| We had been reading the Arthur Ransome books - Swallows & Amazons, Swallowdale ... and all the rest, as a family. So the only question about the boat's name when my father bought her was: Swallow or Amazon? This photo was taken with my mother's box Brownie camera at Upnor on the Medway below Rochester in the early '50s. You can see a corner of the Yacht Club hard - known to us as the 'chocolate' because of its resemblance to a bar of Bournville - just under my father's feet. Amazon was a 12' RNSA lugsail dinghy with galvanised centreplate, bamboo spars and an Egyptian cotton sail. Probably hundreds of these sturdy little boats - you can see one pair of the double knees to all the thwarts - were built at Chatham Dockyard across the river. I remember lines of WWII mothballed frigates down the middle of the river. They created a series of wind shadows and swirling gusts so, once you had mastered the basics of sailing, you had to learn to anticipate where a sudden puff might come and knock you flat. Endlessly challenging to an 11 year old, once I had proved to Father that I was competent to take Amazon out on my own. "Don't go out of sight of the clubhouse" was the rule, so no hiding the other side of the frigates where I could have been capsized and taken far down river before anyone on shore realised. Further up, behind the camera, the full rigged four-masted barque Arethusa was moored - a sight to behold when the cadets lined out on the yards - for she was the training ship for the boys of the Shaftesbury Homes. Later I learned she had been built for the great Ferdinand Laeisz as Peking, one of his enormously respected 'Flying P Line' of windjammers in the Chilean nitrate (fertiliser) trade. She is now in South Street Seaport Museum, New York. |
| Close Window |