Boats


witnessed the birth of a number of now famous boatbuilding names: Nicholson, Moody, MacWester and Westerly were producing innovative designs for boats which are still giving sterling service today. At the forefront for nearly 20 years was Hurley Marine, builder of the famous Silhouette and Hurley range. More than 8,000 Hurley boats were built in Plymouth between the fi rm’s beginnings in the late 1950s and its eventual closure in 1974. Most of the boats are still around today, some having crossed oceans, circumnavigated the globe and become classics in their own right.


The man behind it all George Hurley trained as a carpenter and worked in the Plymouth shipyards during the Second World War. After the war he started to build caravans, trailers and commercial vehicles, fi rst from his back garden then from a purpose-built factory.


Hurley story T


The


Hurley Marine was one of Britain’s most prolifi c boatbuilders in the 1960s. Tim Sharman and Nick Vass tell the story and describe the boats that make great second-hand buys today


he British boatbuilding industry has had its ups and downs, but the period leading up to the 1970s was its golden age. As post-war austerity gave way to 1960s swing, Britain


LEFT A young George Hurley


BELOW George built caravans, trailers and commercial vehicles, initially from his back garden


BOTTOM Silhouette MkIIs on a trailer designed by George


In 1957 employee Ernie Miners asked permission to build a Redwing dinghy in a corner of the Hurley factory: this sparked George’s interest in boatbuilding and the rest, as they say, is history.


Silhouette Back in 1953 Robert Tucker, a young naval architect, had been dinghy cruising with a friend on the Fens and Broads. Unconvinced by sleeping ashore on cold, hard ground, he thought of designing a ‘dinghy with a lid on’, a concept which progressed to a ‘nice little cruising yacht’. The Silhouette Mk I was born. A plywood cruiser measuring


5m (16ft 6in) with a single chine hull, the fi rst boat was named Blue Boy, cost £85 to build and was launched on the Medway.


The Silhouette Mk II followed A busy construction scene in the Hurley factory 32


in 1955, aimed at the US market, incorporating increased length and beam with a serpentine sheer to give freeboard at the shoulders. Two


hundredweight of internal ballast was moved out onto a stub keel and the skeg and bilge keels were deepened. The fi rst Mk II was called Susanne and cost a little over £100. Hurley began to build the Silhouette from 1958 onwards, initially during the quiet periods between manufacturing cattle trucks and caravans. George Hurley met Robert Tucker in the


USA in 1965 and they agreed to cooperate on the Mk III, a round-bilge version in glassfi bre. Finally, a four-berth version of the Mk III was developed, known as the Mk IV. The Silhouette proved an enormously


popular boat with more than 2,500 built, providing Hurley with the point of entry into the emerging recreational boating market, and the beginning of the Hurley Marine story.


Alacrity 19 Designed in 1960 by Peter Stephenson, the Alacrity 19 was an open plan, relatively beamy yacht built by Hurley for the Essex-based Russell Marine. They performed well – at least one has crossed


Practical Boat Owner 539 September 2011 • www.pbo.co.uk


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