My brother John and his boats

I remember where the idea of building a boat started. We on holiday, were staying at the Watch House in Polperro, Cornwall, the Reason and Garner families.¹ The Watch House sits right on the harbour, with a small terrace surrounded by marigolds planted in the walls. A small, steep slip runs down to the harbour, and at high tide the water laps the walls of the house and up the slip itself. I don’t really know when the idea of a boat came to my elder brother John’s mind. There were boats everywhere, so I suppose it seemed obvious to a young boy in those dreamy days of family holidays that he needed one himself.

The Watch House, Polperro, c 1955

I do remember walking with John through the narrow streets of Polperro to find a greengrocer shop that would let us have a couple of orange boxes. In those days, the 1950s, if you wanted cheap wood, you would go after an orange box — maybe two feet long and eighteen inches square, thin slats of wood nailed together. Grownups chopped them up for kindling, but we children had much better uses for them in our various projects — camps in the garden, treehouses, and in this case a boat. John was always full of ideas and projects, very much the big brother, and sometimes I was allowed to join in.

John showed me how to pull the nails out carefully, straighten them somewhat with a hammer, using a stone as an anvil — they were never quite straight enough, and hammering them in was often frustrating; it was easy to hammer your finger instead of the nail; and often they would bend awkwardly and have to be bent straight again. We can’t have had much in the way to tools, being so young and away from home, but we managed somehow. As I remember, he took one box as a basic structure, and used the planks from the other to fill in the gaps between the boards. Somewhere we got some black gooey stuff to seal between the planks.

What we ended up with was less a boat, more of a sealed-off orange box. At high tide, in front of the assembled families, John took it down the slip for a maiden voyage. The boat floated OK on its own, but as soon as John climbed in it capsized quite violently, pitching him into the water. I was then allowed to try — maybe the boat would accept a lighter body — but had no more success. This became one of those family stories that was repeated over the years, but it is true, and we have some very fuzzy photos to prove it!

Orange box boat

Not put off by this lack of success, the idea of a boat was now in John’s mind. He talked over different designs through the next winter, and decided to make a boat that would fold up so it could go on the roof rack of a car (poor Dad, I now think, what must it have been like to have a teenage son insisting on taking a boat on holiday along with everything else in a very basic just-post-war family car). The second boat was designed and constructed over the winter. I think the basic idea came from a magazine like Practical Woodworker, but John adapted it to his own needs. It was very simple, just two boards maybe six feet long held apart by stretchers, floorboards and a thwart, and a thick plastic sheet between them, stuck and screwed through a brass strip. But it was very neatly made and carefully painted a light green. This was in 1955, so John was 15 when he designed and built it.

Our first outing (I was included I think because he needed someone to help him carry things) was very early one spring morning. We used wheels from my old tricycle to take the boat down Routh Road to the Wandsworth Common Pond and, before anyone was up and about, we assembled it and paddled a maiden voyage. She was stable, didn’t leak, and could either be paddled or rowed. Success! But then a Common Keeper cycled past in his brown uniform and (probably quite kindly) told us off because we were not supposed to be taking a boat on what was meant to be an ornamental pond.

We had some good fun with the boat that summer, mainly in Talland Bay near Polperro where we stayed. Maybe the most dramatic moment was when Bill Garner overturned in the surf and lost his expensive glasses — we all spent ages looking for them.

John and me in Talland Bay

I think John’s project the next year was to make a harpoon gun and learn how to use a snorkel — and that clearly is another story about this big brother of mine who was always thinking up and making things. I don’t think the harpoon gun really worked very well, and so there was a return to making boats. This time John followed the plans for a collapsible Rob Roy style canoe: no orange boxes this time, but marine ply, flexible ash stringers, specially constructed brass fittings fixed with copper rivets, and a rubberized canvas cover that was agonizingly sewn with Mother’s hand-driven Singer sewing machine. He also made carrying bags and a proper trolley (still with the same tricycle wheels!) so he could take it about on public transport. I don’t seem to have any pictures of this boat.

I should have said earlier that he had a workshop down in the cellar of our house in Routh Road where he progressively collected the tools he needed, and I used to stand and watch him sometimes for hours on end. I was full of admiration for his capabilities, tried to imitate him, but was too young to handle the tools or have the patience. It took me another twenty years to realize that I was capable of making things every bit as well as he could — as he very kindly acknowledged when we were both grown up.

This canoe was a great success, and I think I was old enough now to be a legitimate companion as well as needed for the carrying. I remember we had a family trip in the car to our favourite picnic spot on the upper Thames near Windsor. Another time, he and I took the canoe on the bus and train to Kew and paddled down the Thames to Putney. We took it on holiday to Llangrannog in Wales, again with the Garners, where he and I were allowed to paddle around a headland and into the next bay while the rest of the families walked along the cliff path. Goodness knows what our parents thought they were up to letting us do this with no lifejackets, no knowledge of tides and possible tidal rips, but we survived in one piece. We later took it to Polzeath, the great surfing beach in North Cornwall — I don’t think it did the canoe much good, taking her out in the surf. I do remember standing on the cliff overlooking the beach and seeing the canoe, with John in it, being picked up and tipped end over end by a wave and wallowing full of water in the foam. After that the poor thing was a bit too flexible and leaked somewhat!

I didn’t see much of his later boats — Elizabeth and I spend a weekend on his little yacht Worthington E when we first went to the States, and I helped him sail from Long Island to Staten Island a couple of years later. I know he made model boats for his son Tim and later for his grandchildren Will and Nick to sail on the New York Central Park Pond, but by that time he had gone out of my life in the intimate big brother sense that these earlier stories tell.

I think John was really a maker of things. Of course, he was an engineer and a journalist, and later politically and socially active. But he liked stuff — wood and metal and plastic — and liked making things out of stuff, including struggling with all the questions about how to make it do what he wanted it to do. This, of course, came out later in his marvellous garden sculptures, made often from things he found ready to hand (and much more substantial than old orange boxes!) and assembled with enormous ingenuity and persistence. His passion of making things has passed down to Nick, his younger grandson. Nick built a boat himself that is very similar to the one we paddled in Talland Bay.

Nick and John in their boats

I still have some of the woodworking tools John used — chisels and a couple of planes. I think I will go and clean them up and see if they can be made useful again.

1. I write about our family friends the Garners in Paring Chisel