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36339 results in Social and population history

Page 120 of 1817

  • 16 - After the Crash

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 365-379

  • Summary

    Billy Connolly, in his funeral oration for the shipbuilders’ union leader, Jimmy Reid, on 20 August, 2010, described walking through Govan, Glasgow, with him. Connolly recalled Reid's words:

    You look at these housing estates, and these high rise flats. Look at all these windows, he says, and behind every one of those windows, there's somebody who might be a horse-jumping champion, a Formula One racing champion, a yachtsman of great degree, but you'll never know because he'll never step on a yacht or in a Formula One car, or that. He'll never get the chance.

    In this chapter, I bring the narrative of British yachting into the present and look at pointers towards its future. While I am confident of the trends I suggest, I can be less precise about timing, and recognise that there will be some regional, and even local, variations.

    The 2008 Banking Crisis and financial crash were caused by reckless mortgage lending and other risky financial behaviours by British bankers. The taxpayers had to lend (give?) billions of pounds to the banks to bail them out, resulting in the longest economic slump in modern British history.

    The grounds for such an event had been created from the 1980s onwards, as successive governments believed that the economy could only flourish if they gave the multinationals all they demanded in terms of a docile workforce. This required that they provided a cheap workforce, and a fearful one, by removing the financial and legal safety nets for anyone who was not working – mothers who believe that bringing their children up is a full-time job, the poor, the ill, the old.

    The impact of political or social issues on yachting is not discussed in the yachting press. There are three large-selling magazines in the United Kingdom: Practical Boat Owner, catering for the smaller boat sailor who wishes to undertake his own maintenance; Yachting Monthly, aimed at the cruising, middle-size, yacht owner; and Yachting World, concerned with yacht racing and super yachts. All are owned by the same company, IPC (International Publishing Corporation, now part of Time Inc. UK), and editorial staff move freely between them. Given this near monopoly situation, there is a lack of alternative views or vision.

  • 10 - The Golden Age of Yachting, 1880–1900 Part One: The Rich

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 177-208

  • Summary

    … on one occasion when asked the Princes of Wales’ whereabouts, the Kaiser replied that his cousin was sailing with his grocer, a reference to Sir Thomas Lipton. The Prince is rumoured to have shown his feeling about this remark by kicking a silver cup he had just won, which had been presented by the Kaiser, off the side of his boat.

    During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, yachting achieved a higher level of social and cultural – and even, to a limited extent, political – centrality than before or since. The next two chapters concern this centrality and examine it in six different areas:

  • • the sea, especially the English Channel, was central to the nation's anxieties and its imagery; and this importance extended to those who sailed on it, be they the Navy, merchant seamen or yachtsmen

  • • the leisure activity of the monarchy and the very rich

  • • the growth of yacht racing, as rich owners hired the best yacht designers, such as the Fifes of Fairlie and George Watson of Glasgow, to create winning yachts for them

  • • the attention paid to yachting in newspapers, magazines and in the cultural media – photography, art and novels

  • • the development of small boat racing. In this chapter, I discuss the development of keel-boat racing

  • • a final factor, which I discuss in the following chapter, was the arrival of the dinghy, which allowed much cheaper sailing and which, because of its lightness, made successful small boat racing feasible for women sailors.

    • Yachting, Patriotism and the Navy

    One major reason for the centrality of yachting was its links with the monarchy and the Navy. After the 1870s, national identity and the nautical became increasingly fused into a complex of public emotions concerning patriotism, the Navy and Englishness. For the empire to flourish, our seaborne trade required safe passage anywhere around the world. Naval supremacy was seen as the key to winning a major war, if not to the nation's very existence. British wealth, security and prestige depended on the effectiveness of our Navy.

  • 6 - The Slow Expansion of Yachting in Britain, 1815–1870

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 97-109

  • Summary

    There are at the moment a score of Yacht Clubs in the United Kingdom, containing altogether about five thousand subscribing members … A national sport … ought certainly to have a Magazine, to register the regattas, cruises, crotchets, inventions, deeds, discussions, and opinion of its supporters.

