A selection of plans, drawings and notes.  Compiled by Jeremy Burnett with a foreword by Nigel Irens

Ed Burnett worked with Nigel Irens on some significant designs in the late 1990s, including the Westernman modern pilot cutters before starting out on his own at a unit on the Dart in Totnes, opposite Baltic Wharf. Ed’s genius was in taking an established design, like a pilot cutter or the 30 foot gaff-rigged yacht, and turning it into something that was simultaneously modern whilst also looking a century old.

Ed aboard Cometa at Les Voiles de St Tropez

When he and Nigel produced Zinnia – the first of those 30ft (9.15) LOA yachts, for Ian and Sue Pople, launched in 1998 there was general drooling among the classic sailing community. And while she was a heavy displacement vessel at nearly eight tons, she seemed to sail well in nearly all conditions. With a neat and clean interior inspired by the spartan cabin of Tim and Pauline Carr’s 1905 Curlew she set a standard that produced an ongoing order book for similar boats. Unlike Irens, who at one point had designed both the then fastest power boat and sailing boat in the world, Ed was always inspired by the classic line, albeit tweaking it, subtly, for performance. When Tim and Alex Loftus wanted a family yacht for cruising in high latitudes they went to Ed and the 35ft (10.6m) Thembi (2007) was the result. Ed was already espousing traditional carvel construction as being better than strip plank and Tim proved it was viable by largely completing Thembi‘s hull on his own. From then on owners were encouraged to go trad by Ed.

Working closely with Ed as a judge on a couple of magazine design competitions was an insight into the depth of his knowledge and grasp of technical detail. His fingers would fly over his calculator on the table as he pored over someone’s entry before declaring a problem that others had missed. He was forthright in his views and they were welcome in providing a rigorous testing of the submissions. But he also had a fabulous sense of mischief and quite liked the idea of playing a practical joke. This was brought out when sailing with him aboard Peter Woodd’s S&S inboard yawl Cometa, at Les Voiles de St Tropez one early October where we were at the dark end of the pontoon in front of the Irish Bar. Ed made a catapult worthy of a seige machine, strapped athwartwise between the mast and shrouds from which to launch water balloons that soared through 60 or 70 yards of darkness before splashing onto the front wall of the Irish Bar – the contents falling onto the otherwise happy drinkers below.

It went on for a while and we were never discovered though someone should have wondered why quite so much laughter was coming from that pocket of darkness off the end of the Jean Jaurès quay. This book is a lovely memory of Ed who was one of very few designers with the requisite knowledge to build boats which bestrode both past and future. The chapter on how he saved the day with the design for the Queen’s 2012 Jubilee rowbarge Gloriana, the first designer of which clearly hadn’t got it right, only hints at what must have been quite a scramble to the deadline. “Building took only five months,” is the poker-faced remark that belies his, and the builder’s, achievement.

Ed tragically took his own life in 2014, aged 43, and one wonders how this book could have grown into so much more of a compendium of happy classic drawings of handy classic boats had he been able to carry on. His loss is the loss of the whole community of those who like these kinds of boats. We do have a book though, lovingly compiled by his father Jeremy, who introduced Ed to sailing in Falmouth in the 1970s. Dan Houston

Pub Left Field Editions, 2018, £30, hardback, 168pp

You can find it here: www.centralbooks.com