The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Water

The Misfit

12 March 2001

Dear Poppy

I was sorry not to see you this weekend. Weekends are always a bit lonely here when you’re not around. You missed a glorious display in the Gardens – the crocus carpet is in full bloom already – very early this year – and to stroll along Cherry Walk, one’s eyes taking in swathe upon swathe of these white and purple beauties, their heads bobbing in the breeze, is to realize that spring has come again – finally! Anyway, I hope you had a good time with your mother. Did she take you anywhere, do anything interesting with you? The NFT were showing The Magnificent Ambersons on Saturday evening and I would also have liked to take you along to that. I went by myself in the end, but while I was there I bumped into a friend of mine, Martin Wellbourne, and his wife Elizabeth, and they were kind enough to invite me for supper with them afterwards. So it was not such a solitary evening after all.

Now, about our plans for Saturday. I think I mentioned that there was a show at Tate Britain at the moment that you might find especially interesting? They are showing some films and photographs by a new young artist called Tacita Dean. You might possibly have heard of her already. A couple of years ago she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. If you don’t like the sound of it, just say so and we shall certainly find something else to do, but I hope you will want to come. I have to say that I have very particular and personal reasons for wanting to see this show. You see, it contains a short film inspired by the disappearance at sea of the lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst in the summer of 1969 – and even, so I am led to believe, some photographs of his ill-fated yacht, the Teignmouth Electron, which Ms Dean has taken just in the last couple of years, travelling for this purpose to its final resting place at Cayman Brac in the Caribbean.

It occurs to me that you might not know what on earth I am talking about here. It also occurs to me that, if I am to tell you a little bit about my fascination with the story of Donald Crowhurst, this is going to turn into a very long letter. But, no matter. It is Monday morning, an empty day stretches ahead of me, and there is nothing I like better than writing to my niece. So, excuse me for a moment while I go and pour myself another cup of coffee, and I shall try to explain.

Well now.

If I am to make you understand what the figure of Donald Crowhurst meant to me, when I was an eight-year-old boy, then I must take you back – back more than thirty years, to the England of 1968 – a place, and a time, which already seem unimaginably remote. I’m sure that the mention of that year summons up all sorts of associations for you: the year of student radicalism, the counter-culture – anti-Vietnam rallies and The Beatles’ White Album and all of that. Well, that only tells part of the story. England was – and always has been – a more complicated place than people would have us believe. What would you say if I told you that, in my memory of things, the great hero, the defining figure of that era was not John Lennon or Che Guevara, but a conservative, old-fashioned, sixty-five-year-old vegetarian with the looks and bearing of an avuncular Latin master? Can you even guess who I might be talking about? Does his name even mean anything any more?

I’m referring to Sir Francis Chichester.

You probably have no idea who Sir Francis Chichester was. Let me tell you, then. He was a yachtsman, a mariner – one of the most brilliant that England has ever produced. And in 1968 he was a celebrity, one of the most famous and talked-about people in the country. As famous as David Beckham is today, or Robbie Williams? Yes, I should think so. And his achievement, although it might seem pointless, I suppose, to today’s younger generation, remains, in many people’s eyes, much greater than simply playing football or writing pop songs. He was famous for sailing around the world, single-handed, in his boat Gypsy Moth. He completed the voyage in 226 days, and most incredibly of all, during that time he made only one stop, in Australia. It was a magnificent feat of seamanship, courage and endurance, performed by the most unlikely of heroes.

I had the enormous good fortune to grow up next to the sea. I think you’ve visited the town where your mother and I grew up, haven’t you? Shaldon, it is called, in Devon. We lived in a large Georgian house close to the water. Shaldon itself, however, is built around a relatively modest saltwater inlet, and to get to the seafront proper you have to go half a mile up the road to neighbouring Teignmouth. And here you will find everything you might want from a seaside resort: a pier, beaches, amusement arcades, miniature golf, dozens of boarding houses and, of course, down by the docks, a lively marina, where yachtsmen and boaters of every description would gather every day, and the air was always alive with the whispering noises of masts and rigging as they creaked and shifted in the breeze. From an early age – ever since I can remember – my mother and father used to take me down to the marina to watch those comings and goings, the ceaseless ebb and flow of maritime life. Although we never sailed ourselves, we knew plenty of people who did: by the age of eight I was a veteran of several modest ocean voyages aboard yachts belonging to my parents’ friends, and had developed a deep schoolboy fascination for all things nautical.

