Lone adventurer who sailed the globe
HE cheated death so many times between 1949 and 1951 to become the first person to sail both ways across the Atlantic single-handedly, it’s a wonder Edward Allcard ever took to the open seas again.
In his first book, Single-handed Passage, about his 81-day voyage from Gibraltar to New York and his follow-up about the return leg, Temptress Returns, Allcard faced sharks, gales and hurricanes, was knocked unconscious and suffered several cracked ribs and broken bones, not to mention finding a 23-year-old Azorean woman, Otilia Frayao, had stowed away on his 35ft wooden ketch, Temptress.
After 34 days Frayao was put ashore in Casablanca but the pair remained friends and when Allcard turned 95, Frayao and her husband joined in the celebrations.
Born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, Edward Cecil Allcard was the son of Rupert, a stockbroker who had coxed the Cambridge crew in the 1905 Boat Race and his wife Helen. He was already sailing by the age of six and at 12 his grandfather gave him a 15-foot dinghy which he sailed along the Thames to the sea.
He graduated from Eton College and while continuing his studies at Chillon College on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, he coxed the school’s boat to a number of victories. After apprenticeships in Scotland’s shipbuilding yards, Allcard became a naval architect. Poor eyesight disqualified him from serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War so he worked in the Air Ministry, supervising the building and testing of air-rescue craft.
Allcard made his first solo voyage in 1939, from Scotland to Norway and back. His Atlantic crossing followed a decade later, after which he sailed single-handed around the world via Cape Horn. It was an adventure that took him 16 years, from 1957 to 1973, to complete, culminating in two books Voyage Alone and Solo Around Cape Horn.
“I’m not looking for something,” he told The Sunday Express in the late 1960s. “I’m just living.” In 1967 he met Clare Thompson, 31 years his junior, who had read about his exploits in our sister newspaper.
She wrote to him begging to be taken on as crew and within weeks joined him in the Seychelles where romance blossomed. In 1969 Clare gave birth to their daughter, Kate.
The couple married four years later and along with Kate spent the next 20 years sailing the Caribbean, Europe, the Seychelles and the Far East before returning to Europe and settling down in Andorra.
Allcard, who quit sailing at 91, is survived by Clare, Kate and another daughter, Dona, from a previous marriage. The cause of death was complications from a broken leg.