Whatever you may think about the historic gun-running by Erskine & Molly Childers’ Asgard into Howth on July 26th 1914, there’s no denying the fact that this was one of the most significant interactions of sailing as a sport with Irish national life in its most all-embracing form. Indeed, there is perhaps only one other sailing-related happening which has totally lodged itself so enduringly in the national consciousness, and that is the August 2016 arrival of Annalise Murphy into the National Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire with her sailing Silver Medal, won at the Rio Olympics. It was an occasion of purest shared joy which chimed perfectly with the sense of a country finally emerging from the economic recession of 2009-2012.
That velvet summer night of nationally-shared Dun Laoghaire celebration simply took it for granted that it was a woman sailor who had made all this possible. Yet in drawing any comparisons with the singular events of 102 years earlier, so much is under consideration that it is easy to overlook another key fact. It was a woman sailor who helmed Asgard throughout the tricky manoeuvre which brought the ketch and her important cargo safely alongside Howth’s East Pier to affect the course of history.
National joy – Annalise Murphy returns to Dun Laoghaire with her Olympic Medal
Molly Alden Osgood Childers was usually at the helms of Asgard during difficult manoeuvres. Of Boston sailing stock, she was nine years senior to her relative, the noted yacht designer and successful offshore racing pioneer John Alden. Partially disabled as a result of a childhood skating accident, she turned her limited mobility to advantage by making herself a brilliant helmswoman, while her husband and the other men and women on board attended to the more athletic needs of line handing and sail setting.
TWO OUTSTANDING WOMEN-HELMED EVENTS
Thus these two outstanding sailing-related events spread over a century and more of Irish national awareness both have quietly capable and very effective women sailors at their core. And while it could be argued that between them there came the arguably equally significant global circumnavigation of male sailor Conor O’Brien with Saoirse in 2023-2925, can we honestly claim that the voyage of the Saoirse is lodged in the national consciousness in the same way as the achievements of Molly Childers and Annalise Murphy?
For sure, the Saoirse voyage’s completion was very big news at the time. But in truth, it was something of a nine-day wonder, and the carefully-envisaged and restrained celebrations being planned to mark the Centenary of O’Brien’s departure next month, his actual rounding of Cape Horn in December 1924, and his subsequent return to Dun Laoghaire on June 20th 1925, suggests that this is an achievement whose significance has to be explained at every turn, whereas “Asgard” and “Olympic Medal” are all that needs to be said about the woman-centric sailing highlights of 1914 and 2016.
THE WOMEN WHO SAVED O’BRIEN FROM HIMSELF
And in any case, when push came to shove, it was often strong and capable women who extracted Conor O’Brien from self-inflicted difficulties. The poet Robert Graves has recorded how O’Brien’s sister Kitty’s no-nonsense approach was sometimes the saving of everyone when O’Brien’s recklessness and nervousness got them into difficulties while mountaineering in North Wales.
The calming presence. The amiable and easygoing Kitty O’Brien at the helm of Kelpie in 1913, while brother Conor sedates himself with a pipe of tobacco
Equally, when O’Brien had sold his Dublin house to buy his first sea-going yacht, the heavy old ketch Kelpie, the photos on board off Ireland's west coast, as likely as not, will have Kitty calmly at the helm. Then as the Saoirse round-the-world voyage drew towards a close with the Azores reached and Ireland beckoning, O’Brien’s short temper meant that any credibility he had in the crew-recruiting department had evaporated, so it was Kitty who went through the then-lengthy process of getting to the Azores in order to help him complete the final 1200 miles home.
Afterwards, it was his sadly brief marriage to Kitty Clausen which turned O’Brien into something more closely resembling a normal human being, and their cruises in the Mediterranean – with Kitty playing a key role as crew, helm, cook and floating home-maker - were undoubtedly O’Brien’s happiest years.
Happy days. Conor O’Brien and his new wife Kitty Clausen combine forces to send Saoirse’s heavy sails aloft. Typically of O’Brien, he regarded the use of chain as a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem of halyard chafe.