    The Lack of Political and Social Stability Needed for Yachting to Develop

    The growth of yachting and yacht clubs in Great Britain was rather laboured after 1815 until the 1860s. To understand the reasons for this slow growth, we need to try to specify the conditions necessary for a yachting community to develop.

    The Conditions Necessary for a Yachting Community To Develop

  • • The use of the sea for leisure purposes requires political stability, so that people feel safe to invest in non-essentials

  • • There is economic and political confidence and optimism: potential boat owners must believe that these favourable conditions will continue into the future

  • • The potential boat owner considers that sailing and the role of being a yachtsman relate to a way of life they value and wish to achieve

  • • There are a sufficient number of potential sailors for the would-be sailor to feel part of a community of like-minded souls

  • • A sufficiently large group within a society have surplus wealth

  • • and surplus time. 4) and 5) are not the same, as the creators of new wealth may spend all their time working, so it may well be the second generation of a newly rich family who become yachtsmen

  • • They have sufficient time and motivation to learn how to sail, to use the boat, and maintain it (or have it maintained), and to enjoy their chosen leisure pursuit

  • • There are a sufficient number of potential yachting havens, capable of providing safe moorings for a number of yachts

  • • There is easy access from the yachtsmen's homes, which are likely to be in a city, to these yacht havens

  • • The seas around these havens provide protected waters within which to sail

  • • The water is clean – free from sewage and pollution

  • • And free of industrial and urban character and congestion

  • • Peter Johnson adds: Access to foreign or other land within a few hours.*(This is surely a bonus, rather than a requirement.)

A New History of Yachting
  • Mike Bender
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017
  • This book, by a leading expert in the field, is the first major history of yachting for over a quarter of a century. Setting developments within political, social and economic changes, the book tells the story of yachting from Elizabethan times to the present day: the first uses of yachts, by monarchs, especially Charles II; yacht clubs and yacht racing in the eighteenth century; the early years of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes and an analysis of the America Cup challenges; the pioneering developments in Ireland and the exporting of yachting to the colonies and trading outposts of the Empire; the expansion of yachting in Victorian times; the Golden Age of Yachting in the years before the First World War, when it was the sport of the crowned heads of Europe; the invention of the dinghy and the keelboat classes and, after the Second World War, the massive numbers of home-built dinghies; the breaking of new boundaries by risk-taking single-handers from the mid-1960s; the expansion of leisure sailing that came in the 1980s with the use of moulded plastic yachts; and current trends and pressures within the sport. Well-referenced yet highly readable, this book will be of interest both to the scholar and the sailing enthusiast.MIKE BENDER is an experienced yachtsman and qualified Ocean Yachtmaster, with some forty thousand miles, mostly singlehanded, under the keel. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Exeter.

  • 5 - The Landed Gentry Take Up Yachting

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 69-96

  • Summary

    Mr Herbert Weld, who was elected to the Squadron in 1924, owned the Big Class cutter Lulworth which he raced very successfully. Or to be more accurate, his crew raced very successfully … The papers were always delivered to Lulworth about half an hour before the race was due to start. Weld would then go below with a copy of The Times tucked under his arm and would not reappear until the race was well under way. ‘Hullo!’ he would say, casually looking round him. ‘We've started’.

    Cowes Becomes Yachting's Capital – the Squadron's Early Years

    We left an informal grouping of yacht-owning aristocrats at the end of the last chapter who had agreed to meet twice a year, once in London and once in Cowes. Two questions merit answering. Firstly, why meet at Cowes, and, secondly, how did this informal group become the most prestigious yacht club in the United Kingdom, if not the world? In the final section, I will examine the America's Cup, first raced for in 1851, and its subsequent history.

    I described in Chapter 3 how, during the second half of the eighteenth century, inland spa towns had gradually lost favour to seaside resorts, as doctors began lauding the merits of seawater, seawater bathing and sea air. Besides, inland resorts were becoming ‘invaded’ by members of the ‘lower classes’, seeking to join in the promenades, the dances and the meetings. Royalty and the Aristocracy moved their socialising away from the inland spas to coastal spas.

    Already, before the turn of the century, grand properties were being built along the Solent Coast around Cowes and along the Medina River. The swelling of its summer population was reported on by the Hampshire Courier and the Hampshire Telegraph, ‘two papers which may be regarded as the archives for the first period of English yachting, of the fine company which gave an increasing prosperity to Cowes before the nineteenth century had run into its teens’.

