Classic Boat
Power Dressing
After a 20-year restoration, the 1903 C&N motor yacht Romola, dressed with her auxiliary sails, is now wowing the crowds in the Med. Nic Compton talks to her dedicated owner.
There was a time when just owning a classic sailing yacht was enough to make you stand out from the crowd, and there's no denying that the mere sight of a set of varnished spars in amon a forest of aluminium sticks is likely to get the heart pumping a little faster. Yet, when I visited the Voiles d'Antibes in May, it seemed to me that the star of the show wasn't a sailboat at all. There was Tuiga, in all her long-limbed elegance, Moonbeam looking as serene as ever, and Cambria with her new, impossibly-tall-looking wooden mast. But while the sailboats thrust their lengths of wood about in ever-more spectacular ways, most visitors were inexorably drawn to the long white motor yacht moored slightly off to one side. Perhaps it was because she looked so different, or maybe it's just that there are so few superbly restored classic motor yachts on the circuit, but the old yacht very nearly stole the show. What's more, anyone tempted to dismiss her as a 'soul-less motor boat' would have been very mistaken, for the yacht's history is as rich and personal as anything any of the sailboats could conjour up.
Romola was designed by Charles Nicholson as a steam yacht and built at the Camper & Nicholson yard in Gosport in 1903. Her first owner, Anthony Sanderson, cruisted her extensively, including a 1,568 mile trip to the Baltic - during which she consumed 25 tonnes of coal - and a four-month round-Britain voyage via the Caledonian Canal. This spirit of adventure is remembered to this day in the Romola Cup, awarded annually by the Royal Cruising Club 'for an outstanding cruise of any duration' and including among its alumni the likes of Claud Worth, Henry Denham, Nigel Warington Smyth and, more recently, Helen Tew.
In 1912 the yacht was taken back to C&N and converted to petrol and paraffin and soon after sold to the Earl of Morton, a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes. There, she caught the eye of the yacht club commodore, Sir Ralph St. Gore Bt, who persuaded the Earl to part with her. Sir Ralph owned Romola for several years before selling her on to Fred May, one of the pioneers of power-boat racing. Details of her history after this time become a little foggy, but she eventually turned up in a bedraggled state on the west coast of Scoltand sometime in the 1970s.
By then the years of neglect had taken their toll and, with her leaky deck and gradually disintegrating structure, her own struggled to even keep her afloat. His solution was nothing if not ingenious and consisted of setting up a pump on her aft deck, filling it with diesel and leaving it running until it ran out of fuel. Inevitably, however, one week the owner didn't turn up and the engine wasn't filled up and Romola sank. It was the first of several sinkings. A few weeks later she was raised by some local divers and sold to the owner of a nearby caravan park, whose wife soon dubbed the yacht 'Thrombola' because 'she was nothing but worry'!
Which is when Fred Multon spotted her. A former architect turned property developer, Fred was brought up sailing on board his father's 35ft (10.7m) Angus Primrose sloop on the Solent and, later, crewing on IODs. Moving up to Edinburgh after University, he bought himself a 36ft (11m) Shetland that had been decked over for cruising and sailed around the west coast of Scotland for several years. With his work life revolving around converting derelict old buildings, the last thing he needed was a rotten old boat to do up.
'Look the other way' said his wife Briony when they saw Romola sitting at her mooring on Dunstaffnage Bay with a 'for sale' sign. But it was no good. Fred was already seduced by the yacht's sleek lines and decided that, with the addition of a small deckhouse, she would make an excellent little home tucked away on a loch - a kind of floating holiday cottage. It was only after he had bought the boat that his brother-in-law took it upon himself to find out a bit about her history. A few days later, he rang and told Fred the news: 'She's a Camper & Nicholson,' he said 'You're going to have to do it properly!'
Fred didn't know whether to laugh or cry, as he felt his dream of a swift, rustic conversion fade into the distance. He nevertheless rang Beken of Cowes who told him they had three glass-plate photos of a motor yacht called Romola, and the very next day the images arrived in the post. 'There was a wonderful picture of the boat going at full speed, with the owner at the helm and the steward and some crew lined up on the deck. Another showed the owner at the stern sitting on a ratine sofa with a dog on his knee,' remembers Fred. 'I suppose that's what clinched it - that's when we realised she was something special.'
