To some, including Sir Francis Chichester, something did not sit right. It took but a routine search of Teignmouth Electron to confirm their suspicions. Despite the squalor of the cabin, two logbooks were set out neatly on the table. The first accorded exactly with Crowhurst’s purported course: south through the Atlantic, skirting South Africa, across the Indian Ocean, then below Australasia, dipping into the treacherous Southern Ocean before rounding Cape Horn. It was the second, the actual log, that was the confession. Crowhurst had fabricated his voyage while idling in the south Atlantic. He was waiting to rejoin the race on the home leg, perhaps slipping in in a respectable, but not overscrutinised, third or fourth place.
Only therewasno more race. Thorough though Crowhurst’s grand deception had been (he had even zipped down to Antarctic waters to fake some photographic proof), he had not banked on his rivals, one by one, falling by the wayside. He was entangled in a web of his own deceit, as if the dementia of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner had descended. Among Crowhurst’s belongings was a thick tome containing his rambling, philosophical meditations on man, life and the universe. The only item missing was the yacht’s brass clock. It was assumed he’d clutched it to him as he took his last step over the gunwale.
For Clare Crowhurst, Donald’s widow, her husband’s loss remains painfully vivid. “I’d gone for a walk with the dog,” the 73-year-old recalls at her home in Devon. “My sister caught up with me and said the boat had been found empty. When I came down the drive, there were a lot of journalists, a couple of nuns and some policemen, and I only thought, ‘Get the children out of this.’” Clare soon abandoned her Catholicism. Her God was no longer merciful. She was 35, with four children to support; for her, family life as they’d known it was over. Over nearly four decades, the Crowhursts have had their private grief made public in umpteen books and documentaries, a couple of films, an opera, an epic poem, even an art installation.
Only recently, Clare was informed of another “sighting” in Australia, in keeping with the cranky theory that her husband had faked his own death. “Even after all this time,” she sighs. It has perpetuated a tragic legend — Donald the hoaxer, Donald the cheat and, quite often, Donald, just a bit of a joke.
Deep Water, a 90-minute documentary about Donald’s voyage, is released in cinemas next month. By their own admission, the makers do not claim to reveal anything beyond the account in a 1970 book, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall (the definitive written text). “Only one person knew, and he’s apparently not available,” Clare remarks drily. But they do a terrific job of humanising the man, thanks to her first-time testimony. “I would have thought this definitely draws a line under it,” she offers. The result is a harrowing yet strangely bittersweet tale, portraying a man racked with guilt, financially crippled, ill equipped and armed with an old-fashioned sense of honour. Here, Crowhurst is a universal victim, unable to resist an unstoppable momentum, who concocts a series of untruths to get out of his fix. “We can all get in over our heads, where you think, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’” says the producer, John Smithson, who used the notion of a moral conundrum to great success in his docudrama about two mountain climbers, Touching the Void. “There’s a little bit of Donald in all of us.”
Look back at 1968 now, and the past is indeed a far-away country. Britain had advanced from monochrome to Technicolor, but there was still something essentially unshowy about life. While the Americans were off exploring the stars (Armstrong landed on the moon just 10 days after Crowhurst’s boat was found), Britain found her final frontier closer to home. There was something postimperial about Britannia reclaiming her waves. In 1966, the former paratroopers Chay Blyth and John Ridgway became household names when they rowed across the Atlantic. In 1967, Chichester completed the first solo circumnavigation, followed a year later by Alec Rose. Both men, sexagenarians and unlikely darlings, were greeted by a quarter of a million wellwishers and inevitable knighthoods on their return. There remained an oceanic Everest — completing that same trip nonstop.
It was in that spirit that, in March 1968, The Sunday Times announced its Golden Globe Race, the aim being to find the world’s ultimate mariner. There would be two prizes: a trophy for the first man home, and an additional £5,000 for the one who made the course in the fastest time. The race was open to all comers, who could leave at their own leisure, provided (to avoid winter in the southern hemisphere) they set sail by October 31 of that year.
To a marine engineer from Bridgwater, the prospect was enticing. Donald Crowhurst, born in India, was acutely aware of financial ruination. When the family relocated to England, forgoing a cushy life in the twilight Raj, it was the resultant financial hardship that killed his father. Booted out of the RAF, then the army, Crowhurst was a loving father, but a rudderless soul; despite his place in the local community (he had stood as a Liberal council-lor), his business, Electron Utilisation Ltd, was failing. But he had a keen sense of adventure. A skilled technician, he had devised assorted nautical paraphernalia — including a self-righting mechanism for capsized vessels and a direction-finding instrument, the Navicator. Ahead of his time, he had also calculated the value of sponsorship. By entering the race, he believed, he could guarantee marketing exposure and a secure financial future.