Is this sense of women sailors being equal - or even superior - with men in significant sailing experiences something which occurred more in Ireland than anywhere else? In previous issues, we have highlighted how, in 1894, the new magazine Yachting World ran a supposedly saucy feature about the women sailors of the Water Wag class in Dublin Bay. But closer examination revealed that, far from being a sort of Victorian nautical version of Page 3 girls, these were serious and successful sailors who just happened to be women.
THE POWERHOUSE THAT WAS MAIMIE DOYLE
At the same time, everyone knew that the real creative design talent behind the James Doyle boat-building enterprise in what was then Kingstown was his daughter Maimie, whose designs not only continue to sail the sea, but they’re even still being new-built in the case of her 1900 version of the Water Wag.
The 52ft cutter Granuaile designed by Maimie Doyle in 1905, and built in Dun Laoghaire by her father James Doyle. An able seaboat, Granuaile voyaged to Australia and is now based in Tasmania
CRUISING CLUB WOMEN
Then when the Irish Cruising Club was formed in 1929, in drawing up the rules it never seems to have occurred to the founders that women should in any way be excluded. So much so, in fact, that the Club’s Faulkner Cup of 1931 establishment – the first major annual cruising award in Ireland - was to be won twice by women members in the 1930s – Elizabeth Crimmins in 1934 and Daphne French in 1939 – while more recently a rounding of Cape Horn has featured in its award to Maire Breathnach of Dungarvan.
The 9-ton Albert Strange-designed yawl Nirvana of Arklow, built by Jack Tyrrell in Arklow in 1925. In 1934 she was skippered by Elizabeth Crimmins of East ferry, Cork Harbour to become the first woman winner of the Irish Cruising Club’s Faulkner Cup
As for successful women sailors in the wider Irish racing scene, the list goes on and on from club racing right up to Olympic level, so much so that my own experience is that you find you feel you’re racing against the boat in question, and whether or not it emerges that it happens to have a female helm at race’s end is neither here nor there.
Nevertheless if examples are insisted on, just reflect on the fact that the co-skipper of the current ISORA Champion, the J/109 Mojito, is Vicky Cox of Pwllheli. In Ireland it may well be that this state of affairs is simply taken for granted as being normal, but perhaps in Wales they still sense an air of exceptionalism about it.
Vicky Cox racing ISORA Champion Mojito off Pwllheli
WELCOME RE-PUBLICATION OF WOMAN SOLO TRANSAT BOOK
Such thoughts are occasioned by the recent-re-publication of an almost forgotten book about solo sailing achievement by a woman. Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s When I Put Out To Sea initially appeared in 1972, after she had become the first woman to sail non-stop solo direct from a northwest European harbour to Newport, Rhode Island in 1971 an often upwind distance of 4,000 miles made good in 44 days.
There are those who would argue that it was Ann Davison with the 23ft Felicity Ann in 1952 who achieved the “first”. But the able little Mashford of Plymouth timber-built Felicity Ann coasted along the shores of northwest Europe to several ports before making the much shorter Transatlantic hop across from the Canaries to the Caribbean. Thus the initially low-key story of Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s non-stop crossing with Aziz in 1971 is rather different.
Clever cover. The re-publication of Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s When I Put Out To Sea works well on several levels. We may not be immediately aware of it, but subconscious heft is given by the title taken from Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar – Hemingway was a master at this “title-borrowing” technique. And though the cover photo may look ordinary enough, half a minute’s thoughtful consideration of it is a forceful reminder of just how relatively primitive was universally-used boat and navigation equipment only fifty years ago. And on top of all that, the book’s handy acronym is WIPOTS – it’s unforgettable.
It was fifty-two years ago when a blue van de Stadt-designed glassfibre-built Pionier 9 – just a slip of a boat by today’s standards – sailed away from the anchorage at Dale close inside the entrance to Milford Haven in southwest Wales. When she finally berthed again 44 days later, it was to be at Newport in Rhode island after sailing just on 4,000 miles through the water.
Yet although this little boat Aziz had sailed between some of the islands in the Azores archipelago, she hadn’t stopped or had any local contact, and thus in Rhode Island it was justifiably claimed that the skipper, 28-year-old Nicolette Milnes-Walker, was the first female sailor to make the complete east-west Transatlantic passage non-stop.
