Sub-headed: ” A yachtsman’s gossip”
There is ‘nothing of high mark’ in any of these pages Alker Tripp, quoting Dickens, says of this book in the introduction… but he does hope they carry the smell of salt water and the wind. And they do just that. This has become one of the classics of sailing books – much in the same vein (though less well known) as Maurice Griffiths’ Magic of the Swatchways. The book was first published in 1950 and this imprint is from Lodestar Books in 2014. It’s a collection of sea stories, cruising mainly, from Tripp’s sailing around the east and south coasts, many of which were published in yachting magazines. Kent and Essex feature largely but he also makes it to Cowes and into western waters.
It’s a delightful collection of yarns which are made more special when you realise most of them are from sailing 80-plus years ago, yet they could have been written last season. And although Tripp modestly denigrates his writing style just listen to the cadence of a sentence like this:
“Course had been laid by compass for the Nore. In the jewellery of yellow lights that studded the waterway the light was not yet visible. It would only be a pin-point as yet, gleaming every half minute. But… yes there it was! The binnacle could be ignored now.”
So it’s one of those books that passes on the practical elements of sailing small boats (he sails a 12-M too!) and Tripp delights in besting the tides among the shoal waters of a beloved Thames estuary. Tripp was an artist of no mean ability; he exhibited at the Royal Academy. And his paintings pepper these pages (albeit in monochrome) adding graphically to the tales themselves. He was a senior policeman who was Assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police from 1932 to 1947. But he was also a very practical and skilled yachtsman, and he’s an author you feel you’d like to meet in a waterside sailors’ haunt, or better still go on a passage with… And you kind of can… by reading Under the Cabin Lamp. DH
Lodestar Books £12
One for the Classic Sailor’s Bookshelf