No wonder, then, that Francis Chichester and his accomplishment loomed so large in my consciousness. Although we never actually made the pilgrimage along the coast to Plymouth to see him make his return landing in May 1967, I vividly remember watching coverage of the event – along with millions of others – live on BBC television. If I remember rightly, the normal schedules had even been cleared for the purpose. Plymouth docks and the area surrounding them were covered with swarms of well-wishers – hundreds of thousands of them. They cheered and applauded and waved their Union Jacks in the air as Gypsy Moth glided into the harbour, surrounded by launches carrying journalists and TV camera crews. Chichester himself stood on the deck and waved back, looking tanned, serene and healthy – not at all like someone who had spent the last seven and a half months enduring an extreme form of solitary confinement. It had been an occasion which made my heart swell with uncomplicated patriotic pride – something I cannot remember feeling very often since. And after that, I began keeping a scrapbook, full of cuttings about Chichester’s voyage and any other boating-related stories I could cull from the newspapers my parents favoured.

Those newspapers, I seem to remember, were the Daily Mail on weekdays, and on Sundays – along with at least half of the nation, it always seemed back then – the Sunday Times. And it was in the Sunday Times, on 17 March, 1968, that I read this electrifying announcement:

£5,000

The £5,000 Sunday Times round-the-world race prize will be awarded to the single-handed yachstman who completes the fastest non-stop navigation of the world departing after 1 June and before 31 October, 1968, from a port on the British mainland, and rounding the three capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn).

A race! And a race that would top Chichester’s achievement by subjecting the competitors to an even more extreme test of survival – a non-stop circumnavigation. Quite apart from the trial of seamanship involved, could anybody survive such an ordeal, psychologically? As I said, I had already sailed in one or two yachts. I knew what the cabins were like: surprisingly cosy, sometimes, and surprisingly well equipped, but above all tiny. Even smaller than my little bedroom at home. The fact that Chichester had lived in such a confined space for so long was, to me, almost his most impressive feat. It seemed incredible that these men were prepared to live like that for so many cramped, waterlogged months.

Who were these masochists, in any case? Already, after reading a few of the Sunday Times reports, I had concluded for myself that the strongest contender was a French yachtsman called Bernard Moitessier. He was a fabulous seaman – lean, sinewy, and totally dedicated to the life of the lone explorer. He had already sailed his 39-foot boat Joshua through the fearsome waters of the Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn, encountering (and surviving) terrifying storms in the process. It appeared that he was reluctant to enter the race, but under its rules, he had no choice: the Sunday Times had cleverly arranged things so that any sailor who set off round the world between June and October was a contender for the prize, whether they wanted it or not. I pinned my colours to Moitessier and even persuaded my parents to buy me an expensive hardback copy of his book, Sailing to the Reefs, for my eighth birthday. The writing was rather too dense and poetic for me to enjoy, but I pored for hours over the black-and-white photographs of the muscular Moitessier powering his boat through the waves and swinging effortlessly from rope to rope amid the rigging of his yacht like a nautical Tarzan.

The other entrants to the race, announced one by one, failed to capture my imagination in the same way. There was Robin Knox-Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old English merchant marine officer; Chay Blyth, a former army sergeant, one year his junior; Donald Crowhurst, aged thirty-six, a British engineer and manager of an electronics company; Nigel Tetley, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, and four others. None of them seemed in Moitessier’s league. One or two of them, from what I could gather, had barely been to sea before. But then something happened to change my mind, and my allegiance. My father came in from work one day with a copy of the Teignmouth Post and Gazette and showed me the front-page story – which announced, amazingly, that one of the entrants to the race, Donald Crowhurst, had now decided not just that he was going to set sail from Teignmouth, but that he had even agreed to name his yacht Teignmouth Electron. (In return, as it later emerged, for a number of local sponsorship deals.)

