Historic
René’s grandson Tanguy Bolloré has furnished the current owners with a grainy colour picture of the boat cruising in Bandol-sur-Mer during René’s four-year ownership. With Europe coming to boiling point, Lilian – still Dahu – very sensibly emigrated to England in 1935 and became the property of a Mr Ellis Ferguson Roydhouse of Kingston-on-Thames, in whose possession she would remain for over 30 years, until 1967. In 1938 she embarked on a cruise to Deauville and Dieppe, which was to be her last sea voyage for over 50 years. She didn’t participate in the evacuation at Dunkirk with the other riverboats, probably because she was too big to approach close in shore and too easy a target to stand off.
In 1968, the Sea Cadet Corps issued a brochure to
raise money for her purchase and for ten years, during which she deteriorated rapidly as a cause of vandalism and simple lack of funds, she became TS Windsor Castle, until she became too dangerous and expensive to keep.
And there, in the usual course of events, the story
would have ended. Someone would have taken her away, stripped out the remaining fi ttings that might have been of some interest or value, and broken her up for scrap. But Lilian’s luck hadn’t quite run out. She was discovered by Scott and Hilary Pereira, probably the only two people in the known universe who thought that a derelict gentleman’s yacht was a good buy to make a home for two busy doctors bringing up a young family. Lilian had been on her way to the scrapyard when they fi rst saw her, delayed by a broken propeller. Every porthole was broken and there was a hole in her side ‘that you could walk through’. (Conversation with the Pereiras consists of affectionate constructive confl ict, in which they fi nish each other’s sentences not necessarily in the way that the person who started them has intended.)
Wished There must have been times when they wished they had never bought her, I suggest as we take coffee in the sumptuous saloon. Next door is the Smoking Saloon, complete with piano. “No,” says Scott. “Yes,” says Hilary fi rmly, and he laughs. “When we fi rst moved on board, this section of the boat was completely grotty and closed up” says Hilary, “…there were no fl oorboards; we had a chemical toilet behind a curtain. Water came from a hosepipe. We were having central heating put in. Electricity came from a lead cable. And every day we had to try to go to work. We had netting round the stern so that the kids couldn’t throw their toys overboard…” “But that was very temporary,” says Scott. “It
was only for a few months. It’s been fairly liveable on for about 30 years. It was only the fi rst three or four years when it was diffi cult…And anyway, we’d been living on a narrowboat. And we were young and stupid…” (True love needs no anthropomorphism. I have been
26 cywinter 2011
Right: Lilian 1984 Middle: Dining area Botom: Lilian of Stockholm Far Right: Construction
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