The Dolphin Class has been in existence for almost 100 years, the anniversary will be in 2010. The account below is from (* full citation required) Appendix II of The History of Parkstone Yacht Club by Tom Hunt. The Dolphin Class are indebted to Tom, firstly for collecting and assembling this important historical information and secondly for agreeing to allow us to publish it on this website. (Tom Hunt's book can be obtained through the Club office) .
With thanks to Livingspace Construction http://www.livingspace-construction.com/ , suppliers of building extensions, building alterations and conservatories in Bournemouth, for preparing the copy.
The Parkstone Sailing Club Dolphin Class
Although the XOD class was not adopted by Parkstone Sailing Club until 1925, these two classes were the backbone of the club for many years; indeed it was not until 1950 with the introduction of the Merlin Rockets that another successful class was established. Several attempts were made between the wars to start up other dinghy classes such as the Redwing dinghy, but there was evidently no room for an additional class and none could displace the Dolphin.
The original boats were designed in 1909 by a member of the Club, L. H. Ashton, who successfully raced a small cruiser at the time called Banbin, which he had designed. He was also the owner of one of the first Dolphins to be built. It seems likely that he was a Marine Architect. By the time of their first race, at least 8 boats had been built; most if not all were built at Shutler’s yard in Poole. The Shutler family, father and sons, who were keen yachtsmen who’s main business was running an outfitters shop in the High Street: their boatyard was situated on West Quay Road on the site now occupied by the R.N.L.I.
From its earliest days in 1895, the Parkstone Sailing Club had arranged races, but these were for small cruisers usually divided into two handicap classes, “A” and “B” and only six “club matches” were sailed each season. The new Dolphin owners were keen to make more use of their boats and they put on one or two more races each year.
The first record of Dolphin racing appeared in Yachting Monthly for June 1910 and an extract report is given below:
“The annual race to Wareham took place on Whit Monday (16th May) and the appearance in the contest of the new Dolphin class enhanced the interest. Altogether 12 boats competed and the performance of the new Dolphins gave great satisfaction. These boats are quite a new feature and will give additional interest to all races this season. They are 16ft in length with a small deck forward and a centreplate and are very roomy. They are rigged with a lug mainsail and jib. They handled well in this race and showed a fair turn of speed …. The prizes, four in number, were all taken by Dolphins which have not yet been named. They kept practically in a bunch throughout. First, Mr F Maddeford’s, second, Captain Goodden Chisolm’s, third Mr L H Ashton, fourth Mr EA Hawker’s, fifth Mr H Keene’s, sixth Teal, Mr L Way and seventh Geraldine, Mr Tilney Barton.”
The next edition of Yachting Monthly had further comment about performance of the Dolphins in the next race held on May 28th “A good deal of interest was taken in the race for the newly established Dolphin Class. The behaviour of these boats proved very satisfactory both in running and windward work. Captain Gooden Chisolm and Mr Hector Keene sailed their craft in capital style and had the race a good deal to themselves, at the finish only 25 seconds separating themk.” These two were followed home by E G Hawker, L H Ashton, and F Maddeford. Three others gave up ( Bousfield, Riddett and Wright.) There must therefore have been a total of at least 8 dinghies. A report on the next race, held on 4th June, indicates that 7 boats started.
Towards the end of the first season, it was reported that the Dolphin Class had increased the Club’s interest in sailing that year and the Commodore (Casson) had offered a prize for the boat gaining the most points in the series of seven races, which ended on 10th September. This was won by Messrs. Hawker and Springfield, as joint owners with LH Ashton (the designer) being the runner up.
Hawker was a most active Club member for many years; he owned cruisers, Dolphins and XOD’s and lived nearby at “The Elms”, in what is now
Records of the Dolphin affairs after the Great War and until 1931 are sketchy, but from that year until the outbreak of World War II, there are minutes of all the annual owners meetings with several sail plans and specifications. It seems likely that there had been no substantive changes to hull or rig for the first fifteen years or so, but there is little doubt that the original specifications and plans were not drawn sufficiently tightly and owners had started to exploit discrepancies.. Ashton, the designer, presented the original plans to the Club in 1926 but in the following year, the owners themselves agreed to revised plans and specifications which were endorsed by the Club Committee. The Committee laid down that they were not to be altered without their approval and any agreed alterations had to be initialled by the Commodore.
