You can date the start of the demise of the classic and the beginning of the modern yacht building era to 1953, or thereabouts, and if that is also the year of my birth, it’s coincidental. It was, in the UK at least, also the start of what we call the New Elizabethan era, which began with such hope after so much misery and destruction. It saw the opening up of the country after the years of war, despite the rationing that lasted into the late 1950s.
For a golden decade or more, designers – Buchanan, Holman, Giles, S&S, Illingworth and Primrose, Griffiths and the like – would be thriving, and prolific builders such as Anderson, Rigden & Perkins, or Tucker Brown’s for instance, on the East Coast, would be…