The people’s boatbuilder
When boats were still made of wood rather than plastic, Hillyard built vessels for everyman
Back in the water again, and there are boats everywhere. There are the usual blacksailed rockets, weather rails crowded with eager speedfreaks, cranked up to an earthshattering 8.3 or even 8.4, lawdy! knots. There are the school boats and the charter boats, symphonies in white plastic with cockpits full of people much given to chaotic sail changes and slightly too much shouting.
Then there is a category with a more home-grown air – plenty of timber on show, coachroofs too high for elegance but splendid for headroom, and sail plans too low for speed but fine for ease of handling, towing oversized dinghies and perhaps with a dustbin full of beach toys strapped to the pushpit.
It is of this last category of boat that the late David Hillyard, founder of the famous firm of boatbuilders, is the unsung patron saint. Hillyard was born in the late 19th century, at the height of the Big Boat era. His family were stalwarts of the east coast village of Rowhedge, where the aristocratic owners of the enormous cutters dicing in the Solent sent their skippers to pick their racing crews of hard-bitten fishermen.
Yachts, in those days, were for the very rich, but the men who did the actual sailing were often the reverse. It is possible that it was a consciousness of this divide that led Hillyard – a devout Christian, descended from a long line of fishermen – and his successors in the firm to build boats that were robust, practical, and within the means of owners who did not have the advantage of dukedoms, armaments factories, or even, in the case of the ghastly Kaiser Wilhelm, empires.
The big boats have largely disappeared. But plenty of Hillyards are still around, waddling across seas and oceans more like farmyard ducks than ocean greyhounds, carrying families in their cosy wooden interiors. Hillyard realised that there are more miles in a duck than a greyhound. His designs were practical cruising boats, far removed from the beautiful but impractical beauties of the classical era, whose overhangs maximised waterline length but produced matchbox-sized interiors.
Hillyard sail plans are usually divided into easily-handled chunks, and do not need the professional attention of paid hands. Their accommodation was built familyfriendly. The pioneering combination of forepeak with or without bunks, saloon with settee berths, cockpit and probably aft cabin is a handy one. Slap the tinies up front, teddy bears and all, the slightly larger mob in the saloon, and a parent or two in the luxurious peace of the aft cabin; and away you go at a steady four-knot average, which if not rapid is at least continuous.
The Hillyard influence can still be seen in my Deep Seadog Dahlia, plenty of Hallberg-Rassys, and indeed in most family cruising boats built in the post-paidhand era. The idea was to bring cruising under sail within the reach of ordinary people, and that meant understanding what ordinary people actually needed.
David Hillyard himself was as innovative in his boatbuilding as in his designs. He started a sort of rudimentary production line, with off-the-peg hulls fitted out with variable layouts and rigs. Many of his customers were in it for life: starter boats for young families, more luxurious craft for the well-heeled prime of life, smaller, easily-managed boats for the sunset years.
Ordering a boat from his yard was a process that depended on the buyer trusting the builder, and the builder trusting the buyer, in terms not only of design but of money. By all accounts the level of trust was so high that sometimes no price was mentioned; and there is a record of Hillyard giving a purchaser a quote for a new boat before World War II and delivering it after the war, when inflation had taken a firm grip on the country, at the price originally quoted.
The Hillyard story is the subject of a new book by Nicholas Gray, published by Lodestar. It is a story that celebrates the more spacious age of wooden boatbuilding that preceded the GRP era, and in some ways founded it.
Hillyard’s disappeared in the 1970s after an unsuccessful flirtation with GRP; but the Hillyard legacy, and the philosophy of cruising of which David Hillyard was one of the founders, endures in creeks and harbours and off quiet, sunny beaches to this day.
‘There are more miles in a duck than a greyhound’