The name of the man who had persuaded Crowhurst to bestow these benefits on a town with which he otherwise had no connection was Rodney Hallworth: a one-time Fleet Street crime reporter, now Devon-based press agent and assiduous promoter of anything and everything that might raise the profile of Teignmouth in the eyes of the wider world. From the stories which he now began to feed to the local and national newspapers, I began to build up an image in my mind of Donald Crowhurst as a kind of yachting superhero: the dark horse of the race, and therefore its most intriguing and alluring competitor. Not only was he an accomplished seaman, apparently, he was an electronics wizard, and a designer of genius, who despite making a late entrance into the race was going to snatch it from under the noses of his rivals by setting sail in a sleek, modern, radically innovative vehicle which had been built to his own specifications – a trimaran, no less, with a unique self-righting system which would activate in case of a capsize, and which was controlled (here was the clincher – the word which, in 1968, set everybody’s pulse racing) by a computer.

Instantly, Donald Crowhurst became the focus of all my interest and admiration. He was due to arrive in Teignmouth in only a matter of weeks – and I, for one, couldn’t wait.

A support committee had now been formed, and one of my father’s sailing friends was a keen member. In this way we were drip-fed pieces of information. Crowhurst’s boat was finished, we were told, and he was already sailing it from a boatyard in Norfolk round to the Devon coast. He would be with us in a matter of days. As it turned out, this forecast was optimistic. Teething troubles dogged that maiden voyage, which took four times as long as it should have done, and it was mid-October by the time Crowhurst and his team made it to Teignmouth. On the Friday afternoon after his arrival, my mother picked me up from school and took me down to the harbour to catch an early glimpse of my hero and to watch some of his preparations.

Every child, I imagine, has a defining moment at some point in their lives, when the meaning of the word ‘disappointment’ becomes cruelly apparent to them. A moment when they realize that the world, which they had hitherto conceived as being ripe with promise, rich with infinite possibilities, is in reality a flawed and circumscribed place. That moment can be devastating, and can linger in the mind for years afterwards, much stronger than the memory of early joys and infant excitements. And in my case, it came that grey Friday afternoon in mid-October, when I had my first sight of Donald Crowhurst.

This was the man who was going to win the Sunday Times round-the-world yacht race? The man who was going to defeat Moitessier, the brilliant, experienced Frenchman? And this was Teignmouth Electron, the ultimate in modern boat design, which was going to skim across the massive waves of the Southern Ocean, every nuance of its fleet-footed movement tempered and adjusted by the latest in computer technology?

Frankly, both of these things seemed hard to credit. Crowhurst cut a poor, diminished figure: after all the bravado of his newspaper interviews, I had been expecting someone with an aura of confidence about him, some sense of derring-do – a presence, in other words. Instead, he seemed ineffectual and preoccupied. I have the impression (in retrospect, of course) that he was alarmed, even terrified, by the spotlight that had been turned upon him, and the weight of expectation that came with it. As for the much vaunted Teignmouth Electron, not only did it look puny and fragile, but the preparations around it were shambolic. The boat itself seemed to be still under construction, with a succession of workmen trooping on and off it every day, performing endless repairs, while on the quayside bewildering numbers of supplies were steadily accumulating in messy piles – everything from carpenter’s tools to radio equipment to tins of soup and corned beef. In and around all this chaos, Crowhurst himself pottered aimlessly, posing for the omnipresent camera crew, quarrelling with his boat-builders, popping into telephone kiosks to remonstrate with would-be suppliers, and every day looking more and more obviously sick with apprehension.

