The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

apparently, he was an electronics wizard, and a designer of genius, who despite making a late entrance into the race was going to snatch it from under the noses of his rivals by setting sail in a sleek, modern, radically innovative vehicle which had been built to his own specifications – a trimaran, no less, with a unique self-righting system which would activate in case of a capsize, and which was controlled (here was the clincher – the word which, in 1968, set everybody’s pulse racing) by a computer.

Instantly, Donald Crowhurst became the focus of all my interest and admiration. He was due to arrive in Teignmouth in only a matter of weeks – and I, for one, couldn’t wait.

A support committee had now been formed, and one of my father’s sailing friends was a keen member. In this way we were drip-fed pieces of information. Crowhurst’s boat was finished, we were told, and he was already sailing it from a boatyard in Norfolk round to the Devon coast. He would be with us in a matter of days. As it turned out, this forecast was optimistic. Teething troubles dogged that maiden voyage, which took four times as long as it should have done, and it was mid-October by the time Crowhurst and his team made it to Teignmouth. On the Friday afternoon after his arrival, my mother picked me up from school and took me down to the harbour to catch an early glimpse of my hero and to watch some of his preparations.

Every child, I imagine, has a defining moment at some point in their lives, when the meaning of the word ‘disappointment’ becomes cruelly apparent to them. A moment when they realize that the world, which they had hitherto conceived as being ripe with promise, rich with infinite possibilities, is in reality a flawed and circumscribed place. That moment can be devastating, and can linger in the mind for years afterwards, much stronger than the memory of early joys and infant excitements. And in my case, it came that grey Friday afternoon in mid-October, when I had my first sight of Donald Crowhurst.

This was the man who was going to win the Sunday Times round-the-world yacht race? The man who was going to defeat Moitessier, the brilliant, experienced Frenchman? And this was Teignmouth Electron, the ultimate in modern boat design, which was going to skim across the massive waves of the Southern Ocean, every nuance of its fleet-footed movement tempered and adjusted by the latest in computer technology?

Frankly, both of these things seemed hard to credit. Crowhurst cut a poor, diminished figure: after all the bravado of his newspaper interviews, I had been expecting someone with an aura of confidence about him, some sense of derring-do – a presence, in other words. Instead, he seemed ineffectual and preoccupied. I have the impression (in retrospect, of course) that he was alarmed, even terrified, by the spotlight that had been turned upon him, and the weight of expectation that came with it. As for the much vaunted Teignmouth Electron, not only did it look puny and fragile, but the preparations around it were shambolic. The boat itself seemed to be still under construction, with a succession of workmen trooping on and off it every day, performing endless repairs, while on the quayside bewildering numbers of supplies were steadily accumulating in messy piles – everything from carpenter’s tools to radio equipment to tins of soup and corned beef. In and around all this chaos, Crowhurst himself pottered aimlessly, posing for the omnipresent camera crew, quarrelling with his boat-builders, popping into telephone kiosks to remonstrate with would-be suppliers, and every day looking more and more obviously sick with apprehension.

Well, the great day came at last. 31 October 1968. A drizzly, overcast and altogether dismal Thursday afternoon. There wasn’t a great throng at the quayside – nothing to compare with the crowds who had come to Plymouth to welcome Chichester the year before, that’s for sure – maybe about sixty or seventy of us. Our teacher had given the whole class permission to leave early if we wanted to go and watch, and of course most of the children had taken advantage of this, but wherever the others went, it wasn’t to wave goodbye to Donald Crowhurst on his round-the-world voyage. I was the only child of school age who made the effort, of that I’m fairly certain. My mother was with me, my father must still have been at work, and as for your mother – I don’t know where she was. You would have to ask her. I remember the mood among the crowd as being sceptical as much as it was celebratory. Crowhurst had acquired a fair number of detractors in Teignmouth over the past few weeks, and he didn’t do much to assuage them when he turned up for his grand departure in a beige V-neck sweater, complete with collar and tie. Hardly the outfit Moitessier would have chosen for his send-off, I couldn’t help thinking. And things got worse after that: Crowhurst set off at three o’clock exactly, but almost immediately got into difficulties, was unable to raise his sails and had to be towed back to shore. The crowd became even more derisive at this point, and many of them went home. My mother and I stayed to watch. The problem took nearly two hours to put right, by which time dusk was falling. Finally, he set sail again just before five: and this time it was for real. Three launches went with him – one of them containing his wife and four children, wrapped up tightly in the duffel coats that were considered essential fashion items for youngsters at the time. Despite the fact that Crowhurst was cutting such an unimpressive figure, I can remember envying them for having him as their father: being at the centre of attention, being made to feel so special. Their launch followed his yacht for about a mile, after which they waved goodbye to him and turned back. Crowhurst sailed on, into the distance and over the horizon, heading for months of solitude and danger. My mother took me by the hand and together we walked home, looking forward to warmth, tea and Thursday-night television.

What were the forces operating upon Donald Crowhurst during the next few months? What was it that made him act as he did?

Most of what I know about the Crowhurst story – apart from my early memory of seeing him off from the harbour, that is – comes from the excellent book written by two Sunday Times journalists, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, who had access to his logbooks and tape recordings in the months after he died at sea. They called their book The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, and in it they quote something that he said into his portable tape recorder not long after leaving home: ‘The thing about single-handing is it puts a great deal of pressure on the man, it explores his weaknesses with a penetration that very few other occupations can manage.’

In Crowhurst’s case, there were the obvious pressures of living alone at sea – the cramped conditions, the constant noise, motion and dampness, the terrible privacy of his tiny cabin – but there was also pressure coming from other sources. Two other sources, to be precise. One was his press agent, Rodney Hallworth; the other was his sponsor, a local businessman called Stanley Best, who had financed the building of the trimaran and was now its owner, but in return had insisted upon a contract stipulating that, if anything went wrong with the voyage, Crowhurst would have to buy the boat back off him. This meant, in effect, that he had no option but to complete the circumnavigation: anything else would reduce him to bankruptcy.

The pressure coming from Hallworth was slightly more subtle, but no less insistent. Hallworth had spent the last few months building Crowhurst up into a hero. A man who was essentially little more than a ‘weekend sailor’ had now been chosen to take on, in the eyes of the newspaper-reading public, the role of the lone, audacious challenger – the embodiment of Middle English backbone and resilience, a plucky David battling it out with the yachting Goliaths. Hallworth had done (and continued to do) a brilliant if totally unscrupulous job. It’s hard not to see him as a prototype ‘spin doctor’, before that term came to be so prevalent. In any case, Crowhurst had certainly been made to feel that he could not let this public down, and he could not let his press agent down after all the work he had put in. There could be no turning back.

He was not long into his voyage, however, before something became all too painfully obvious: there could be no going forward either. It took little more than two weeks for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation to be revealed as a complete fantasy.

‘Racked by the growing awareness,’ he wrote on Friday, 15 November, ‘that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision – to chuck it in at this stage – what a bloody awful decision!’ Teignmouth Electron’s electrics had failed, her hatches were