Tom Diaper - Tom Diapers Logbook: Memoirs of a Racing Skipper

Captain Tom Diaper

Contents

Sailing, as I have done, on the big classic yachts that race in high-profile venues around the globe, it has been impossible not to be impressed by the high level of seamanship required to operate these craft. Today, many of them are power-assisted with inboard engines, modern winches, electronics and even computer-driven, hydraulic sail trimming. No such benefits were around in Tom Diapers day. Piloting was by Lead, Log, Lookout and Trust-in-the-Lord, while deck work was all Armstrongs Patent, horny fists and a lifetime of learning how to throw what weight you had in the right direction.

Crews in the third millennium are often well educated. Most carry some sort of official qualification and the deckhand who has not spent time on sophisticated training courses is now the exception rather than the rule. The relationship of the focsle and the owners party has moved a galactic distance from a world when, skippers perhaps excepted, the men forward of the mast were hired, fired and barely noticed by many of the quality in the saloon.

When Tom Diaper and his shipmates raced against the Kaiser, and Sir Thomas Liptons giant gaff cutters were competing for the Americas Cup, the crew were hard-bitten professionals of working-class stock. Most were Essex fishermen who had left school before their voices broke. A few, like Tom Diaper, hailed from a similar background in and around Southampton. Pay was poor, but prize money helped and there was always the chance of a good bonus when they won a race on which their owner had staked a large sum.

Tom Diapers Logbook leaves no doubt about the sheer scale of the mighty yachts in the so-called big class, but he also reminds us of humbler jobs, sometimes equally satisfying in the end. However, his pithy observations on Shamrock IV s failure to lift the great prize from the Americans are priceless, shining a bright light on a foredeck perspective we would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. Penned many years after the event, they are undiluted by tact, political correctness, or any concerns about upsetting his employer. Indeed, the forthright nature of this unique account from an unlettered man of the old school has to be required reading for social historians as well as yachting enthusiasts. That his family have preserved the log and seen to its publication stands to their eternal credit. Those of us who yearn for deeper insights into the Golden Age of Yachting are in their debt, as we are to a publisher with the vision to deliver this new imprint to our cabin tables.

The words of the log echo down to us on the gales of time. Whatever ethereal seas he is sailing now, we wish Tom Diaper and all the hands of his generation fair winds, eased sheets and a snug berth when the great race is run.

Tom Cunliffe

2016

The first sight of Captain Tom Diapers memoirs was rather depressing. A bundle of pages torn out of an old exercise book, each one filled to bursting-point with a solid mass of close writing in a large, sprawling and somewhat tremulous hand; no chapters or paragraphs; spelling decidedly eccentric and apparently fortuitous. However, the script was legible and I dipped into it, hardly expecting to be rewarded for my pains. Very soon I found myself wondering what the old man was going to say next and I read on and on till, with eyes aching from the strain of deciphering the script and the clock pointing to long after my normal bed-time, I came to the end and realised that I had been completely carried away by this unsophisticated, but vivid and convincing narrative.

Then I began to wonder why I, a man with no special interest in yachts and no previous acquaintance with the author, should have been so fascinated by his stories. True, he has had many interesting experiences and has come across a few notable personalities particularly the late lamented Kaiser Wilhelm. But that was not what kept me out of my bed. It was not the Kaiser who interested me so much as Captain Tom Diapers reactions to the Emperor and his entourage. Thinking it over, I realised that I had been attracted by the extremely vivid picture that the author gives of himself; and Captain Tom Diaper is undoubtedly a character. Brave, competent, self-reliant and at times self-assertive; he holds his head high, knows his own value and will suffer no one to trample on him. Not unduly elated by success, he keeps his chin up in adversity and one feels the pathos of his repeated disappointments in his search for a permanent job a job that would give him such security as is possible in his rather hazardous calling.

Moreover, Tom Diaper has somehow learned to use words in a simple and effective way. They are not the words of a professional writer and his syntax is decidedly irregular, but he writes as he talks: lucidly, emphatically, and to the point. The spelling has been rendered more orthodox, but the syntax seemed to be so much part of the story-teller that it has been left to add its rich colour to the background. Here and there a slight obscurity has been removed, but only so as to involve the least possible interference with the original words. The narrative has been paragraphed and divided into chapters and a few short passages have been cut out, but in other respects it reaches the reader almost in the same shape as was given to it by that ancient mariner, Captain Tom Diaper.

It is not often that a simple old man is allowed to tell the story of an adventurous life in his own words. Too often his manuscript is handed over to a hack writer, who improves it with padding, decorates it with fictitious descriptions and dilutes it with a liberal admixture of clichs, so that the result is almost indistinguishable from the typical products of second-rate journalism.

Diaper is not a professional author. He has spent almost all his life on the sea and has told the story of that life in the language of the forecastle. That story has been passed on to the public in its authentic form. Readers who like their literary fare to be correct and colourless are advised to put this book back on to the shelves and choose something else. However, anyone who enjoys a good story told with force and character in rough but effective language can turn to Tom Diaper with joyful anticipation. And if the reader happens to be interested in yachts and their racing, his pleasure will be so much the greater.

Sidney Wadsworth

1950

Tom Diaper was born in Itchen Ferry Village, a thriving fishing and ferry community on the banks of the river Itchen near Southampton. The Itchen Ferrymen were so prized for their maritime skills that whole families made their livelihoods as merchant seamen and yachtsmen. The village was small, with just a few families who for centuries had combined running the ferry and fishing with being farmers and yeomen; like many insular communities they developed local crafts and culture particularly connected to the water: rope making, net craft, boat building and silk work.

The village was centred on Peartree Green, where legend has it Queen Elizabeth I planted the pear tree that gave the green its name. The green looked out over the river to the town of Southampton and the ribbon of red-brick houses built near the church and school led down to the ferry and the older ferrymens cottages, and of course to long-standing pubs such as the Yacht and the Royal Oak. The Itchen ferry fishing boat was also used for local sailing and rowing races, and boat builders, such as Dan Hatcher, developed the design to create the proper racing yachts that had become a favourite pastime of millionaires such as Sir Thomas Lipton as well as royalty such as Edward VII and the German Kaiser.