Well, the great day came at last. 31 October 1968. A drizzly, overcast and altogether dismal Thursday afternoon. There wasn’t a great throng at the quayside – nothing to compare with the crowds who had come to Plymouth to welcome Chichester the year before, that’s for sure – maybe about sixty or seventy of us. Our teacher had given the whole class permission to leave early if we wanted to go and watch, and of course most of the children had taken advantage of this, but wherever the others went, it wasn’t to wave goodbye to Donald Crowhurst on his round-the-world voyage. I was the only child of school age who made the effort, of that I’m fairly certain. My mother was with me, my father must still have been at work, and as for your mother – I don’t know where she was. You would have to ask her. I remember the mood among the crowd as being sceptical as much as it was celebratory. Crowhurst had acquired a fair number of detractors in Teignmouth over the past few weeks, and he didn’t do much to assuage them when he turned up for his grand departure in a beige V-neck sweater, complete with collar and tie. Hardly the outfit Moitessier would have chosen for his send-off, I couldn’t help thinking. And things got worse after that: Crowhurst set off at three o’clock exactly, but almost immediately got into difficulties, was unable to raise his sails and had to be towed back to shore. The crowd became even more derisive at this point, and many of them went home. My mother and I stayed to watch. The problem took nearly two hours to put right, by which time dusk was falling. Finally, he set sail again just before five: and this time it was for real. Three launches went with him – one of them containing his wife and four children, wrapped up tightly in the duffel coats that were considered essential fashion items for youngsters at the time. Despite the fact that Crowhurst was cutting such an unimpressive figure, I can remember envying them for having him as their father: being at the centre of attention, being made to feel so special. Their launch followed his yacht for about a mile, after which they waved goodbye to him and turned back. Crowhurst sailed on, into the distance and over the horizon, heading for months of solitude and danger. My mother took me by the hand and together we walked home, looking forward to warmth, tea and Thursday-night television.

What were the forces operating upon Donald Crowhurst during the next few months? What was it that made him act as he did?

Most of what I know about the Crowhurst story – apart from my early memory of seeing him off from the harbour, that is – comes from the excellent book written by two Sunday Times journalists, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, who had access to his logbooks and tape recordings in the months after he died at sea. They called their book The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, and in it they quote something that he said into his portable tape recorder not long after leaving home: ‘The thing about single-handing is it puts a great deal of pressure on the man, it explores his weaknesses with a penetration that very few other occupations can manage.’

In Crowhurst’s case, there were the obvious pressures of living alone at sea – the cramped conditions, the constant noise, motion and dampness, the terrible privacy of his tiny cabin – but there was also pressure coming from other sources. Two other sources, to be precise. One was his press agent, Rodney Hallworth; the other was his sponsor, a local businessman called Stanley Best, who had financed the building of the trimaran and was now its owner, but in return had insisted upon a contract stipulating that, if anything went wrong with the voyage, Crowhurst would have to buy the boat back off him. This meant, in effect, that he had no option but to complete the circumnavigation: anything else would reduce him to bankruptcy.

The pressure coming from Hallworth was slightly more subtle, but no less insistent. Hallworth had spent the last few months building Crowhurst up into a hero. A man who was essentially little more than a ‘weekend sailor’ had now been chosen to take on, in the eyes of the newspaper-reading public, the role of the lone, audacious challenger – the embodiment of Middle English backbone and resilience, a plucky David battling it out with the yachting Goliaths. Hallworth had done (and continued to do) a brilliant if totally unscrupulous job. It’s hard not to see him as a prototype ‘spin doctor’, before that term came to be so prevalent. In any case, Crowhurst had certainly been made to feel that he could not let this public down, and he could not let his press agent down after all the work he had put in. There could be no turning back.

He was not long into his voyage, however, before something became all too painfully obvious: there could be no going forward either. It took little more than two weeks for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation to be revealed as a complete fantasy.

‘Racked by the growing awareness,’ he wrote on Friday, 15 November, ‘that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision – to chuck it in at this stage – what a bloody awful decision!’ Teignmouth Electron’s electrics had failed, her hatches were leaking (the port forward float hatch had let in 120 gallons in five days), Crowhurst had left vital lengths of pipe behind in Teignmouth – making pumping out water almost impossible –his sails were chafing, there were screws constantly coming loose from his steering system, and as for the ‘computer’ which was supposed to self-steer the yacht and respond to its every motion with exquisite sensitivity – well, he had never even got around to designing or installing it. The cat’s cradles of multi-coloured wires running so visibly all over the cabin were connected to nothing at all. In other words, Teignmouth Electron was barely seaworthy – and yet this was the vessel in which he proposed to sail across the Southern Ocean, the most dangerous sea passage on earth! ‘With the boat in its present state,’ he wrote in his logbook, ‘my chances of survival would not, I think, be better than 50-50.’ Most people would have said that even this assessment was optimistic.

So, there was no going forward, and no turning back. Deadlock. What, in these circumstances, could Donald Crowhurst possibly do?