“I was very sceptical, actually,” Clare says. “I truly believed he wouldn’t get sponsorship, because he wasn’t experienced as a sailor. It was like a lot of people’s ambitions — it was a little bit over the top and would fizzle out. I didn’t reckon on so many changes to the scheme.”
Transition came in the shape of two men, a sugar daddy and a spin doctor. A local millionaire, Stanley Best, agreed to stump up the cash for Donald to build a new boat, a lightweight trimaran. A press agent, Rodney Hallworth, with a hotline to Fleet Street, generated the necessary media buzz and moved Crowhurst’s HQ to Teignmouth. “I remember all the running around with the boat being built,” recounts Donald’s son Simon, then an unquestioning eight-year-old. “The plans were laid out on the piano in the sitting room. He used to use it as a kind of desk.” The business was far more hard-nosed than that image implies, though. By July, his father had remortgaged the family home and ploughed everything into his great gamble. He was duly listed as one of nine competitors in the Golden Globe Race. Some had already set off. Others, like Crowhurst, were cutting it mighty fine.
In Deep Water, you know there is something wrong when, at the launch of Teignmouth Electron, the champagne bottle fails to break; when the trimaran takes two weeks to sail from its yard in Norfolk; and when, minutes after casting off, Crowhurst is forced to return to port as an anticapsize airbag gets tangled in the rigging. And, for the first time, it’s all there to see. The Deep Water team reconstructed Crowhurst’s cabin, but nothing else. Their trump card is to have found nearly four hours of unseen footage, shot by local BBC news crews or, more remark-ably, on board by Crowhurst, with a 16mm camera loaned by BBC Bristol. Most of it, along with nine hours of his audio diary, was unearthed in uncatalogued boxes at the back of a BBC warehouse, having survived not just the high seas, but the archival culls of the 1970s. In places it fades to red, but the footage is in amazingly good shape.
One of the most haunting images is of Crowhurst, a man clearly troubled, rowing in an overladen dinghy, dressed implausibly in shirt and tie, while, ashore, his Ovaltinie kids are corralled by mum, unaware they are about to wave dad off to a watery grave. “The BBC started filming for a disaster,” Simon insists, “rather than a heroic departure.” They had good news sense. The trimaran, it turns out, was badly constructed, with leaking hatches and, critically, an inoperative bilge pump. “Without that, he had to scoop water out with a Tupperware box,” Simon says. “The hull hadn’t been glass-fibred, either: it was a layer of paint.” But a furious Crowhurst had done a deal with the devil. Best’s financial backing had come with a caveat: fail to complete the voyage and Crowhurst would have to buy back his own boat.
Clare had always tempered her scepticism with the consequence of denying her husband his dream. But on the night before departure, reality intruded. “Donald realised then there were too many problems,” she says. “Stanley Best’s laws about how he would recoup his money really were the last straw. But I felt he had to be the one to make the decision, not me.” The next day, October 31, the deadline caught up with Crowhurst. The technology he had hoped to showcase, the object of the whole exercise, lay strewn in bits and pieces. But he was a man who had signed on a dotted line. He would assemble everything in transit.
What happened in the race is a matter of public record.
Five competitors came a cropper, including Blyth and Ridgway. When the experienced Bernard Moitessier sig-nalled his abandonment of the course, too, there was nothing to prevent Robin Knox-Johnston coming home first. On April 22, 1969, after nearly 11 months at sea and a full-blown Nato rescue search, he emerged from the mist off Falmouth to become the first man to circumnavigate alone and nonstop. At 92 miles per day, however, Knox-Johnston’s pace had been pedestrian. Attention thus turned to the only two men who could conceivably beat it: Nigel Tetley, an ex-RN man, and, by default, Crowhurst.
