Tragic lone sailor Crowhurst on his trimaran

FORMER Daily Express reporter Rodney Hallworth stood watching sadly from the shoreline as the Round-the-World Yacht Race trimaran was towed into the Caribbean harbour in 1969 after being found abandoned and adrift in the South Atlantic.

Below deck it held the tragic secret of what had happened to its ill-fated skipper, amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst and his bid to survive one of the toughest sea races in the world and save his family from bankruptcy.

Instead, he had disappeared from his boat, suffering from depression and retreat from reality after living alone for seven months sunburned and naked beneath the stars.

He had left behind scrawled mathematical formulas he believed represented universal life truths, along with rambling meditations on his childhood; his understanding of God and human dishonesty.

He had ended up fixated on Einstein’s theory of relativity and argued furiously with the dead physicist in his reams of notes. Tragically, lone sailor Crowhurst, who had little experience of the sea, only pretended to race around the globe.

One man who knew this was Hallworth and he was after a prize that would net him a small fortune … the logbooks in Crowhurst’s boat Teignmouth Electron.

Nicknamed Rodders in Fleet Street, Hallworth had once tracked down Christine Keeler along with Expressman Frank Howitt, as Garth Pearce recalled in The Drone recently, and had enjoyed a fruitful career, driven along by a large amount of light and bitter. He was also an Express ‘minder’ to Keeler’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies and they were often photographed together.

In a past life on the Daily Mail, he had accompanied Ruth Ellis — the last woman to hang in Britain for murder — to the gallows. And at the long trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams who was cleared at the Old Bailey of killing 132 patients who left him their money, he was in the press box each day alongside Mail legend Vincent Mulchrone, jointly writing by-lined court reports.

Hallworth, said to be ‘rotund and a larger-than-life man’ with a huge beer gut, due to his intake of pints at Fleet Street bars, left the Mail and joined the Express in 1960. But he later left there too, after promises of replacing Chief Crime Reporter Percy Hoskins were dashed in the editorial game of political chess.

He launched his own agency Devon News and moved to Teignmouth where he signed up as publicity director for Crowhurst’s daring venture to race around the world single-handed, without stopping at a port in 1968/69.

But unbeknown to anyone, the yachtsman, who had re-mortgaged his house to finance his dream of winning, was beset by problems from the moment the race started. The boat was ill-prepared: hatches leaked, the plywood hull would not stand up to the pounding of Atlantic waters and vital safety equipment was left behind on the dock.

But the pressures of time and money forced him out of port before he was truly ready and soon slipped behind his competitors. So, he began to report false positions, fabricating a voyage he wasn’t making, pretending to circumnavigate the globe.

Instead of following the course down the Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope, east across the southern oceans and round Cape Horn back into the Atlantic, he planned to rejoin the Sunday Times race on the return leg – not to be the first to arrive, or to record the fastest time, but to save face and complete the task, or he would lose his house. At first, he sent false reports of where he was.

But as he lingered in the South Atlantic for months. He turned off his transmitter for fear of being tracked down and was riddled with worry that he would be found out.

He let his boat drift aimlessly through the mysterious Sargasso Sea, historically rumoured to swallow up ships in the thick carpet of seaweed on its surface, and islands of fog, and began writing a rambling, 25,000-word meditation on free will, physics, perception, the nature of God and the possibility of freeing the soul from the body.

When he made contact again saying his transmitter had broken down, fate took a hand. He discovered that through sickness, mechanical breakdowns and storms faced by other race entrants, he was in the lead, a possible winner of the race with a £5,000 prize.

Hallworth added to the pressure: He sent a cable saying: “A photo finish will make great news!” And then … “TEIGNMOUTH AGOG AT YOUR WONDERS / WHOLE TOWN PLANNING HUGE WELCOME!” The world watched and waited. Crowhurst became a household name. But the worry became too much. It is believed he stepped into an angry sea, committing suicide and freeing his tormented soul.

Hallworth got Crowhurst’s logbooks and sold them for a small fortune to the Sunday Times. Some say that when the yachtsman turned off his transmitter, Rodders sent the Sunday Times his own estimates of the yachtsman’s position. There were many complaints from readers with nautical backgrounds about their authenticity.

Yachtsman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, who won the Golden Globe race, donated his £5,000 prize money to Crowhurst’s family so that they could keep their home.   

  

*****

DAY CONAN DOYLE HAD A SOUR WHINE

Conan Doyle believed in the spirit world

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was furious. It was 1920 and the Daily Express had reported one paragraph on a dinner where he spoke on spiritualism, with the humorous headline ‘Wine and Spirits’. The Chief Sub thought it was particularly good. But Doyle, the Editor Ralph Blumenfeld’s friend of ten years, thought it made a mockery of his beliefs.

At first, he complained to Blumenfeld in a letter: “The spirit world is very sacred to me. The headline was like ‘Holy Wafers and Penny’ buns to a Catholic. So cheap!”

But Doyle hadn’t finished there. Two days later he burst into Blumenfeld’s office and told him: “You have never given me cause to think that you regard me either as a charlatan, a fool or a lunatic or a child before!”