    Travel to the Island was improved by the introduction of the paddle steamer, Prince Cobourgh, on the Southampton–Cowes run from 1820.

  • 1 - Stirrings and Beginnings

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    Dating the beginning of the sailing narrative is inherently problematic since people have sailed for pleasure since there were boats to sail, so a fisherman, the captain of a commercial vessel, or a harbour pilot might well sail for pleasure on high days or holidays, and they had no reason to record their experiences in a permanent form.

    Leisure use of yachts is recorded from ancient times. W. M. Nixon goes back to 600 BC and the Roman poet Catullus, ‘proud owner of a 30ft seagoing yacht, planked in pitch-pine on oak frames … with a somewhat cumbersome lug-sail’, he sailed from his home water of the Adriatic to Greek ports, and ‘on his most ambitious cruise, of all, the Black Sea’.

    An early example of the use of yachts for royal leisure is shown by Harold, king of Norway, presenting a ‘king's ship’ to the English king, Athelstan (924–939); and King Edgar (944–975) enjoyed ‘sommer progreses and [his] yerely chiefe pastimes were the sailing round about this whole isle of Albion’. ‘When King Robert Bruce of Scotland lived in his castle at Cardross near Dumbarton “his chief amusement was to go upon the river [Clyde] and down to the sea in a ship which he kept for his pleasure. In 1326 six men were paid 2s for crossing in his yacht to Arran.”’

    Brian Lavery in The Island Nation tells how ‘A fifteenth century manuscript in the British Library shows three people in a small boat partly covered with an awning, playing musical instruments and drinking from a jar’. I point out the continuous association of sailing and drinking at various points in this book; and also the link with music, and often singing, especially after ‘a few jars’, as seems to have been the case on this occasion.

    Representations of the Sea

    We need to pay attention to the various ‘meanings’ of the sea, since these inform leisure sailing and define the various types of pleasure and purpose to be gained from it.

  • 8 - The Enthusiastic Adoption of Yachting by the Mercantile and Professional Classes after 1870 Part One: The New Men

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 134-149

  • Summary

    The love of boating is inherent, more or less, in the heart of every British boy, the more so if brought up within the sight of salt water

    … careful papas and anxious mamas would do well to throw no obstacle in the way if master Harry or Tom show any predilection for yachting.

    As yachting became increasingly popular among the members of the rapidly expanding middle class with surplus income to spend on leisure, so the composition and structure of yachting and yacht clubs changed, and the Corinthian style of yachting grew. The key factors in this growth were political stability and the creation of a railway network linking the cities to the coast.

    Regarding political stability, the working class moved away from radicalism towards cooperation, friendly societies and trade unionism. Abroad, the Navy was establishing a Pax Britannica that lasted from the Crimean War (1853–1856) to the First World War.

    With the advent of the railways, ‘the countryside seemed to shrink perceptibly, as the iron rails swiftly formed connections between the cities, linking town and country, city and coast, and bringing together the far extremities of the land’.

    Who Were the New Participants in Yachting?

    As Ryan has pointed out, yachting expands as the middle class expands, and it was expanding fast. We can distinguish three overlapping but distinct groups.

    Firstly, there were those involved in manufacturing or the production of raw materials, such as coal. It was among these new industrialists, the manufacturers and their managers, that new yachtsmen were recruited; and if not from them, because they were too concerned and too anxious about maintaining their new found status and wealth, from their sons.

    These men were, very predominantly, based in and around the cities, created by the Industrial Revolution. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Manchester, Salford (the location of Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844), Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull, Bristol and Glasgow all doubled or trebled their population. New cities grew from towns, created because they were suitable for a particular product or process like Leicester (engineering, joinery, traditional hosiery), Stokeon- Trent (pottery), Cardiff (coal export), Middlesborough and Barrow-in- Furness (ironworks), and Crewe and Swindon (railways).

  • 11 - The Golden Age of Yachting, 1880–1900 Part Two: Small Boats and Women Sailors

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 209-237

  • Summary

    The Golden Age of Yachting was not confined to the rich. There was a much larger group, which took up the new sport of dinghy sailing, among whom were a significant number of women sailors.

