Sailing and exploring by sea were the two dominant factors in his life with both providing maximum, lifelong excitement, enjoyment and not a few frights.
Through service appointments and creative leave-planning he had ‘sailed’ to the Denmark Straight,Iceland’s fjords and the Norwegian Arctic, to Patagonia, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and to the southern Ocean; from Hong Kong to the West Indies via Bombay, to Oman, Malta, Cyprus, Crete, Sardinia, Corsica, Minorca and to the islands of the Dalmatian and Greek coasts; from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Baltic; from Florida to the Chesapeake river; from North Island, New Zealand and the east coast of Australia to the Maldives; from the Persian Gulf to the Outer Hebrides; from Italy’s Lake Garda to the Canadian lakes; from Britain’s rivers and canals to those of Germany and northern France….
…: in rowing and racing dinghies, day-boats, square-riggers,out-riggers, catamarans, trimarans, gaff cutters, Bristol Channel pilot cutters, sailing trawlers, ‘covert’ Norwegian fishing trawlers, Bermudan sloops, ketches, yawls, schooners, naval whalers, admirals’ gigs, kayaks and canoes, Arabian dhows, Chinese junks, Cornish ‘crabbers’, a sand yacht and even (please excuse me) as a deck hand in a ‘super yacht’ while ‘working my passage’ from Nassau to Miami. To which list I must add inflatable and rigid raiding craft, assault and mechanised landing craft as well as small, medium and large hovercraft. There was also a North Sea oil rig, two trans-Atlantic Cunard ocean-liners, one troopship, a P&O cruise ship, an‘expedition’ ship in South Georgia, a 150-ton motor vessel and a cement-built,Colin Archer ketch among the Falkland Islands; a 40-knot, water-skiing boat, a five-knot narrow boat and a 20-knot ex-Royal Navy, 112 ft, Fairmile B Class motor launch, a veteran of the Normandy beaches in 1944.
In addition there were a variety of submarines, amphibious assault ships, frigates and aircraft carriers of various nationalities.
On 1stMarch 1942, when he was two weeks old, his father, Major Norman Tailyour, melted a handful of snow into his yacht Sea Vixen’s bell and invited his battalion’s RNVR vicar to ‘do the honours’; which he did in the NAAFI’s snow-bound Nissen hut at Stobbs Royal Marines camp, clinging to a windy hillside above Hawick. Norman had had Sea Vixen built in Alexandria during the 1935 Abyssinian crisis then brought her home as deck cargo on a troop ship.
Although, post war, he was introduced to the delights of using broken glass to scrape down her spars it was sad that the wooden hull, laid up ashore, did not survive six years out of the water. She was soon exchanged for an ex-Royal Navy Fairmile B Class ML, Naughty Princess, in which we lived briefly but, as she came without propellers, ownership was short-lived!
The only godfather at his christening was Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Phibbs, a most successful pre-war skipper of naval whalers and gigs who, as he was almost a generation older, had been wholly responsible for his father’s nautical upbringing. Hence Pat’s official family status as Ewen's honorary grandfather making him the first of, currently, four generations of yachtsmen with his sixteen-year-old grandson, Jacob, continuing this family ‘tradition’ by, with any luck, swiftly maturing into the fifth generation.
Until he joined the Royal Marines in 1960 he lived, on and off, with ‘Uncle’ Pat in Olga, thus he was also responsible for my own nautical advancement.It wasn’t, though, an entirely easy childhood. Apart from Elizabeth Mary, a Polperro ‘hooker’ owned since the mid 1930’s, in 1946Pat had added to his collection, Olga,a Bristol Channel pilot cutter.
On his retirement from the Royal Marines in 1947, Olga not only became Pat’s permanent home but, during most school holidays until 1960, Ewen's too...and it was here that the fun, and the education, really started! Many evenings, with Olga on Pat’s Percuil River moorings, Ewen and a girlfriend (later an international, fashion model!) living on board the only other yacht (a Brixham trawler) would ‘shoot the trammel’ at dusk then, pre-dawn (before the crabs arrived for their breakfast) they would row back to Amsterdam Point to hand the net before selling the produce on St Mawes Quay.
Easter leaves from prep and then public school were men-only affairs to St Peter Port to take advantage of the spring tides for Olga’s annual bottom-scrub and anti-foul. During the summer holidays they cruised France’s Biscay coast, sometimes as far south as northern Spain.