The first significant modification to the boat was the approval in February 1928 of the new Bermuda sail plan, following the fashion set a year earlier by the XOD’s. The bowsprit was retained and the boom, at 12ft 6 ins, overlapped the transom by a foot, which necessitated the use of runners. Piplers on Poole Quay were the principal sailmakers for yachts in Poole and they agreed to make a jib and Bermuda mainsail for £6 10 0d. Owners were not restricted to one firm and some owners bought their sails elsewhere from firms such as Ratseys and Lucas. About this time, spinnakers were also in use, but they were not to be set except on courses outside the harbour and then not until yachts had passed the chain ferry on the way out, although they could then be carried to the finish on the homeward journey. Evidently there was no great enthusiasm to adopt any increased use of spinnakers, because in 1935 one of the owners proposed at the Dolphin AGM that spinnakers be carried in every race. He was unable to find a seconder.
Between the wars, there were two outstanding helmsmen in the class. Engineer Captain EJ Mowlam and Ted Hill. Mowlam. Mowlam won his hundredth winning flag in Damsel in September 1932. Over the period of 8 years, he had 100 firsts and a total of 203 flags in 247 starts. He was Sailing Secretary from 1931 until the outbreak of war and he died in 1940.
Ted Hill, crewed by his wife Esmee, won nearly every race in 1937 in Luna even though they had only recently learned to sail. He was killed in January 1944 when in command of HMS Wallasey, a minesweeper, which was torpedoed by “E” Boats in Lyme Bay during an attack on the convoy being escorted by his ship.
From the minutes of the owners’ meetings between 1931 and 1937, it is clear that they were most dissatisfied at the inequality of the boats. They thought of running the class on a handicap basis but this was rejected; in some years the Class was divided into a fast and a slow division. In 1934 for example, the four fastest boats were excluded from many of the prizes, but the following year the fast group had been increased to 5 boats – Tartarin, Seagull, Glaven, Luna and Falcon. This idea was dropped in 1937 when the “second division” concept was held in abeyance.
In parallel with these rumblings of discontent, efforts were being made to tighten yet further the design and specifications drawn up in 1927. The man principally responsible for the work was RW Moon. In September 1934 he produced plans and specifications based on his own boat Luna which he himself had recently built. These plans were approved and two members immediately applied to build new boats. Mowlam placed an order with Shutler – the builder of the original batch in 1910 – and Stevens was authorised to build one himself, both boats to be built under Moon’s supervision. It was also agreed that boats were not to cost more than £85 complete.
You might think that this would have sorted out the one-design problems but it evidently did not do so, for reasons which are not clear. In September 1937, an owners’ meeting was held to hear Moon’s proposals concerning a new Dolphin he intended to build. At the meeting, Mowlam “gave a short history of the Dolphin Class and the failure of post-war boats to hold the old ones.” It would be nice to have a transcript of this, but there are no further clues.
Moon then produced a profile of the new boat and a sail plan and gave details of the various alterations proposed to the hull. He was given a free hand to carry on with the building and it was agreed that the new boat be accepted as a Dolphin to sail with the Class in 1938 without handicap.
This new boat Lyra(D1) became the prototype of the fleet, as it was to exist for the next 44 years. There have been changes since then to rig and buoyancy, but the hull itself has remained unaltered. Unlike the old boat, the Mark 2’s sail numbers were prefixed with the letter “D”.
It is evident from the minutes of this meeting that Moon’s ideas and proposals were in tune with the owners’ wishes. They passed a resolution that a “hearty vote of thanks” be given to him for “placing the Dolphins on a square footing as a One Design Class”.
