Under the shadow of likely war with Germany on the other side of the globe, 1939 was a very full year for Bill Couldrey’s yard.
Despite British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declaring “peace for our time” in September 1938, the German army invaded Poland on September 1 and Britain and France declared war on September 3, 1939.
Bill still had some commercial orders to get out of his Sulphur Beach, Northcote yard. Once he had launched the 42ft bridgedecker Manunui on September 30, 1939 and the racing 18-footers Marie Dawn in November and Athena in December, both near-clones of Jeanette, he had a keel yacht on the stocks, the 29ft 6in Tuirangi (C35) he had designed for Jack Allen of Epsom. Wartime shortages of materials and staff meant that Bill did not manage to launch her until a year later in November 1940.
Arch Logan, Bill’s mentor, died on March 27, 1940 at his home at 18 Stanley Point Road across Shoal Bay, the same day as the Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage. It is hard to assess the depth of the interaction between Logan and Couldrey. Arch was a design genius with a characteristic “Logan sweetness of line” and he was a high-principled man. He handed the privilege of permitting his designs to be built to only three younger men, Colin Wild, Les Coulthard and Bill Couldrey, who matched his standards, including in behaviour.
Arch’s influence on Bill’s building practice and design work was profound and was clearly evidenced in his later work. It was significant that the Herne Bay Junior Yacht Club commissioned Bill to tweak Arch Logan’s 12ft centreboard Silver Fern class design after Arch’s death.
Any prospect of major commissions had to be shelved for the duration of the war. Bill spent the next months designing and building small craft. There was constant work for Wisemans Sports Stores building a range of inboard and outboard dinghies and there were always clinker dinghies to build for the market, built by eye to the price of “one pound a foot”. Over the years Bill built 400 of them.
In 1940 Bill designed and built the 11ft sailing dinghy Gay for himself. He raced her at the Maraetai Regatta on New Year’s Day 1941 where the Couldreys were staying on the family farm. A good customer was my uncle, Andy Ryland of London St, St Mary’s Bay, for whom he designed and built an 18ft utility sailing and outboard and a 12ft sailing dinghy in 1941.
For the duration of the war his occupation was ‘essential’, and he threw his heart into it. He served with the Home Guard. Thanks to Dad’s Army, the Home Guard is currently regarded as bit of a joke, but with our young men serving all over the world, it was in fact a seriously effective home-defence force.
German commerce raiders had caused considerable damage to coastal shipping, notably the sinking of the Niagara on June 19, 1940. The Government’s first reaction was to convert trawlers to minesweeping vessels and build new ones, but when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, the war was now really on our doorstep. As the Japanese progressively captured Singapore and swept down the Pacific, US forces were stationed here in large numbers. Serious planning went on in Wellington, not only to cope with New Zealand’s own defence requirements, but also to produce the large quantity of support vessels that the Americans were requiring.
The Government improvised very successfully by bringing together all of the country’s boatbuilding and steel-working firms to work in close association on jobs, but separated to avoid loss of function by enemy action. At the outset, little information was given to the Press.
The first task was building 112ft wooden Fairmile antisubmarine patrol launches to an Admiralty and Fairmile Marine Co. design. They used British prefabricated kitsets of plywood hull frames with local timber for the double-diagonal planking and decking. Twin 630bhp V12 Hall-Scott Defender petrol engines were fitted. Six hundred were built in Allied boatyards worldwide, 12 in Auckland. The construction of bullet-proof petrol tanks was a job which interested Auckland shipwrights greatly, and they did an excellent job.
In 1941 Bill Couldrey joined Associated Boat Builders Limited, a consortium of local builders including Lidgards, Collings & Bell and Colin Wild, operating out of W.G. Lowe & Son’s yard in Beaumont Street, with a staff of 84. An early task was building minesweepers but then Bill took a large role in supervising the Fairmile project. Associated built four Fairmiles, laying down the first one in March 1942. On September 29, 1942 the launching of this first Fairmile, ML403, later Q403, the very first fighting ship built in New Zealand, was proudly publicised. The fourth left the yard in June 1943. Bill’s son Brian remembers well having a day off school to attend a Fairmile launching; it was probably the first when he was nearly seven.
Boatbuilders were in short supply; many had gone into the armed forces but there would never have been enough to cope with the amount of work. Tradesmen of all sorts were pressed into boatbuilding, trained on the job, and commonly worked 60 hours a week. Bill proved to be valuable in this context as he had natural ability in training men and managing construction tasks.
Between 1940 and 1946 the New Zealand boatbuilding industry turned out 13 new minesweepers for the RNZN, 12 Fairmiles, several craft for RNZAF use in the Pacific and locally, and a large number of vessels for the US Navy and Army. Construction for the New Zealand Navy and for RNZAF purposes was valued at £1,270,000, huge sums at the time. The minesweepers cost £60,000 each, and the Fairmiles £35,000 each. It was a tribute to the workmanship of New Zealand shipwrights and engineers that, in the case of the Fairmiles, the total of manhours per ship was 35,000, as against the 40,700 hours estimated as the average time consumed in United Kingdom yards.
Under reverse Lend-Lease, for the American Army in the Pacific and for the American Navy, the local shipyards and steel contractors constructed 22 75ft steel tugs, 50 45ft wooden tugs, 15 114ft composite-built powered lighters of New Zealand design, 40 wooden barges in knock-down condition, 140 wooden barges complete, 100 amphibian steel trailers, and 60 wherries for general purposes. The cost of this work on American orders was £2,213,000.
After Bill Couldrey supervised Associated’s fourth Fairmile in June 1943, the Marine Department offered him a position liaising with the US Army and Navy as an Inspector of Wooden Ships. His job was to assist with developing their building programme, the logistics, arranging contractors, training workmen and supervising construction of the large number of craft the US required to carry out the war in the Solomon Islands and beyond.
The construction of the 50 45ft wooden tugs involved the use of a large amounts of local materials. The planking and most of the timbers were of kauri with frames of Southland beech and knees of pohutukawa, while totara was used for sheathing and the false keels. Engines for the vessels were provided by the American authorities. A further batch of 24 of these craft was ordered for the Eastern Supply Group in India in November 1944.
When the threat from the Japanese ceased suddenly with Hiroshima in August 1945, American and British forward contracts were abruptly cancelled. In Auckland alone, 150 men were given notice in September 1945. There were few jobs for them back in civvy-street, many with freshly learnt skills that had little application in a post-war world.
Bill Couldrey remained working for the Marine Department until 1947, supervising the completion or moth-balling of contracts in progress and winding down the sophisticated processes that had made New Zealand boat and ship building contractors produce so much in such little time. Some craft were only partly finished. There was a large fleet of laid-up surplus ships and launches scattered about the Waitemata Harbour needing care and arranging for disposal.
In 1947 Bill was now in the post-war world and had to reinvent himself.
I will pick up Bill’s story with some wartime centreboard designs, the 1946 keel yacht (K Class) competition sponsored by the RNZYS, and culminating with Helen (K1), the Bob Stewart-designed K Class keel yacht that he built at Colin Wild’s yard in 1947. BNZ
