It was one of my most scintillating phone calls ever – straight out of the Antiques Road Show: skipper Toby Maris, calling to report that a dusty photo album had been discovered at Yarlington Country House Fair, packed with images from Jolie Brise’s cruise to Norway in 1933. As Jolie Brise’s official historian I was beyond excited – so little is known of the boat’s new owner and her movements after Bobby Somerset sold her in the autumn of 1932. Race results are easy to access but private cruises tend to slip under the radar. The album was a very rare thing.
In fact Chris Hoare and his eagle-eyed wife, Diana, were no strangers to our Jolie Brise: Chris’s uncle Commander Newcombe Hoare was the man who helped fund her acquisition for Dauntsey’s School in 1977. Apparently the kind stall holder, had handed over the album for nothing as soon as he heard of the family connection and that Dauntsey’s was still sailing her; at that moment no-one could have anticipated what research would reveal after the carefully wrapped parcel landed at my door, by Special Delivery.
In some ways the album owner made it easy for me. On the inside page he had written:, and Taken from bowsprit end, North Sea Bill takes the tiller Vital clues from the album’s inside cover in her centenary year underneath ‘Cowes – Hankø – Oslo – Hankø – Croydon, June July 1933’. Something tugged at my memory, and a quick check revealed that the KNS (Kongelig Norsk Seilforening, Royal Norwegian Yacht Club) 50 Year Jubileumsregatta had indeed taken place at Hankø in 1933. So now we knew the probable reason for the voyage to Norway. But who had been at the helm? And had she gone as a cruiser or a racer?
