Lived his dream
Harry Pope was born in Mt. Albert in 1929, the son of Devon man Harry Full, a Royal Navy matelot serving on HMS Diomede on the New Zealand station, based at Devonport Naval Base. Full had been a Seaman Boy aboard HMS Iron Duke at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916. Harry Pope’s mother Myrtle (nee Ladbrook) also had a seagoing association – her grandfather being master mariner and coastal skipper Capt. Robert Christian Lamb, who commanded the cutter Stag.
After the Fulls divorced, Myrtle remarried in 1937 and Harry took his stepfather’s surname of Pope. He was drawn to sailing from a very early age, joining the Point Chevalier Sailing Club aged nine in 1938. There he learned to sail a friend’s sailing dinghy, Twerp, which had a well-earned reputation for tenderness: “Everybody in Pt Chev [had] tipped out of it.”
The first yacht Pope actually owned was a one-off 3.6m sailing dinghy, which he paid for by doing a double paper round. He started labouring work which he renamed . The name came from Pope’s mistaken belief this was the name of Count von Luckner’s WWI commerce raider, actually .