Well, this is what he did: he hit upon a solution worthy, you might say, of our very own Prime Minister. For – just like Mr Blair, faced with the twin undesirables of free-market capitalism and state-heavy socialism – Donald Crowhurst decided that there was another possibility: a ‘Third Way’, no less. And it was, even his critics would have to admit, an extremely daring and ingenious one. He decided, in fact, that if he could not make a voyage around the world, single-handed and non-stop, he would do the next best thing – and fake one.

Remember, Poppy, that these were the 1960s. All the technologies which are now becoming available to us – the email, the mobile phones, the Global Positioning Systems – were yet to be invented. Once Donald Crowhurst set sail from Teignmouth harbour and drifted into the high seas he was about as alone as it’s possible to imagine a human being could be. His only means of communication with the wider world was a hopelessly unreliable radio system. For weeks, even months at a time, it was quite likely that he would not have the slightest contact with the rest of humanity. And during that time, it was equally likely that the rest of humanity would not have the slightest idea where he was to be found. The only record of his route would be the one that he himself made in his logbooks, in his own handwriting, taking positions using his own equipment. So, what was to stop him giving a completely false account of his voyage? He didn’t need to go round the three Capes at all. He could wander down the coast of Africa, then tack over to the west, hang about in the mid-Atlantic for a few months, and tuck in quietly behind the genuine racers after they had rounded Cape Horn and were heading back towards Great Britain. He would come in a decent fourth or fifth – in which case, no one would be interested in scrutinizing his logbooks too carefully – and honour would have been saved.

Keeping two entirely different sets of logbooks – one recording his real journey, one containing the fake records – would require considerable skill and ingenuity, but Crowhurst was capable of it. At any rate, he obviously found this idea preferable to the prospect of humiliation and bankruptcy. So he made up his mind, and the great deception began.

Back in Shaldon, I had not been giving Donald Crowhurst an enormous amount of thought. The ramshackle, undignified nature of his departure had somewhat shaken my faith in my hero. What’s more, he had barely been mentioned in any of the newspaper reports covering the first few weeks of the race. Several of the competitors had already dropped out and, of those that remained, it seemed to be Robin Knox-Johnston, Bernard Moitessier and Nigel Tetley who were capturing the journalists’ imaginations. I can remember getting very excited, though, one day in December when Crowhurst was suddenly back in the news – and, indeed, dominating that weekend’s sporting headlines – with a Sunday Times story reporting that he had claimed a world record for the furthest distance travelled by a single-handed yachtsman in one day – something in the region of 240 miles, I think. This, of course, would have been just after he had made his decision to start keeping false records of his progress.

After that, I kept following the race as best I could, cutting out the latest reports from the newspaper every Sunday and pasting them into the new scrapbook which my mother had bought me for this purpose from Teignmouth post office; but again, things began to go pretty quiet on the Crowhurst front. That spring was when I was selected as goalkeeper for the school football team, and an obsession with football began to supplant my obsession with yachts. Also, my mother and father bought their first caravan, and we took it on a trip to the New Forest during the Easter holidays. I remember being upset because your mother (who would have been almost ten) spent the whole week reading Mallory Towers stories and wouldn’t play with me. I remember The Move playing ‘Blackberry Way’ on Top of the Pops, and Peter Sarstedt with his interminable ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’. These are the things that survive, in my mind, from the early months of 1969. Family life, ordinary life. A life spent surrounded by other people.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, Donald Crowhurst was going slowly mad.

Chillingly, the encroaching madness was chronicled in his logbooks. I suppose with no human company whatsoever, and no opportunity to communicate with his wife and children by radio in case it gave his position away, it’s not surprising that he attempted to find solace during those long, lonely months in the silent communion between pen and paper. At first, alongside the details of his position – real and fake – he would just write rambling assessments of his current situation, reflections on the nautical life, or even the occasional poem. This one, for instance, was written after a bedraggled, shivering owl had perched for a while on Crowhurst’s rigging, prompting him to think that this might perhaps be the weakling of a migrating flight, ‘a misfit, in all probability destined like the spirit of many of his human counterparts to die alone and anonymously, unseen by any of his species’:Save some pity for the Misfit, fighting on with bursting heart;Not a trace of common sense, his is no common flight.Save, save him some pity. But save the greater partFor him that sees no glimmer of the Misfit’s guiding light.

