If you sail a classic wooden One Design in Ireland, there's a good chance it originated from the drawing board of one of the great Scottish yacht designers, geniuses who flourished internationally from 1870 onwards for almost a century as they carved out a worldwide reputation.
Certainly there were some talented home-grown designers in Ireland, both professional and amateur, whose work lives on in vintage One Designs. Think of Herbert Boyd's Howth 17s of 1898, Maimie Doyle's Dublin Bay Water Wag Mk 2 of 1900, John Wylie's Belfast Lough Waverleys of 1902, John B Kearney's Mermaids of 1932, and O'Brien Kennedy's IDRA 14s of 1946.
And designs of others were brought in, such as Linton Hope of London's Belfast Lough and Lough Erne Fairies of 1903, and Morgan Giles of Devon's design for the Shannon One Designs in 1922. But the Scots were the leaders, and a new Maritime Museum presentation in Scotland should put it all in context.
SCOTTISH IMPACT STRONGEST
But as William Fife III of Fairlie (1857-1944) and Alfred Mylne of Glasgow (1872-1951) created One-Designs of international significance for the top sailing centres of Cork Harbour, Dublin Bay and Belfast Lough between 1895 and 1945, with many of them still sailing and racing, their impact has gone beyond the merely numerical.
The G L Watson-designed 37.5ft cutter Peggy Bawn has spent her entire life in Ireland since being built by John Hilditch of Carrickfergus in 1894. Restored to the highest standards by Hal Sisk, he is sailing her here with a perfectly-preserved suit of cotton sails of considerable antiquity. Photo: W M Nixon
WORLD'S FIRST CODIFIED ONE-DESIGN CLASS
As well, the original Dublin Bay Water Wags of 1887 – the world's first codified One-Designs – were developed as a class by Ben Middleton of Killiney from a standard range of 13ft double-ended rowing/sailing dinghies and yachts' tenders batch-produced by Scottish boat-builders McAlister of Dumbarton. But after the more robust transom-sterned Mark 2 version was introduced in 1900 to the designed of Maimie Doyle, daughter of Dun Laoghaire boat-builder James Doyle, it all became very much a Dublin Bay creation.
WHY NO EARLY SCOTTISH ODS?
Nevertheless there's no doubting the original Scottish input into an idea which was taken up and developed with enthusiasm in many Irish classes. Why then were there no Scottish One-Design keelboat classes of any significance until the 1920s?
Possibly it's because the Clyde area was such a pressure cooker of yacht design development that there was an aversion to agreeing to something for which development had to stand still. Thus the sailing energy of many of the innovation-minded Young Turks of the Firth went into the always evolving 17/19 Class.
Harlequin, one of the champions of the crazy Clyde 17/19 class, emerged from among the draftsmen in the G L Watson design office in Glasgow. But the very highly regarded Watson (1851-1904) made sure that such extreme boat designs were never exported.
This was a brutally simple keelboat controlled by restricted rules, based on the ideas of an earlier time carried into contemporary extremis. They simply had to have a hull with waterline length 17ft, overall length 19ft, seemingly almost limitless draught, and setting as much as 530 square feet of sail.
CIVILISED LARGER SISTER
From them there developed the slightly more civilized larger sister, the 19/24. But it was with the 17/19s that Scottish sailing ideas ran riot in such a way that when William Fife III and soon afterwards Alfred Mylne, were asked in the 1890s to create One-Designs for Ireland, they made sure they looked like their notably elegant larger yachts, rather than the crazy little 17/19s and 19/24s.
A proper yacht - the Fife-designed Cork Harbour OD Imp heads seawards. Photo: Tom Barker
WHO WAS FIRST?
One-Design classes will come into being in a variety of ways, so it can be difficult to place an exact date on their date of origin, but late 1895 seems to have been a happening time in OD keelboat births in Cork Harbour and Belfast Lough.
This first Fife-designed Belfast Lough OD design appeared in 1896, but the One-Design keelboat ideal took hold so rapidly that she soon became the Belfast Lough No 3
The restored Belfast Lough No 3 Uandi has proven to be a delight to sail (inset shows pre-restoration)
One of the first of them, the Belfast Lough OD Association's No 1 Class, was becoming reality early in 1896, and she was a William Fife design. She was small but perfect, just 23ft long and 15ft waterline, yet sailing like a dream. So within months the idea of a BLOD 37ft LOA version took shape, and they came in 1897 with a cabin which made offshore passages possible for campaigning expeditions to the Clyde and Dublin Bay, which so inspired the latter place that the similar Fife-designed Dublin Bay 25s were up and racing by 1898.