During the winter of 1937/38, whilst Moon was busy building Lyra three other boats were building to the new hull plans; D2 Toucan for Alan Drake, D3 Bluebird and D4 Cambrai. D4 was owned by the sailing club of the Royal Tank Regiment and its name commemorates the famous tank battle of World War 1. The Club handbook of 1938 indicates that there were 11 old Dolphins as well as the 4 new ones: a year later there were 11 new boats and by 1951, the number of new boats had grown to 21 in total. Two or three have been built since then, but 43 years later there are still 91 boats listed in the Club Handbook. This must be some sort of record.
The next major alteration came about as a result of a dramatic incident in1946. Mrs Esmee Hill who had shared Luna with her husband Ted before the war, had kept the boat in her ownership after his death at sea in 1944. In the summer of 1946, the weather being suitable, one Saturday she took her young daughter Tessa and son Rodney aged 3 for a gentle sail. Whilst other Dolphins were preparing for their race, Tessa persuaded her mother to join in, which she agreed even though somewhat shorthanded. In those days, the act of coming about or gibing required good timing and careful adjustment of the running backstays so Mum had a job on her hands when the breeze picked up. Whilst rounding Stakes Buoy, there was a popple on the water and at the same time the boat was hit by a puff of wind. Although Esmee let go the mainsheet, the boat gently filled and sank. Neither Tessa nor Rodney could swim, but Esmee was able to support both children with some difficulty until they were rescued by Moon sailing another boat in the race. Luna was left sitting on the bottom and the owner was happy that she should stay there; she wasn’t interested in sailing again. However, unknown to her, the crew of one of the “Skylark” pleasure boats recovered the boat and returned it to the Club, on their own initiative and without seeking reward.
This incident which could so easily have ended in tragedy, caused the owners to look into the safety of their boats. A sub-committee of owners was set up in 1947 with Leslie Millar as secretary and they decided to ask G.O’Brien Kennedy to advise them. He was a well known marine architect and dinghy designer, then based in Lymington. The sail plan which he drew then remains unchanged on the Mark 2’s to this day. The bowsprit was removed and the boom shortened to accommodate a high aspect ratio mainsail. These things helped to make the boat safer, but the big advance lay in reducing the weight of the lead ballast by half, from 4 to 2 cwt. And the compulsory fitting of buoyancy tanks. Provided that these copper tanks were properly secured, it meant that the boat would no longer sink when filled up. With the development in later years of plastic materials, buoyancy bags took the place of metal tanks but here, too, it is vital that they be firmly and adequately tied into the hull.
Leslie Miller has an amusing story to tell about how he persuaded some of the old codgers to modernise the rig of their boats. You will always get a small group of owners who for one reason or another, usually financial, don’t want to up-date their boats. In this case Leslie had the perfect answer. “We’ll all poole our surplus lead, saved by the reduction in ballast, and the money from the sale will pay for the new rig”. All objections were immediately overcome.
Elms Avenue. The two XOD’s which he had built over 60 years ago, Moonfleet (X43) and Minikin (X49) both remain in the present Parkstone fleet and are still raced successfully.
A contemporary report in 1910 stated that Dolphins were specifically designed for Poole Harbour to give the keen racing to be found in a one design class and at the same time, to meet the needs of those who wanted a suitable boat for a Sunday cruise to Studland or Swanage. Unlike the present boats, they had a rounded foot to the stem and, at first, they were gunter rigged, with a bowsprit and carried more sail, thus they were appreciably faster than the modern design, which caused many problems in the transition period in the late 1930’s. These early boats were seriously defective in having 4 cwt of lead and no buoyancy equipment, so if they filled up they sank like a stone. Over the years there have been several changes to the hull, rig and buoyancy and many attempts were made to revise the rules and specifications to plug loopholes and improve performance and safety.
The first race which involved the newly established 16ft Dolphin Class took place on 16th May 1910, so that in one form or another the class has been raced in Poole Harbour for over 80 years. (Of course that’s nearly 100 years now!)
