The Joy of the Sea Sea Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

These lines evoke perfectly the feelings about the sea

that so many of us have.

For some, the lure of the sea is to be on it, in a boat or dingy.

For others, it's crashing through the waves on a surfboard.

And for millions, it's just wanting to be close to it.

The sea just has a great fascination because it's the unknown.

It's a great challenge.

My father used to say to me when I was little,

"Get it or on it and go as fast as you can."

There was nobody on the beach, why not? Let's just do it.

There's my dad jumping up and down in the altogether looking like a loon

and having the time of his life.

To enjoy the sea in the early years of the 20th century,

you had to be either living close to it, or rich enough get to it.

Sailing especially was largely the preserve of the upper classes...

and their hired hands.

As the century unfolded, that changed.

A revolution took place that saw more and more people

being able to get to the sea and enjoy it in all sorts of ways.

Lots of them filmed those experiences,

and their movies and memories reveal why that revolution happened

and its consequences.

Five, four, three, two, one.

-Mark. That is your start.

-All clear.

Artemis Challenge, all clear, all clear. Have a good sail.

This is the starting platform of the Royal Yacht Squadron,

one of the most exclusive yachting clubs in the world,

and this is one of its busiest times of the year, Cowes week.

Can you please be quiet?

Quiet please. SHORT BEEP

One time, that was your preparatory signal for Artemis Challenge.

In charge of today's racing is squadron member Simon van der Byl.

There are starts every five minutes,

but Simon has an army of people to help.

Laser SP3, just to remind you, you are starting east of the east line.

Plus one line. Out.

Now it's a case of fingers crossed, whether we can...get them away.

Five, four, three, two, one.

-Gun.

-CANNON FIRES

Recall!

Too many of them were over the start so they have a general recall,

they all go back... Ooh, damn. Start again.

If you can see the individual boats that are over,

you can call the individual numbers. When there's a big mass, you can't.

We have to wait till they get back round, and the sequence goes again.

Laser SP3, just to warn you, this will be a black flag start.

You will be expelled to outer darkness if you get this one wrong.

Five, four, three, two, one.

BEEP, CANNON FIRES

3465 is now over.

3465, you have been black flagged. You should retire.

The regatta at Cowes has been the highlight of the sailing calendar

for the rich since Victorian times.

All clear!

Typical of the class of gentlemen

who were competitors at Cowes in the 1930s

was this Royal Yacht Squadron member and amateur film-maker.

Well, I wish it was sharper, but that's age for you. It's shaky.

It's very hard to hold a camera steady when you're at sea anyway.

With the sort of equipment they had then, I think it's not too bad.

He was born to an upper middle-class family in Berkshire,

and he went to Eton and to the Guards,

had a very traditional upbringing.

After that, he joined the Army and went into the Grenadier Guards.

He was posted to Egypt in the late '20s, early '30s,

at which time he took quite a lot of these movies.

Then he had a blinding row with his commanding officer

who wouldn't let him sail in some race that he wanted to,

and he was a very impulsive chap, my father

so he just said, "Right, OK, I'm quitting."

He had an uncle to whom he was very close,

who founded the Lymington Yacht Club, and he taught him sailing.

I think he might have been unsettled with himself or something,

not entirely happy with himself, but at sea,

it became utterly different for him.

He enjoyed the whole element of being at sea

and was much more relaxed and happy at sea.

So this I think must be Cowes because the boats were dressed overall,

flags all the way up and down and round.

Cowes, of course, was in the '30s, in its absolute heyday.

It came to prominence and public notice really through Queen Victoria

when she bought Osborne House.

And then, after the death of Albert,

she spent a lot of time there and that just naturally drove

the aristocratic community,

and in particular the yachting community, to Cowes.

Cowes was perhaps the pre-eminent yachting venue in the world.

It was where people needed to be and wanted to be.

Gerald Potter, a wealthy person, the car of choice a Rolls-Royce,

would have fitted into the whole of that world perfectly.

And like many of the upper middle classes

who could afford to sail at Cowes in the 1930s,

Gerald Potter was wealthy enough to be able to commission his own boat.

This film is the construction of Gerald's boat, called Carmela.