Introduced in 1897, the Fife-designed Belfast Lough No 1s were nearing full strength at the RUYC regatta of 1898.
CORK HARBOUR ODs AHEAD OF THEM ALL?
But whether or not these East Coast boats could truly claim to be the first Fife One-Designs in Ireland was a moot point. Around 1895 a Royal Cork YC group, with the ubiquitous Harry Donegan as their secretary, had been in touch with the Fife office about a possible one design around 30ft LOA which, in addition to close quarters racing in Cork Harbour, would be a boat of sufficient power to race "on the ocean" to Kinsale and beyond for the regattas of West Cork.
The Cork Harbour One Designs had Harry Donegan as Executive Secretary to get the class up and running after the William Fife design had appeared in 1896. The restored Jap, originally built in Carrigaloe in 1898, has her tiller fore-and-aft to demonstrate the class's lightness of helm. Photo: Robert Bateman
The first of them were racing by 1896, and after some adjustments to the balance of the gaff cutter/non topsail rig, proved to be very sweet boats to helm, with tremendous racing sport. But meanwhile Dublin Bay and Belfast Lough were also getting a move on. The original little BLOD No 1s only lasted the season of 1896 before they were demoted to being the No 2s with the arrival of the 37ft class. And when the demand grew for something in between. William Fife was so busy that the project had to be taken up by Alfred Mylne, and thus the new 32ft Belfast Lough No 2s – the Star Class – were racing by the turn of the Century.
MYLNE TAKES UP THE MANTLE
With America's Cup challenges designed by William Fife for Thomas Lipton under way, Dublin Bay sailors seeking a boat around the Star Class size likewise had to turn to Mylne, and thus the Dublin Bay 21s began to appear in 1902, spectacularly cutter-rigged with jackyard tops'l and setting a spread of cloth that had the hulls well worn out within 60 years.
The Mylne-designed Dublin Bay 21s raced for 60 years under this heroic rig
But now, thanks to Fionan de Barra and Hal Sisk, the seven DB 21s that were such a splendid feature of Dublin Bay sailing in their heyday have been re-built with a more modest rig, and thus Cork Harbour and Dublin Bay continue to pay regular homage to William Fife and Alfred Mylne with the CHODs and the DB21s.
Dublin Bay 21s in their restored form Photo: Jonathan O'Rourke
Not that it stopped with the DB21s. The Belfast Lough No 1s – the 1897 37ft cutters with cruising capability – kept going for 13 years, considered really remarkable at the time. However, some increasingly affluent owners were looking to introduce the International 8 Metre class to Belfast Lough, but others thought to see this off with a 39ft cruiser-racer that became the Belfast Lough Island Class. It was just getting into its stride when World War I brought all recreational sailing to a halt in 1914.
Fiara, one of the Mylne-designed 39ft yawl-rigged cruiser-racers of the Belfast Lough Island Class that were built between 1910 and 1913 by John Hilditch of Carrickfergus.
BOATS FOR WOMEN CREWS
The war reduced available man-power so much that the topsail-toting Island Class yawls and Star Class had difficulty getting crew together as peace returned in 1919, so a group of RUYC members went to Alfred Mylne for the design of a simple 28ft 6ins sloop "that could be raced by a man and his daughters". What seems at first glance like an unexpected early push for gender equality is no such thing – it is in fact a reaction to a tragic loss of promising young men's lives. But either way, the new Mylne-designed Bermuda-rigged River Class ODs were racing on Belfast Lough and later Strangford Lough (now their permanent home) by 1921.
The 28ft 6ins River Class of Strangford Lough may be the world's first ODs to set Bermudan rig.
All involved with the Rivers could reasonably claim they're the world's first Bermudan-Rigged One-Design class, but having celebrated their Centenary in 2021, the River Class have sensibly retreated back into splendid isolation in Strangford Lough, there to provide good racing in boats which are a joy to sail.
