“Couples, mainly, often with kids, and I reckon they were up there with the best of the ‘70s.”
By the time Earthworks opened in 1975 — shoppers shoulder to shoulder, workshops and demos out the back, sausage sizzles on the street — concrete boat building had been competing for our attention for a couple of years. Another adventure and another expression of those heady, hippy times when young people could do anything.
Or, in my case, what I could and couldn’t do. It took years, but I made progress.
I was still teaching when we started building our Donovan-designed brigantine at Span Farm. Brian was our guru, but ferrocement was one of those collaborative 1970s subcultures, centred around designers like him and Richard Hartley, a few industry figures and the New Zealand Ferro Cement Marine Association Inc.
Pretty much every right-thinking boatie at the time thought we were nuts. Concrete boats — really?
There were certainly failures — some sad, some tragic — and some of us learnt our limitations. But there were some truly remarkable people who built their dreams and sailed them around the world, learning a prodigious range of skills along the way. Couples, mainly, often with kids, and I reckon they were up there with the best of the ‘70s.
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These days Westhaven is a sprawling marina where people with more money than most of us park their boats, and maybe it was like that fifty years ago, but to me back then it was the Ship Builders slipway in Saint Mary’s Bay, where Dennis Broad and I repaired a couple of concrete boats, and the freezing cold upstairs Ponsonby Cruising Clubrooms, where NZFCMA met.
NZFCMA was founded in 1968, but Ken and I went to our first meeting in early ‘72. The normal set-up: tables at the front for the Secretary, Treasurer and Committee, with the rest of us lined up facing them in chairs. The Chairman‘s Report, the Treasurer’s Report, adoption of the Minutes, General Business and a presentation. Animated conversation afterwards.
Honestly I can’t remember too much about the meetings, although I somehow ended up as Treasurer. But I do recall a gangly, bearded man sitting to the side at one of them. He was stuffing newspaper into his clothing as insulation to keep warm as the meeting progressed. He turned out to be German artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, by that time very successful, although unknown to most of us, and remembered by me mainly for detesting the tyranny of straight lines, and for loving irregular curves, colour, asymmetrical shapes and all things organic.
How he knew Brian Donovan, who insisted on calling him Frederick, I don’t know. Nor can I remember when exactly we got to know him. He first came to New Zealand for an exhibition in 1973, but it wasn’t until 1976 that he sailed back in on his boat the Regentag (“Rainy Day”), itself an expression of his art and outlook.
In the 1970s Hundertwasser bought harbour land in the Bay of Islands, and he lived there for most of the rest of his life. We visited the place some time later.
Hundertwasser popped up occasionally in our lives and recollections for a year or two after that, visiting Graeme Kenyon and his then wife Alison’s “terrible old flat” in Mt Albert, where they were building a 36’ Herreshoff modified for ferrocement. Frederick loved the kikuyu grass growing up through the weatherboards of their\ old house and reappearing in the roof guttering. Memory’s a funny thing. Graeme remembers feeding him baked beans on toast for lunch, while Alison insists it was Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner. Graeme says, OK, maybe it didn’t come out of a can, but it was definitely on toast, and for lunch. At first they had no idea who this “hobo” was, and were surprised by the “gorgeous chick” who came to pick him up afterwards.
Alison remembers him declining the tea or coffee she offered. She then suggested Milo, and he read everything on the tin before agreeing to a cup. When he came to our place he roasted and ground up barley to make ersatz coffee.
At some point he passed around big numbered prints, beautifully produced in Japan with embedded gold and silver foil, and offered them to us at prices we could never afford, saying they’d be an excellent investment. Well, they may have been. He did give both of us little books of his work, and to us a book about the Regentag, to the Kenyons another about hot air ballooning across Europe.
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Those early NZFCMA meetings seemed to attract a good turnout to me, but not to Graeme. He was editor of the Association’s newsletter and his energies and talents were turning it from a sporadic thing into a monthly publication. Attendance had been so low recently that he wondered in the June 1972 issue, his second, how many local members were really interested. The advice and presentations were intensely practical, he said, a unique opportunity to discover ideas and methods from the experts.
The professionals who made up most of the Association’s executive committee were keen to maintain the reputation of ferrocement, a material still in the early stages of acceptance, and they’d do all they could to ensure that every boat was well built, regardless of its designer or builder.
Could you wander into a steel boat yard, or any other for that matter, Graeme wrote, and start asking the professionals for advice?
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Unfortunately he was right on two other points: the meetings were good value, and interest in them was waning. But the Newsletter, or Bulletin or Journal as it was variously known, was flourishing, and to me it was obvious why — it was jammed full of interesting stuff.
