THE MAYFLOWER BLOSSOMS AGAIN
Former Daily Express man Warwick Charlton was a larger-than-life character who masterminded the building of a replica Pilgrim Fathers’ ship. As she sets sail once again, his nephew tells his incredible story . . .
BUILT by hand using painstakingly recreated blueprints by English shipbuilders using traditional tools and methods, Mayflower II was an exact replica of the original Pilgrim Fathers’ ship when she was launched in 1957.
Today, after a £6million refit, the vessel will be relaunched prior to taking pride of place in next year’s 400th anniversary celebrations of the 1620 voyage to the NewWorld.
She is the exact double of the square-rigged 183-ton merchant ship that took 102 passengers, many of them Puritans fleeing religious persecution, from Plymouth in Devon across the Atlantic to Cape Cod.
Mayflower II was built in 1957 and sailed to America thanks to the efforts of late Daily Express journalist Warwick Charlton, encouraged by his boss Lord Beaverbrook.
When, on her maiden voyage, she approached land off the coast of Massachusetts, she received a very different welcome to that of her namesake. After battling through storms for 65 days, the original Mayflower’s passengers faced dwindling food supplies, a potentially hostile indigenous population and the onset of winter.
By contrast, Mayflower II arrived in triumph. Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth, then the world’s largest passenger liner, serenely glided past and saluted.
The replica ship then sailed the last 30 miles into Plymouth, Massachusetts, escorted by a 200-strong flotilla of boats, while helicopters buzzed overhead and jets swooped low and loud.
On arrival, they were greeted by cheering crowds and welcomed ashore by vice president Richard Nixon, a young Massachusetts senator, John F Kennedy, and the wonderfully-named Henry Hornblower, of the local living history museum.
The crew became instant celebrities. American attempts to build a replica Mayflower had failed, but a motley collection of Englishmen, living in post-war Britain, had sailed an identical ship, down to the inkwells in the Captain’s cabin, across the Pond.
What’s more, it had been built using only 17th century tools.
MAYFLOWER II was the brainchild of ex-Army officer and journalist, Warwick Charlton, who was also my uncle – and what an uncle.
Warwick was just 13 when his journalist father died and he and his sister were raised by their mother, Birdie. Although a single woman of limited means, she somehow managed to maintain an apartment on the elegant Champs
Elysées in Paris. There she entertained such oddballs as the Duc de Guise, pretender to the French throne, and Prince Yusupov, one of Rasputin’s assassins.
Eventually Birdie married the Honourable Nigel Hughes-Onslow, a nephew of the Earl of Onslow.
Warwick had a natural gift of conjuring up a story out of nothing, and a flair for public relations. This became apparent when this newspaper ran his front-page story after war was declared in 1939, which began: “What will I tell my war baby son? Will he know who Hitler was?Will he care?”
Early in 1939, Warwick had enlisted as a private in the Royal Fusiliers. Within months he had been selected for officer training.
Posted to Cairo, he published poems, which caught the eye of Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, who was setting up a North African intelligence unit. He asked Warwick to start a news service. His protege enthusiastically printed newspapers, often on stolen presses.
When Field Marshall (then General) Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army, Warwick had him photographed in a tank, holding binoculars and persuaded him to swap his peaked officer’s cap for a regular soldier’s beret. The picture was published worldwide. When Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini was hanged, Warwick wrote one of the best wartime headlines: “Benito Finito”.
His irreverent articles, some bordering on revolutionary, did not endear him to his superiors back in London.
At one point, when one of Whitehall’s military chiefs visited, he was disgusted to find Warwick publishing the Tripoli Times from a brothel.
Many were seduced by this larger-than-life figure’s wartime and Fleet Street exploits. His height, good looks and marvellous baritone voice captivated almost every woman that he came across.
Aged about 16, while my parents were holidaying in Spain, I bolted from my temporary guardian’s home and turned up in London at Warwick’s Marylebone flat. He promptly installed me in a nearby penthouse apartment, across the road from a casino. Its “tenants” were a troupe of long-legged, scantily clad, vivacious young ladies.
I thought that I’d landed in teen-Heaven.
When Easy Rider hit the screens a year later, I enlisted Warwick’s help to successfully persuade my father to buy me a motorbike.
Warwick’s experience in the war left him in no doubt about the American contribution to victory. Their superior Sherman tanks, which changed the course of the
North Africa campaign, and their Liberty ships’ protection of the British Fleet, led to a feeling we owed the US a huge debt of gratitude. This sowed the seeds of what would become Project Mayflower.
After the war, Warwick was crossing to England aboard an American ship and, bored, he began reading a book, Of Plimoth Plantation, written by one of the original Mayflower’s passengers, William Bradford.
It was this that inspired Warwick to start Project Mayflower to build an exact, working replica. By the time his passenger ship docked in Southampton, it was under way.
At the time, Warwick was working for newspapers, magazines and the BBC, and had become friends with Lord Beaverbrook, a powerful press baron, and the then proprietor of this newspaper.
While Beaverbrook enthusiastically encouraged Warwick’s plan to build a replica Mayflower, he did not finance the project. Undeterred, Warwick set to work, despite knowing nothing about boatbuilding, and having no money or even a bank account.
HE SET about his mission with zeal and a healthy dollop of true grit. He begged and borrowed enough cash to get the project under way, running up large debts in the process.
Despite all the hurdles, the ship sailed from Plymouth on April 20, 1957, with a 33-man crew relying on sextants and wind power, shunning modern navigational aids.
The 54-day voyage was relatively
uneventful, despite Warwick’s insistence that Captain Alan Villiers turn off the ship’s radio, in order to boost public interest about what was going on at sea. He needn’t have bothered.
The Press enthusiastically covered the voyage of the little wooden ship as it pluckily took on the mighty Atlantic.
Warwick had always intended the ship to be a gift to the American people, but Henry Hornblower had other ideas. He distrusted Warwick, believing him to be a chancer.
This became apparent as soon as they stepped ashore. The crew had all been assigned local families to stay with but Warwick had no accommodation. Eventually he slept in a local museum.
Despite doing TV interviews and a series of popular lecture tours in the US, he was haunted by debt. Even so, he signed over his only asset, Mayflower II, to Hornblower and his Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum recreating to this day the Pilgrims’ original 1627 home. At that point, it consisted of no more than a couple of huts. But Mayflower II changed the fortunes of both the Massachusetts town of Plymouth and its museum, making them a tourist mecca. By 2017 more than 25 million visitors had walked the ship’s decks.
But Warwick returned to the UK and filed for bankruptcy. True to form, when he died in 2002 aged 84, he still had no bank account.
I had the privilege of sailing on Mayflower II out of Plymouth in America, as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations in 2007.
Some of the 1957 crew were on board and told salty tales of Warwick’s maritime exploits.
Before returning to the Plymouth in the US next year, Mayflower II will join the 1797 USS Constitution, America’s oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat, tol sail into Boston harbour together. Sadly, there are no plans for her to sail to the UK.
Warwick’s son Randal told me: “With his love of history, my father would have been very proud to have his little ship sail next to such illustrious company.” Amen to that.
●●The Wicked Pilgrim by Warwick’s eldest son, Randal Charlton, tells the story of his father and Mayflower II and is published to coincide with the launch. See thewickedpilgrim.com for more details.