Several years ago my father, now into his nineties, reworked a model boat he'd been given. Thinking that the story of the boat and the modelling venture would be of interest to his siblings, for whom the original of the boat has a strong family link, I helped him produce a site with some pictures and a brief account. I've duplicated it here lest it otherwise become lost in the internet.
Nancy - a model rebuild
By Rear Admiral Conrad Jenkin
The History of the Bristol Pilot Cutters. The full story of these boats is told in a delightful little book called ‘The Sailing Pilots of the Bristol Channel’ by Peter Stuckey. Here he tells how they were built and operated and something about the men who manned them – or rather the man, the ‘Westernman’ and the boy who manned them. By coincidence, but happily from a personal point of view, the picture on the dust cover of the book is almost identical to the model of Nancy as she now is.
These cutters were not a Class of boat, as many of the yachts of today are of a particular class, outwardly identical to each other in every respect, though they were mostly very similar to each other. These ‘skiffs’ - as they were called by everyone who had anything to do with them at the time - were built to the requirements of the individual Pilots who ordered and then owned them and as they all had to do much the same job, it is not surprising that their build was remarkably similar; mostly between 40 to 50 feet overall, with a beam of 10 to 11 feet and with a draught at the heel of between 7 to 10 feet. At the turn of the century the cost of a new boat to her Pilot was about £350 complete with spars and sails.
They had very long booms and reefable bowsprits (the bowsprit could be let right aft for high winds and then hauled well out when the blow was over) and both foresheets and both the main and topsail halyards were taken aft to abreast the cockpit. Most were fitted with roller reefing on their mainsail booms and as this put an enormous strain on the boom when well reefed, with the gaff jaws right down on to the boom, boom breakages were common.
At the height of their life – 1840 to 1910ish - there were about 60 or 70 of these skiffs operating out of Bristol and Cardiff and when at sea, each was in competition with the other, each boat trying to get further and further west out into the Atlantic so as to be the first to offer their services to incoming ships – and they more often than not knew what ships to expect. Once the ship accepted them, the skiff was sailed into the lee of the ship and the boy then rowed the Pilot over in the dinghy – which they called ‘punts’ (as did Para Handy in the west coast of Scotland ‘Puffers’.) Being shorter even than Wren, these tiny boats had some scary moments way out at sea – and they operated in all weathers.
It’s a splendid little book.
NANCY – the full sized boat. Nancy herself was built at Pill in the Bristol Channel in about 1900 and the port of Pill features strongly in Peter Stuckey’s book, as it was the place where many of the skiffs were built. As you all know there are one or two good photographs of the boat under construction in the photograph album on the Island as it was in Nancy that Bernard and Frewen first ‘discovered’ Macaskin.
NANCY – the model. Some time, perhaps in the early 1920s though it may have been earlier than that, Uncle B built a model of Nancy, to a 15:1 scale, on stout, half inch softwood frames, planked, edge-to-edge with screwed planks and with a heavy lead keel but whilst the basic hull shape was absolutely right for many of the cutters at the time, from deck-level upwards she was not very accurate, with no bulwarks, no cockpit, no winch, with the bitts too far aft, both standing and running rigging wrong - and so on. Her rudder was free-hung and her mast and spars, though dimensionally correct were dressed in a rather toy-like fashion. By the time Uncle B gave her to me, she leaked quite badly and by the early 1960s her suit of four sails were badly perished. Her hull was varnished. Sadly, we do not have a photo of her in that varnished livery, before I started work on her.
At one stage, in the 1950s, Uncle B made her the twin mast system, with a heavy lugsail suspended from the mast join. He was keen to experiment with this arrangement, the prime advantage being a clearer deck and easier access to and from the bows. As far as I know we never sailed her properly with these masts but I still have them.
As the years went by, the model sat on a shelf on the Island, first in Suite and then in Walrus, progressively a bit forlorn and mostly un-sailed. So, in 2004 I determined to get her down from the Island and rebuild her as a scale radio-controlled model.
Research. When I decided to rebuild her (a scale model is one in which everything, hull, equipments and so on is as precisely correct, and as accurately to scale as it is possible to get them), I realized that I would have to do quite a bit of research. I first went on to the web to see what these boats really looked like and I bought that book. I also found that there were two groups of Modellers who raced their radio-controlled models of Bristol Pilot Cutters, one lot in Portishead, just south of where Nancy herself had been built at Pill, and another lot at Penarth just to the west of Cardiff. Pictures of some of their beautiful models can be seen on www.bridgeboats.fut.net/index.htm and at the bottom of one of the pages there are a number of photographs of the four or five real Pilot Cutters which are still in commission today, 2005. I based the cockpit of my model of NANCY on the real Cutter Mascotte.
