Alan Hill - Designer of the Trident 24

When Eric White first asked the young Alan Hill - then in his early twenties - to design him a 24-footer he could mould in GRP, he was not given a contract for the work. Nor was there even a detailed brief. And Alan seems never to have been daunted by the fact he had not designed a GRP boat before - very few yacht designers had in the late fifties.

Enthusiasm for a fresh challenges has been evident throughout Alan's working life and in the wide variety of the boats he has designed - more than 120 in all including motorboats, trawlers and ferro-concrete yachts.. That passion for boats was first sparked when, growing up in Battersea in the thirties and forties, Alan watched model yachts sailing on the Clapham Common pond.

In 1948, fresh out of school and aged 14, Alan joined Thornycroft's boatyard at Platt's Eyot Island on the Thames near Hampton on a seven-year apprenticeship building launches. Later he was also to work for a time at Thornycroft's shipyard at Woolston, Southampton. Coincidentally this was adjacent to where, years later, Marcon would eventually build Tridents and several of Alan's larger designs.

His interest in sailing boats was fed by the drawings of a yacht he found in a drawer at Thornycroft. And on his way home he often watched the model yachts raced on Rick Pond, the lake at Hampton Court. This led him to join a model yacht club and by the1950s he was drawing and building model racing yachts - something he still does to this day. National Service in Coastal Command at Felixstowe and Calshot also brought him into contact with the sea and yachts. At Calshot he sailed Hamble Stars and found himself in demand as crew at Cowes.

Following his National Service, Jack Thornycroft asked Alan to go and run the company's Singapore yard. Instead, in 1957 Alan found himself a job in Robert Clark's design office in Albemarle Street in Central London - largely on the strength of his model yacht drawings.

Clark was one of the leading UK yacht designers of the day. He designed Gypsy Moth III in which Francis Chichester (later Sir Francis) won the first single-handed trans-Atlantic race (OSTAR) in 1960. Clark was also to draw the plans for British Steel, the 59 foot ketch in which Chay Blyth circumnavigated westabout (the "wrong way") in the early seventies. And one of the designs Alan worked on in Clark's office was Mary Deare, the yacht of the novelist Hammond Innes.

In 1958, he first met Eric White in Cubitt's Yard on the Thames at Chiswick.

Eric sailed on the East Coast but he was a Londoner so laid up his Yachting World 5-Tonner Tarmin at Cubitt's Yard over the winter. The fact that Tarmin was also a Clark design led to the chance conversation between them that gave rise to the Trident commission. Alan says no actual contract was signed and he wasn't given much of a brief. "Eric just said about 24 foot. Not too heavy."

It says something about the rapport that must have been created between Eric and Alan, as well as Alan's enthusiasm and confidence in his design ability, that on such a slim basis he set about drawing the first ever GRP sailing cruiser he had ever designed.

"I'd always wanted to design racing yachts along the lines of the model racing boats I built," Alan recalls. So it is ironic that most of his designs are cruising boats, and even motor boats and trawlers. And he always resisted the temptation to design racers for cruising: "A cruising yacht should not emulate a racing boat." he says.

"People wondered what this GRP was…it was like a bombshell hitting the boat industry…" Alan recalls. Working for Thornycroft, Clark and Buchanan gave Alan a sound all-round training and ability. But he readily admits that initially it was Eric who had the experience of GRP from building what Alan describes as "lovely little dinghies". It was Eric who advised on lay-up weights - the layers of glass cloth and resin - used in various sections of the hull. And this fruitful partnership was to last way beyond the Trident and Alan became the principal designer for the expanding Marcon boat company. "We worked closely together. We were telepathic. Eric's input always improved the design." Alan says.

Alan Hill's yacht designs for other builders include the 24-foot Vivacity, the Duellist 32, the Coaster 33, the Biscay 36, the 41 and 46 foot ferro Valients and the Wakering 33. Alan also designed many one-offs including sailing-cartoonist Mike Peyton's 8-berth Touchstone, an innovatory ferrocement design with twin lifting daggerboards which Peyton built in his back garden. Though 38 foot long, with its boards up it draws no more than a bilge-keeled Trident. Writing in Practical Boat Owner in 1982 about the ideas incorporated into Touchstone, Mike Peyton recognised the passion her designer brought to his work: "Alan Hill is an enthusiast if ever there was one."

Eric White - Builder of the Trident 24

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