A HUNDRED YEARS OF THE ROYAL OCEAN RACING CLUB

This is a magazine for cruising sailors, but even the least competitive amongst us cannot fail to recognise the powerful influence that the Royal Ocean Racing Club has had on recreational sailing as a sport and the boats themselves

- WORDS: Ben Lowings

Back in 1925, Malden Heckstall-Smith, then editor of Yachting Monthly, was one of a small group of yachtsmen who formed the organising committee for the inaugural offshore contest, the Fastnet Race, an event that has become a household name for yachties. Heckstall-Smith was indeed an authority on organising handicaps for racing yachts. There was serious debate within this clique of yachting gentlemen about what shape this first ‘Ocean Race’ would take. The renowned Claud Worth wrote to Yachting Monthly in 1925 to state that the Ocean Racing Club's first course should be to the Spanish port of Vigo and back.

It was a colleague, the writer Weston Martyr, who suggested a race from Cowes, around Fastnet Rock and back to Plymouth. His idea was inspired by an earlier race to Bermuda. In June 1925, Worth wrote in Yachting Monthly explaining he wasn't entering his cutter because, with Fastnet, land would be ‘close aboard’ for ‘a large proportion of the [race] distance’. His argument was that the Biscay crossing was more of a test for oceanic sailing. That may or may not be true, but the ‘Vigo Race’ was not to be. It attests to the different world of a century past that organisers agreed there would be no limit on crew numbers but ‘no more paid hands than can normally be accommodated in the foc'sle.

The RORC has pioneered and driven change since 1925. As with other clubs, its members in the Second World War formed a vessel ‘pool’ for the Dunkirk evacuations. In 1940, RORC secretary Pete Peterson argued in Yachting Monthly for an Allied Navies War Comforts Fund to raise money to support families of naval personnel in Nazi-occupied Europe: ‘This fund to help Allied seamen will make a special appeal to yachtsmen, so many of whom have enjoyed the hospitality of Norwegian, Dutch, French, Belgian and Polish waters.’