George Martin (far left) and Algernon Maudslay were the cream of Edwardian 6 Metre sailors making the most of the new opportunities provided under the International Rule, winning the One Ton Cup in 1912 and 1913 respectively for the Royal Thames Yacht Club. Their friendship, formed racing against each other before the First World War, became one of the cornerstones of the new RORC
AGM in February 1928, when members of the ‘lower division’ (25-30ft) races were also now permitted to apply for member- ship… The first sailing committee was also instituted, and he personally proposed the stalwart Bobby Somerset as the club’s first vice-commodore. This was his way, work- ing within institutions.
Typically he was secretary rather than
chair of the organisers, but his usual metic- ulous planning and personal charm deliv- ered a highly successful outcome. The Americans, when they arrived, were in for a surprise: this was the first team event in ‘Sixes’ and the two countries had four yachts apiece. But when they looked at the entry, where was Algernon? Freesia was only reserve yacht… The man they knew best in England, the one they looked for- ward to racing, was not taking part! Instead a private race was quickly set up
between them around the Isle of Wight, plus, when the British-American Cup was run, there was a Royal London YC compe- tition for Sixes over the same course start- ing half an hour later; in this Algernon’s winning time knocked spots off the even- tual BA Cup victors which must have restored some of his pride and dignity. Sometime later a strange notification
appeared in Yachting World to the effect that Mr A Maudslay would sell his 18- footer Asphodel for a nominal sum if some- one was prepared to race her. In 1922 he also offered to lend Freesia for racing. Something had radically changed in his
post-war world. He was older now of course and had been desk-bound through four traumatic years; perhaps he had not regained pre-war fitness. But he seems to have lost heart, and with it his competitive edge. The winning momentum had gone. After Maudslay ‘faded out’, someone
noted sadly that things were not the same with the Sixes… since he ‘left the class’. Post-war it is claimed that he was pro-
prietor of Yachting World and we also catch occasional details of his public life – protesting against the evils of Bolshevism alongside Rudyard Kipling in the press, establishing the Anglo Belgian Union, run from his private offices at 35 Albemarle Street, raising money for a memorial at Zeebrugge, the planting of primroses to mark the passing of the Belgian king. Then, in 1925, together with Weston
Martyr, his friends Captain Dixon and George Martin of course, an ‘Ocean Race’ was arranged around the Fastnet Rock… after which the fledgling ‘Ocean Racing Club’ was formed.
50 SEAHORSE
The Ocean Racing Club Sir Philip Hunloke’s biography tells that one day at Albermarle Street, before the first Fastnet, George Martin asked Algernon to match his ten-shilling note. So he obliged, albeit feeling somewhat bewil- dered. George insisted that now he was ‘the secretary’, and his startled friend the treasurer, of the new ‘Ocean Racing Club’. There is good argument for this being
the precise moment when the mighty RORC was founded. The RORC archives show Algie did
indeed become treasurer, maintaining a watch over things, making suggestions, keeping everything moving along smoothly despite the problems of finances, rocky organisation and occasional jarring personalities. No one knows in which boat Algernon
crewed in any of the Fastnet races, although he must have done so in order to be an ORC member. In 1926, two days before the second
Fastnet, Algernon presided over a dinner at the Royal London YC where he was rear-commodore. Present were 32 of the 40 members of the fledgling ORC, whose Admiral, Hunloke, declared in his speech that this type of race was different from the kind ‘where you can jump into a boat, sail a course doing little yourself, and climb ashore again’. Men had to rough it in those ocean
races, and ‘no man made a proper sailor unless he had roughed it’. The same ethos that fed into the ocean-racing mileage stip- ulation that remains the first requirement for RORC membership today. The Royal London made George Martin
an honorary member in 1926, following his Blue Water Medal voyages in Jolie Brise. Their commodore, Sir Charles Allom, also offered a Cup to encourage American owners to race him back across the Atlantic to enter the Fastnet. Only one yacht, Primrose IV, appeared in the end, but the support for the ORC from the Royal London was unflinching. You can sense the guiding hand of RLYC Rear- Commodore Maudslay encouraging things along behind the scenes. It was he who chaired the club’s first
Other organisations Algernon also became the backbone, and treasurer, of the crucially influential YRA (today’s RYA), administrating their far- reaching decisions, keeping finances on the straight and narrow, at one stage even renting them rooms and loaning them his own furniture. One legacy of the war had been his
influence within the British, and later the International Red Cross. A photograph of a Parisian Committee in the 1930s has him placed behind the group of international delegates, peering out over someone’s shoulder! But he was almost certainly running the
show under the radar. A surviving letter he wrote is firm and authoritative, signed simply ‘Maudslay’ – for the man by now had gravitas and statesmanship. The International Red Cross joined the
long list of diverse institutions he had upheld in a very devoted hardworking life: Sea View, the Royal Thames, War Refugees, One Ton Cup, British American Cup, Anglo Belgian Union, YRA, Royal London YC… and of course the RORC. A file at the British National Archives is
labelled simply ‘Algernon Maudslay, Public Servant’, which probably says it all.
At the going down of the sun His days as an international sportsman were over. In 1935 he finally resigned from the RORC and there was a subsequent sale of his beautiful china and paintings; we wonder what happened there. A little later he came into an inheritance from the Alma Tadema family so at least there was money to support his declining years. One suspects his health was failing. Algernon Maudslay died in 1948 in a
slightly elegant nursing home in Winchester, by now seemingly almost forgotten. Yet without his steady administrative thorough- ness, financial generosity and 10 fine years’ keeping the RORC on an even keel the whole enterprise might not have survived. He was a key member of the team of pivotal characters, now almost forgotten, who set the new Royal Ocean Racing Club on its way, and kept it steady, come what may. At the going down of the sun, we do q
well to ‘remember’ them.
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