    Lubbock's Bank Holiday Act, 1870, and the release of Saturday afternoons from work, allowed aquatic leisure activities to spread to the lower middle classes during and after the 1870s; and ‘by the turn of the century even the poor came to assume that they had a right to leisure’.

    Cruising, in whatever size boat, has always been much more popular than racing. In the San Francisco Call, 22 May, 1904, there is an article on ‘Ladies of High Station Who Love the Sea’. It starts by telling the reader that good women sailors are far more frequent among ‘British sisters’ than among American women. Three outstanding helmswomen are mentioned, but over twenty who enjoy cruising (these being high class ladies, they have crew).

    Unfortunately for the historian, it is hard to get a handle on yacht cruising. The tens of thousands who packed a hamper and sailed with friends and/ or family a couple of miles down the river to their favourite picnic spot are unrecorded, and since they had no reason to join a yacht club, even assuming they would have been acceptable, there is even less record of their existence.

    To cater for the needs of the cruising man, E. F. Knight, along with Claud Worth and his regular crewman, H. J. Hanson, created the Cruising Association in 1908, to counter the snobbishness and exclusiveness of the Royal Cruising Club. The Association, whose purpose was and is to offer support to the cruising yachtsman created a network of Boatmen, carefully selected and supervised by the Honorary Local Representative, who would go off to meet any incoming vessel flying the Association burgee.

    On the Clyde, the Clyde Cruising Club was formed on a November night in 1909, when four young men, standing on the starboard paddle box of the Duchess of Montrose heading for Wemyss Bay (on the mainland) from Rothesay (the Isle of Bute, and a major yachting haven) agreed to set up a club for the cruising man.

  • 14 - Yachting's Third ‘Golden Period’: Of Heroes and Heroines; Of Families and Marinas, 1965–1990

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 315-349

  • Summary

    For boating people August is the height of the season, and the day after Blyth's triumphant return [6 August, 1971], in Cowes Road … hundreds of men and a number of women plunged to windward at the start of the Fastnet race … For many others that Saturday was the start of an annual summer holiday when the family would be off on some cruise … For dinghy men, it was another weekend in a points series … But suddenly everyone in Britain, who looked at a newspaper or a television screen, knew a bit about sailing. For five years, a procession of men alone against the sea had passed before their eyes: Chichester, Rose, Knox-Johnston, Blyth.

    The key phrase here is ‘suddenly everyone … knew about a bit about sailing’. In the 1970s, yachting events, such as single-handed circumnavigations, became headline news. An atmosphere was created whereby yacht sailing became an important statement of a person's values and social position – in short, this was yachting's third golden period.

    The late 1960s and 1970s are often characterised as a period of ‘flower power’, ‘hippies’, and taking psychedelic drugs – relatively trivial fashion and lifestyle phenomena. Economically, the key event of this era was Britain joining the European Common Market in 1973, and the key social change concerned the radical improvement in the position of women, due to a number of important medical and legal changes, namely:

  • • the arrival of the birth pill – in the early 1960s, for married women and then in 1967, for all women, regardless of their marital status

  • • relaxation of the abortion law, much decreasing the fear of unwanted pregnancies (The Abortion Reform Bill, 1967)

  • • thirdly, the easing and the equalisation of divorce through the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969, providing for ‘no blame’ divorce

  • • the impact of this legislation was strengthened by the Legal Aid Act of 1960, which made available legal services to those who could otherwise not afford it

  • • finally, sexual equality in the workplace. The 1970 Equal Pay Act made it illegal to pay women lower rates than men for the same work. The 1975 Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to discriminate against women in work, education or training. (However, unlike the Race Relations Act, 1965, the legislation did not cover private organisations, such as yacht clubs.)

  • Epilogue: Fair Winds

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 380-380

  • Summary

    There is a huge amount of research and study still needed into yachting history, which should be rewarding, because, as I hope I have shown, yachting holds up a mirror to its society and has been an important part of this nation's social history for centuries.

