Donald MacQueen Street Jnr of Glandore and the Caribbean and formerly New York has gone from among us after an extraordinary life of nearly 94 years, in which he experienced a sometimes picaresque existence. Throughout it, he significantly encouraged, instructed, and influenced sailing people on both sides of the Atlantic and across all oceans to such a respected extent that he was inducted into America’s National Sailing Hall of Fame while still active afloat.
He was a one-man universe at such a level that he successfully lived with the contradiction of his total rejection of his banking family’s assumption that he would follow their traditional career path into what he disdained as “the canyons of New York”. For in his prime at a well-advanced age, he was running a miniature conglomerate involved in sail charter, nautical journalism, ocean sailing instruction, cruising guides and their on-site research by sea, with chart publication and correction to such a high level that he was consulted by the Hydrographer of the Royal Navy.
Additionally, “Street Inc” provided insurance consultancy and brokerage with sail and rig design and manufacture plus many other activities, each of which on its own might have fully pre-occupied a more ordinary man.
The magic scene observed at Street level - Iolaire racing with the Street family (in three generations) and friends at Antigua Week 1990
COMPLEX BUSINESS CONGLOMERATE
Whatever he was, “ordinary” he was not. For Don achieved his success and ran his complex business not from a suite of offices in the canyons of New York, but rather from the deck of a cruising boat – usually in the Caribbean - or from Rock Cottage in Glandore in southwest Cork County. He could do this thanks to his lifelong and infectious enthusiasm for boats and sailing, which attracted a diverse group of family, friends, colleagues and strategically-based business associates who enabled him to keep this sometimes unlikely show on the road.
For although his father was blue-blood New York finance, he increasingly put the emphasis on his mother’s Irish descent with a sea-faring heritage. So although the family - like many similar – spent their summers at choice New England coastal locations, he avoided his father’s plans to make him a tennis star (please be serious) by messing about with small rowing boats from the age of six or so, though later he was to lament the fact that he “started sailing late, at about the age of 12” .
Don Street feels he always wanted to be a yacht designer, but he went on to a non-nautical university in Washington DC where he eventually graduated, majoring in American History. Yet from the time I first met him more than fifty years ago, we never had a conversation that brought in anything whatsoever about American history, as his only reminiscing about university was of forming the college sailing team with two friends to be the other helms, and generally having the time of his life with small boats.
SUBMARINE SERVICE
But university had been interrupted by the Korean War, and somehow this meant that on joining the US Navy, in order to be near anything to do with the sea Don had to get himself into submarines in the first of his many interactions with officialdom’s unerring ability to try and fit a square peg into a round hole.
Don Street at Glandore Summer School 2014 with his son Richard as they discuss his Korean War experiences – between them is a model of “The Beast”, the submarine on which he served. Photo: W M Nixon
Initially, this involved the threat of a long course in diesel engines, their maintenance and functioning. The young Street was so thrawn that subsequently when he acquired a yacht with a temperamental to non-functional auxiliary, he ignored its existence such that in time it had become so useless he lifted it out, using the main-boom as a crane, and lowered it over the side to become the basis of a mooring.
Despite his apparently difficult relations with service life, he left the navy at officer grade, yet at something of a loose end. But real life intervened after going back to university and finishing his degree. Having turned his back on the banking life to cause some family acrimony, he took up the only available option, which was the offer in 1954 of a paid crewing job on New York shipping magnate Sumner “Huey” Long’s new yawl Ondine, a 1953-built 53ft yawl designed and built by Abeking & Rasmussen of Hamburg in Germany.
Anyone who ever had dealings with Huey Long (1921-2011) and his increasingly large ocean racing yachts will have given a wry smile at that mention of a “paid crewing job”. Indeed, it may be from observing the behaviour of this tight-fisted glacially-paying billionaire that Don learned his own approach to cash management, whereby he severely controlled and curtailed any casual movement of coinage.
One of the side-benefits for Don of sailing with Huey Long was that this hugely ambitious owner-skipper ensured that he had talents like the America’s Cup legend Arthur Knapp on board to dispense unrivalled knowledge in practical situations
Be that as it may, things seemed good at first - when Ondine’s professional skipper was fired, Don was promoted to the role, albeit without any increase in pay. This gave him a chance to be learning in jig time from the superstars such as America’s Cup legend Arthur Knapp whom Long enticed on board to up his game in 1954, before the focus moved across the Atlantic for the 1955 Fastnet race.
PENNILESS IN COWES
On re-joining the Ondine setup in Cowes, Don had yet to be paid anything at all that year – crew rates or skipper – when it became apparent that Long had done a vanishing act with his latest girl-friend to the luxury of Claridge’s hotel in London. Don was at his wit’s end for money, but his situation was well understood in Cowes, where experiencing the financial vagaries of some VROs came with the territory. He was taken under the wing of a tolerant pub, where those standing him drinks included a man who turned out to include Sheriff of Cowes - or some such ancient legal title - among his many roles.
