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N ARGUS SPECIALIST PUBLICATION NOVEMBER 1992 £1.65 The Magel Slipway’s — } \ |\ EXTRA WITH THIS ISSUE Prey on theOpposition riko MANT swith our stacem © Sore Oo. reJ | | ad) | Russel Potts and the Isle of Man, plus Toy Boat production Isle of Man Veterans The Vintage Group has only two members . in the Isle of Man, but they are both very keen and between them they are managing to unearth a very large number of interesting boats from the inter-war and earlier periods when model yachting seems to have flourished. Though there is an active model boat club on the island, there is no regular yachting activity, so the two enthusiasts have organised an annual ‘sail day’ on the lake at Port St Mary. This takes place on Tynwald Day in early July, the Manx National Heritage Holiday, and is attracting increasing numbers of boats, with a majority now being vintage sailing models of a wide variety of types. As the island is a relatively small and close community, the activity gets a fair amount of publicity in the local press and on the radio which has resulted in a steady The over-36in class at Port St Mary Regatta, July 1992. Next year they hope to split the class, so that the Marbleheads, of which there will be more in 12 months, race separately. Photo: Brian King. on the sole condition that they are sailed on Tynwald Day. Two of the most interesting are a pair of 12-metre models that were built in the early 1920’s. 1920’s 12-Metres on the Isle of Man There is quite a story to these boats, as summer visitor. 12-m were not at that time a class sailed Charles Kinrade Jr. with two Manx 12-m; in the foreground Pioneer, 1920, behind an unnamed 12-m of 1923. Photo: Brian King. a they were designed and built by Charles Kinrade to the order of Colonel A. B. James. Kinrade is described in an article by Col. James which appeared in Model Engineer in 1923, as “like his father before him, a yacht designer and builder all his days”, whose models were each unbeatable in their respective classes and who in his youth, “thirty years ago”, had built boats which went to Liverpool and were still holding their own in competition there. As he is shown in the photo as a man well advanced in years, this implies that there had been active model sailing on the island since at least the 1870’s, and possibly a good deal earlier. Some of what follows is drawn from James’s article, the rest from conversations with Charles Kinrade’s descendant, who has restored the boats. It is not entirely clear whether Col. James was a resident of the island or a regular Two toy boats, different in size and date, but surely the same workshop? stream of boats coming forward from attics and garden sheds. Something over thirty class yachts from the period just before the 1939 war have been identified, and a smaller number of boats from earlier eras, including straight stem cutters equipped with swing rudders. The active enthusiasts offer to refurbish the boats for the owners 14 MODEL BOATS % Lo oa % P g The “Pioneer”, Ramsey Model Yacht Club, Isle of Man on the island and Col. James had conceived the ambition to enter the MYA National Championships which were usually held at Southsea. The first boat Pioneer, had been designed and built by Kinrade and given her trials in Ramsey bay during 1920, with the intention of entering the nationals either that year or the following one. Given the delay in getting things into print, even in a weekly magazine like ME, it is not possible to be clear exactly which year he was aiming at. Pioneer measured 63 inches loa, 41 lwl, 12.5 beam and 8.15 draft. The actual sail area is not given, but as can be seen from the photo was not large and arranged in a topsail sloop rig. The hull form was quite unlike any other 12-m I have seen and must have owed a great deal to the traditions of the length classes that were sailed on the island in earlier days: The substantial fin must have played havoc with her rating and was the cause of her relatively small sail area, which might well have been appropriate for sailing on the open sea round the island, but which was a good deal less than the sailors who used the Round Pond, Southsea Canoe Lake or Central Park, Wallasey would have wanted. She seems to have had no steering gear, which again puts her outside the mainstream of model practice in the class at the time, though still without any form of steering gear. In any event, Col. James never did enter the nationals with Pioneer. By 1923 there was another unnamed Kinrade 12-m built, but probably not sailed; the photos show her to have been much more like the normal run of 12-m and possibly, given the changes in the Rule that came in in 1920, not far off the average form of designs to the class. Though she is shown in a couple of photos, there is no discussion of her in Col James’s article and no details of her dimensions or performance. The tradition in the Kinrade family is that Col. James left the island without paying for her, which explained why both boats remained in their possession until the present. Both have now been restored by Charles Showing Underwater Body of Mr Kinrade’s 12-Metre Kinrade Jr., the son of the original builder and were given their first outing on Tynwald Day this July. There is a slight cheat in the rig; instead of a gaff mainsail with a separate topsail, each boat has been given a one piece mainsail with a substantial through batten in the place of the gaff. The appearance is very similar, but of course there is no way of reducing the rig by taking off the topsail. And so to the Small Fry a pe a, yee A 12-Metre Built by Mr Kinrade NOVEMBER 1992 As acontrast to the 12-m, one of the other photos from Port St Mary shows a couple of the toy boats that appeared at this year’s evént; despite the great similarity in style of the two models they are at least thirty years apart in their origin. The smaller dates from 1900 and the larger from 1930, by which time it had acquired the name Britannia. They must surely have come from the same manufacturer, though I can’t tie them up with any of the catalogue illustrations available to me, 15 none of which feature the gunter rig that is such a notable feature of the design. Toy Boat Production As an aside on the scale of toy boat production in the past, I recently came across a copy of the magazine, The Yachtsman for 1891, which had a short article on a visit to the workshop of Paxton, the model maker who operated from an address in Bow in the 1890’s. Paxton made display models for shipbuilders and shipping companies, but specialised in the design and construction of high class model yachts for his fellow model yachtsmen in the London clubs. He himself was a notable skipper and a member of the MYSA club. Many of his best and most wealthy clients were members of London MYC, which shared the Round Pond with MYSA. His great standby however was toy sailing boats which he continued to produce with great rapidity while being interviewed by ‘our correspondent’. These were made entirely by hand but were all exactly similar in form and very well finished. He tended to work on these during the winter, building up a stock which he sold to a number of toy shops in the Spring. The author comments that if he had not seen the speed at which Paxton worked he would not have credited his claim to have sold 300 dozen boats to his outlets in the last season. There is no way of knowing at this distance which toy shops he sold through, nor what his boats looked like. They may be recorded in a Gamages’ or Stevens’s catalogue, but as . they never identified the makers of the goods they boughtin, this Stakhanovite of The 1923 boat under sail again, this year. Photo: Brian King. the model making business will remain unrecognised. If one man could produce over 3500 toy boats in a year, what can the total output have been? And where did they all go? Even allowing for the low regard in which these models were probably held by their owners as they grewa little older, and for the ravages of over 100 years you might expect many more of them to have survived than seems to have been the case. Contact Addresses Old boat enquiries; Russell Potts, 8 Sherard Road, London SE9 6EP. Tel 081 850 6805. Vintage Group Secretary; Richard Howlett, 3 Maudlin’s Green, St Katherine by Tower, London E1. Tel 071 480 5288. MYA Secretary; Jim Wheildon, 50 Elmgrove Road, Harrow, Middx, HA1 2QH. 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