    I am all too aware of the many unanswered questions in this text, unanswered because the data was not there. There is an additional urgency for two reasons. Many of the original shipwrights who built wooden yachts, and many of the sailors who cruised and raced in them, are now getting on in years. A second, more recent, overlapping watershed concerns those who sailed by compass, log and sextant, before the advent of Global Positioning Systems, that started coming into civilian use in the late eighties. There is so much yachting history that urgently requires recording and researching.

    In a book of this length, covering such a long period of time and so many types of sailing, there are bound to be factual errors, misunderstandings and misinterpretations. If you spot one, please contact the publisher who will pass your comments on to me. Thank you.

    Mike Bender

  • 9 - The Enthusiastic Adoption of Yachting by the Mercantile and Professional Classes after 1870 Part Two: A Philosophy of Yachting for the New Men

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 150-176

  • Summary

    We know of no amusement that can offer such splendidly healthful adventure and at the same time so cheap, as cruising … All that is required is a boat that may range from £20 to £600 according to the purse of the adventurer. …

    The more one cruises the more friends one will have, and the more friends one has the better ought to be one's chances in life – provided they are of the right sort.

    The Corinthian Yachting Narrative

    If the leaders in industry and manufacturing and their supporting professions were to be attracted to yachting, it had to be congruent with their core beliefs and values. Since Corinthian sailing is so central to the yachting narrative till well beyond the Second World War, I will first describe it and then examine it from a number of angles, such as its leading exponents, educative texts, and the implementation of class boundaries.

    The origins of the application of the term ‘Corinthian’ to sport are somewhat vague but in A Manual of Yacht and Boat Sailing by Dixon Kemp, published in 1878, the author defined ‘Corinthian’ as:

    a term in yacht parlance synonymous with amateur. The name was adopted in consequence of the similarity between the fashionable young men of Corinth who emulated the feats of athletes and their modern prototypes. Some clubs in Corinthian matches do not allow any paid hands to be on board.

    The Corinthian spirit is well described in Cowper's introduction to his pioneering five-volume pilot for yachtsmen, published in1892:

    We write for that large and ever-increasing brotherhood of ‘corinthian sailors’ … A corinthian sailor, we take it, is one capable of managing a craft either single- handed (if she is small enough) or with the assistance of other amateurs, if she is from 5 to 30 tons.

    This passage includes most of the key values of Corinthian yachting – the small boat, manned exclusively by amateurs; a hardy activity which refreshes the soul; the soul being gender specific, since only men would be strong enough to undertake it; and also makes links with a glorious seafaring tradition and brotherhood of god-fearing, yet fearless, men.

  • 12 - Between the Wars

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 238-272

  • Summary

    War is coming. 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never.

    Britain and its allies had won the War, and the British empire had expanded still further, with the handing over of German East Africa and Mesopotomia (later Iraq), Palestine and part of Greater Syria from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire. It now owned 30 per cent of the world's surface and controlled 25 per cent of its population; so winning the war could be judged, from that perspective, as a success. But this expansion was rendered problematic, as it required yet more troops and administrators to rule at a time when the British economy was much weakened by the colossal cost of the war effort in lives and money.

    Figures vary slightly concerning the carnage of the Great War, but, approximately, of 5,397,000 men mobilised, 703,000 were killed, and 1,663,000 wounded, giving a casualty rate of 44 per cent. Ten per cent of the British male population under 45 was dead.

    In the early part of the war, officers led their men ‘over the top’ (of the trenches) at the Front, wearing a different uniform and carrying a pistol, not a rifle. This made it easy for the German soldiers to carry out their orders to take out the officers in order to increase the chaos and demoralisation among the men. The average length of time before becoming a casualty as an officer in the trenches was six weeks.

    The war was followed by the 1918–1920 pandemic of Spanish Flu, which killed some 40 to 50 million worldwide, and around 250,000 in Britain.

    By 1920, many, many yachtsmen, and potential yachtsmen, were dead or invalided. I can find no figures for yachting, but in the neighbouring field of rowing, a quarter of the membership of Bradford Amateur Rowing Club on the River Aire were killed on active service. The huge losses of men and their families’ grief made enjoying leisure seem disrespectful into the mid-1920s. There was little sailing in Swansea Bay, for example, till 1922, when its first post-war regatta was held.

Page 120 of 1817