But while Tetley began advancing into the Indian Ocean, Crowhurst was contending with his leaking tub — the cabin drenched, the electrics flooded, the steering mechanism knackered. “This bloody boat is just falling to pieces,” he recorded. By November 15, he “reached the awareness of whether or not I can go on with this awful situation”. Crowhurst was in a terrible dilemma. Give up and face financial ruin; proceed and risk certain death in more perilous waters. “Time and money,” he went on. “If I stop, I will disappoint a lot of people ... a bloody awful decision.” There was, in fact, a third way out, and he had the nous to seize it. Going into an 11-week radio silence, he began to transmit phoney telegraph messages, suggesting he was, at last, turning things around. In December, he went from 60 miles per day to 172, then, extraordinarily, to 243. Meticulously, he falsified evidence to suggest he would not be far off the Indian Ocean himself. It was just a piece of bluff. He was really in the calm of the south Atlantic, going from veering erratically to just sailing round in circles. He even made an illegal stop, calling in at a backwater Argentinian port to effect some repairs, passing himself off as a participant in a local regatta.
Denis Herbstein was the Sunday Times journalist given the Golden Globe Race as his weekly beat. He constructed his stories from the bulletins relayed by the radio station at Portishead, which went, crucially, via the desk of Rodney Hallworth. “Well, I was taken for a ride,” Herbstein says now. “And nobody on the paper said, ‘Better watch this guy.’ We were interested in extracting the maximum publicity, and in the end we got the maximum publicity for the wrong reasons.” On April 10, they got the headline they wanted. “The big story is when you come round the Horn,” he says. “And suddenly we get this wonderful newspaper-savvy message handed out by Hallworth, all about the smell of wood smoke as Crowhurst went round the Falklands.” He laughs. “‘Smell of wood smoke’, Christ!” But it meant Crowhurst was back in contact. And on his way home.
The Crowhurst family still maintain that the infamous false positionings were somewhat tongue-in-cheek, never alluding to where Donald was supposed to be, but to where he was heading, the information embellished by Hallworth. “There’s a certain resentment when you feel everything’s going wrong and they’re all sitting there in their armchairs,” Clare says. “You think, ‘I’ll have a game with them.’ And that’s basically what it was. Something to break the boredom.” The false bulletins had a very real effect on Tetley. Convinced Crowhurst was hot on his heels, he pushed his boat to the limit. It was the ultimate irony: on the night of May 20, Tetley’s trimaran broke up, leaving Crowhurst the only survivor and the sure-fire fastest entrant if he could just cruise home.
The sea does strange things to people. Moitessier was possessed by a desire to abandon the race and go round the globe again, philosophising, in a very Gallic kind of way, about his oneness with the sea, and how “the journey is everything, the destination nothing”. (He ended up in Tahiti.) For Tetley, too, the obsession with a bogus rival, one who probably stopped him attaining the speed record, continued when he reached dry land. He committed suicide a year later. Who knows what the solitude had done to Crowhurst?
News that a rapturous reception was in store was the worst possible outcome. Again entering radio purdah, he sailed aimlessly. On June 24, he began writing his stream-of-consciousness babble, of how he was “a cosmic being” and would “set a time when he will resign ‘the game’ of being a human”. On June 25, a Norwegian cargo ship spotted him waving cheerfully from the deck, but they could not possibly have known his torment. Fifteen days later, Crowhurst was dead, his body never recovered.
Though Deep Water and other works suggest a suicide, there are those who still doubt Crowhurst took his own life. At the time, Knox-Johnston talked of “some dreadful accident”. For Clare, the clue is in the diary. “I’ve always believed those last few lines meant something entirely different. He was due to talk to the BBC, and the sentence ‘I think it will be done as my family would want’ means he was going to confess. Boats are very dangerous places. I think he was just stomping about in a state and he fell off ... That’s the way I deal with it in my head, anyway.”
These days, with GPS and satellite phones, it’s hard to fathom how anyone could even contemplate such a stunt. Moreover, in the current moral climate, which applauds gamesmanship, it seems possible Crowhurst would actually be fêted as some sort of crafty wag, selling his story to the tabloids. But those were different times. “He would have hated the idea of letting people down,” his son says. “The irony is, by trying not to let people down, it led him to let people down in the biggest way possible.”
“I don’t think I believed Donald was dead for at least two years,” Clare says, “even though Rodney Hallworth walked into the drawing room and said, ‘He committed suicide and he never sailed around the world.’ It was such an appallingly cruel thing to do.” Hallworth gets bashed in all accounts of the story, certainly after he flew to the Caribbean to retrieve the logbooks and sell them to this newspaper. The boat still lies in Cayman Brac, dilapidated after a second career as a dive boat.
Clare has had 38 years to consider every alternative. “In grief, you blame everybody at first, then you turn the full works on yourself,” she reflects. “The fact is, I always felt I should have done more to stop Donald, and I didn’t. So the children were deprived of an extremely good father because I was not tough enough to stop him.”
Does she still feel that way today? “Absolutely.”
