The Drawing Board

Tough economic conditions in the years immediately after the Second World War - remember that raw materials were rationed, along with bread and petrol - did not prevent Robert Slater from building his boats to a high specification. They are unusually heavily-built for a 27-foot yacht, using 7/8 inch mahogany planking on sawn frames 24 inches apart, with steamed oak timbers between each pair of frames. All the externally visible timbers including the cockpit, cabin sides, king planks and toe rails are of solid mahogany. The basic price of Stealaway, the first boat launched (in 1947), was £450 - not including engine or sails. That price really must have been a steal, because the next two boats were priced at £600.

By the time that Salna was built in 1962, the price had risen to £1,300 according to the bill of sale found in her files. In the early sixties people were a lot richer than they had been twenty years earlier, and the leisure society was emerging. The world of yachting marinas and zero-maintenance boats had not yet come into being, but yacht cruising was coming within reach of many more people. The demand for tough, traditional boats was still strong enough for the Shipyard Company to have three S-Class boats on the stocks in 1963 - but they would be the last of the line. With the GRP revolution just around the corner, classic wooden boats would soon be seen as the exclusive preserve of either the wealthy or the eccentric, and it would stay that way for decades. The S-Class and boats like them have had to wait forty years before the current revival of interest in traditional boat building and sailing has revealed them to be the long-lived useable classics that they are.