I think he just liked to be able to look back on something

that was very dear to his heart and be able to see it all over again.

Wealthy people had yachts designed and built for them.

They were all hand-built,

individually drawn and individually built. No two were the same.

An owner would invest a huge amount of his own time and his personality

in having a yacht built,

and employ a professional skipper and partly professional crew

to sail it and race it for him.

He would have been very typical then

of what might have been called the after guard on big yachts,

who stayed at the back of the yacht, directed operations,

who owned the yachts.

This was how the sea was enjoyed in the early years of the 20th century

by people with wealth.

But for those from a less privileged background,

a more improvised approach was required.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied,

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying.

'They're coming out of the train with the luggage

'which my father was carrying.'

He was carrying a basket on his shoulder.

Lewis Rosenberg shot these films in the 1920s.

They are all wearing suits.

And you never think of people going on holiday,

especially a camping holiday, wearing suits and ties.

'It's such a contrast to the way that we travel nowadays.'

My father came from an East End Jewish family,

his parents had been immigrants from Poland.

He always had a camera with him.

I think he was just wanting to capture and retain

the memories of the holidays that he went on.

They were a group who met through work

and all had sort of fairly similar backgrounds, similar political ideas.

They saved for a year, two shillings a week.

My father made the tents for their holiday and off they went.

'There is my father aged 19, 20, looking at me.'

He looked frightening like me, he moved like me,

he seemed to talk like me, his gestures were the same.

He died more than 50 years ago.

It was the first time I had seen him in 50 years.

It was quite moving and I just... and I was entranced.

Lewis Rosenberg's films of Ivor's father and the rest of the group

show just how ingenious these working-class London teenagers were.

The surfing was extremely unusual and was perhaps indicative of the fact

that this was a group that didn't follow

the things that people every day were doing.

There used to be a thing, before the days of television news,

called news theatres, where once a week there was a newsreel

showing the news from around the world and also features.

And my dad's group of friends went there one day

and saw a feature about surfing in Australia.

They saw the boards and they just thought it was fantastic.

The surf board that my father made for himself was a long board,

and it didn't have a fin

and therefore didn't balance very well in the water.

That is actually a remarkable piece of film.

I have certainly never seen anything like that before

in as much as it's the earliest surfing photographs

ever taken in Britain.

I saw them get up temporarily to their feet

but nobody had it mastered to stand up right to the beach, did they?

As you can see in the films, they could never stand up,

because what they didn't know,

surf boards have fins which stabilise them.

On the newsreels, you never saw the surfers

going in and out of the water carrying their boards,

you simply saw them on the water standing up.

No matter how hard they tried, the boards weren't stable

and it was a great frustration.

Given the time period, they wouldn't have seen a fin on the boards

that they were looking at anyway.

The fin didn't come in until about 1937,

and that was only in Hawaii,

and then it slowly spread in the following decade.

It was only natural that there wasn't a fin on the base of the surfboard.

'My father is now walking into the sea

'with his stripy bathing costume on,

'and he is just trying to stand.'

He was ever so proud,

because he had made a waterproof casing for the camera,

and actually strapped it to the surf board and I'd never seen the film

of the surf board going through the water. That is remarkable.

For someone then to think about doing something like that...

What I was particularly struck with, watching the film,

was that role my father plays is the court jester.

He seems to be the centre of the fun, not centre of the surfing,

not the centre of the chasing the girls, but the centre of the fun.

For me, that was very, very exciting because he was quite a serious man,

he was very interested in politics and music and he worked very hard.

There is one extraordinary sequence where he is naked, which was...

I don't want to overstress the politics,

but it was a bit of the anti-establishment.

It was a time of hope, it was before the Spanish Civil War

which was one of the first great disappointments.

There was nobody on the beach, why not? Let's just do it.

And there is my dad jumping up and down looking like a complete loon

and having the time of his life.

It was that sense of political possibility but also teenage fun.

Which makes it such an exciting bit of film to look at,

and it captures something which we don't have now.

'These days, you associate beaches with being packed full of people,

'and these are big, almost empty beaches.'

The Cornish beaches were almost empty in the 1930s

because the area had yet to be discovered.

