming the log.
SeaBreeze.jpg
I only saw En Avant on one occasion, very early in the fit out and before HWT had any connection with the voyage. I was living in Southampton at the time and met Simon at the boat in response to an 'offer' of a crew place.

Maybe these pictures fill in some gaps?

Frank Holden said:
Information on 'En Avant' seems rather sparce but my curiosity finaly got to me the other day.
This is one of only two photos of her after conversion that I have found.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gbHqwt_w...lfJQbaJqElLTBPfrxnX0gCLcB/s1600/09_tilman.jpg
and a little bit of detail can be found here
Bill Tilman: Turning the page once again on old adventures.
Further searching has turned up this photo... the little bit of raised bulwark frd is a bit of a clue.
" uit den ouden doosch " - EN AVANT X | Tugspotters.com

If this is indeed her she seems a remarkably poor choice of conveyance into high southern latitudes.

Does anyone know?
Click to expand...
 
doug748 said:
Interesting stuff. I recall there was some criticism of the biography but can't remember why. The only thing that jars with me is Madge referring to Tilman as "Bill" throughout. As far as I know he never met him and I feel that the Major would not have approved.
Click to expand...

I worked with Dick Wynne on the republication of the 'Tilman Edition', the sixteenth volume of which is JRL Anderson's original Tilman biography ('High Mountains & Cold Seas'). After my less than complimentary Amazon review of his own biography, Madge and I buried the hatchet at a talk I gave in Henley and I asked him if he'd consider contributing a new foreword to the reprinted Anderson. When the first draft came, it was shot through with 'Bill's; by the time it was published, my editorial blue pencil had restored the appropriate level of respect.

In 1970, we were fortunate in having Colin Putt aboard, already a known quantity to the Skipper from the Patanela 'Heard Island' expedition. Colin's use of the form of address 'Skipper' quickly rubbed off on the rest of us. In 1971, I stepped into Colin's shoes as 'the old hand' (aged 19!) and the rest of the crew fell in behind me. It was completely natural and HWT clearly appreciated being addressed in that way.

The only person I ever heard call him 'Bill' was his niece Pam, who at eighty was still flying gliders, smoking like a chimney and using the colourful language of a trooper to describe two* of the three* biographers. She had respect for the ailing Anderson, who unfortunately had lost his fight with cancer before High Mountains was published.

Even Sandy and Mary Lee, who were genuinely close friends of the Skipper, addressed him as 'Major' - a term which privately made him chuckle.

*Don't get me started on Perrin.
 
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