The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Well now.

If I am to make you understand what the figure of Donald Crowhurst meant to me, when I was an eight-year- old boy, then I must take you back – back more than thirty years, to the England of 1968 – a place, and a time, which already seem unimaginably remote. I’m sure that the mention of that year summons up all sorts of associations for you: the year of student radicalism, the counter-culture – anti-Vietnam rallies and The Beatles’ White Album and all of that. Well, that only tells part of the story. England was – and always has been – a more complicated place than people would have us believe. What would you say if I told you that, in my memory of things, the great hero, the defining figure of that era was not John Lennon or Che Guevara, but a conservative, old-fashioned, sixty-five-year-old vegetarian with the looks and bearing of an avuncular Latin master? Can you even guess who I might be talking about? Does his name even mean anything any more?

I’m referring to Sir Francis Chichester.

You probably have no idea who Sir Francis Chichester was. Let me tell you, then. He was a yachtsman, a mariner – one of the most brilliant that England has ever produced. And in 1968 he was a celebrity, one of the most famous and talked-about people in the country. As famous as David Beckham is today, or Robbie Williams? Yes, I should think so. And his achievement, although it might seem pointless, I suppose, to today’s younger generation, remains, in many people’s eyes, much greater than simply playing football or writing pop songs. He was famous for sailing around the world, single-handed, in his boat Gypsy Moth. He completed the voyage in 226 days, and most incredibly of all, during that time he made only one stop, in Australia. It was a magnificent feat of seamanship, courage and endurance, performed by the most unlikely of heroes.

I had the enormous good fortune to grow up next to the sea. I think you’ve visited the town where your mother and I grew up, haven’t you? Shaldon, it is called, in Devon. We lived in a large Georgian house close to the water. Shaldon itself, however, is built around a relatively modest saltwater inlet, and to get to the seafront proper you have to go half a mile up the road to neighbouring Teignmouth. And here you will find everything you might want from a seaside resort: a pier, beaches, amusement arcades, miniature golf, dozens of boarding houses and, of course, down by the docks, a lively marina, where yachtsmen and boaters of every description would gather every day, and the air was always alive with the whispering noises of masts and rigging as they creaked and shifted in the breeze. From an early age – ever since I can remember – my mother and father used to take me down to the marina to watch those comings and goings, the ceaseless ebb and flow of maritime life. Although we never sailed ourselves, we knew plenty of people who did: by the age of eight I was a veteran of several modest ocean voyages aboard yachts belonging to my parents’ friends, and had developed a deep schoolboy fascination for all things nautical.

No wonder, then, that Francis Chichester and his accomplishment loomed so large in my consciousness. Although we never actually made the pilgrimage along the coast to Plymouth to see him make his return landing in May 1967, I vividly remember watching coverage of the event – along with millions of others – live on BBC television. If I remember rightly, the normal schedules had even been cleared for the purpose. Plymouth docks and the area surrounding them were covered with swarms of well-wishers – hundreds of thousands of them. They cheered and applauded and waved their Union Jacks in the air as Gypsy Moth glided into the harbour, surrounded by launches carrying journalists and TV camera crews. Chichester himself stood on the deck and waved back, looking tanned, serene and healthy – not at all like someone who had spent the last seven and a half months enduring an extreme form of solitary confinement. It had been an occasion which made my heart swell with uncomplicated patriotic pride – something I cannot remember feeling very often since. And after that, I began keeping a scrapbook, full of cuttings about Chichester’s voyage and any other boating-related stories I could cull from the newspapers my parents favoured.

Those newspapers, I seem to remember, were the Daily Mail on weekdays, and on Sundays – along with at least half of the nation, it always seemed back then – the Sunday Times. And it was in the Sunday Times, on 17 March, 1968, that I read this electrifying announcement:

?5,000

The ?5,000 Sunday Times round-the-world race prize will be awarded to the single-handed yachstman who completes the fastest non-stop navigation of the world departing after 1 June and before 31 October, 1968, from a port on the British mainland, and rounding the three capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn).

A race! And a race that would top Chichester’s achievement by subjecting the competitors to an even more extreme test of survival – a non-stop circumnavigation. Quite apart from the trial of seamanship involved, could anybody survive such an ordeal, psychologically? As I said, I had already sailed in one or two yachts. I knew what the cabins were like: surprisingly cosy, sometimes, and surprisingly well equipped, but above all tiny. Even smaller than my little bedroom at home. The fact that Chichester had lived in such a confined space for so long was, to me, almost his most impressive feat. It seemed incredible that these men were prepared to live like that for so many cramped, waterlogged months.

Who were these masochists, in any case? Already, after reading a few of the Sunday Times reports, I had concluded for myself that the strongest contender was a French yachtsman called Bernard Moitessier. He was a fabulous seaman – lean, sinewy, and totally dedicated to the life of the lone explorer. He had already sailed his 39-foot boat Joshua through the fearsome waters of the Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn, encountering (and surviving) terrifying storms in the process. It appeared that he was reluctant to enter the race, but under its rules, he had no choice: the Sunday Times had cleverly arranged things so that any sailor who set off round the world between June and October was a contender for the prize, whether they wanted it or not. I pinned my colours to Moitessier and even persuaded my parents to buy me an expensive hardback copy of his book, Sailing to the Reefs, for my eighth birthday. The writing was rather too dense and poetic for me to enjoy, but I pored for hours over the black-and-white photographs of the muscular Moitessier powering his boat through the waves and swinging effortlessly from rope to rope amid the rigging of his yacht like a nautical Tarzan.

The other entrants to the race, announced one by one, failed to capture my imagination in the same way. There was Robin Knox-Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old English merchant marine officer; Chay Blyth, a former army sergeant, one year his junior; Donald Crowhurst, aged thirty-six, a British engineer and manager of an electronics company; Nigel Tetley, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, and four others. None of them seemed in Moitessier’s league. One or two of them, from what I could gather, had barely been to sea before. But then something happened to change my mind, and my allegiance. My father came in from work one day with a copy of the Teignmouth Post and Gazette and showed me the front-page story – which announced, amazingly, that one of the entrants to the race, Donald Crowhurst, had now decided not just that he was going to set sail from Teignmouth, but that he had even agreed to name his yacht Teignmouth Electron. (In return, as it later emerged, for a number of local sponsorship deals.)

The name of the man who had persuaded Crowhurst to bestow these benefits on a town with which he otherwise had no connection was Rodney Hallworth: a one-time Fleet Street crime reporter, now Devon-based press agent and assiduous promoter of anything and everything that might raise the profile of Teignmouth in the eyes of the wider world. From the stories which he now began to feed to the local and national newspapers, I began to build up an image in my mind of Donald Crowhurst as a kind of yachting superhero: the dark horse of the race, and therefore its most intriguing and alluring competitor. Not only was he an accomplished seaman,