These North London teenagers were unusual.

The vast majority of poorer people searching for the sea

were more likely to do what this movie maker from Manchester did.

Take the train to one of the big Northern seaside resorts.

I worked in the cinema in Manchester.

Whenever I got a day off, we'd shoot off somewhere

with the kids and Southport was normally a good venue to come to.

Don Sykes was a cinema projectionist and as well as making his own films,

he collected ones made by others.

The prints that are on this reel came from a chap

who was a projectionist at Formby during the silent days.

Occasionally, we'd get a newsreel with an item about Southport.

Before I sent it back, he'd snip out that item of Southport and keep it.

The early films that Don has collected

show how popular seaside resorts like Southport were in the 1920s.

It was certainly busy. A lot of people here.

I think it showed that when people came to Southport,

generally, they enjoyed themselves.

Plenty to do, plenty of entertainment.

Looking down to see who's bathing,

there is probably seven or eight thousand people in there.

Right from the beginning, the seaside has been

what's called in the jargon a liminal space, where the land meets the sea.

It's nobody's land.

There's a suspension of the usual conventions

and constraints on everyday behaviour.

You're liberated from the discipline of the factory and the office.

The seaside allows you to break away from your everyday self.

It's about the carnivalesque, it's about the possibility

that you can temporarily turn the world upside down.

And, as course, you can dress up to pretend to be somebody you aren't.

As well as portraying the town's carnivalesque atmosphere,

the films Don Sykes collected show how the council in Southport,

a holiday resort on a river estuary,

overcame the distinct disadvantage of the sea going out a long way.

If you're an estuarine resort like Southport,

what you do is make the most of the space that the extended

area of sand provides and you consolidate it.

You have your public gardens, marine lakes, your outdoor swimming pools.

You have a whole alternative, artificial seaside

and you can market that as a controlled landscape.

The council's policy worked well and people from Lancashire mill towns

flocked to the sea bathing lake and Southport's other attractions.

The town's cinemas found an ingenious way of using film

to make money from these teeming crowds.

The local cinemas in the back end of the '20s and the early '30s

would send a freelance cameraman out to film local important events.

The brief for the cameraman was to shoot lots and lots of crowd shots.

The more the better.

On the cameraman's tripod was a sign saying "See yourselves at..."

and the name of the cinema.

Basically, it was an advertising film,

a very early form of advertising film.

Working-class families continued to pour into places like Southport

right through the 1930s.

Then, at the end of a long hot summer in 1939,

the outbreak of war changed everything.

For six years, most of the coast in Southern England was out of bounds.

So when peace came in 1945,

the desire to get back to the sea was huge.

That desire was encapsulated in the home movies

of a famous Second World War hero.

Max Aitken, heir to the powerful Beaverbrook group of newspapers,

had been a remarkably brave and successful wartime fighter pilot.

When the war was over, his competitive character

and love of sailing brought him, and his film camera,

to this house in Cowes in the Isle of Wight.

You don't understand what happened to these guys in the war.

'All his friends were killed, and to put up with that,'

to get to that level,

and to live after all his friends were killed...really awful, I think.

After the war, he then got into offshore sailing.

It kept up his life a bit.

At the same time, he was running the Daily Express.

His father was Max Beaverbrook, my grandfather,

and he was getting older by this time

so my father ran the newspapers.

Every weekend, he'd be down and doing his sailing.

How much did you see of your father?

Um...I suppose not as much as normal families

in the sense that he was working in London during the week.

But, you know, Sunday lunches.

I thought it was perfectly normal.

That's my mum.

She was pretty glam, wasn't she?

-That's me.

-SHE LAUGHS

I was a pretty little thing, wasn't I? Little chubby face.

That's where I grew up.

That's my grandfather.

He was great to me. I was the youngest grandchild.

He used to call me the prettiest little girl in Surrey.

I always wondered why just Surrey!

That's Capponcina, our house in the south of France.

There's Dad there. He had a house down in the Bahamas.

Ah! This is Drumbeat, a wonderful boat that my father had.

I would put Max definitely in the competitive class.

