by Jane Fryer
BoATBuILdeR, sailor, adventurer and designer James Wharram was a man of multifarious interests who approached life very differently from the rest of us.
He was obsessed with Polynesian fishing boats. Apart from sailing, he loved politics, reading — and strong, clever, independent women. And he was never the sort to tie himself down to just one life partner.
‘Many men are in need of two women in their lives, one to complement the other,’ he told the Sunday Pictorial newspaper in 1959. ‘Many are like myself and are capable of walking the tightrope of human relationships necessary to do it.’
He was something of a celebrity at the time — frequently in the papers and on television with Sir edmund Hillary in New York — because, three years earlier, he had made the 3,000-mile journey from the Canaries to the West Indies in a flimsy, 23ft, plywood and glue, double-sided canoe called Tangaroa. It was named after the Polynesian god of the fish and sea, and he had designed and built it in a barn near Manchester Airport.
No GPS in those days, of course, nor did he take a chart-plotter; no state-ofthe-art gear. Nothing, really, that Christopher Columbus wouldn’t have used centuries before.
He took very few clothes (‘What’s the point when they get ripped off by the wind all the time’); more than 200 books, from Plato to thrillers; 300 lb of wheat and oats; 70 lb of discounted dates; and two coffee grinders.
Ah, yes, and not forgetting his small, perfectly-formed crew, which included a terrier called Pepe and two freshfaced, frequently-naked German girls — Jutta Schultze-Rhonhof, 18, and Ruth Merseburger, 30 — who doubled as cook, navigator, bosun, helmsman, hairdresser and below-deck lovers.
‘They are both in love with me and I love them. If I could marry them both, I would do it tomorrow but, sadly, it is not allowed,’ said James, who has just died aged 93 after an epic life of free love on the ocean wave.
So instead, they lived, and sailed, as a joyous nautical ménage à trois — the first of a series of similar arrangements that stretched happily through James’s wonderfully rich life.
Sometimes, like Jutta and Ruth, there were just the two ladies. Later, there were as many as five, who jokingly nicknamed him ‘His Lordship’. All were bright, boatmad, strong, attractive and worked alongside him in his world-famous boat design business. Between them, they provided James with two adored sons, ganged up on him when he was annoying and laughed a lot. Somehow, it worked — for all parties.
‘We were both in love with this man and we were both happy and great friends,’ wrote Jutta and Ruth. ‘We were sharing not so much a man as an idea — and a life of freedom and achievement. We were never jealous.’
It is a sentiment mirrored more than 60 years on by Hanneke Boon, a fellow boat designer and his final surviving life partner and soulmate, who spoke to the Mail this week from her home in Cornwall.
‘He was open and honest and appreciative of every woman for her own qualities. He never made one of us feel left out,’ she says. ‘Because it was always based on respect and openness and having a common aim and goal — building and sailing boats together. We had a goal we all worked on.’
Though on top of all that, James did, of course, have something else. Tall, strongminded and charismatic, with enormous feet, he had a zing, a spark, and a magnetism, according to Hanneke.
‘Yes, he was attractive. Physically, he was light and strong. He was true and honest to his ideals and he was sexually strong as well, so there was no problem that he had several women. That just gave him more vigour and strength,’ she says.
But for now, back to the winter of 1956, his epic voyage on Tangaroa with his crew of gutsy fräuleins.
For five long weeks, they wrestled towering waves, violent storms, and a marine termite that gobbled through a large section of the flimsy hull.
‘Time and again, death seemed certain as our tiny craft was hurled about like a cockleshell in the mountainous rollers,’ James later recounted.
But they baled furiously, clung to each other and, whenever the sun appeared, lolled luxuriously naked.
Jutta, despite terrible seasickness, did the catering on a spirit cooker; Ruth, the navigating. They took turns to polish the deck, and goodness knows what else — and very happy they all were, too.
And when, finally, five weeks later, the boat was ripped to pieces on a reef off the coast of Trinidad, the girls stripped off and paddled to shore on rafts accompanied by a shoal of sharks, while James set off with a sharp knife in search of coconuts on another raft.
‘We were a very special sort of family,’ said Jutta. ‘Sex was only a tiny part of our very full lives and virtually unimportant, but we were two women and one man.’
And even in those teeny cabins, barely the size of an upended wardrobe, it did happen. Because soon, it transpired that Jutta’s seasickness was morning sickness and son Hannes was later born in Trinidad, where they lived in a bamboo raft house they built themselves.
All of which caused quite a ripple among the snooty sailing fraternity, who were already ruffled by James’s blunt comments about boat design — and his northern accent.
Some were outraged, others resentful and churlish — putting Tangaroa’s epic voyage down to wind ‘drift’.
Many were just downright jealous. After all, as James’s mother once put it: ‘They did
‘They are both in love with me and I love them’