DUNMORE EAST, THE HOSPITABLE GLUE-POT HARBOUR
The fact that Milnes-Walker, whose supportive family hail from Cheshire, comes across as being so utterly grounded, so “normal”, is part of the fascination of her story. For some reason, one day she just got hold of the idea of doing the voyage. She did some training with Peter Pattinson’s little sailing and cruising school in Southwest Wales in Milford Haven. This inevitably involved convivial visits across channel to Ireland and the glue-pot harbour of Dunmore East, with its hyper-hospitable Waterford Harbour Sailing Club, and the boisterous late feasts in the Ocean Hotel. Survive that, and you could survive anything.
“Just keep on sailing, and you’ll get there”. Rory O’Hanlon’s famous advice to the then-neophyte John Gore-Grimes before his first long voyage springs to mind as we contemplate the very sensible little Pionier 9 Aziz departing from Milford Haven on Saturday 12th June 1971. 44 days and 4000 non-stop miles later, Nicolette Milnes-Walker and Aziz were in Newport. Rhode Island
At an early stage with some experience gained, she’d pooled her resources and found a used but well-loved Pionier 9 in the Solent at the right price, and got the show on the road. This adds an extra significance to an already intriguing story, as the Pionier 9 as an all-fibreglass concept may have appeared as early as 1955 to be the first such boat in Europe - a typical Ricus van de Stadt concept breakthrough. But it wasn’t until 1959 that Frank King and his team at Southern Ocean Shipyards in Poole put her into production, and in the almost de rigeur promotional debut gesture of the time, they immediately won the Round the Island Race overall.
SOUND THINKING IN BOAT SELECTION
Thus the selection of the boat by Nicolette Milnes-Walker clearly demonstrates the soundness of her thinking and general approach, as the Pionier 9’s seaworthiness had been further demonstrated in very active RORC racing.
Yet when the book of the voyage When I Put Out To Sea was subsequently published, with Aziz being put on display in the Earls Court Boat Show in London by the builders, the yachting establishment - as evidenced through the sailing print media - seems to have been a bit sniffy about the whole business as being a lightly-planned and rather casual adventure, even if the provenly-serious sailors such as Robin Knox-Johnston had no hesitation in acknowledging the achievement.
Support from the man who matters – Robin Knox-Johnston with Nicolette Milnes-Walker in 1972
NEGATIVE SAILING MEDIA ATTITUDE
But as for much of the sailing media, if anything when they did register the story – for some ignored the book altogether - their attitude seems to have been that it all should be forgotten about as soon as possible, as it might have a dangerous inspirational effect on impressionable young people of both sexes, and particularly on attention–seeking young women.
More than fifty years later, we have come through such a change of attitudes towards women in sailing that we almost feel sorry for those male dinosaurs who were clinging like limpets to such viewpoints back in 1971. And as we were arguing earlier, perhaps in Ireland we’ve always had a more sensible attitude to women sailors in the first place.
But as well in Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s case, her remarkable voyage may have became part of her life, but it didn’t dominate or define it. As soon as the voyage and its brief post-achievement razzmatazz had died down with the Americans making much of it and greatly emphasising the fact she was a woman, she retreated to a country cottage in Cornwall with her literary agent Bruce Coward to create a book out of her log and hotch-potch of personal notes.
And when that was done, they found they’d become an item and spent some of the early years of their married life living and working in London and starting a family. But the coast and the sea called, and when a bookshop business in Dartmouth came up for sale, they bought it.
Dartmouth in Devon. Until the recent re-publication of When I Put Out To Sea, most of her fellow members in the local sailing club were unaware that the dinghy-racing neighbourhood bookseller Nicolette Milnes-Walker had once upon a time established a notable first in Transatlantic sailing
ETHEREAL STORY
Reader, this is where the story becomes really ethereal. The bookshop owner was Christopher Milne. Or more properly Christopher Robin Milne, son of A A Milne and the young hero, along with sundry superstar humanized animals, of his father’s much-loved Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books.
It was such a psychologically complex situation that it made a very good film, well capturing the fact that the best way Christopher Robin could preserve his own identity was by becoming the semi-anonymous village book-seller in Dartmouth, far indeed from the little East Suseex river where the Pooh Sticks had been raced under the bridge.