He obviously loved being at sea, but in everything else he did,

from shooting giant German airplanes to, you know, polo racing,

all sorts of other contraptions and craft, he was competitive.

It was these competitive instincts

that drove Max Aitken into ocean racing.

And he had the wealth to be able to commission Drumbeat

as a boat that he believed could beat the best.

She was built by Clare Lallow in Cowes,

then at the absolute height of their powers and abilities

as the builders of beautiful yachts.

Clare Lallow considered the boat to be so special,

he decided to record its construction on film.

This was a big step forward as far as Father was concerned.

It was the biggest boat he'd ever built.

This boat was built in about eight months.

A lot of the chaps that did this sort of work had part-time jobs

sailing with other customers at weekends in various boats.

All you see is people using planes and sharp tools

of various shapes and sizes, because it's all wood.

It's a dying art. You won't see this ever again, quite frankly.

There's a picture of Sir Max with Lady Aitken

and my father walking out through the yard.

They've obviously just been in to inspect progress.

What was so very special about Drumbeat

was the newness of her design.

And nothing quite like her had been seen in this country.

She was just a thing of real, real beauty

when she came out and was launched.

She was launched with a great fanfare in the summer of 1957.

There's my father telling Lady Aitken

how to throw the bottle on the bow and make sure it cracks first time.

Bang, there we go, first time.

Father with a drink in his hand. The launching's over.

The pressure is off. The boat's afloat.

She was a work of art.

Varnished Honduras mahogany, topside.

She just sparkled golden in the sun.

Very, very radical boat of her day.

There's Drumbeat with a huge great fantastic spinnaker,

which is the big round sail at the front.

When they put that spinnaker up,

the boat was taken where you had to go.

She had a proper galley and dining saloon forward.

An owners' state room to one side.

You don't get many of those on racing yachts now.

But it was not just the look of the boat that was different.

To make it faster through the water,

Drumbeat had been designed with a revolutionary keel.

Max Aitken was used to success,

and he expected the same from his state-of-the-art boat.

But it never happened.

Its first big challenge came in 1957

in one of the Royal Ocean Racing Club's most prestigious events -

the Fastnet Race.

Max was very keen to do that race.

It started in a gale and then got worse.

Of the six very smart, modern, brand-new winches

to the very latest designs they had on Drumbeat,

five of them failed and stripped their gearing,

so they couldn't sail the boat and they had to retire.

And worse was to follow.

After a couple of years of modest success,

disaster struck in the 1960 Transatlantic Race.

Drumbeat's mast broke in half.

Max's friend and skipper of the boat Gerald Potter filmed the aftermath.

It must have been quite an alarming time when the mast actually went.

They ended up constructing what's called a jury rig.

They essentially put a spar on top of the broken mast

and turned the main sail around so that it was on its side,

so they still had sufficient sail to be able to make progress.

There's my father at the helm.

So obviously someone's taken his cine-camera.

Here you can see how the mainsail is completely sideways.

The bottom is on the left,

and the two long sides are pulled towards the back.

Very effective.

Max Aitken sold Drumbeat in 1966 and its sale marked the end of an era.

Perhaps sailing just wasn't thrilling enough

for the ace wartime fighter pilot.

He discovered powerboat racing and that was, "Wow, this is amazing."

And so he brought it over here.

And he started off something called the Cowes Torquay Cowes,

which I'm running this year. It grew and grew and grew.

It went to Italy, France, became hugely big

and so that rather took over his life, as opposed to sailing.

I hated sailing because when you get on a sailing boat

with someone like your father

or your boyfriend, they're perfectly nice people,

and when they get on a sailing boat, they grow horns

and they become absolute horror people.

And they start shouting and screaming at you.

Whereas on a powerboat, my father used to say to me when I was little,

"Get in it or on it and go as fast as you can."

But it wasn't only the rich who were looking to go faster.

This was the Swinging 60s,

and just as Max Aitken was getting into powerboats,

the pastime that Lewis Rosenberg's friends had discovered

in the 1920s in Cornwall was beginning to re-emerge.

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf... #

My name is Gwynedd and I just love surfing.