Like the main feature of that June ‘72 issue, a transcribed presentation by Morley Sutherland, a pioneer in prestressed concrete and ferrocement in New Zealand. It was informed, practical and refreshing in its honesty. He said:
Up until now, all of the design of ferrocement, steel, timber, aluminium, fibreglass, and the new resin sandwich type of boats — that is the small ones under 100-150 feet in length — has been what is commonly known as “eyeballed” — you do it by experience. You build one, and if it works, that’s fine. You build the next one with a little bit more off the timbers, and if that doesn’t break in a storm, well, you shave a little bit more off and so on. Tradition has given us timber boat building and from established scantling sizes we have moved into plywood…
When he met Dr Nervi, the Italian pioneer of ferrocement, in 1959, Sutherland asked him how Nervi had analysed his own boat, the Nenelle. Nervi said, “Well, you’re an engineer, you know as well as I do that you can’t. It just seemed right, so I did it.” I loved that.
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The June Newsletter ended with Richard Hartley taking issue with an article published in Yachting Monthly about ferrocement building methods. He wrote, “At one time, I would wholeheartedly agree with the author … that the professional builders should get together and iron out the deficiencies in different types of construction, but this is no longer necessary, because the sea is sorting out the weak hulls and enabling customers to sort out the builders and designers using the best types of construction.”
The builders and designers on the Association’s Technical Committee never did agree on building and structural design approaches. There was ongoing debate about framed versus frameless construction, mesh types, building upright or upside down, single or two shot plastering and so on. But what they did do was offer pre-plastering hull inspections and advice, going a long way to ensure that “every boat was well built”.
In our neck of the woods everything was Donovan v. Hartley. Our boats were built over temporary moulds made from cheap timber and discarded after plastering. Hartley’s were shaped around welded steel frames, which his agents sold as a kitset. They were what made the boats strong, Hartley said — imagine what would happen to a canvas canoe if you took out the frames! But we didn’t know who was the sillier — Richard for saying it or the people who thought he had a point. It’s the shape that gives a ferro boat its strength, Brian said — the curvature — the same reason egg shells are strong. Frames are a weak point, like kindling bent over your knee…
Beneath Richard’s letter there was this sad little note:
Advertising: It appears that no member of the Association has anything to sell or any wish to buy anything.
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Graeme’s third issue was thin on content, but his fourth, in August ‘72, was much better, including a useful article about rigging by designer Alan Mummery, an indignant rejection by Richard Hartley of Morley Sutherland’s statement that the design of small boats was “eyeballed”, and a response to Hartley from a Sutherland associate1. There were even a few ads!
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And so it went. Practical information (much of it obviously ferreted out by the Editor), hotly contested opinions and plenty more, and I wanted to be part of it.
By November ‘72 I was on a new Editorial Committee along with Graeme, Ken Adams and Garry Bowen.
My first newsletter contribution, about lofting, took up most of the March 1973 issue. Re-reading it now, it’s not bad at all provided you don’t mind my amateurish lettering on the drawings, and I did properly acknowledge Brian’s advice and Chapelle’s book. My second article was about building timber frames from the lofted lines, the third on fairing the erected frames. When I’d done it once, I wrote about it!2 Mind you, I was describing how we’d built a Donovan hull, and those wooden moulds would have been anathema to Richard Hartley.
Gary was even more active, with three articles already credited by the end of 1972 and plenty more where they came from.
My stint as Treasurer ended in ‘73, and Graeme began to take a back seat, although still writing the occasional article. Gary and I gradually took over as Editors, with me handling most of the practical business of editorship — layup, dealing with printers and the like. I can see my hand starting to appear on the pages — inked lettering stencils on the covers, and more tedious Letraset in the headings. Those were the painful old days, with computers and dot matrix printing still a decade away. Eight years before someone in the Solomons said to me, “Have you heard of a company called Apple?”
One thing that still strikes me is our honesty about corrosion, grouting, paint failure, hull damage etc. We got a bit of pushback for being “alarmist” about corrosion, but disagreed, saying that corrosion in ferrocement was no more concerning than rot in timber or rust in steel. It was better to face up to our problems than ignore them.
We also quoted a dismissive article from American designer William Garden, which concluded, “I’m sure that plans for a ferrocement trimaran with clipper bow, square rig and a great cabin aft would appeal to all the fringes of boat buyers and be a sure key to the bank.”
But we reported the successes as well as the failures and the jibes, and, all that aside, continued to review books and boat designs, welcome articles from overseas contributors, write about projects under way, describe building procedures in detail, and publish the ongoing debates about frames, meshes, plastering methods and so on.
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Hard times and lost interest
Then, in June/July 1975 the Journal came under new management — mine. I couldn’t justify continuing as an unpaid volunteer, I said, and nobody else had put their hand up. In future the magazine would be published “in association with” NZFCMA, and I’d get to keep the profits, less a 7.5% royalty.
Fortunately for me, Gary continued as joint editor. Not much else changed either, least of all my income, and a year or so later the inevitable happened. I gave up, and publication reverted to the Association.