Thus after another few days of distant contact-going-nowhere non-communication with the receptionist at Claridge’s, Don got his new Sheriff friend to place Ondine under Sheriff or Admiralty Marshall Arrest by taping an official sequestering notice to the 56ft aluminium main-mast. This was a feature of the boat that Don detested, for although everything else about Ondine was superb Abekking & Rasmussen timber craftsmanship, he thought the use of aluminium in the spars was an intervention of the devil, whereas wood was divine.
ONDINE SIZE MYSTERY
And it reveals something else. For although Don and everyone else referred to that first Ondine as 53ft LOA, it seems strange that such a capacious sail-carrying boat had a mast only 3ft longer than her length, and in fact some searches indicates she was “only” 48ft LOA.
This air of mystery around Huey Long’s first significant sailing boat is further compounded by her American-built successor - the 1959-built 57ft Ondine II designed by Bill Tripp - being described by all involved as “the world’s first all-aluminium offshore racer”. Ondine II took to the water a good eleven years after the appearance in England in 1948 of the all-alloy 55ft Gulvain designed by Laurent Giles.
The 55ft Laurent Giles-designed reverse sheer Gulvain, built in England in 1948, was the first all-aluminium ocean racer
Further to add to the air of confusion, following the money fall-out with the owner, Don didn’t do the 1955 Fastnet aboard that first Ondine, but walked off Ondine and instead found himself with designer Jack Laurent Giles himself aboard Lutine, the handsome two-year-old 58ft yawl the latter had designed for Lloyd’s Yacht Club. They were both crewing for Sandy Haworth, who was only properly introduced to his new post-Ondine pierhead-jumping American crewman as they beat down the Solent, bound for the Fastnet Rock.
FIRST FASTNET RACE
Sandy Haworth’s first offshore racing had been done pre-World War II, when he owned and campaigned the 1894 cutter Glance, subsequently raced in 1950s RORC events by the Hopkirk brothers of Belfast. But by 1955, he had all the style and reassuringly quiet confidence of a man who was both Commodore of Lloyd’s Yacht Club, and Rear Commodore of the RORC.
Thus the atmosphere aboard Lutine was that of gentlemanly London clubland, a whole world away from the noisy cut-throat world of New York ship brokerage on Ondine, and Don Street fell in love with it all. He was to recall in awe that the only occasional and quiet discordant note came from Jack Giles pointing out faults with the boat he’d designed, while Don was firmly of the opinion that Lutine was the finest Giles creation ever, and many would agree.
The 1953-built 58ft Laurent Giles yawl Lutine was the boat on which Don Street did his first Fastnet Race in 1955
Don always said that personally he was a frustrated yacht designer, so the chance to talk with Jack Giles might have been a Godsend were it not for the fact that the innovative Giles had been strait-jacketed by Lloyds YC into creating a boat without his usual trademark vertical transom on the long stern.
Lutine was a yacht that gave more than a nod to the then-current Cruising Club of America Measurement Rule, rather than the RORC Rule which Giles and John Illingworth had completely collared with the 1946 design of the all-conquering Myth of Malham. So Giles’ pointing out of Lutine’s defects was slightly more than the usual self-deprecating English style.
RORC AND LLOYDS OF LONDON
Apart from providing his first Fastnet Race experience, Lutine and her skipper gave Don an intro to the endless possibilities of the Lloyds Insurance market, and the deep comfort of Royal Ocean Racing Club membership, something he cherished to the end of his days. He was further reassured by being invited to crew on Lutine for the remainder of the 1955 RORC programme, building on Fastnet relationships in sailing and the insurance business.
The season over, he stayed on to experience a total of nine months “knocking around Europe” before returned to America on the 46ft ketch Arabella for his first Atlantic crossing, the first of twelve, seven of which were to be made in command of his own 46ft yawl Iolaire. But he started at the bottom of the ladder, as the Arabella crossing was made as “ship’s cook and apprentice navigator”. And as his travelling inevitably ended up back home on parental territory by the summer of 1956, the pressure to “get a proper job” increased despite the fact that he was doing so many odd jobs and sailing deliveries around boats that ready cash was never a problem.
LUXURIOUS RED BEARD
He was living as he wished, with the result that he sported a luxurious red beard – he must have looked like the young George Bernard Shaw. But with Autumn, the family pressures on career prospects increased, and when he gave in sufficiently to land a job with a leading firm of big ship insurance brokers in those canyons of New York he so loathed, office rules obliged him to remove this splendid protective beard.
Consequently, in frostbite dinghy sailing at Larchmont, he was mocked as the only person in New York who had to use chapstick on his entire face. And at home, his father had taken early retirement at 55 as he’d experienced two minor heart attacks and three ulcers – the father had the heart attacks, while Don’s mother had the ulcers from looking after this irascible invalid.