Their quality received further recognition with the introduction of the slightly larger Mylne-designed Island Class for Clyde sailing in 1929, and we've one of them in Ireland with Kevin O'Farrell's much-admired Cara in Baltimore.
The Mylne-designed 29ft Scottish Island Class of 1929 was the first Clyde-based O-D keelboat to be designed by Alfred Mylne
WELSH MOVES
But meanwhile after three decades of focusing on big boats, in 1926 William Fife was persuaded to create an unmistakably Fife-designed 24ft Bermudan-rigged OD for the Royal Anglesey Yacht Club at Beaumaris on the Menai Straits, and eight years later the Royal Mersey YC responded with the similarly-sized but unmistakably Mylne-designed Mersey Mylne OD.
The Royal Anglesey Fife Class of 1924 – seen here racing in the Menai Straits – have come to Ireland to compete in the Glandore Classics
DUBIN BAY 24 CONCEPT FIRST AIRED IN 1934
With the tumult of life in Ireland in the first three decades of the 20th Century, Dublin Bay had remained rather static in the one-design keelboats it raced. But the remaining Dublin Bay 25s were becoming very tired, and at a committee meeting of the rules-setting Royal Alfred YC in 1934, Gordon Campbell - the owner of the Dublin Bay 21 Garavogue – made the far-sighted suggestion for the creation of a new Bermudan-rigged OD class drawing on the proven seaworthiness of the Mylne-designed DB21, River and Scottish Island classes, but moving up in size to 37ft 6ins to be something like a cruiser-racer version of the International 6 Metre.
As Gordon Campbell was also Lord Glenavy, and happened to be the Governor of the Bank of Ireland, his suggestions carried real weight. But in the moribund Irish economy of the 1930s, it still took a while to move this excellent idea forward, and in the end it was the broader scope of the more energetic Dublin Bay Sailing Club that took the idea to Mylne in 1937.
INTERNATIONAL IMPACT
By the end of 1938 the first boats of what had now become the Dublin Bay 24 class were under construction in Mylne's boatyard at Port Bannatyne on the Isle of Bute in the Clyde, but all building stopped with World War 2 in 1939. It was only with the ending of hostilities in 1945 that the design was finally able to be published in yachting magazines, but even then it revealed a pace-setting concept which – had it been activated when first aired in 1934 – would have had a remarkable international impact.
The restored Mylne-designed Dublin Bay 24 Zephyra sailing in Maine. In 1963 her sister-ship Fenestra was overall winner of the RORC Irish Sea Race. Photo: The Apprenticeshop
As it is, with the continuing delays of wartime, the boats didn't start racing until 1947. They immediately proved their quality in both OD and cruiser-racing, with one of them – Fenestra - going on to win the RORC Irish Sea Race of 1963. It was a high point, as DB24s also were awarded the top trophies of the Irish Cruising Club for various voyages But at a more modest size level, the Scottish contribution to Irish One-Design had one final burst of energy.
ECONOMIC BATCHES
During World War II, while dealing with the Mylne office on other business, a Belfast Lough-based boatbuilder called Arthur Clapham asked for some ideas for a new one design which he planned to build in economic batches to provide the most boat possible within the constraints of post war restrictions and economy. The result was the 25ft Glen OD. Nearly forty were built in all, and the class now races in Strangford Lough and Dublin Bay, where a revival of the Dun Laoghaire fleet is currently under way.
The restored 1949-built Mylne-designed Glen Class Glenluce (Ailbe Millerick) afloat with sister-ships in Dun Laoghaire. Photo: John Duggan
MARITIME MUSEUM EXHIBITION
They were the last designs from the golden age of Scottish yacht design to make a major impact on the Irish One-Design scene. And this is now all of special interest, as the Scottish Maritime Museum at Irvine on the Clyde coast last Saturday (February 22nd) launched an exhibition "Crafting Elegance" to detail the work of the Scottish design greats – G L Watson, William Fife and Alfred Mylne
It runs until 25th May, so it may even be possible to make an early-season cruise up there to examine it at leisure. For even though we only have one notable G L Watson design in Ireland in the form of Hal Sisk's immaculately-restored gaff cutter Peggy Bawn on 1894 vintage, it's not unreasonable to claim that the ability of William Fife III and Alfred Mylne to create a viable One-Design class was best demonstrated in Ireland.