But later, as the horror of his predicament began to bear down on him more heavily, Crowhurst’s logbook entries became still more peculiar. Quite apart from the intense isolation to which he was subjecting himself – months of absolute solitude, with nothing but the rolling immensity of the ocean on every side to distract his eye – there would also be the dawning awareness that, if he carried this hoax off, he was going to have to live an enormous lie for the rest of his life. It would be one thing to tell lies to journalists, or even to saloon-bar yachting friends – thrilling tales of bravado on the high seas – the horrors of the Southern Ocean – the exhilaration of rounding Cape Horn – Crowhurst could spin these by the dozen – but what was he going to tell his wife, for instance? Could he lie next to her, night after night, knowing that her love and admiration for him were based, in part, on acts of heroism which he had shown himself far from capable of performing? Could he keep that truth hidden from her for the next forty or fifty years? I have written of the ‘terrible privacy’ of his cabin. Could Crowhurst’s lies survive the even more terrible privacy of family life?

And then, a few months later, towards the very end of the race, his situation grew even more desperate. He found himself destroyed, in effect, by the very success of his own fabrications and exaggerations. For when he had rejoined the race, and telegraphed his position to an astonished Rodney Hallworth (who had assumed – not having heard from Crowhurst for months – that he must probably be dead), the news of his supposed progress was radioed on to Nigel Tetley – now the only other yachtsman, apart from Robin Knox-Johnston, who was still in the running. (Moitessier, remarkably, had rounded Cape Horn in good time but had then turned his back on the race altogether, protesting that the cash prize and attendant publicity were an affront to his spiritual values.) Knox-Johnston, then, was a certainty to win the prize for first man home; but the problem was that he had set out months before the others, so he was not going to win the £5,000 prize for fastest circumnavigation. That now seemed to be a toss-up between Tetley and Crowhurst. Tetley was in the lead but Crowhurst – apparently – was gaining on him fast. Tetley decided that he could take no chances. He began to push his own trimaran (the ironically named Victress) harder and harder on the home stretch. But it had already suffered badly in the Southern Ocean, and it was coming apart. Late one night – while he was sleeping – the port bow came away and smashed a hole in the bow of the main hull. Water was pouring into the boat. He could immediately see that there was nothing for it but to send a Mayday message and abandon ship. He took his camera film, logbooks and emergency radio transmitter with him into the inflatable life raft, and then spent the best part of a day drifting anxiously in the Atlantic before an American rescue plane appeared in the late afternoon to pick him up. For Tetley, the race was over and his dream was shattered.

But for Crowhurst, too, this was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. It meant that he would be the clear winner of the prize for fastest voyage, and would come under intense media scrutiny. Already Rodney Hallworth was telegraphing him with news of the hero’s welcome that awaited him: the circling helicopters, the TV camera crews, the boatloads of newspaper reporters. His logbooks would soon be examined in the minutest detail – and he must have known, in his heart, that they would not pass muster. Unmasked as a fraud, how would he survive? Stanley Best would want his money back. Hallworth himself would be a laughing stock. His own marriage might even crumble under the strain …

Faced with the impossibility of his position – realizing that his audacious ‘Third Way’ had turned out to be just another cul-de-sac – Crowhurst simply gave up. Instead of racing, he began to coast. He drifted into the Doldrums and allowed the yacht to plod its way through those stagnant, seaweed-infested waters untended while he sat below deck, naked in the steaming heat, methodically trying to repair his broken radio transmitter – a task which involved rebuilding it from scratch, at some risk of severe electrical shocks and injuries from his soldering iron, and which took almost two weeks to complete. But at least this project kept him, for a while, from too much introspection. When it was finished, in the hot, lonely days that followed, Crowhurst blocked off all thoughts of the reception waiting for him at home, and retreated into a fantasy world of pseudo-philosophical speculation. Inspired by the only book he had thought to bring on the voyage with him (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), he began to pour out words on to the pages of his logbooks, scoring the letters so deeply with his pencil that he frequently tore the paper. Thousands and thousands of words. Viewed now, they show in stark detail the process of a mind quickly unravelling under pressure. He began by addressing one of the greatest riddles of mathematics – the impossible number: the square root of minus one.