On top of that, Don was hating the increasing cold. Then a friend just back from a Caribbean holiday enthused about the weather and the developing economies of the Virgin Islands. So he went out and bought a $45 one way ticket to Puerto Rico on an overloaded prop-drive PanAm Dakota DC6. That old silver bird didn’t so much take off as rumble to the watery end of the runway at what was then Idlewild, before gradually starting its gaspingly slow ascent once the pilot had noticed there was sea rather than tarmac beneath him.
WITH A MIGHTY LEAP, OUR HERO FREES HIMSELF
It may have been the flight from hell, but it was a flight from much else as well, for with a mighty leap our hero had freed himself. He got off the plane at San Juan in Puerto Rico into that special Caribbean deep warmth in the small hours. Another $10 got a Carib Air flight to St Croix. And within a matter of days he had secured a job in land surveying on St Thomas.
St Thomas today. It was much less developed in the Fall of 1956 when the young Don Street arrived from the piercing cold of New York to the welcome warmth and sunshine, and a land surveying job for which he trained himself from scratch in an intense four days of studying
THE FOUR DAY QUALIFICATION
His only professional qualification being that long-forgotten History Major from College, he remedied his ignorance about Land Surveying by ensuring that the job started on a Wednesday after a long Bank Holiday weekend. Preparing for it, Don borrowed a book about basic surveying on the Friday, and immersed himself in it totally while everybody else holidayed. When he started work on the Wednesday, he’d taken aboard such an impressive patina of surveying knowledge that he seemed to know more about it than anyone else in the office.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” was what he drily observed of this sudden surveying skill once he had his life truly on track with sailing, writing and publishing to provide a living. And that speed-absorbed surveying knowledge didn’t go to waste, as it stood him to the good when - out of exasperation with the official ones - he started to create his own Caribbean charts, which went on to be published by Imray in London.
FINDING IOLAIRE
To reach that fulfilling state, he needed his own proper performance sailing cruiser to do his own cruising, exploring and surveying. While many superficially important things seem to move with exasperating slowness in the Caribbean, the network of fellow enthusiasts through the islands can make some important things happen surprisingly quickly.
A new friend in St Thomas, Bob Crytzer, was being told by his wife that with three boats, he had at least one too many. But as one of them was Electra – originally Owen Aisher’s first Yeoman, a handsome 56ft Camper & Nicholson ketch of 1936 vintage – it had to be one of the others, and the most superfluous was Iolaire, a 1905-vintage 45ft cutter in need of much work.
The 45ft Iolaire in her original gaff rig. Designed and built in 1905 by Harris Brothers of Rowhedge in Essex, she had become a well-worn Bermudan cutter when Don found her in the Caribbean in the late 1950s
But she’d crossed the Atlantic five times, and one of her owners had been RORC and Blue Water Medal-winning legend Bobby Somerset. Don was bewitched, and he secured what was to become one of his life works by purchasing Iolaire for $3,000 down, $1,000 a year for four years, and no interest payable and no repossession clause.
JOHN STEINBECK INTERVENES
Thus by the 1960s we are into the long era – sixty years and more – in which the Don Street story becomes part of the public arena. For although his writing may not have been initially smooth in style, he had much vital information and many fascinating stories to publicise. When he told a few of these tales at a sailors’ dinner in the islands, one of those present told him he should get them published. He resisted by saying he know nothing about grammar, syntax and punctuation, but another guest firmly told him that correcting any such flaws was the job of editors and proof readers, and he should get on with it.
Man at work. Don at the helm in the midst of Iolaire’s successful rig re-development. Whatever they might have thought at the brewery in Amsterdam, it was reckoned in the Caribbean that well-chilled Heineken was invented primarily for Don Street
As that other guest was Nobel Laureate for Literature John Steinbeck, Don had no excuse for not settling down to the special hell of facing a blank sheet of paper with all one’s previously brilliant ideas apparently suddenly blank too. But by 1964 he had received his first money for published material, and the output has continued ever since, with many books, magazine articles, and charts being published and up-dated over a period of sixty years. This saw him gain an unrivalled knowledge of Caribbean islands both well known and virtually undiscovered, and nearly all surveyed with his enduring enthusiasm and dedication aboard the engineless Iolaire.
He may have been leading the idyllic sea life he had so often dreamt of, but like any life it was not without its personal acute sadnesses and tragedies. Yet with marriage to Patricia Boucher whose parents lived in Rock Cottage in Glandore which they were eventually to inherit, life acquired an extra southwest Cork dimension, but throughout it all, Iolaire was the strong continuing thread.
