WELL DONE, CUTTY SARK!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 727, 19 June 1953, Page 21

WELL DONE, CUTTY SARK!

NOW well into his nineties, Charles Andrews, who served in the Cutty Sark in 1888, said not long ago to Philip Donnellan: "I wish you'd do something on the Cutty Sark. There she is, lying down in London River and not a blessed soul knows or cares much about her." Donnellan went down to where the Cutty Sark, now the property of the training ship Worcester, lies at her buoys, and. despite her pathetic appearance, cut down to stump masts, he sensed the atmosphere of past glories that still clings to the old ship. He made the Cutty Sark his study, reading the old logs and talking to anyone he could find who had some personal link with her-in particular the family of the late Captain Richard Woodget, most famous of the Cutty Sark’s masters, who lent him many documents and newspaper cuttings. All this (and the fo’c’sle bell of the old ship, too, which was found in Suffolk) he turned into a radio programme, A Cloud of Sail,

which was broadcast first by the BBC and is now to be heard from National stations of the NZBS. The story of the Cutty Sark goes back to 1869, a great year for clipper ships, when Captain John ("White Hat’’) Willis ordered a ship that would "beat the Yankee Clippers and show the steamships her heels, too." In the end she broke all records in the wool race from

Australia to England. She fulfilled Captain Willis’s other prophecy, too, for in the early hours of July 26, 1889, off the Australian coast, she caught and passed the P, and O. liner Britannia, one of the crack mail steamers on the EnglandAustralia run. A Cloud of Sail will be heard first from 4YC at 7.52 p.m. on Tuesday, June 23, and from 4YA at 3.30 p.m. on Sunday, June 28. ;