# Surf fever brings 'em here to meet the test... #

Paddling for the wave and then stumbling up

and then managing to stand up and then going across the wave, it's just like walking on the sea.

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf... #

Gwynedd started surfing early.

She grew up in Cornwall and as a child she was never far away from the north coast beaches.

The beaches through the '50s were enjoyed just for being beaches.

But there was always the waves on the north coast of Cornwall

and this gave rise to a really marked increase in the popularity of belly-boarding.

One of these belly-boarders was Gwynedd's father.

He would be at the beach in all seasons, with his board, and his family and his film camera.

The belly-board one, those were back in the 1950s.

That's how people used to enjoy their surfing. I still like to use the wooden belly-board.

That's what I learnt on and you get the feel of the wave.

Gwynedd was the first British woman I can really remember making her mark in the waves.

In the mid-'60s when I was just a child on Great Western Beach,

the next beach to it in the Newquay Bay is Tolcarne.

Trevor Roberts was the lifeguard and he offered to teach her to surf.

But he put a proviso on this that if she could actually carry her surfboard down to the water

and actually put it in the water because it was big

and she was a girl, he would then teach her to surf.

It was so heavy I had to put it on my head

and I was determined to carry the board down. But he was right.

If you couldn't carry a surfboard, you shouldn't be going in the sea.

But I managed to carry it down and managed to push it out and paddle out with it.

Gwynedd was interested in competition and to make a point

about the girls, she entered one of the early British contests.

No ladies' section. So she had to surf in the men's section

which was embarrassing for the contest organisers and it was

very shortly after that a women's category was introduced to surfing.

I was the first British ladies surfing champion.

I was champion for about four or five years.

By the time Gwynedd was winning these surfing competitions, Newquay,

like other Cornish holiday resorts, was beginning to attract visitors from right across the country.

What was happening on this coastline was after the Second World War, there was a period of lull of about

10 years, but by the time we're into the '50s,

people are starting to get back into society stabilising and people are starting to take holidays.

And these young people were seeing something quite different from their

lives in Liverpool or Birmingham or Manchester.

One of the great developments of the 1950s is the emergence of the teenage consumer.

You've got people in work,

better paid at younger ages than before.

With a bit of surplus.

You've changing relations within families as well, so that with a bit more prosperity,

young people aren't expected to tip up the whole of their wage packet

and get just a little bit of spending money back.

It's wanting to be able to display your sort of fashions and freedoms,

which go beyond those of the 1930s.

If you've got access your own transport in one form or another,

you can be adventurous, go away from the conventional resort where your parents might go,

try something new and have a bit of fun as a teenage group.

You've moved from a situation in which tastes were shared across the generations to

divisions between the generations in what they want.

As so how do you provide for the rising generation with rock 'n' roll

and at the same time in the same places for the older generations with their kind of music?

# Bring me sunshine in your smile

# Bring me laughter all the while... #

For traditional seaside resorts, the problem of catering for

different types of holiday maker was not immediately apparent.

Summers in Southport were still very busy when Don Sykes, the home

movie-maker from Manchester, moved to the town permanently in 1973.

When we first came here it was a bit of a novelty.

We'd be down with the kids on the beach every weekend.

Whenever I got a day off from the theatre. It was absolutely heaving.

And the kids loved it.

# Bring me fun Bring me sunshine, bring me love. #

But changing tastes and growing choice were taking their toll

and by the late 1970s Southport was seeing holidaymakers drifting away.

The chap who at that time as director of tourism and attractions knew that

I had a keen interest in cine-photography.

And he suggested that we make this film about Southport and what it had to offer.

We made Wish You Were Here in about 1976.

When you're making a film of that sort, and I've seen an awful lot of

documentaries about seaside resorts, you get a sort of this and a shot of that and a shot of the other and you

get a commentator saying, "And this is so and so and that's so and so."

Nothing connects things together.

And, to me, they're totally boring.

And I wanted to have

something that connected the sequences together.

So I roped in a couple of girls to be in this film as though they were two girls on holiday,

sending a postcard home to mum and dad.

"Dear Mum and Dad. We're having a smashing time here in Southport.

"There's lots to do and so far we've had plenty of sunshine."

