THE SHAPE OF WATER
She is beautiful. Even from a distance, she makes you stop and stare. The lines, the curves: everything attracts your attention. The closer you get, the better she is: so refined, every detail adding to an almost perfect whole. She is not young, and neither has she lived an easy life: this Second World War veteran, still capable of stealing the show from much younger sisters, turns 85 this year. That’s a respectable age for any object, still more so for a steel-and-wood motor yacht.
The 48-tonne, 68ft (21m) Thelas was designed by the celebrated English naval architect Norman Hart and manufactured in the Netherlands at the Amsterdamsche Scheepswerf, an Amsterdam shipyard founded by the Olympic sailor Gerard de Vries Lentsch and which still exists. The boat was named by the first owner in celebration of his children, Thelma and Douglas, and was the first of a series of ten built.
That first owner was Percy Newsome Hirst, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1887 to the British industrialist Joseph Newsome Hirst, who had moved to South America to develop his restoration and researched its commissioning owner.
