History of Hyde Sails 

Some memories of “Clarence” Austin Farrar
I came to sailmaking by accident and good luck. In the summer of 1961 I was sent down from London University, where I had had a lively social life but an undistinguished academic career; there may have been some slight connection between these two facts. My only excuse was that I had been cooped up at boarding school since I was seven years old and in the holidays had lived on a farm with parents who were not at all sociable so I had not come across many girls in my life; here, all of a sudden I was sitting next to them in lectures, rubbing shoulders with them at the bar. It was all too much for my self-discipline, fragile at the best of times, which collapsed about 24 hours after my arrival at this seat of higher learning.

Anyhow I came down with no clear plan for a career and no way of earning a living. Fortunately I had been friendly for years with a chap called Raymond Widdicombe whom I had met at prep school. His father, Leslie, was a keen sailor for whom I had crewed from time to time and had recently started a sailmaking business with a friend of his from the Royal Harwich Yacht Club, and this is where I got really lucky, meeting one “Clarence” Austin Farrar. This little business was Seahorse Sails, based in Hadleigh Suffolk. I had worked for Seahorse at the London Boat Show in 1961 and just loved the buzz that surrounded them. All the great and good of the day came to see Clarence and Leslie who were making waves in the dinghy sailing world. So when Leslie asked me if I wanted to work at Seahorse for the summer, while I looked for a “real job”, I jumped at the opportunity.

Dinghy sailing in the 1960s was growing fast. There was any number of boats which could be built at home by amateurs from marine plywood. Companies like Bell Woodworking produced kits of pre cut parts, which were fairly easy to assemble, even with little experience, and in garages all over the country people were building Enterprises, Scorpions, GP 14s, Wayfarers and Graduates, to name a few. These amateur builders could make most things for themselves but they couldn’t make sails, so there was a lively new market and very few sailmakers to supply it. “Ratsey and Lapthorn” was the top brand in the United Kingdom, founded God knows when, it was said that they supplied sails to Nelson, very much the establishment but struggling with the new technology, of manufacturing sails from woven polyester and nylon. Hitherto all sails had been made from cotton. This was where Clarence and Leslie had the edge-they had never made cotton sails so were not prejudiced by that experience. They tackled sailmaking from scratch just as the new materials were becoming available. Clarence was an original thinker, forever producing ideas and having the faith to follow them through to their conclusion.

Clarence was a naval architect by profession. He worked before the war in the office of Robert Clark, a distinguished yacht designer. Clarence was one of the best International 14 crews of that era and sailed with Charles Currey, with whom, I believe, he won the POW on at least one occasion. After the war, during which he worked for the Admiralty designing mine sweeping equipment, he returned to naval architecture and in particular the design of 14s. He bought the Woolverstone Shipyard at some point and began to build 14s of his own design for the most eminent sailors of the time. Stewart Morris, Bruce Banks and Charles Currey were among his many customers and for a decade the 14s Clarence designed and built dominated the class. Stewart’s “Bolero” was perhaps his best-known creation. Sadly Clarence’s business acumen was not as great as his ability to design and build fast boats and he always struggled to make ends meet. In the end he was forced to sell the business and it was as a result of this that he met Leslie Widdicombe and founded “Seahorse” in the late fifties.

The Flying Dutchman had been selected as the two-man dinghy for the Olympics sailed in Naples in 1960 and it was for this class that Clarence did some of his finest sailmaking, breaking much new ground in the process. The Jardine twins Stuart and Adrian, in separate boats, and “Slotty” Dawes were the leading FD sailors in the UK. They were also among the fastest in Europe and they came to Clarence for their sails.

Clarence focused his attention on spinnakers and genoas-for some reason his mainsails were never as good. His major achievement was the development of the orbital, or spherical, spinnaker. This was a real break through for which Clarence never got the credit due to him. Up to this point spinnakers had relied on stretch in the material to create their shape as they were made up of flat panels laid vertically, horizontally or diagonally with the centre seam being the only one with shape. This led to sails which were either very “roman nosed” or very narrow in the head. They were not easy to use on a reach and were inefficient, even when running. The arrival on the scene of woven nylon gave sail designers a more stable material with which to work with but this actually made life more difficult for them when they used the existing designs. Conversely the Olympic course of those days, triangle, sausage, triangle, beat, put the emphasis on reaching so it needed someone to design and build a reaching spinnaker that was also effective on a run. Clarence did this amazingly well and some of his designs remain competitive today, almost 50 years later.

Clarence set to work to produce a sail which had the shape built into the seams and which relied less on distortion of material. He was sufficiently good at mathematics to be able to work out the seam shape required to form segments of a sphere of a given radius. These segments were 34” in width at their widest point and tapered at each end. Clarence had these segments for spheres from 15’ radius down to 4’6”. He then devised a method of combining the segments so that the spinnaker was constant in section as it narrowed towards the head. So each panel was a section taken from the surface of a sphere-hence he called his creations spherical spinnakers. All this work was done by the time I appeared on the scene in 1961 so I am not sure how long it took him to establish the principle and develop it to produce sails. All I knew was that in 1961, the year after the Games in Naples, the Seahorse FD spinnaker was a must. It was way ahead of anything else available at the time and indeed it took others years to develop their own orbital systems, most of which I suspect were copied from Clarence’s original work.

In fact the Seahorse FD spinnaker continued with very little modification to be the most successful sail in the class right up to the last Olympics in which the boat was used. Bruce Banks copied it first and added a small seam right at the head to give the sail a bit more fullness up there and a bit more width. Naturally enough when I left Seahorse in 1965 I was able to reproduce the Seahorse design for Musto and Hyde and we dominated the class with this sail for many years.

However we should return to Clarence’s activities prior to the Naples Olympics. He somehow found the time not only to develop a new and original method of making spinnakers but also to develop a material suitable for their manufacture. Up to this point nylon spinnakers had been made from parachute material, which was porous and stretchy by design. The air leaking through the material made the parachute more stable. Clarence believed that low porosity was essential to fast spinnakers and had equipment to measure this property. After experiments painting spinnakers made from normal parachute nylon with PU varnish he came to the conclusion that if he could persuade a manufacturer to coat the nylon with polyurethane this would render the material completely air tight and make it much more stable. Grouts in Great Yarmouth were one of the major producers of parachute nylon, which they were also selling to sailmakers for spinnakers. Somehow Clarence persuaded them to experiment with PU coating. Under his guidance, Grouts produced this ripstop PU coated nylon which was infinitely more stable than anything else on the market and was completely non porous. PU coated nylon is still widely sold for spinnakers and it is very little different from the material that Clarence developed back in 1958/59.

This story is one of many that I could tell of Clarence. Many of his ideas were a rousing success but there were some that misfired and they make almost as interesting a story as the ones that came off. I spent the best part of four years working for Clarence and Leslie and it was a great episode in my life. In the end ambition got the better of me and I left in 1965 to set up a sailmaking business with Keith Musto, who had just returned from Tokyo with a silver medal in the Flying Dutchman, using genoas and spinnakers made by Seahorse to designs by Austin Farrar. That story will have to wait until another day.