BOAT SURVEYOR PLANS BIKE TREK
After more than 20 years as a marine surveyor, 58-year-old Trevor Whitling is taking early retirement to ride his beloved 1977 Royal Enfield motorcycle back to the factory in southern India where it was originally built. Then he plans a retirement of boat restorations – any boats as long as they are made of wood, and are NOT narrowboats! Tim Coghlan talks to Trevor about his life and plans.
TREVOR Whitling was born in Swansea in 1961 into a family with strong nautical traditions.
His grandfather and seven of his cousins had been in the Royal Navy, some seeing active service in the Second World War.
Trevor’s father was too young for war service and a landlubber by trade, but he still enjoyed family leisure boating. He was taught to sail during school holidays by his grandfather out of Lymington, on the Solent near Southampton, where the old man lived in retirement. There were also family sailing holidays on the Norfolk Broads with his parents and grandparents.
Not long after Trevor was born, the family moved to the Medway in Kent, where he was brought up in view of the River Medway and enjoyed an active time with the local Sea Scouts. Then his parents began to take an interest in the growing revival of the canals for leisure use and in 1972, when Trevor was 11, they hired their first narrowboat for the family holiday, which was repeated in subsequent years around the then-navigable network. The canals were now in Trevor’s blood.
In 1979, Trevor enrolled at the Marine Engineering College of Southampton College of Higher
Education – now the University of Southampton – on a four-year course, in which he was funded by the major shipping company P&O, with which he completed the year’s practical training at sea included in the course.
On qualifying, Trevor became a junior marine engineer on the P&O container fleet. His main voyages, which he did in all about 12 times, were to Australia and New Zealand, taking goods from northern Europe – the UK, Holland and Germany. The route out was mainly via the Cape of Good Hope, following the old wool-clippers run, which benefited from the favourable ocean current and winds in the Southern Ocean – and no Suez Canal tolls.
But Trevor also went through the Suez Canal about four or five of those 12 times, loading cargoes in the ‘Medi’ as he called it, to deliver to Fremantle in Western Australia. The ships would then load meat in refrigerated containers to bring back to Europe, via Cape Horn, again following the clipper route, but sometimes returning by the route out. On average these Australasian voyages would take about 12 weeks.
In all Trevor rounded the dreaded Cape Horn eight times. The first time he saw this extreme southern point of South America, the ship made its passage in a dead calm, and as it passed the lighthouse high on the island to port, he wondered what all the fuss was about.
But on a later voyage, aboard the 60,000-ton P&O container ship Mairangi Bay, it was very different. In the Drake’s Passage, the vessel took the full force of a southeasterly hurricane coming out of the Antarctic. The captain was left with no option but to heave-to, and with the engines put in tickover, to point the bow into the teeth of the gale.
After three days the wind eased, and the ship was able to resume its homeward-bound journey.
Trevor served 16 years with
P&O, experiencing a variety of other voyages, also including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. But he never visited North America nor passed through the Panama Canal. He qualified as a chief engineer, but never served as one, as he did not serve long enough afterwards and retired as a second engineer.
In 1995, aged 34, our sailor decided to leave the sea to a more settled life ashore as a narrowboat marine engineer.
A factor in this decision was that in about 1987, his parents had bought a second-hand 45ft narrowboat, Rambler, the hull for which had been built in 1983/4 by the then-prolific narrowboat hull builders Hancock & Lane of
Daventry, near Braunston.
Many of those boats were fitted out by Aubrey Berriman and team at what was then the Ladyline operation at Braunston Marina, but Rambler went somewhere up north. The boat was moored there when purchased and then later moved to the fairly new marina at Fenny Compton on the Oxford Canal, and then the Lea & Stort, before moving it to Braunston Marina in early 1988.
Rambler was therefore at the marina which was in a somewhat sorry state when I acquired it from its receivers in October 1988. The boat continued to moor with me for a few years afterwards. Inspired by his parents’ purchase, in 1988/9 Trevor bought a 23ft Springer Waterbug with a Honda 10hp outboard from Sam Springer at his factory at Market Harborough, to use on leave. This he kept at Weltonfields Marina.
Then in 1991 he bought a former wooden working 1936 BCN Tug as a restoration project, which he first moored at Braunston Marina for four years. It was because of this that I first met him during those early years when he was on leave from sea.
Trevor also met my selfemployed mechanic Aidan (Mac) Macadam, whom I had taken on shortly after I had acquired the marina. Mac left me in about 1993 to set up his own business in the dry docks at Hillmorton, taking a lease on the dry docks and workshops and the half dozen or so adjacent moorings.
The result of all of this was that when Trevor left P&O in 1995, he bought himself a modern estate house in Crick, and went to work as a self-employed marine engineer with Mac at Hillmorton for two years. He took the view that narrowboat engines and their equipment were no more of a challenge than the ships’ lifeboats he had been required to maintain to the highest standards.
He was attracted to narrowboat surveying, where he perceived there was a shortage of surveyors to service the growing market in second-hand narrowboats. There was also now a call for surveying boats under construction, as their build specifications, to include modern equipment, were growing exponentially, and not all boatbuilders were building to professional standards. And associated with this, prices were now sometimes breaching the £100,000 mark.
This huge growth in demand for narrowboats – in some ways fuelled by the early retirement packages being offered to the Baby Boomers in the 1990s postBlack Friday layoffs – was met in part by a substantial growth in narrowboat production in the last decade.
Springer Engineering – later a victim of that recession – was alone then producing more than three boats a week of varying lengths. At the budget end of larger boats, supply was helped by the massive sell-off of hire boat fleets as UK holidays went into decline from where they had been in the 1970s-early ’80s, with the lifting of exchange controls on foreign holidays.
