Converted fishing smack Dusmarie was Douglas and Mary Dixon’s wedding present to each other, their home and the facilitator of their nautical adventures. They were married in her saloon. Here ‘skipper and mate’ take on adjusting the compass during their voyage to Lapland
Full circle There is not enough space to tell of Dusmarie’s further adventures. Douglas and Marie took parties of teenagers above the Arctic Circle, on what would now be thought of as adventure training. He wanted them to exchange the grey skies of a ration-bound Britain for the excitement of sailing in peaceful northern waters. In 1948 he published a biography of the
King’s Sailing Master, and the RORC’s first Admiral Sir Philip Hunloke, which remains the definitive work on this iconic yachtsman. They had worked together organising the Plymouth Santander Race in 1929, and post-war this important com- mission demonstrates great trust. Douglas returned, as he had always
they had to go inside to thaw their eyelids. Douglas said even their brains seemed numbed by the cold. Undaunted, they helped herd some 4,000 reindeer, caught fish through holes in the ice and shared a tent with 13 Sámi and seven dogs, wrapped in furs and skins. Reindeer meat was unpleasant, ‘like the
top of an old sea boot’. It was so good to come back to a ‘good old English roast beef dinner’. However, their hosts were the most friendly, peaceable people on earth, who didn’t understand the concept of war, something none of them had known. The simplicity of living with these ‘survivors of a very old civilisation’ among the vast forests inspired and moved the couple.
Adventure is never done Douglas soon published a book about their Lapland voyage. From the 1920s he had made his living as the official lecturer of the Navy League, delivering illustrated talks on a variety of topics, including Gal- lipoli, Fishermen in Peace and War and, of course, Lodgers in Lapland. He was witty and his stories colourful.
He startled one audience, who had come to learn about fishing, with a supposed real-life Jonah story of James Bartley who fell overboard from a whaler, the Star of Essex, and was found inside a sperm whale that had been harpooned and sliced open to reveal a ‘suspicious lump’. When rescued all James remembered was falling into an insufferably hot place, not being able to breathe and falling unconscious. When war broke out his health barred
Douglas from active duty. But, taking inspiration from the seamanship of the men who rescued our army at Dunkirk, he found himself co-opted onto a ferry crew, ‘bringing one of several little lend-lease vessels of 100ft from America to England’.
58 SEAHORSE
An appeal had gone out to the yacht clubs from the Small Boats Department of the Admiralty to find such volunteers. Being Douglas, he wrote a book about
the experience called Adventure is Never Done. The foreword expresses his views exactly. ‘This is a fine example of what has been achieved hundreds of times in this war by a nation which still has the salt of the sea in its blood. It helps to emphasise how men in the twilight of life can sur- mount physical discomfort, and at the same time enjoy stern duty and adventure. ‘It proves that youth does not win
through unaided when old men of the sea blunt the scythe of time to play an equal part.’ The ‘old men’ were 17 elderly volun- teers. They brought their little ship safely over, experiencing other ships mined in their convoy, then having to wait for orders before rescuing exhausted, burnt survivors, being issued with ‘dead men’s kit’, most of it unwashed for many weeks.
A post-war world When Douglas and Marie went to retrieve Dusmarie from Sweden in June 1946 Douglas climbed back aboard her… and put his foot straight through the deck. He sat on the worn bulwark and cried. Yet his Ocean Racing Club connections
came to his aid. As Douglas wrote, ‘Jac M Iversen, sometime partner of EG Martin, founder of the RORC, was now practising in Sweden as a naval architect. He came and looked, then told the shipyard, whose guilt of neglect during the war years was apparent enough – “the dead shall live again”, so inspiring the yard with his thought that while birth was a common- place, resurrection was a miracle, that they gave me two shipwrights to work with, and thus the “dead” did “live again” in the summer of 1947.’
longed to do, to Gallipoli where he had earned his DSC as a teenager. This last extended voyage in Dusmarie brought him back to the scenes of devastation he had never been able to forget. He was a man of great sensitivity as well
as imagination and guts. Of course this voyage was enshrined in another book, A Sail to Gallipoli, about how Dusmariewas rebuilt of Swedish oak and iron fastenings, and how he made time to blood their 15-year-old daughter Astrid by taking part in the 1955 Plymouth to La Rochelle Race so she too could fully engage with the family RORC tradition. The return to Gallipoli proved pro-
foundly moving. Douglas swam in the ‘clean and blue and empty water’, but see- ing in his mind’s eye ‘that same stretch of warm sand in front of him, peopled by masses of naked invaders trying to get relief in the sea from the blood, the flies and the stench’. He climbed up to the graves, from
where land stretched away to the Bay of Suvla and the dry salt lake beyond. ‘The sea, blue and at peace, held no ship, nor was there a soul in sight, nor any sort of life but bees and flowers. I felt I had never seen or sensed a land now so utterly at peace, the serenity deepened by the quiet orderly calm of the cemeteries.’ It was the scene of what Douglas called ‘history’s most glorious failure’. Later on he quoted the famous lines: ‘It isn’t life that matters, but the courage you bring to it.’ These early RORC members took patri-
otism as a given. Their equipment was practical, hand operated, capable of being mended when it broke with the tool kits and needles and thread you carried with you. They had a practical spirit of adventure,
and a sense of honour, which is evident in so many of the club’s pre-WW2 members. Not just the flag officers, who are the ones we normally hear so much about… q
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