The re-configured Iolaire in a brisk breeze off the Cornish coast during one of her Transatlantic visits
She was always work in progress, but when the old cutter had finally reached the nearest to Don’s ideals, she’d emerged as a sort of sailing shrine to the RORC racing of the 1950s which he’d found totally inspirational. Thus she had a cutter fore-triangle rig which precisely emulated the rig perfected by John Illingworth and Jack Giles for the all-conquering Myth of Malham.
Yet in order to improve Iolaire’s sailing balance options, Don tipped a nod to fellow Americans such as Dick Nye and Carleton Mitchell by making her a yawl, an adjustable setup which - even in what others might have though of as old age - enabled him to show with skilled trimming that Iolaire’s sometimes heavy tiller could be make as light as a feather without any loss in speed – it was more usually an increase in speed, and with enhanced comfort below.
GOLDEN JUBILEE FASTNET RACE
By 1975 Don was well pleased by the re-born Iolaire, and he brought her across the Atlantic to race the Golden Jubilee Fastnet of that year. Having acquired a selection of antique timber offcuts from his on-going Iolaire modification work, he used one of the better bits to create the Iolaire Block for the best-placed 1905 or earlier boat in that Fastnet, and presented it to the RORC.
But it proved to be a light wind Fastnet, without the firm breezes of the Caribbean that Iolaire relished. However, the result gives some idea of the underlying strength of he classic boat movement in West Cork fifty years ago, as the Iolaire Block was won by Glandore club-mate Hugh Sherrard with his 1905 Fife-designed Clyde 30 Brynoth.
Let’s hear it for Glandore! Hugh Sherrard of Glandore at the helm of his 1905-built Fife 30 Brynoth, winner of the Iolaire Block in the Golden Jubilee Fastnet Race of 1975
GLANDORE MOVES UP THE AGENDA
In time the family emphasis shifted to Glandore, where the local classic Dragons became for him another source of interest and passionate involvement. Iolaire spent some years in Ireland wintering in the deep shelter of the upper reaches of Castlehaven well upstream of Castletownshend, but the call of the Caribbean came in the depths of those winters. Don assuaged it with the discovery in a hidden island anchorage of a little cruising sloop designed by Jack Francis Jones of Suffolk, and self-built in Whiteabbey north of Belfast by Brian Martin, a DIY sailor with skills of professional standard.
How she came to be in the Caribbean is another story, but anyway it was expunged as she became a red-hulled yawl called Li’l Iolaire which Don much enjoyed sailing until she disappeared in an all-destroying summer hurricane in the Caribbean while he was home in Glandore.
Home from home. Rock Cottage is at the centre of this photo of Glandore
There, even Iolaire herself began to be too much, so at the right time he sold her to the right person, and the 1933 Scandinavian-built International Dragon Gypsy became his wooden-boat passion, for he had long eschewed glassfibre, dismissing it as “frozen snot” with all the piss and vinegar of someone who, despite his unorthodox life path, remained a classic New Englander.
DRAGON SAILED TO FRANCE
He’d shown himself to be one tough old bird by sailing his Dragon from Glandore across the Celtic Sea and the western approaches of the English Channel to Brest for one of Brittany’s many Festivals of Sail. Under the foredeck was a tightly packed heavy-duty plastic bag, and when Brest was finally reached in the inevitable sodden state, the bag was pulled out and carefully unpacked, and Captain Street stepped ashore in dry clothes including a dazzlingly white shirt with RORC tie, and a classic blue-black reefer jacket.
Glandore provides an ideal home for classic Dragons
Needless to say, while the shirt wasn’t quite so dazzlingly white when they returned to Glandore, nevertheless it was worlds away from the usual Don-Street-at-home attire they were accustomed to in Glandore when he and his crew returned home properly dressed to a rapturous welcome.
SURGICAL INEVITABILITIES
Even Don Street was prone to some ailments, and though his 90th birthday on 25th July 2020 was celebrated in style under sail with the Glandore Dragons, from time to time in the years since he has needed surgical attention, such that he was prone to say in his distinctive nasal drawl that he’d soon be able to double-job as a colander.
25th July 2020
Nevertheless, in the poor-weather Spring of 2024 he was getting Gypsy ready for launching again in May, and had got to the stage of having the wellnigh perfect final topsides coat of purple enamel in place. Life was good, life was moving along. But on Wednesday, May 1st, he took his departure in peace at home with his family in Rock Cottage.
It’s not so long since the inspirational Donal Lynch of Glandore Harbour YC took his too-early departure. Now Don Street has gone too, albeit at what seems the right time. But there’s never really a right time. The sailors of Glandore are suddenly orphans. A wonderful sailing clan has lost its unique patriarch. Words cannot convey the depth of feeling which many sailing people worldwide are experiencing for the family and friends of Don Street at this time.
The vintage International Dragon Gypsy has received her last coat of topside enamel from the experienced hands of Don Street Jnr
WMN