Often his mother would join them with a girlfriend, or his younger sister, Veryan, when Pat would give up his double cabin aft. These were the late 1940s when there were few other yachts yet in post-war commission. So few indeed that if another sail was sighted we would consult Lloyds Register of Yachts while closing to shouting distance and exchanging, or comparing, pilotage notes. Anchorages and alongside berths were empty. There were no marinas; not that Pat would have dreamt of entering one. Tunny fishing was still conducted under sail.
Olga carried two ‘ship’s boats’ with the smaller praam upside-down in the sailing dinghy. There was no life raft lifejacket or safety harness. Navigation was largely a matter of dead reckoning or, if pushed, by using Consul. She carried two sextants - one quadrant and one bubble. The oil navigation lights were lit if another vessel’s lights were sighted,then soon extinguished. Lighting below was courtesy of Tilley lamps and heat via a coal-burning stove in the saloon. The engine came from an old lorry and was fitted athwartships. In due course Pat acquired an electric windlass- of sorts: an ex concrete-mixer engine powered a light aircraft’s dynamo which, in turn, drove a motorcar’s self-starter attached to a large cogwheel bolted to the winch. It worked!
In 1956 Olga, with scratch crews picked up and disembarked along the way,was sailed to Malta where Ewen's father was then stationed. Thus holidays were spent cruising those islands and Corsica.
Meanwhile he had joined the Nautical College, Pangbourne, where in due course he turned down the offer of an Olympic trial for, to him, sailing has never been about cut throat-competition. He also disliked the manner in which many races were won, or lost, in the protest room and not through fair sailing.
Commissioned into the Royal Marines in 1960 he was introduced to the wooden RNSA 14-foot dinghies and also bought his own Firefly which, in theory, he still owns as he gave it to Wellington College on permanent loan.Having completed initial training I specialised in the, then, dying art of the Landing Craft branch which included the complexities of amphibious operations, inshore pilotage, celestial navigation and, inevitably, Morse and semaphore.
Three tours in the Middle East acquainted him with the mysteries of the dhow and even a ridiculously-dangerous sand yacht in the Oman desert. Two visits to Hong Kong offered chances to crew a junk - a fascinating experience as was an outrigger off Kenya’s coast. Later, reefing the foretops’l of the ill-fated brig Maria Asumpta in a rising channel gale was a sharp learning curve for a fifty year old.
Before retirement he managed by some subterfuge and despite many senior, raised eyebrows, to ship a five-ton gaff cutter to an arctic Norwegian winter in one of his landing craft.
During a year’s appointment to a Plymouth-based commando he was asked to take over the duties, inter alia, as sailing master of the 50-squaremetre, windfall, Sea Soldier. He had skippered her often before and knew her as the highly-strung thoroughbred she was designed to be by Abeking and Rasmussen in 1936: a real delight to sail fully crewed or (much to the horror of the generals) single-handed. As well as being available for ‘private hire’ from within the Corps she was also the Royal Marines’ sail training vessel. Dozens of young marines and ‘officers under training’ grappled with her quirks, especially the temperamental Stewart Turner engine and the equally awkward Baby Blake heads.
In spite of not really liking racing, in 1963 he was coerced into navigating a plastic 30-foot sloop in the Fastnet. As the smallest entry, and having been beset by a viscous gale while all others were safely back in Plymouth, they came last by well over a day. It had been a hideous week in a ‘dry’ vessel (alcoholically but most certainly not on deck or below) and with a humourless skipper. He swore ‘never again’ yet two years later, was tempted by the same skipper who, wisely now, owned a more suitable Nicholson 36. He was hooked but not by the ‘racing’ side of affairs - rather by the navigational challenges allied to those of a skipper’s tactics and the eccentricities of the weather and tides. He went on to skipper or navigate four more Fastnets including, in 1969, as a fore-deck hand in the RORC’s Griffin III. She had been so poorly maintained and stored by her bo’sun that when he de-briefed the club’s notoriously-prickly secretary he was invited never to renew his temporary membership. Among a number of other calamities, he had explained in straightforward language, there had been no charts of the course (until bought at the very last minute) the dinghy was stolen on the morning of the start, they ran out of water and food - ‘oddly’ there was plenty of tonic water and corn flakes - and had to jury rig the port,topmast shrouds and the steering gear. The Brookes and Gatehouse instruments failed as they rounded the Rock.
That brings us neatly on to the next year’s Two Handed Round Britain race when myself and Roger Dillon (nephew of Major Desmond Dillon, Squadron secretary from 1968 to 1980) were leant the beautiful, wooden 49-foot yawl, Speedwell of Cremyll. (Now, happily, owned by RYS member David Reynolds)