Despite Fred's brave words, the vessel's diagnosis was not good. The whole hull was gently hogged and most of the deck and deck beams were rotten, as were the beamshelf and the tops of most of the frames. Nearly all the beautiful original panelled interior had been replaced with nasty 1970s formica, and a plywood wheelhouse had been built in place of the original teak one. Two old Gardner engines, seized solid, sat rusting away in the engine room. Strangely, the counter stern - usually the first place to give way to rot - was the most intact and the only area where all the deck beams had survived unscathed. It was with understandable trepidation that Fred fitted a couple of temporary engines and motored the boat to her new home in Leith docks.
Most people would have been daunted by a project of this scale, but not Fred. 'I don't know what I was thinking. It was certainly not logical or planned - it just happened,' he says. 'I must have felt young and inspired. I've spent my life renovating old buildings, so lots of rot doesn't put me off. If you like what's in front of you, it doesn't put you off.'
Although he would play a very much hands-on role in the work that ensued, Fred was sensible enough to realise his own limitations and decided to employ a professional carpenter to take on the bulk of the woodwork.
'Thinking Joiner Required' said the ad in the local paper, and carpenter Alastair Letch duly applied. Despite only having ever been on a boat once in his life and having originally trained at Camberwell as an artist, Alastair showed an aptitude for the work and his initial three-month contract stretched to an astonishing 16 years - and still counting.
So, while shipwright Nick Griffin looked after all the heavy structural work on the hull, Alastair busied himself replicating the original joinery as much as possible. Fred had obtained the original plans from C&N but decided to apply the straightjacket of originality with discretion. Again, his background in property conversion came into play. 'We decided the outside should look completely original, but the inside would be a compromise, with 220-volt power, modern electronics and air conditioning. After all, she was going to be used for something that she was not intended for, she was built as a dayboat for the Solent, whereas we were going to use her for family cruising and chartering on the Med. Like an old building, she had to be adapted for modern usage.'
For a start, instead of her original steam engine and coal scuttle, the yacht was to be fitted with two compact modern diesels (a pair of Perkins 6354s), immediately freeing up a large area amidships where the galley could be located. That in turn freed up space forward for an extra cabin - and so the process went on. Aft, the enormous stateroom, complete with buttoned velvet settees and leather-bound armchair, remained almost as original. The two small guest cabins, however, were joined to create a spacious master cabin.
On deck, everything was rebuilt as near as possible to the original, except for the small sunken shelter amidships, which was raised by 18in (46cm) to make a fully fledged wheelhouse. The boat had by then been stripped of nearly all her original deck fittings, so some ingenuity was needed to create lookalike replacements. A few of the stanchions were left, so it was a simple job to replicate them - although every foot had to be at a different angle to accommodate the slope of the deck. The davits, however, were more complicated as they were gently tapered at the top. The solution was to cut a pipe lengthways, cut out a triangular section, and then weld the two sides back together, before bending them into shape. 'I had a very good blacksmith,' says Fred, 'so the fittings look as if they've been cast or forged rather than welded.'
Being a long way from any 'meccas' of yachting, Fred's research options were limited. Luckily, a few pieces of the internal joinery had survived, and could be extrapolated to the new and missing sections. The Beken photographs provided invaluable clues for the exterior details, as did the old C&N plans. And , in the midst of it all, a stranger turned up one day claiming that he had Romola's logbook from her 1909 round-Britain cruise. It turned out to be eminent architect and author Roger Zogolovitch, who had picked up the book at an auction. As much a scrap book as a logbook, it provided an invaluable insight into life aboard a gentleman's yacht in the Edwardian era.
Progress on the restoration waxed and waned in tandem with Fred's business fortunes. When business was booming, Romola took another leap forward; when business was quiet, work on Romola slowed down. The result was that it took nearly 20 years in which the boat was never far from Fred's mind. Eventually, however, in May 2005 they took their first tentative foray out of Leith and two months later headed south for the Hamble. The plan was to head for the Med and start chartering that year, but problems with the yacht's engines delayed progress, and they finally made it past the Straits of Gibraltar that December.
Back in Scotland, Fred was feeling the separation. 'It leaves a big hole in your life, finishing a project like this,' he says. 'She became a part of the furniture at Leith. It was a shock coming back from the Hamble and seeing an empty space where she had been moored all those years. My wife is quite pleased though because I can now do more gardening!'
After wintering in Tunisia, under the watchful eye of skipper Neil Roberts and stewardess Louisa Wohlfahrt, Romola was launched onto the Cote d'Azur circuit in May. Despite her thoroughly British roots, she looks strangely at home amid the glitz and glamour of the Mediterranean jet set. But then perhaps the South of France in 2006 isn't so very different from the Solent in 1903. And, as if to prove that she can keep up with the times, her first job of the season was a fashion shoot for a German lifestyle magazine. Proof enough that style and luxury never go out of fashion.