The outbreak of peace in 1945 brought fresh opportunities for New Zealanders as, bit by bit, life – and yachting – gradually returned to normal.
Arnold (Bill) Couldrey had some light relief doing private design work during his wartime service with the Marine Department. As he had done before hostilities, he designed at night in a study he built under his house at 24 Richmond Ave., Northcote.
In 1943 he designed two M Class 18-footers. The first was for Horie Hewson, the General Manager of John Burns Ltd but was never built because Horie was overwhelmed with work after the John Burns fire of August 1941 and the subsequent demands on his company to produce vital supplies for the boatbuilding industry. The design probably later appeared as Mandalene (M24) launched in 1947 by N. McIndoe The second design was Maui (M25) for Keith Liddle who had just sold Maranoa (M8). Snow Telford, a fine Chas. Bailey alumnus, built her beautifully in his house at Westmere, launching her in November 1946. She proved to be fast, especially when Bill was invited to helm her in a blow.
In 1946 Reg and Alan Postles, father and son, bought the timber from Horie Hewson and built Mawhera (M10) which Bill designed for them in 1946. The Postles, father and son, launched her in March 1946. Mawhera was very successful, proving faster than Maui. She was finer, much lighter and generally better skippered than Maui.
Prominent Squadron yachtsman Harold George was Bill’s first cousin. Harold had experienced a most exciting war, as I recently described in Vintage Perspective. On his return to Auckland in 1945 he recommissioned his yacht Victory (A8) which had been laid up “for the duration”. Long a holdout for the gaff rig, Harold now got Bill to design an up-to-date Bermudan rig for Victory.
1946 also brought a sniff of the return of high-value commercial design work. Stan Parker commissioned Bill to design Rakanoa, a 53ft bridgedecker to be built by Shipbuilders Ltd at its Poore St, Freemans Bay yard. Shipbuilders were returning to civilian work from years of building wooden vessels for the United States Navy. Stan Parker of Parker Engineering was an experienced launchman. He ran the fast launch Eros from 1928 until 1935, fitting her with a 100hp Hall-Scott engine. He then bought the 35-footer Nomad, lengthened her to 42ft, installed a Deutz diesel and renamed her Arawa. She was commandeered by the RNZAF in 1942 and sent to Laucala Bay, Fiji. Rakanoa was her post-war replacement.
Trouble came once the keel, frames and stern were in place Stan wanted changes. He was a tall man and considered the headroom Bill had given him in the engine room insufficient. Shipbuilders’ brilliant in-house designer was Tim Windsor. Many years later he had this to say.
“Stan Parker realised that the boat as designed was not going to meet his requirements. He wanted a boat that would provide full headroom in the engine room…..Work on the boat was stopped while discussions were held as to what could be done to satisfy Parker’s requirements… It was an embarrassing situation for me, having to alter another designer’s work, and I have no idea why Couldrey did not make the necessary alterations himself. I can only assume that he refused to do so.
“In the process of redesigning the boat I raised the freeboard one foot, lifted the sheer to the bow 15 inches, increased the beam, gave the fore sections more flare and put more rake on the stem in profile. The general arrangement and superstructure were also redesigned.
“As the frames were already in position, alterations were kept to a minimum, and the underbody sections as designed by Couldrey were not altered. So you could say that the underbody of Rakanoa is Couldrey’s design. What you see above the waterline is my design.”
But controversy remained. When registering her with Lloyd’s Yacht Register in 1964 Stan Parker’s son Ross claimed his father Stan had designed her. No doubt his input had been great, but credit was given to neither Couldrey nor Windsor. For his part, Bill Couldrey did not remove her from his list of designs nor did he make any comment on Tim Windsor’s or Stan Parker’s part in the eventual as-built design.
During 1946 Bill was also approached by H. H. Gray of Herne Bay to design a round bilge 14-footer, something of a departure for him. Roy Parris of Westmere built the boat, Nudger (T1) with plywood decks. She took part in the Freshwater Championship races at Rotorua in May 1947 and was advertised for sale in Whangarei in 1950 as “the best T Class in Auckland, £110.”
The Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron’s executive had spent the fallow years of the war assisting in the preservation of its members’ keel yachts, mostly laid up, and, after 1943 when the war was clearly turning in favour of the Allies, they began to plan for a repetition of the immense boom in yachting activity that had occurred after the Armistice and the Spanish ‘Flu epidemic of 1918-9.
All the wartime Commodores, Keith Draffin (C Class Kotuku, built as a 6 metre by Colin Wild), Dr Frank Macky (C Class Medina) and Spencer Tewsley (A Class Waitangi), had a sound grounding in keel yacht design. They saw the need for a restricted class of keel yacht offering competent harbour and off-shore racing but also cruising for families, the type of yacht the Americans once familiarly called a “knockabout” and of which there were already some fine recent examples in Auckland, Anita designed by R.L. (Bob) Stewart, Cyrena by Charles Collings and Arch Logan’s Little Jim, Waiomo and Gypsy, all three, of course, built by Bill Couldrey.
With the idea of having available for members returning from war service overseas a selection of keel yacht designs suitable for racing and cruising in the Hauraki Gulf, the Squadron took the bold step of setting up an international design contest for an auxiliary keel yacht of 36 to 38ft loa, 26ft lwl, 9ft beam and a draught of 5ft 6ins for a prize of £25 for the winner. They placed advertisements in London, Washington and New Zealand, closing on December 31, 1944. It called for a “good, wholesome type of fast cruiser, capable of being handled by a crew of two and suitable for local conditions”. There was to be accommodation for four and an auxiliary.
On the date the competition closed the Allied forces had only just emerged from disaster at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, the Russians were besieging Budapest and US Forces had landed in the Philippines. There was a lot of war to go! Despite this horrific background, 21 designs were submitted to the judges who had a rigorous confidentiality system to preserve the designers’ anonymity.
In the outcome, the first prize went to Arthur C. Robb, an Aucklander who had gone to England in the mid-1930s and was serving as a designer with the Admiralty with his Mokoia design. Bill Couldrey had built his Tamatea (A20) design for the Newcomb brothers in 1936 and Robb had more recently designed Houhere (B26) for Barton and Ryan. The second prizewinner was Bob Stewart, third was Tim Windsor of Shipbuilders Ltd, jointly with A.H. Hall of the RORC, fifth was G.C. Dickson of Nelson. The judges highly commended the designs of Jack Brooke and Bill Couldrey, his design No.51.
By 1947, when the war was finally over and some sort of normality had been accomplished, it became clear that several Auckland yachtsmen were keen to build some of the designs. The Squadron decided to slightly alter the design parameters and formulate rules to cater for what it saw as a new class. What to call it?
The alpha-numerical yacht system was an understood and respected feature of Auckland’s boating world. It started with the letter A for first class keel yachts, traversing through the mid-alphabet for the various centreboard mullet boat classes and to Z for Takapuna class centreboarders, with numerous anomalies and interpolations. Indeed, such was the quantity and number of types of yachts in Auckland that there were very few Class letters left, the prominent candidate being K; and K was adopted to most people’s satisfaction.
The first K Class to be started was Helen (K1) for Bob Stewart to his own design. It is understood that Stewart wanted Bill Couldrey to build her, but Bill had just left the Marine Department and had no yard. The arrangement appears to have been that Bill started the contract at Colin Wild’s yard and drew wages. Bob Salthouse recently recalled that most of the work on the boat was done by Chris Robertson.
Bill had been in a senior supervisory role for many years during the war. With two young sons he must have felt unsettled by the prospect of going back to the tools and dealing with the vagaries and risks of commercial boatbuilding. By the time Helen was launched in early 1948 he had begun a series of senior Public Service jobs associated with shipping and house-building.
But his designs kept coming. BNZ