Carol worked in the Floral Hall Gardens as a deckchair attendant.

And so she was number one.

It was 1976. I was 16. I was doing a summer job at the time

and so I was a convenient person for Don to pick on.

-Cheap as well!

The other girl, Chris, she was a kiosk attendant in the theatre.

She sold sweets.

I asked them first of all, "Would you like to have a go at this film?"

Then we made the film.

I don't know why he chose two young girls. You'll have to ask Don.

We didn't have any young chaps working at the theatre that were suitable!

I think there's a great sense of freedom when you're near the sea.

I think you feel a bit more relaxed.

Blue skies and sea is much more relaxing than being in a busy town.

We would go to the different locations and do a little bit of filming each day

and it was just a question of picking out the tourist spots of Southport.

"The models of towns and village life

"are all built on the premises and the details are quite fantastic."

When you're doing it, put a bit of thought into it.

If you're going to take a shot of that, you need a shot of this.

But in between time, you'd need a shot of the other.

And so we covered things like Pleasure Land...

..the Botanic Gardens...

-Rotten Row.

-Rotten Row.

A tour on the open top bus.

"You can forget that old joke about the tide not coming in at Southport.

"Cos it does. We saw it."

Basically it was made up as we went along.

I think it's always been thought of as a Victorian seaside resort

and so I think he wanted to show more of a fun entertaining side of the town.

There's not as much for the visitor, entertainment-wise,

as there was 25 years ago.

The model village, that's gone and that is now Safeway's.

Sea Bathing Lake's gone and in place of it, the Vue cinema.

The Floral Gardens that are featured with the English Rose and Rosewood Competition, that's gone.

One of the things we can learn from Southport is that

if you want to be a successful resort, rather than a town that happens to be by the seaside,

if you want a seaside identity, you have to keep your existing icons and recognise them for what they are.

And when you're building new stuff, it shouldn't be stuff that you could find anywhere.

When the film was finished, we had a premier at Southport Theatre

and we could show a picture as big as the normal 35mm picture

what can be 25 foot wide.

We had 1,600 people in to see that.

Good night. Knockout.

Though he didn't realise it at the time, Don was filming a seaside experience in decline.

But at the same time, a young film-maker in Cornwall was capturing a seaside phenomenon on the rise.

Surfing had all ready come along way from the pioneering days of the early '60s.

This film I made in 1976.

Two of my friends wrote the soundtrack, so I had two original pieces of music in it.

Talking Surfers Blues...

# Funny thing's happening in the world today

# Gonna capture the moon, or so they say

# Tell you boy, it's not too certain

# Folks down here are goin' surfing... #

And Getting Wet, which is the title track of the film.

# Getting wet Hm, getting wet in the morning light

# Ooh, I'm getting wet...

It was made on Super 8 and I did it purely as an amateur enthusiast surfer and film-maker, really.

# Hm, getting wet in the morning light... #

He may have been only an amateur, but John was just as imaginative with his film camera in the '70s

as Lewis Rosenberg had been with his camera filming surfing back in the '20s.

The point of view shot is the shot which is the money shot.

It was my speciality.

And I always used to wear a helmet, not for protection,

but I used to wear the helmet so that they could

see me in the water because you can imagine a head in the water

is a very small object.

And they used to say you could tell the Hawaiian surfing cameramen,

because they had big bumps on their forehead where they'd been hit by surfboards!

# Getting wet in the morning light... #

In the 50 years since cinema newsreels had first brought pictures

of this new pastime to Britain, surfing was just becoming a global pastime.

But there was nothing new about what lay behind its appeal.

There's nothing that compares with the thrill of actually standing up on the wave.

There is no engines, no power. It's just the force of nature that's actually driving you along it.

# I love you by night and day Sweet Atlantic Ocean

# Getting wet... #

And John did more than just make films for himself.

He showed them.

First in local dance halls and later travelling across the country

he conveyed to others what was happening in Cornwall.

John with his journeys around the country, showing the surf films,

became very much a carrier of

information from one place to another on a sort of cultural level.

What they were looking at was trying to find out what on earth the surfers looked like

and the waves looked like in other parts of the country.

