Bittern Model in Southwold Reading Room
No other traditional craft quite equalled the rich diversity of commercial sailing boats that were built to work from British beaches. Lute-sterned Hastings luggers had little in common with double ended, North Norfolk crabbers; which in turn bore little resemblance to the cobles that launched from north eastern beaches. Standing astride this magnificent diversity were East Anglian beach yawls. They were quite simply the longest, fastest and most spectacular of them all. Usually written ‘yawl’’ the word is pronounced ‘yoll’ and a corruption of the Scandinavian ‘jolle’, describing an open boat. They weren’t yawls at all but the name stuck. The beach yawl Thought was recorded sailing the 8 miles between Yarmouth and Lowestoft in thirty-four minutes – an average of 16 miles per hour – in the mid nineteenth century. A magnificent, yet strangely forgotten genre of vessels and men.
Before the railways came to East Anglia in the mid 1840s, nearly all cargo had to be transported by sea and usually unloaded on a beach. A large number of Beach Companies serviced the thousands of relatively small coasting vessels.They covered about sixty-five miles of coast from Happisburgh in the north, to Shingle Street in the south and usually maintained a range of boats for specific jobs. In 1882, Winterton played host to two Beach Companies of sixty men apiece. The Blue and the White Companies operated from Sea Palling and painted their oars to match. The prosperity that followed the herring shoals ensured Great Yarmouth was home to the largest number of Beach Companies including the Standard, Diamond, Roberts, Denny, Holkham and Star companies. Three companies operating from Gorleston on the opposite bank of the River Yare seem to have been the last to function on the East Coast. The Storm, Rangers and the strangely named Young Flies Company latterly kept their yawls inside the Haven at Brush bend.
The companies functioned as co-operatives. Some had over two hundred shareholders with a proportion allocated to widows and dependants. Usually about one percent of earnings went to the needy. There were unwritten (illiteracy was still a problem in 1900) rules that a man had only to touch the boat during launching to claim part of crew’s share. The Companies maintained tall lookout posts, usually next to their ‘shod’ where the gear was stored and constantly scanned the horizon. First to arrive at a ship got the business. The beach yawls that they used for rescue and pilotage became their pride and joy and earned them big money.
Beach yawls were maintained in a permanent state of readiness. To launch, the mizzen was set first and sheeted to a long bumpkin; whilst other crew members carried the moveable ballast, usually sacks of sand and gravel that were easy to empty before returning to the beach in a rough sea. Some yawls were berthed on skids, so that as soon as the stools were removed, the vessel immediately moved. In anything of an onshore wind, a hauling off line would be used. Once afloat, the crew piled in and the lugsail set with halyard and burton to windward. They went to sea in all weather and their crews displayed superb seamanship.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the longer ‘yawls’ were three-masted luggers. Those based in Great Yarmouth tended to be longer than those on other parts of the coast with several over sixty feet long. They were clinker built, had no keel or leeboards and . with low freeboard, needed crews of twenty-five or thirty men to sail and bale them. It was not uncommon for the leeward rail to be eighteen inches under water as they powered their way through the short North Sea chop to pilot a ship through the treacherous outer banks that defend the East Coast. Skippers never gave a second thought to sailing across the banks and yawls often bumped. The long, narrow hulls gave devastating performance on a reach but were not quite so convincing to windward. Tacking had to wait for a spell of calm water when the lugsails could be lowered and re-hoisted on the other tack and it was essential to take seas bows on, as one over amidships could easily swamp their shallow hulls.
The most successful beach yawl of her day was Reindeer. She was a three masted lugger, seventy-five feet long, with a beam of twelve feet and built by Jermyn of Great Yarmouth in 1838. When the schooner America won the Queens Cup in 1851, the beachmen issued a challenge to sail a match for the required £200 purse. Today, it’s easy to overlook that America was specifically constructed to win money for her owners. Commodore Stevens of the New York Yacht Club, one of the America syndicate, sent one of his friends to Great Yarmouth. As soon as he saw Reindeer’s speed on a reach, he advised declining the challenge; ostensibly on the grounds the yawl was an open boat and not a yacht. Just to make sure; the visitors also raised the stake money to £1,000, an impossible figure for the beachmen, who took their rebuff as a compliment to their outstanding vessel.
Subsequently it appears the above para ranks as a load of oft-repeated (and reprinted) bollocks. The Great Yarmouth Mercury ran a story not long after America had won the cup to the effect that the NYYC Syndicate had sold the boat to a new owner who intended taking America to the Med. He wasn’t interested in accepting wagers/challenges, although he did say £2,000 might persuade him.
James Beeching of Great Yarmouth was already well known for fast beach yawls when he began to tinker with lifeboat design. His family hailed from Bexhill, where they were noted for their smuggling exploits and in the early years of the nineteenth century he built fishing boats and fast vessels in Hastings that owed at least some of their existence to smuggling. When the business failed in 1816, Beeching set up again in Flushing and in 1819 famously launched a smuggling vessel, endearingly christened Big Jane. By the mid 1820s he returned to England, settling in Great Yarmouth, where he set up a yard near the old Trinity House base. An eccentric army captain from Gorleston called Captain Manby, who was already well known for his rocket launched Breecher’s buoys and cork lifejackets, commissioned Beeching to build a lifeboat fitted with barrels for built-in buoyancy. James Beeching began to tinker with his own lifeboat designs an in 1851 he won the hundred-guinea prize offered by Rear Admiral Algernon, Duke of Northumberland for the best design of a self righting lifeboat for the RNLI. Beeching’s entry was closely based on his beach yawls and the old smuggler’s feelings on mixing in such exalted company can only be imagined.
Several of Beeching’s products have survived but alas no beach yawls. He was something of an innovator and all of his boats seem to have been constructed with ‘joggled’ timbers; that is ribs rebated to accept individual planks. Whilst this produced a stronger hull for launching off a beach, today it provides restoration of his work with just another headache. Smaller, commercial sailing vessels built in Great Yarmouth (including Norfolk Wherries) are notable for what is known as a ‘Yarmouth hump’. This is a slight reverse sheer or ‘hump’ in the sheerline between the bow and the shrouds, sometimes said to help keep spray out of the boat.
Although largely redundant by the 1850s, a number of Beach Companies retained their magnificent open boats for increasingly competitive racing and the beach yawls developed into a celebration of the Victorian obsession with gambling. In 1853, the Young Company of Lowestoft became the first to abandon three masted yawls when they built Mosquito. By 1892, her successor The Young Prince was too old to race and a group of wealthy gentlemen clubbed together and built Georgiana. Although relatively short at forty eight feet, she was probably the fastest beach yawl ever built. Not to be outdone, the Old Company went to G.L.Watson, who was still working on his design of Britannia for the Prince of Wales, to draft the lines of Happy New Year, the fifth yawl to bear that name. Henry Reynolds of Oulton Broad built her in 1894. Despite their pedigree, Happy New Year and Jubilee; also designed by Watson never really equalled the locally designed Georgiana.
The last yawl race was held at Lowestoft in 1907, although Yarmouth continued for a little longer. The majority of yawls went through to the Broads to live out a peaceful retirement as houseboat or motorboat conversions. Only one is known to still be afloat; a small, thirty five foot Caister yawl called Cafila which was converted to a motorboat many years ago. Happily lines were taken from several examples and a number of fine models are in existence before they disappeared completely. These spectacular vessels have captured the imagination of generations of East Coast sailors and it only remains for someone to produce a replica so another generation is able to see one in action.