Although we both continued to be involved in editing, Gary was clearly more proactive than me, and he managed to establish an impressive Editorial Board including people from commercial, engineering, regulatory and UN backgrounds.
But Editorial Boards don’t get the donkey work done, nor increase the readership, and a year later the Journal was taken over by IFIC, the International Ferrocement Information Center at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok — secure in the embrace of the engineering establishment.
I was probably feeling a bit sorry for myself when I wrote in our final issue:
Life of the Journal has always been a struggle for survival on two fronts — for good copy to publish and the cash with which to print it. The editors have been at all times essentially unpaid. Supposedly committed to boat building themselves, they’ve spent much of their time writing letters, servicing subs, soliciting copy, making personal visits, writing, rewriting or editing articles, dealing with typesetters and printers, pasting up camera copy and — all too infrequently — visiting the bank. There has usually been enough money coming to print the publication, but never enough to pay its servants.
Ours was a dynamic little publication, but for a few reasons we never did get the big amateur readership we’d hoped for. There were several books on ferro boatbuilding available by then — meaning less need for how-to articles like ours — and we were also writing for a much broader readership, of “builders … both commercial and amateur, designers and architects, research specialists, marine authorities etc”.
Trying to appeal to four or five disparate audiences in the same magazine was probably a sure way to fail. You live and learn.
But to be honest, yet again, the ferrocement boom of the early ‘70s was also coming to an end, “the victim of hard times and lost interest”.
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There’s a lot more that could be said but this is already long enough and probably tedious. Certainly there was a lot that Gary, Graeme and I could be proud of — and grateful for.
Bowing out, we described ferrocement as an “open technology… mainly restricted to the marine field, where many capable amateurs, the designers who depend on them, and nonprofit agencies have been particularly generous with their ideas and experience.”
We were the grateful recipients of their largesse.
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A few things we published over the last couple of years meant a lot to me personally. The first was an introduction to The Ferrocement Yacht, one of three “handbooks” we published (the others were — as you’d expect! — on corrosion, and grouting and emergency repairs).
Another was an article by John Fyson of UN-FAO describing FAO’s interest in ferrocement. This was accompanied by a gloomy description of Brian Donovan’s six months experience supervising an FAO project in Madagascar in 1973-74. Brian expressed his admiration for FAO personnel “who, he feels, are doing a tremendous job against great odds.”
Reading it now, I’m more than grateful that my own “third world” experience a few years later was completely different.
Even closer to home for me was a lengthy article by D.J. Eyres in January 1975 on the survey of ferrocement fishing boats built in New Zealand. David Eyres was New Zealand’s Principal Surveyor of Ships, and I’m pretty sure he interviewed me for a job in the Solomon Islands in 1978. David was on Gary’s Editorial Board, and maybe that boosted my credentials.
But that’s another story.
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What else did I get out of it personally?
Well, the knowledge that if you put something interesting, or challenging, in front of me I’ll dive right in, as reliably as my dog chasing a new smell.
And I’d found a new skill, writing — technical writing if you like — explaining things to people rather than trying to admonish or persuade them, or write novels. I was learning how to edit contributors, and uncovering a written tone of voice I was happy with. Those were things I did, and enjoyed, for much of my working life.
It was odd, too, that, after the years I’d spent working on a tan, I found that I liked working at a desk, especially once a computer turned up on it.
Meantime I’d certainly learned to admire the characters we’d come across, and not just the success stories. Unlike Gary and Mary, both we and the Kenyons gave up on our cruising dreams, although Graeme went on to live a remarkable life around boats. As I said at the top, I was learning what I could and couldn’t do.
And as for money, not a brass razoo. Maybe don’t bother googling that. It’s the name of a race horse now, and like the rise and fall of the ferro wave, it’s had its time.
Before moving on, though, I do want to linger on a remarkable character.
MORE TO COME
- Amusingly enough, in a later issue (volume. 2 no. 7) Richard wrote a long article defending his use of framed construction, saying “The bare facts of the matter are that the technique of building timber yachts and launches has been developed over the years by boatbuilders, simply by using trial and error methods, and latterly by evaluating the strength of the hulls by studying those which have failed, or by studying those that have lasted say 20 years and have then lost half their strength.”
Sadly, Morley Sutherland died of cancer a year later, aged only 48.
↩︎ - Having been involved with this kind of thing for years now, mainly for our own software and systems, I think that having someone relatively fresh write up a technique or procedure is the right way to go. Why? Because the expert is likely to skip over critical steps and/or fail to understand what’s confusing the novice. Instead, have your expert review it after you’ve written it. If you’ve got their attention they’ll point out any errors and add anything you’ve left out. That’s certainly how I worked with Brian for a few years. He was an exceptional teacher. ↩︎