What's this that I'm part of?

I know that locally,

surfers were regarded as something of oddballs, to a certain extent.

It wasn't rugby, it wasn't cricket.

It was an individual sport.

And most of the people that did it had a bit of a bad reputation

of having long hair and smoking dope

and not taking life too seriously

which is really what all the surfers were about.

They were just about enjoying the water, enjoying the pleasure

of surfing and listening to really good music at the same time.

It was slow in the beginning.

And the main reason was because although a lot of people

might have seen it and thought, "That looks kind of interesting,"

the ones who were able to act were the ones who could get their hands on a surfboard.

It wasn't something that was mass-produced, that was sold in the shops,

Therefore you had to find somebody who knew how to make it or make it yourself.

At the beginning of the 1960s, surfboard technology hadn't moved

much beyond the old-fashioned home-made, wooden belly-boards.

By the end of the decade, fibre-glass was replacing

wood and boards were becoming much lighter and much cheaper.

I've had this one about six years.

It's eight foot long

and it's not really a short board, like the young fellows like to surf and the young girls.

It's quite light, actually.

I want to be able to get out through the surf.

I catch a wave quite easily and have a longer ride.

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf

# Ride, ride, ride the wild surf

# Got to take that wild last ride.

# Surf fever brings 'em here to meet the test

# And hangin' 'round the beach you'll see the best... #

And it wasn't just the boards that changed.

When Gwynedd Haslock started surfing in the early '60s wetsuits were unheard of.

In the winter, you didn't surf

but in the autumn you'd put on a woolly jumper.

That would keep you warm and then people were starting to buy suits

and I managed to get a diving suit, which zipped up at the front.

We were making it up as we went along.

We didn't know how to make a wetsuit but we'd find out how to make a wetsuit.

And so on and so on with every aspect of the sport.

It took a surfer here to look at it and go, "We need to

"refine these designs to become more athletic, more flexible."

And it was surfing that demanded that the wetsuit grow better.

And, as well as getting better, wet suits got cheaper.

Once an expensive item, the mass-produced supermarket

varieties were well within the price range of the casual holiday-maker.

Here, in the 21st century, surfing has now definitely arrived.

Beaches that I and my earlier peer group surfed alone

are now absolutely jam-packed full of people surfing.

From the time Roger and his peer group first surfed those empty beaches in the 1960s,

the sport had evolved in a haphazard "make do and mend" fashion.

The same was true of sailing.

Once it had been the pursuit of an elite.

By the '60s, it too was changing.

When I was a seven-year-old, there was lots of young people in boats.

There seemed to be more enthusiasm for sailing and general boating and mucking about in boats.

I first came to Porlock when I was seven. That was in 1955.

We came from Sussex and I knew nothing about the sea at all.

I used to hear the waves all night and it used to rock you to sleep.

It was a lovely sound.

Porlock, on the coast of West Somerset, was a classic mud harbour

and the years that Bill Hogg grew up there were filmed by one of the yachtmen, Maurice Culverwell.

When he died - he died by drinking himself into oblivion, I'm afraid - but he left me all his films.

That's my father waiting for me to come in from sailing.

I'm afraid I used to sneak off and leave father set on the shore.

Poor father.

Part of the fun down here was our harbour master used to

involve us quite a lot and we used to help out with other people's boats.

And people from away expected us to look after them and the harbour master used to keep an eye on us.

That's Mike Ley.

Mike Ley was brought up in the Wear. He was my first mate.

We went to school together, we got in lots of trouble together.

Mike use to take the mickey out of me a bit because I didn't talk properly

because I didn't say "Ooh-arr" and all that!

He's a bit more posh then we are.

We're two different classes, in a way. In those days, it was to be recognised.

But the common denominator was the sailing.

We could do everything down here. Everything from younger age, we had model boats.

And then as you got bigger before we went sailing in proper boats, we used to have small dinghies.

Put a mast up on it and a sheet.

I think the freedom gave you confidence.

When I had my first boat Mike and I used it to go

out quite a lot together and he used to show me the ropes.

There's only one way to teach someone to sail, take them out there, put them on the helm.

And just let them do it themselves.