Buyers needed pre-purchase surveys, and there just weren’t enough surveyors. This was made particularly so following the untimely death in 1998 of Don Inglis, another ex-merchant navy man, who had so dominated the central Midlands surveying market in the 1980s and ’90s, and was regularly surveying two narrowboats a day. Of Glaswegian origins, this tall man would arrive in his blue Mercedes wearing clean white overalls, beneath which he wore a white shirt and blue tie and navy blue jersey. At 6ft 2in, he was known affectionately in the trade as ‘Wee Don!’
By the end of 1995, Trevor began actively looking to move on, and he came to see me. He also visited Tim Langer, whose Canal Craft business was then in full bore at Bugbrooke, and Whilton Marina. I said I would happily use his services whenever he was ready.
A further incentive for Trevor to enter the world of surveying was the reintroduction in 1997 of the Boat Safety Scheme, which had first been introduced in 1991, jointly by British Waterways and the Environment Agency. It followed some horrific deaths from gas explosions, particularly on liveaboard boats.
Having decided something had to be done – with everyone agreeing except the RYA, who saw this as another backdoor attack on the freedom of boaters – the navigation authorities went to the other extreme.
There was only token consultation with the trade, including marine surveyors who would have to implement the scheme. The ill-considered measures laid down would be very expensive for boaters to implement, and especially hard on those on retirement incomes.
After about two years, the scheme was summarily withdrawn and there followed a few years when no safety scheme existed at all but in 1997 a new scheme – a much ‘watered down’ one – was produced with the support of the surveyors.
Having decided to become a qualified marine surveyor in that year, with some 30,000 boats on the waterways now needing a Boat Safety Scheme certificate, Trevor had chosen his timing to perfection.
In those days, to become a narrowboat surveyor, you had to have insurance, and to obtain insurance you needed to become a qualified member of the Institute of Marine Engineers. Exemption from the exams was given to qualified marine engineers from the merchant navy and elsewhere, which applied in Trevor’s case. The only additional training he was required to do was a threeday gas course, which he took at Evesham College, which made him a qualified gas engineer.
Trevor now made his formal application to the institute and was accepted. The insurance was then put in place, and in about early 1997 he was in business. He only needed a good secretary to run his office.
This came out of the blue, when in 1997 he met Sue – the sister of his next-door neighbour in Crick – when she was on a visit. Like Trevor she was born in Swansea, but still lived there. She was a keen sailor and also liked motorcycles. Sharing so many interests, they were soon married and quickly after that had two children.
Based at Trevor’s house in Crick, with a room converted to an office, Sue was Trevor’s anchor point, giving him enormous support with the business, with Trevor unable to be contacted most of the time, out there somewhere crawling under boats, and with no phone signal.
Over the years as the technology changed from fax to emails, desk publishing and the internet, she moved with the times, typing Trevor’s survey reports. Trevor commented that she could read his scribbled notes better than he could, and interpret his Dictaphone dictations – done in docks of all shapes and descriptions – some which should not have been called ‘dry’.
Over the next 20-plus years, they worked at it, with Trevor at his peak carrying out four pre-purchase or hull surveys a week, plus Boat Safety Scheme inspections. He wondered just how many thousand boats he had surveyed, on several occasions more than once – one boat he knew he had surveyed six times.
Where some dread the prospect of retirement, Trevor has taken to it with the energy and enthusiasm of a child released into the playground after a long session in the classroom. He has started with home improvements – something he says he never had time for in his surveying days.
Online classes
Sue, meanwhile, has set up an exercise-to-music group in a shed they have converted next door to the village sports pavilion. During the coronavirus self-isolation, she has run her classes online, attracting paying customers from as far afield as America and New Zealand. She has also for some years been a great raiser of funds for charity – especially Breast Cancer Research, for which she has raised more than £37,000.
Trevor’s first major plan for his retirement was to have ridden his 1977 Royal Enfield motorcycle from England to the factory in Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India where the motorcycle was built. He was to have left on August 15, in the company of three other Royal Enfield owners on a journey that would have taken them across northern Europe, Russia, the ’Stans and China, and then across the Himalayas to Nepal where Sue would have joined Trevor in Katmandu – to ride pillion for the remainder of the journey.
The trip has now been postponed until August 2021, and will be dedicated to the memory of a former fellow Royal Enfield enthusiast who recently died of cancer. It is intended to raise sponsorship in his memory for cancer research.
Beyond the home-makeover and that land-passage to India, Trevor intends to return to playing with boats. His wooden BCN 1936 tug Progress, which he restored, was sold in 2011 after he had owned it for 20 years. In tandem with that boat he had purchased the Eland in 2005, which was a horse-drawn iron narrowboat with a wooden keel, built in about 1850, which he likewise restored. It was sold in 2012 to Sue Day and the Horse Boat Society, which he thought was the right place for it to go.
Then in 2012 he bought Perfect Lady, a Norfolk Broads sailing yacht with a Bermudan rig, originally built in 1936 as number five of 10 for a hire fleet. Trevor has carried out a total restoration, bringing the boat by road to Baxter’s Yard near Cosgrove on the Grand Union Canal to make it easier for him to work on in his spare time. He still owns the boat and he and Sue enjoy sailing her together on the Norfolk Broads. “Nobody knows me there. I’m just another boat-bloke.”
Trevor is now looking at other possible wooden boat restoration projects, including the last wooden ferry in Scotland, which is now out of use and in need of saving.
But of one thing he is certain – it won’t be a narrowboat. Like his time at sea, his canal days are now part of his past.