1936 THELAS MOTOR YACHT
Meet ‘Thelas’, the historic yacht that captured the heart of one of Italy’s most prominent car collectors
On the water in a classic pre-war craft
She is beautiful. Even from a distance, she makes you stop and stare. The lines, the curves: everything attracts your attention. The closer you get, the better she is: so refined, every detail adding to an almost perfect whole. She is not young, and neither has she lived an easy life: this Second World War veteran, still capable of stealing the show from much younger sisters, turns 85 this year. That’s a respectable age for any object, still more so for a steel-and-wood motor yacht. The 48-tonne, 68ft (21m) Thelas was designed by the celebrated English naval architect Norman Hart and manufactured in the Netherlands at the Amsterdamsche Scheepswerf, an Amsterdam shipyard founded by the Olympic sailor Gerard de Vries Lentsch and which still exists. The boat was named by the first owner in celebration of his children, Thelma and Douglas, and was the first of a series of ten built.
That first owner was Percy Newsome Hirst, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1887 to the British industrialist Joseph Newsome Hirst, who had moved to South America to develop his business in wool and yarns. Among Newsome Hirst Snr’s customers were several British public entities, including the Royal Mail and various railway companies. As for Percy Newsome Hirst, he came back to England and established a knitwear company in Batley, Yorkshire, called The Lady Ann Mills. ‘Mr Percy was certainly a man of taste,’ says Francesco Foppiano, the Italian nautical historian and yacht specialist who directed the final part of the Thelas restoration and researched its commissioning owner.
‘In 1934 he bought a Rolls-Royce 20/25 saloon by Rippon Brothers and, soon after, Thelas, a motor yacht with a clean-cut profile, big windows for the saloon and a sunken wheelhouse bridging the engine room,’ he says. ‘It was a classic, balanced, refined and elegant design, but with a lot of modernity inside, being specified with a generator, a Frigidaire refrigerator, a Calor gas cooker and water heater, plus the advanced feature, for the period, of the engine controls set back on the bridge. It was a perfect symbol of English style for a gentleman, an owner who could live on his boat without concerns about its speed. Already, even then, the most powerful yachts were equipped with engines developing 1000hp.’
The result earned a two-page feature in the 24 July 1936 issue of Yachting World and Motor Boating Journal , in which several technical specifications were reported and the internal layouts shown. From that report we learn that the decks, hatches, deckhouse and skylights are all made of teak and that there was a 12ft motor dinghy carried aft and hoisted by means of a boom and a small winch on the mainmast. We also know that the exhaust discharged well below the surface of the water, making for little fuss, no noise and no dirty marks along the ship’s side. The route and timing of her maiden passage were reported as taking 11hr 50min, with a ten-knot cruising speed, from the Netherlands coastal harbor of IJmuiden near Amsterdam to the British resort town of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. From there, Thelas proceeded to her base at Keadby via the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation.
‘We were lucky with our research,’ says Foppiano. ‘We contacted Percy Newsome Hirst’s two surviving nephews,
both born in 1918 and living in British Columbia, Canada. Jack Miles and Dick Moreno have fond memories of the ship in its pre- and post-war years. They even remember something we did not know existed, a “Golden Berger of Europe trophy”, reserved for the most elegant yacht and assigned to Thelas in Paris, where the boat went in the late 1930s to collect it, docking on the Seine.’
As with every other English ship, Thelas was put on duty for World War Two. She escaped a role in the Dunkirk evacuation because she was docked too far north, but saw action in the D-Day landings. On 6 June 1944 Thelas was the Admiral’s Barge in the Sword Beach landing by Force-S, one of 6939 vessels that took part on that heroic day. ‘When we carried out an extensive check of Thelas, we found the bottom of the prow was still dented, damage that most likely happened when Thelas was grounded on the sand of Sword Beach at the end of D-Day to bring ashore the Admiral,’ says Foppiano. ‘That was her purpose during the mission.’
After the war, Thelas was returned – in (mostly) pristine condition – to its owner, and went back to her civilian role of family cruiser. Jack Miles, born in Argentina on 6 March 1918, is the son of Percy Newsome Hirst’s sister and in 1941 enlisted as a C-47 Dakota pilot in the RAF – his first time in the UK. ‘Thelas was moored at Stainforth, just three miles from Doncaster, and I spent a couple of nights sleeping on board,’ he remembers. ‘I was then deployed to the Indo-Chinese area, totalling about 11,500 flight hours, and was decorated for an emergency landing, with no casualties, on 15 September 1945. I was on Thelas several times during those years, and attended several parties on board. Once I had to help Thelma’s husband, an engineer named George, to fix an electrical issue on one of the two Gardner engines.’
‘She was in need of love and attention, but I felt she had something to say’ CORRADO LOPRESTO
Dick Moreno, son of another sister, was also born in Argentina in 1918, and has a similar story – yet he is even more attached to Thelas as he spent his first night with his future wife on board. ‘I was enlisted in the RAF, flying Lancaster bombers in missions over Europe, and I spent a lot of my free time there, living on board. Often I was not alone… Jack and I lived as brothers.’
The two had planned to leave Buenos Aires on board the Upwey Grange, a cargo ship heading to the UK. Destiny had a different plan as Jack was hurt in a road accident while driving to Dick’s house, ending up in hospital. And so both missed the ship – a ship that never reached London. It was sunk by a German U-Boat in 1940; of 86 on board, 50 survived.
Back in its civil role, was put to good use by its owner on the Caledonian Canal and Loch Ness until the mid-1950s, when Percy Newsome Hirst passed away.
Thelas was then brought to the Mediterranean and sold to a Belgian perfume manufacturing firm. ‘As with classic cars, there is a moment in life when comes the risk of being crushed or altered,’ says Foppiano. ‘With Thelas, this happened in the early 1960s, when the 25-year-old yacht was sold in Italy and, rather than being restored, was modernised, made to look younger. From an historical prospective, it was a disaster, but it helped save her. During those works, a bulwark was added and the two masts were replaced with a less beautiful single one. She was moored in Italy, near Rome, owned by a manager of the public television service who renamed her Paloma, then by a hotelier who kept her for many years and put her back in use under the name. Shortly before selling her, he installed the modern Cummins engines.’
This is when Italian architect and classic car collector Corrado Lopresto bought her. ‘It was in 2009 that