I suppose you could say it was a good pulling thing in those days.

You could say I've got a nice car, you could say, I've got the use of a boat.

Do you want to go for a sail? "Oh, OK."

Mike and I have always been very competitive, not only with boats, but with girls.

'These two pals were lucky, they lived by the coast.'

But changes in technology and new materials in the 1960s would give similar opportunities

to thousands of ordinary people wherever they lived.

Technology would democratise sailing.

The revolution began in the late '50s with plywood and kit boats,

the most famous was the red sailed Mirror dinghy named after its sponsor the Daily Mirror.

But the DIY phase was short lived.

The next big jump from development in the whole pastime is the development of glass reinforced plastic.

That obviously marked the end of the do-it-yourself boat-building era.

The next iconic small boat is the laser

which is just stamped out.

Absolute mass production.

Everyone identical, barely a piece of wood anywhere on it.

All made out of glass fibre.

Fibreglass was to mark the end of an era in the yachtsman's relationship with the sea.

At the top end of ocean racing there would never be another Drumbeat.

Drumbeat's from an era when all the Class 1 boats had beds and proper galleys and bathrooms.

They were designed to be lived aboard.

Modern Class 1 boats have left all that behind.

This one is typical.

There is hardly a trace of wood in it.

Orca is a state of the art boat designed purely for racing,

The technology may have changed,

but the reasons for wanting to be aboard are the same as they've always been.

It's a bit like going down a ski slope.

Just the exhilaration of that and all the sensations of the weather and the wind against you.

Going along full speed not necessarily entirely sure what

you're going to do about getting the sails down when you need to slow down.

It's just exhilarating.

It's the buzz, it's the competitive element to it.

We are surrounded by ocean it's there, every day is different.

A bit of it is the romance and it's the quality of the racing.

There's nothing like a boat that gets you round the course

quickly and allows you to get bigger distances than otherwise you would.

They will satisfy people who want a piece of sporting equipment.

They will not at all satisfy the need of ownership which is fettling it, worrying about it,

painting it,

debating with your wife what colour you might paint it.

We used to spend a lot of time varnishing, rubbing down,

and generally the maintenance was higher on a wooden boat as it would be on a Tupperware, we called it.

All the old owners, everybody had lots and lots of time.

Nobody was rushing anywhere.

And they could spend times on boats.

Nowadays people haven't got the time to come down here and sort of look after their boats.

My boat now it is Tupperware, I'm afraid.

It is a lot easier and you don't have the maintenance problems.

In theory, no maintenance.

No cleaning, polishing, painting or varnish to do.

You pick it up, put it in the water, you sail it, you bring it out of the water, you put the cover on it.

And you just walk away and leave it.

And what followed the fibreglass boat, the boat you could keep in the water for the whole year,

was the marina, the place you could keep your boat for the whole year.

The first was built in Lymington in Dorset in 1968 and by the turn of

the century, marinas were to garland or litter, according to your taste, most of the harbours in Britain.

Muddy tidal creeks like Porlock Weir gradually emptied,

not just their water, but apart from a few die hards, most of their boats owners too.

I categorise people who go yachting into three very broad parts.

There are what I call the hobbyists, they tend to restore old boats.

The next group are competitors.

They just like beating people.

Then the third category and this is the category in which I put myself,

so what I call swish of the bow wave men, they just love being afloat.

I'm a mother, I love playing about with my boat, I'm very competitive when it comes to racing.

I really do go for it. But I love being alone.

I love sailing off by myself.

I'm one of all those three.

This is just exhilarating. The noise and the smell and the engine.

Sailing I mean, it's watching paint dry most of the time, isn't it?

No, it's a really challenging sport and power boating is easy. It's too easy.

I've never got into sailing or power boating.

They might be very thrilling.

But I think surfing is more thrilling because I like to be in the sea.

I don't want to be on top of it, I want to be within the water.

It becomes like a drug, it's a passion, you wouldn't want to give it up.

There is a piece of water, I must get afloat on it.

"I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life.

"To the gulls way and the whales way where the wind is like a whetted knife.

"And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover.

"And quiet sleep and a sweet dream.

"When the long trek's over."

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