LONE SURVIVOR
Dorian is one of the few surviving boats to have served in both world wars, now after a decade-long renovation she’s ready to serve again as a comfortable family motor yacht
The extraordinary story of how a World War 1 rowing launch and Dunkirk Little Ship was transformed from a rotting wreck into a comfortable motor cruiser
igel Walters never set out to buy a classic motor yacht, let alone one with a history as long and distinguished as Dorian’s. Until recently any spare time and money that wasn’t devoted to work and family commitments went on his passion for classic British sportscars. Admittedly, he had grown up around boats, learning to sail in a Mirror dinghy aged nine then graduating to racier Enterprises and Fireballs as a teenager before buying his own Seal 22 pocket cruiser as a young man, but married life, a move to Bedfordshire and the arrival of three children left no free time for boating. It wasn’t until the mid ’90s, by which time their oldest daughter was 14 and their youngest six, that he and his wife Lyn made the mistake of visiting the Bedford River festival and chanced across a secondhand Sea Ray sportsboat for sale.
“It had a 7.5-litre V8 petrol engine and was totally inappropriate for river use,” says Nigel. “But it looked great so we bought it on a whim.”
It may not have been ideally suited to river life but the family loved it and they ended up keeping it for 10 years despite its increasingly recalcitrant drivetrain.
“It became so unreliable that a weekend without a breakdown wasn’t a proper weekend,” recalls Lyn. But when the driveshaft broke, leaving them stranded miles from home, she finally cracked and insisted they get rid of it.
Lyn then remembered a Sheerline 950 she had fallen in love with at the London Boat Show some eight years earlier, when they had both been indulging their boating dreams, she in the riverboat section, whilst Nigel had wandered off to look at Fairlines and Princesses. An on-line search revealed that the 2008 Southampton Boat Show Sheerline was up for sale nearby. Nigel agreed it was better suited to the inland waterways around Bedford than a planing sportscruiser and signed on the dotted line. They still have the Sheerline today and there the story would have ended were it not for the release of the movie Dunkirk in 2017.
Nigel had recently lost his mother and was looking for a project that would keep his widowed father busy. His original plan was to buy and restore a classic car with him but when that idea fell on deaf ears, he decided to switch tack.
DUNKIRK SPIRIT
“We had just been to the cinema to watch Dunkirk and I was so inspired by the story of what the little ships had done that I decided to Google ‘Dunkirk Little Ships’. I was astounded to find that three of these remarkable craft were currently for sale. When I mentioned it to my father and suggested we go and take a look at one, he was immediately grabbed by the idea.
“The first one we looked at was immaculate but too small for what we needed – a 32-footer from the 1930s has nothing like the accommodation of a modern 30-footer. We looked at another larger one and took it for a test run but couldn’t turn it around, even on a wide stretch of the Thames. We got as far as
Dorian
having a survey done on the third one before deciding it needed too much work.”
As part of the research process Nigel also contacted the Dunkirk Little Ships Restoration Trust (DLSRT), a charity set up in 1993 to help rescue surviving boats that were in danger of being lost altogether. It doesn’t have the resources to restore them fully but by starting the process with the aid of donations, grants and dozens of willing volunteers, it has been able to find new owners willing to take them on and fund the completion of 16 Dunkirk
Little Ships to date.
Needless to say, it turned out that the trust had a boat in refit at the time, and a particularly unusual one at that. Dorian was one of only a handful of Dunkirk Little Ships to have served in both World Wars. Built in Portsmouth as a Royal Navy pulling launch in 1915, she was originally an open rowing vessel manned by 38 sailors. She would have been used to ferry men and supplies to and from the warships out in the harbour, leaving the steam powered pinnaces to cope with heavier duties. After the war she was fitted with a petrol engine but it wasn’t until the 1930s that she was sold into private ownership and converted into a gentleman’s motoryacht with the aid of raised topsides, a covered deck and a small wheelhouse.
At the outbreak of the Second World War she was requisitioned to take part in Operation Dynamo as one of the hundreds of little ships used to help evacuate allied forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. She served out the remainder of the war as a harbour patrol launch in Chichester before being sold back into private ownership in 1946. A succession of owners followed, who cruised her around the UK and Europe before she finally came to rest on the Thames, where she gradually lapsed into use as a house boat, including a spell as a religious retreat.
The final twist in the tale occurred in 2003, when Dorian was back in use as a private house boat on Ash Island near Hampton Court Palace. A 24-year-old woman was living on her at the time and had returned to the boat after celebrating her brother’s 21st birthday the night before. Tragically, at some point that evening a fire broke out on board, resulting in the death of the young girl and a gas explosion that completely destroyed the wheelhouse and much of the interior. The terrible events of that night left a family bereaved and a historic ship largely destroyed. What was left of her hull was lifted ashore and there she stayed for the next eight years in a quiet corner of a boatyard, slowly being lost to the ravages of time. It wasn’t until 2011 that the DLSRT, fearful of losing her altogether, stepped in and purchased what was left of her for the princely sum of £1.
Carefully lifted onto a lorry and transported to the trust’s shared workshop in Southampton, it was touch and go whether they’d even manage to get her into the shed in one piece. “She was in a terrible state, as wobbly as a jelly,” recalls Jerry Lewis, chairman of the DLSRT. “It was only because she was so heavily built for naval use that she managed to survive intact.”
VOLUNTARY SERVICE
Over the next eight years the trust gradually started piecing her together again, steaming in new oak ribs and beams and painstakingly restoring or replacing the double diagonal teak planking that made her so robust in the first place. A final layer of epoxy was added to seal her permanently and ensure any new owner wouldn’t have to spend a fortune in ongoing maintenance. A new pitch pine deck was laid using donated floor boards from an old church, and a 92hp Perkins diesel engine was sourced to power her. Remarkably all of this was done by 40-50 volunteers, many of them retired craftsmen, who turned up every Tuesday and Thursday come rain or shine to practise their skills in the company of other like-minded people.
By the time Nigel and Lyn heard about the project in late 2017, she had begun to look like a proper boat again, albeit one with a largely empty interior and unfinished wheelhouse.
Lyn wasn’t convinced they should take on such a big unfinished project but Nigel could see its potential. Buying into it at this stage would allow them to create an interior that really worked for them, especially when fitted out with all the mod cons to make it a genuinely comfortable family cruising boat.
“Having carte blanche to do what we wanted with the interior while still having the expertise and guidance of the trust to help complete the project seemed like the ideal solution,” says Nigel.
Nigel’s first decision after committing to the project was to redesign the aft end. He was adamant that he wanted an external helm station as well as the fully enclosed wheelhouse and was concerned that the current aft cabin was simply too small to make a comfortable bolthole for the pair of them away from the grandchildren’s cabin up forward. His
she managed to survive