Jen and I also went to Minehead to visit a fellow called David Alderton who was a Master Modeller and whom we had found out had built one of these models. His model of the cutter Hilda was quite exquisite and we took lots of photos of her, but I quickly realized that no way was I going to be able to get the absolute accuracy and quality of workmanship which he had achieved. To give you some idea as to the work that goes into this sort of model, he had just accepted a commission to build one of these models for an American – for a cost of £17,000! David was able to provide me with a full rigging plan of the old cutters and a never-ending supply of advice and encouragement. He also made me a full suit of sails that I felt was beyond my skill – and when you see them you will see what I mean. Again, to see what sort of work he does, have a look at the roller rigging gear he made for his model Hilda on that bridgeboats website.
Starting Work on the model. I first removed and discarded the old deck and reinforced many of the bulkhead joints. I then cut out sufficient room down aft to allow me to fit a cockpit. I ran in two coats of a very liquid epoxy to try to seal all leaks from the inside and coated her externally with another two coats of epoxy. I faired out as many of the hull irregularities as possible.
Then the fun part started. After fitting a new marked deck (David fits all his deck planks individually, each plank with a strip of black photographic paper glued down one side to simulate the caulking) and then fitted the raised bulwarks all round the deck. The cap rails were steamed to get them to take the proper bend but the taffrail was cut out of solid teak. And so it went on, bit by bit and the photographs will show you what she looks like now. The rudder is over-sized as, with a model, the rudder has to be bigger than scale to give the same degree of control. I made two companion-way hatches, one more authentic than the other but the less authentic one is expressly for when the boat is ready to be radio-controlled as the rope/block rack on the starboard side of the hatch is really just a removeable blank to cover the slot through which the steering servo arm protrudes.
I bought a few of the fittings such as the anchor and cable, the round decklight in the hatch cover leading down into the foc’sle and so on.
Few of the real Pilot Cutters had raised skylights but I had to give Nancy one as it was the only realistic way of hiding the sheet servo. In the real boats, light for the below-deck spaces was provided by ordinary decklights let into the deck.
The Mast. Most of the Pilot Cutters built had a mainmast and topmast and had I been starting from scratch I might well have had this rig for the model of Nancy. But as Uncle B had built his model with a single pole, and as few of the real boats also had single poles I decided to stick with this.
The Rigging. There are three sizes of rope used and there are some 40 blocks including about ten doubles and two trebles, each with brass rotating sheaves turning on brass spindles. The rigging, both standing and running is – as far as I can make it, exactly as it was in the proper Pilot Cutters with dead-eyes, three fore-haliards, and with both the mainsail and gaff halyards brought aft to securing points within reach of the cockpit. There were lots of deck dead-eyes to lead the various ropes to where the crew wanted them.
The Sails. Uncle B gave both the staysail and the flying jib booms and this may have been because he felt they would sail better with them but none of the real cutters had them so my rebuilt model of Nancy has both sails loose footed.
The Radio Control. Virtually all the models currently being raced are built on glass-fibre hulls (many produced by David) and thus are easily adapted to have all their radio control servos and lines out of sight below deck. With Nancy this was just not possible as it was next to impossible to run all the necessary wires and cords through all the bulkheads. I built several mock-ups but eventually had to have both my rudder bar and the sheeting cords visible. I also had to build that pitched decklight to house and hide the sheet servo – and of course no real Pilot Cutter had this. But perhaps it doesn’t look too bad.
The Dinghy (punt). The Pilots were transferred to and from the ships in their own dinghies so I had to build one of these too. Clinker built and very Wren-like, I was pretty pleased with the end result though there are no prizes for spotting a grade one mistake! I was also quite proud of the oars. These were made out of an American wood called Grasse, which carves like butter. But try as I might, I was unable to get the oar leathers thin enough for a scale model and this in turn resulted in rather over-sized rowlocks. But I am less than sure whether these dinghies actually had rowlocks or only thole pins. Certainly the few photos of these punts in the book had thole pins and not rowlocks. One day I will probably convert to them.
Painting. Most of the real Pilot Cutters were painted matt black so Nancy is too. Sadly, I had already painted the hull of the punt gloss black when I read in the book that most of them were really white, so as to show up better in the dark. Maybe I’ll change it to white one day too.