In my youth I sailed for a very successful skipper on board a Contessa 32 out of Levington, winning various trophies from Burnham week to various Haven ports races, all in the early 1980s and still a schoolboy. Pre- Howard’s way I should add. Sadly, something I was forced to watch by an ex-girlfriend because it had boats in it when in reality, it had more sex and drugs than a dodgy B-movie and was undoubtedly more about fashion and lifestyle than boats.
I mention this because this skipper could mortify a teenager like most older people by his dress sense. His idea of a waterproof whilst in a squall somewhere off sunk light vessel was a knee-length green plastic mac with a fetching matching hat. Most of the time, he was in a cheap waterproof-ish jacket, hand-knitted slightly stretched jumper and a well-worn woolly hat. I probably looked as bad to him, cut down jeans a pair of worn-out green flash pumps and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. My oilskins being the kind of thing you see tarmac layers in (mainly because they once were). Never once did it occur to either of us that we weren’t dressed appropriately, or worse still come straight out of Steptoe and Son. Which neatly leads me back to Howard’s way. When and how did we confuse the word image with imagine?
Bored with lockdown I have been reading old boat magazines and having read for the third time how to make a cockpit table (I use a plastic folding one) I have started playing 'spot the uniform'.
Starting from the top – one needs a hat. Now I do get this having got older (I wear a cap to keep my bald spot warm). Seems this has to be a baseball cap advertising its maker and it would appear that various names command better prices (I am out of fashion). It would be fascinating to know if the owner of a 1970s Westerly griffin feels they ought to wear the cheaper brand rather than be ostentatious.
Plastic Macs are nowhere to be seen. Instead, there are many fabrics each one more waterproof than the next in some severe day-glow colours so you can be spotted half a mile away. In fairness to my old skipper, his green plastic mac was the type of green that could easily have been confused as a radioactive substance, so he was ahead of the game. However, there is one fundamental difference, our sorry excuses for waterproofs never left the boat now it would seem they are just the thing for popping out to town.
Trousers look even more fun – I cut my old Levis down because wet jeans were worse than wet legs, now you can decide if you are a traditional sailor – in which case you need the red ochre type or weekend yoghurt pot in which case it would appear the blue is perfectly adequate.
Shoes or boots – now this appears to be a real minefield. We wore flat-soled shoes if we were crewing the contessa, mainly because the glass fibre decks had grip bonded, and heavy boots could damage it. Conversely, if you were crewing a Thames barge on a liver destroying excuse, they called a race then Tarmac wellies with the tops turned down were socially the norm. I never really got on with sailing wellies it did not matter how tight you tied the top one decent wave on the foredeck turned them quickly into the equivalent of deep-sea divers’ boots.
So, was it Jan’s boutique on Howard’s way that started all this? It highlighted the difference between the old yachtsman and a sea change in ideas and perhaps image. It certainly reflected its era when image ruled substance. No, you only have to look back to the J class yachts’ great days in the 1920s to see a perfectly turned-out crew in matching jackets and caps. What I lived and sailed through was the end of an era when our skippers were ex-serving seaman on the Atlantic convoys, wearing hand-knitted sweaters, woolly hats and hard plastic oilskins and wellies by Argile.
Perhaps dressing the part helps us imagine we're Ben Ainslie, or far better sailors than we are, maybe wearing a type of uniform makes us feel we belong, and at the moment perhaps that’s not a bad thing, and me? I am still in Levi 501s and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt – well why would an old rebel want to look anything mainstream.