Leslie also tells two other Dolphin stories which are perhaps typical of their day. He has always been an innovator and improver – the sort of person frowned upon by other owners of one-design boats. He decided to fit rigging screws to the shrouds of his boat Arripay, there being no rule against them. All the other boats till then had manilla lanyards, which shrank in the wet and expended when dry. Keene the dictatorial honorary secretary of the Club and also a Dolphin owner ever since the introduction of the Class, was very huffy about this and told Leslie that anyway they would be no good, as they wouldn’t expand or contract. When Leslie won by a bigger margin than usual, Keene’s reaction is not recorded. The other belief, theory, fable, call it what you will, was that the best Dolphins were those that leaked the most. I suppose they ‘worked’ more, which must have been a good thing!
The 1950’s were marked by a steady decline in the number of boats turning out for the races. In 1954, for example, the figure for Saturdays was 8.4 average and 6.8 for Wednesdays, Four years later the average for both days was down to 4. This pattern has been repeated again and again until 1992 when more boats turned out to race than at any previous time., but despite this, several owners felt it was time for a radical change, and so the “Mark 3’s” were born, when in 1992, D30, South Deep, was finally built after a great deal of discussion and argument. South Deep was the first Dolphin to be built from GRP following an initiative from a group of owners who recognised the fact that the existing timber boats represented, in many cases, a losing battle to stay afloat.
Leading lights in this project were the Class Captain at the time, Giles Vigar, and John Harris, owner of South Deep. A syndicate was created to finance the building of a mould, with the hull of D4 used as a plug. South Deep was launched at the end of 1992 and had a first sail with the usual timber mast and rig.
During the Winter of 92/93 there was considerable discussion as to how to incorporate an aluminium mast. The Class formed a Development Committee consisting of members of the Class with Peter Drake co-opted for outside advice.
It was clear that the existing rig configuration could not be reproduced with a metal mast and the Class was also anxious that the new boats, with stiffer, watertight hulls, would not seriously out perform their older sisters. Peter Drake drew a new sail plan, using the same mast position and hounds height, allowing the same jib configuration as before, but reducing the height of the mast by some 3 feet, and raising the gooseneck by 9 inches, The new mainsail was shorter on the luff, the same on the foot and incorporated considerably more roach than the old sail. There was an overall reduction of some 10 square feet in the total sail area.
Dick Batt designed the rig around the sail plan, specifying mast and boom sections and ran the calculations for the sail plan through his computer. The new rig was fitted to South Deep an March 1993, and the first sails confirmed that the boat was well balanced and significantly better behaved in strong winds. The rig is simpler than before, with no running backstays, and considerably lighter. The overall performance has been equal to that of the old boats in light and moderate conditions, with the new rig showing considerable gains in stronger breezes, as expected. The Class has confirmed that that the new boats can race with the old boats without handicap.
South Deep was sailed and raced extensively during the early summer of 1993 and a second prototype Aunt Betty was built for Peter Chittenden in time for Poole Week. Aunt Betty incorporates several detailed improvements and has been accepted by the Class as the model for all future boats. A further batch of at least 3 boats were scheduled for building during the winter of 1993/94.
With only minor detailed improvements, the general hull and deck arrangements are similar to the old boats although modern materials have allowed the deck to be built from considerably lighter materials. The boats still carry their internal ballast, retaining the inherent stability of the design.
The fleet would have gone out of existence many years ago but for the dedication of a few keen members throughout the history of the Class. Every year or two, the Golden Dolphin and other sources of information report the sinking and serious damage caused to Dolphins which break away from their moorings in storms – or sink at moorings. It would appear that most boats have suffered this fate over the years and yet they have been re-built and put back into racing condition – in many cases better condition than ever before.
It is unwise to attempt to predict the future of long established Classes. Both Dolphins and XOD’s have been described as being in their death throes on many occasions during the past 30 years or so. With the introduction of the new ‘Mark 3’ GRP Dolphins, there appears to be every good reason to expect the Class to reach its Centenary in 2010.
To bring the Dolphin story right up to date, it is sad to have to record that the very lastest Dolphin which had been completed at Latham’s Boatyard was completely destroyed in a fire which occurred in the yard in early November 1994. The boat had never touched the water and to add to the disaster, all the templates, patterns and records were destroyed as well. Now all of these will have to be re-created before the building programme can be set in motion once more.
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