I introduce this idea √-1 because it leads directly to the dark tunnel of the space-time continuum, and once technology emerges from this tunnel the ‘world’ will ‘end’ (I believe about the year 2,000, as often prophesied) in the sense that we will have access to the means of ‘extra physical’ existence, making the need for physical existence superfluous.

Continuing this theme, but descending further into fantasy, he started to believe that the human race was on the verge of an enormous change – that a chosen few, like him, would soon be mutating into ‘second generation cosmic beings’, who would exist outside the material world altogether, thinking and communicating in a way that was entirely abstract and ethereal, breaking through the boundaries of space, so that there would no longer be any need to exist in a physical, bodily relationship with other people at all. As the bearer of this momentous news he began to see himself as a personality of huge importance, a kind of Messiah, while remaining aware that, to the rest of the world, he would always appear much less than that: he was resigned to being viewed as a ‘Misfit’ – ‘the Misfit excluded from the system – the freedom to leave the system’. Finally, on the last day of his life, his scrawls became even more incoherent and abstract (‘there can only be one perfect beauty/that is the great beauty of truth’), and his sense of having sinned, having lied, having let everybody down, became overwhelming:I am what I am and Isee the nature of my offence

In his last writings, Crowhurst had also become obsessed with time – months of notating his real and fake positions on the earth’s surface having made him weary, perhaps, of thinking in terms of the space dimension any more. He had begun to preface every sentence with an exact note of the time at which he was writing it. And so we know that it was at some moment between 10:29 and 11:15 on 1 July 1969 that he wrote what were almost his final words:It is finished —It is finished —IT IS THE MERCY

– and then, after scribbling a few more tortured phrases, he took his chronometer, and the logbook containing his false record, climbed on to the stern of Teignmouth Electron, and disappeared, never to be seen again.

We were not short of real heroes, in the summer of 1969. The news that Crowhurst’s yacht had been discovered in mid-ocean, and that he was missing believed dead, appeared in the Sunday newspapers on 13 July. Two weeks later, on the 27th, the front pages were dominated by him again, but this time, his logbooks had been read, his fraud unmasked, and all the stories were of his attempt to perpetrate a remarkable hoax on the Sunday Times and the British public. I read these stories with bewilderment, I remember, and perhaps a certain sense of youthful betrayal. But then, sandwiched neatly between those two Sundays, on 20 July 1969, came another story, not unrelated to man’s hunger for exploration, for feats of heroic achievement, for redefining his own position in the dimension of space: Neil Armstrong became the first human being to walk on the moon.

It was a summer of wonders, in other words. But strangely, the wonder of my erstwhile hero, Donald Crowhurst, and his tragic downfall, is the one which has stayed with me and haunted me most insistently over the years. Which is why I am fascinated, now, to see that other people – including Tacita Dean – have been haunted by it, too. Where does its resonance lie, I wonder? Crowhurst is hardly an admirable figure, after all. The men who emerge with the greatest stature from the Golden Globe saga are Knox-Johnston and Moitessier. The most heartbreaking story, in a way, is the story of Nigel Tetley – the ‘forgotten man’ of the race, who so nearly bagged that £5,000 prize, and who quietly – without leaving any messages or any trail of newspaper headlines – committed suicide in a wood near Dover two years later.

So … why Donald Crowhurst? Or, to put it another way, what does it say about our own time, the time we are now living in, that we find it easier to identify, not with Robin Knox-Johnston – an almost comically stubborn, courageous, patriotic sportsman – but with a lesser figure entirely: a man who lied to himself and those around him, a little man in the throes of a desperate existential crisis, a tormented cheat?

Well, Poppy, I have no doubt that we will not find the answer to these questions during our visit to the show on Saturday. And I’m sorry to have written to you at such length on a subject which, although it has always been very important to me, can hardly strike the same chord with you, or perhaps with anyone of your generation. But I think we will have an interesting morning anyway, and I hope a good lunch afterwards. Temperatures are due to go down at the end of the week, though, so we’ll not be dining al fresco – and remember to bring your scarf and gloves!

Looking forward to seeing you again.

Your always loving Uncle,

Clive.