Blumenfeld explained that even though he instructed his staff not to make any bad comments about his friend, one could never escape fate. “My order works like clockwork and perhaps for six months not a line, not a sentence, not a syllable, not a comma of criticism appears in print,” he told Doyle. 

“Then the Night Editor is off one night, and his assistant stands in; at the same time, we get five new sub editors and a stand-in Chief Proofreader. To cap it all, me, the Editor, is not there all night as he is meeting Statesmen. And so, in goes a nice little paragraph innocent and interesting enough for print but barbed as well. Fate.”

Doyle seemed to understand. The next day, Blumenfeld issued the instruction to the new staff and stand-ins. They were friends again. And it never happened again.

But Blumenfeld was also sceptical about Doyle and the Cottingley fairies, five photographs taken three years before of fairies from the spirit world, by two young girl cousins in the garden of their home in Cottingley near Bradford.  

Doyle was enthusiastic about the images and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. And he said so in The Strand Magazine. He even planned a film and a book about them. Public reaction was mixed; some people accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been faked. Later it was proved they were.

*****

WAR WOULD NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN

THE horrific TV news films of the war in the Gaza Strip and the rising death roll on the sands of the Middle East, took me back to the days of the first Gulf War and Saddam Hussein.

The TV screens around the editorial in Blackfriars were all tuned into CNN as we watched a live bombing attack for the first time in history. Floodlight beams and white flashes lit up the night sky and flames licked buildings as Saddam’s Scud missiles rained down on Tel Aviv.

We could hardly believe what we were seeing. In the dark hours of January 1991 history was being made in front of our eyes. The whine of sirens split the air and a crackling voice from Baghdad Radio told us that rockets had been launched against the Zionist enemy Israel.

“Western blood will flow,” the voice said. “American President George Bush and the British Monarchy will topple.”

Previously we had watched hours or even days old footage of the war in the Falklands. Now CNN had revolutionised war news coverage and things would change for ever. We would be at the battlefront as it happened.

Before that night in the newsroom, we never thought that Saddam would bomb Israel, the risks were too great. Now the question was: What will Israel do – and Downing Street? Then our thoughts turned to our own staff in Tel Aviv, Alun (Bear Hug) Rees among them. He was staying at the Tel Aviv Hilton, and I’ll always remember his first report that night over 30 years ago, which ran into a spread. I dug it out this week. 

He told us: “Fear, gas masks and the man behind the World Cup anthem combined to make the night of the first rocket strike a surreal experience I will never forget. Outside the Tel Aviv Hilton I watched the flame trail of the Scud missile before reaching for my gas mask and running to safety.”

It was probably the same flame trail we had been watching in London.

Alun added: “I felt the massive thud as the missile struck the suburbs some miles away. From that point, the night took on an air of unreality as I headed with hundreds of others for the Hilton’s specially-prepared shelter.

“Every gap, every door and window had been sealed with masking tape and polythene and I looked with disbelief down the long corridor where we sat. It was like being on some ghastly Tube train stuck in a tunnel. All the passengers were wearing masks, and you could almost reach out and touch the fear.

“In this unlikely setting I met one of my heroes. conductor Zubin Mehta, who brought together Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras for the unforgettable World Cup concert in Rome. Our conversation took place through frog-eyed masks, the rasps of breath obscuring some of our words.

“Hello Maestro, I said, I know it’s a strange place to say this, but I thought your concert in Rome was wonderful. I wish I were there now. He replied ‘So do I. Have you English lost another plane today?’

“I think so, I replied. “None shall sleep tonight.”

He nodded, “Nessun dorma.”   

*****

WHERE STREETS WEREN’T PAVED WITH GOLD

WHEN the Daily Express was born, London was a tale of two cities. This was particularly highlighted in Editor Ralph Blumenfeld’s diary, which he was to keep meticulously over the years of his tenure.

In one entry he talks about his walk in Hyde Park one evening as he saw the spectacle of London society airing itself. He says: “There is no place on Earth where you can see so many equipages at any one time. Such beautiful horses and such a display of elegance. Victoria drove into the park and all traffic was waved to one side as she passed in her C-springed landau. She was followed by the Princess of Wales, Alexandra, a most beautiful woman whose great popularity is in no doubt.

“There were hundreds of carriages, landaus, barouches, curricles and private hansoms. Powdered and bewigged footmen were behind and in front of the vehicles, the red, blue and yellow plush of breeches, the silk stockings of the flunkeys, the flashing buckles. It was like a fairy tale. There was not a shabby-looking turnout to be seen. Just Lordly grandeur.”

But several pages later, Blumenfeld writes: “I walked home along the embankment this morning at 2am with Byron Curtis the Editor of the Standard. Every bench from Blackfriars to Westminster Bridge was filled with shivering people, all huddled up — men, women and children.

“The Salvation Army was giving away hot broth but even this was a temporary palliative against the bitter night. At Charing Cross we encountered a man with his wife and two little children. They had come to town to look for work. The man had a few shillings, and they were stranded.

“We took them to Charing Cross Station and got them a hot meal and beds for the night. Unemployment is a great problem. I talked about this with Mr Chamberlain the other day, and he told me our Free Trade policy with the world was to blame for the loss of work. If foreign goods were taxed, British workers would have a chance.”

TERRY MANNERS

9 September 2024