Sport: Renaissance Man

In Britain, Cowes Week is to yachtsmen what Ascot is to the horsy set. Last week hundreds of sleek racing craft, white and scarlet sails shining in the sun, gathered on the Medina estuary at Cowes on the Isle of Wight for one of Britain’s biggest regattas since King George V went there to sail in 1935. This time, too, there was racing royalty on hand. The sports-loving Duke of Edinburgh left his queen at home, and by helicopter hastened out to the royal yacht Britannia, happy to escape temporarily from Buckingham pomp and ceremony. At sundown on each racing day bluebloods and commoners alike thronged Cowes’s pubs or gathered on boats to roar out a night of song and story over Scotch and pink gin.

Visiting U.S. yachts sailed away with the major trophies, e.g., the yawl Carina II, owned by Richard Nye of Greenwich, Conn., won the New York Yacht Club Challenge Cup and the Britannia Cup; the sloop Maybee VII, owned by William L. Horton of Los Angeles, won the six-meter class race. Some Cowes oldtimers complained that British yachting’s golden days were over. True, all the great sailing dinosaurs like the 100-1 30-ft. transatlantic “J-Boats” of the Liptons and the Sopwiths had been killed by war and taxes.

But postwar Britain has more than recouped in numbers what it lost in splendor. Its yacht squadrons have trebled since 1939, with smaller classes ranging from 12-ft. “Firefly” dinghies to 29-ft. International Dragon sloops. More than 600 clubs now belong to the Royal Yachting Association. As in the U.S.. sailing in Britain has undergone a middle-class renaissance.

A Touch of Blackbeard. Conspicuously present at Cowes last week was the renaissance’s principal architect: salty, roistering Uffa Fox, 57, one of the world’s top yacht designers, boom companion and helmsman to the Duke of Edinburgh. He and Prince Philip fared no better than second, successively sailing in Uffa’s 20-ton sloop Fresh Breeze, the Duke’s Fox-designed Coweslip, and his slim Dragon-class sloop Bluebottle. But they had a fine time anyway. At his home, a converted waterfront warehouse, Uffa presided over the nightly after-dinner festivities that lasted until dawn. At a dinner for the Imperial Poona Yacht Club, he donned a pith helmet and led his cronies in spoon-hammering sea chanties. Said one Cowes pubkeeper: “There’s pirates ’round Cowes at regatta time, and Uffa’s the worst of the lot.” Lusty Uffa Fox certainly has a touch of Kidd and Blackbeard about him—at least in the eyes of landlubbers, whom he has shocked all his life. Uffa got into boats the hard way — as a 14-year-old Cowes shipbuilder’s apprentice. After a World War I stint in the Royal Naval Air Service, he bagged a berth aboard Typhoon, a 45-ft. auxiliary ketch owned by two Manhattan yachting writers who had just crossed the Atlantic in 22 days. The return trip to the U.S. took three hungry, storm-ridden months. Undaunted, Uffa worked his way back to England again, started making his mark as a builder and sailor of yachts.

Although he tried his hand at oceangoing yachts, notably his own Vigilant (1930), Fox’s best designs were sailing dinghies and small, trim sloops. In 1928 he designed the Avenger, an “International Fourteen” dinghy with a planing hull that made it a sure winner before the wind. In 57 starts. Avenger collected 52 firsts, two seconds and three thirds.

Mad, Of Course. Away from boats and drawing board, Uffa Fox pounded out a series of brisk, popular how-to-do-it books on sailing that immensely boosted the sport’s popularity. For all his success, Uffa’s carefree bookkeeping and happy-go-lucky pub-crawling soon separated him from both wife and boatyard. In World War II. though, he became the Air Ministry’s darling when he conjured up a parachuting, self-righting, self-bailing life raft for airmen downed at sea. He demonstrated its effectiveness one midwinter day by stripping before startled British brass and leaping into the icy Solent to board his raft.

After the war, with the growing demand for a sleek, easily handled racing yacht, Uffa Fox came into his own. He designed the “Flying Fifteen,”: a slim. 20-ft.-keel sloop carrying 155 sq. ft. of sail, with a planing hull. By 1948 the Flying Fifteens were the rage among racers (including Prince Philip), became a standard feature at Cowes. With more than 2.000 Fox-designed yachts afloat throughout the world (but few in the U.S.), Uffa has no trouble keeping up his credit at the pubs of Gowes. When the weather prohibits sailing, he rides Frantic, his mare, around the Isle of Wight. Last year he fell off, broke an ankle. He promptly ordered up a sedan chair and set out daily to tour the pubs like a Roman emperor, borne by two sturdy porters and accompanied by an umbrella-toting neighbor. Uffa’s friends and professional competitors tend to agree with one Cowes oldtimer: “Uffa’s a fine chap—a genius, none better—but, of course, he’s mad.”