rebuilds memories
MY mother and father owned a succession of sailing boats when my sister and I were growing up. They were all wooden and mostly old, rather like Maurice Griffith’s description about his early east coast years.
Their first boat was the sailing smack Dauntless, which dad bought the year I was born in 1948 for maybe £50. He recalled, but did not know, that she had been built in Lowestoft at the turn of the 19th century.
It took him three years of hard graft to renovate her in the marshes on the upper reaches of the Crouch. Britain was then in a period of great austerity after World War Two.