BACK TO LOCAL SAILING AND NOW RE-PUBLICATION
Into this scenario stepped Bruce and Nicolette Milnes-Walker Coward and their family. She may have been almost hiding the fact that once upon a time she sailed the Atlantic solo, but years earlier at Dale on Milford Haven she’d savoured that special social scene which is ordinary club sailing, and in Dartmouth as the neighbourhood book-seller she has been able to rejoin it, becoming a stalwart performer in the local sailing club.
And now, fifty years and more have elapsed since the voyage of the wonderful Aziz, tangible evidence of the fact that Ricus van de Stadt may well have been the most important yacht designer in the world in the late 1950s, and that in 1971 there was much more to the Nicolette Milnes-Walker story than at first met the eye.
She certainly lived up to her name. Although production of the Pionier 9 did not begin in Poole until 1959, it s believed that designer Ricus van de Stadt had the concept in place in 1955
So Julia Jones of Suffolk, a determined promoter of women’s sailing achievements, has re-published When I Put Out To Sea under her Golden Duck imprint golden-duck.co.uk. It’s a very effective book title which works well at several levels, and if you want to feel young again and re-vitalise your joy in sailing and slightly reckless youthful adventure, just buy it and read it and then read it again.
OUT-OF-DATE OFFICIAL ATTITUDES
Meanwhile, here we are in 2023, and frankly, the official attitudes and notions about women’s sailing are woefully out of date. So much so, in fact, that we now feel exasperation at people who are continually promoting various initiatives to encourage women afloat, when any look at something like last month’s Youth Nationals in Howth shows that the Women Going Sailing Train left the station quite some time ago, and has long been going full speed as a fully-accepted part of the sailing scene.
In fact, far from the attitude of ordinary harmless male sailors to their female counterparts being a matter for concern and re-education, it could well be that the uneven and unhealthy situation is to be found elsewhere.
After she’d achieved permanent stardom through her Olympic medal, Annalise Murphy was invited to join the all-women crew of a Volvo Racer for a leg or two of the Round the World Race, theoretically in a helming role.
Into the jungle….Annalise Murphy getting to grips with steering a Volvo Ocean Racer
The idea that somebody – however talented - can step straight from the rarefied and specialist solo position of a Laser helm into the street-fighting slugfest of steering a Volvo boat suggests that the organisers were chasing stardust rather than seriously putting together a viable performance package.
RESISTANCE OF THE ESTABLISHED SAILING SISTERHOOD
But the most thought-provoking outcome of the experience for Annalise was that after the semi-schoolgirl camaraderie of the Laser/Ilca circuit, the Volvo Ocean Race scene – whether male or female – was complete and utter jungle. The women’s boat in particular had some hardened veterans at the core of the crew who were totally and aggressively contemptuous of imported talent from a different sailing discipline, and weren’t afraid to say so with a vocabulary that threatened to melt the boat’s fancy carbon construction.
So maybe in trying to encourage women newly into sailing, it’s the established Sisterhood which is as much of a problem as the few remaining redoubts of male stuffiness. Either way, I have to admit to finding the entire Women on Water movement an embarrassment which may well be able to draw down some quite impressive government funding, but seems very artificial in a world where capable women have been paying a leading role afloat ever since Mrs Noah had to take command of The Ark in view of her eccentric husband’s persistent inebriation.
TIME FOR NEW “MEN ON WATER” MOVEMENT
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that far from giving our support to WoW, we should be rallying round a new organisation to be called MoW. Men on Water. For when I think of all the superb women sailors I’ve known and still know, it would make my blood boil (if it weren’t for my cold-blooded reptilian characteristics) to think of the underlying patronising contempt inherent in some movement which presumes to think that Irish women sailors or would-be sailors need special support to get afloat.
There is ample evidence that there is a real need for a properly funded “Men on Water” initiative
Yet all round our coasts, there are harbours filled with old (and not-so-old) fellows impoverished by the fact that they are now in straitened circumstances, thanks to a lifetime of maintaining boats to the high standard expected by our formidable women sailors.
Men on Water will give tangible support to these saintly male characters. And if there’s no money left after just two or three deserving veterans have been properly re-funded, then so be it.
