My first encounter with Walter Marks was nothing short of extraordinary. I’d been reading Alfred Mylne’s pre-World War One letter book, whose hundreds of sheets of tissue paper detail invoices and polite requests for payment: it is fascinating work, for these are communications with some of the most famous yachtsmen of the time. Suddenly I was stopped in my tracks: crossing one of the fragile pages, at right angles to the invoice beneath, was the ghost of a letter from Mylne himself, a proper letter not an invoice. He had clearly laid the wet paper down on the book for a moment, and the inky shadows of his words had sunk in.
After much squinting and angling the light I managed to decipher the gist, which turned out to be a polite refusal by the Scottish designer to meet up with Walter Marks in the south of England. No surprise there; Mylne was not keen on leaving his Scottish waters, and secretly somewhat averse to mixing with the ‘Sassenach’ (English) or other clients down south, if it could be avoided. Just who was this mysterious Marks, and what was the back story? So began my quasi-forensic search to
