Gordon Currey is the son of Charles Currey, an Olympic medallist and one of Fairey Marine’s founding directors. Gordon has inherited his parents’ collection of pictures and press cuttings that chart his father’s illustrious sailing career from winning a Finn class silver medal at the 1952 Olympics, to racing International 14s, developing the first trapeze, and his continued success during the early offshore powerboat racing scene that began with the 1961 Cowes Torquay Race. Entwined within this archive lie the records of Fairey Marine, the company born from Fairey Aviation’s redundant wooden Mosquito airframe factory at Hamble immediately after World War II that transformed the then secret hot moulding autoclave technology to mass produce a wide range of sailing and motorboats at affordable prices.
This reprise of the Fairey Marine story coincides with the 67th start of the annual Cowes/Torquay power boat race, that started from Cowes on Sunday 27 August, an event that established the Ray Hunt designed Fairey Huntress, Christina and Huntsman power cruisers, and later the Alan Barnard designed Swordsman 33 as true all-weather power cruisers. Thunderbolt, a Christina derivative of the Huntress 23, driven by Tommy Sopwith and Geoff Fanner won the first race in 1961 at an average speed of 21.3kts. Charles Currey and co-director Peter Twiss, the Fairey test pilot who set an outright air speed record of 1,132mph back in 1956 flying a Delta 2 experimental fighter jet, proved to be just as canny, piloting these Huntsman and Swordsman boats, to win a lion’s share of the silverware. They did so, by positioning their boats close to much faster race boats at the start, then rode their wakes all the way out of the Solent to give themselves a healthy lead over class rivals.
It helped that the hierarchy within the Fairey Aviation group were all keen yachtsmen. Sir Richard Fairey (pictured below), who had raced his J-Class yacht from Cowes before the War, took up racing the 12-M after peace
