She's A Terror

A Paul Gartside design built by a financial insurance manager turned boatbuilder

- Nigel Sharp

The name of a boat can say much. It can say something about the owner’s sense of humour, or perhaps about their sense of history. In this case, a touch of both is present, as although giving a 20ft wooden daysailer a name that might befit a battleship could be seen as somewhat tongue-incheek, it has in fact more to do with Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to transit the Northwest Passage in 1845. Whereas Franklin’s Terror met an unhappy end in the ice, eventually sinking, the same fate is unlikely to befall her modernday namesake. “The last time I enquired,” says her builder Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, “it was not possible to become icebound off Dorset.”

Jon built her at the Lyme Regis Boat Building Academy, Dorset, after 30 years in the financial insurance industry.

“I had always harboured a desire to do something with my hands,” he says of the life change. “I was a senior global manager in the insurance business and as rewarding as it was, with the family grown up and independent, it felt like the right time to make the move. The woodworking was inherited from my grandfather, who also had a career in banking, but who spent many hours in his garage working with wood. I still use some of his tools.”

The name of the boat, Terror, originally comes from her designer, Paul Gartside, who drew the sprightly gaffer in September 2014, at the same time as the wreckage of Franklin’s ship was discovered in Queen Maude Gulf off the coast of Canada. Gartside was inspired by the story and drew a comparison between Franklin’s Victorian era and the new design’s Victorian lines. The wreckage, in fact, turned out to be not Terror but Franklin’s other ship Erebus. As Gartside said, Erebus just doesn’t have the same ring.