Name Winfrith

WINFRITH was built in 1938 at the David Hillyard yard in Little Hampton UK. She was originally designed as a sloop but converted into a cutter in 2012 with the addition of a bow sprit. She is built with oak frames and her planking is slow growth Pitch Pine. Inside and on deck she is mostly varnished Burmese Teak. She is a double ended, full keel vessel with a centre cockpit. 10 years after When she was built, WINFRITH was registered to one Mr Jock Leigh. According to her part one registration WINFRITH changed hands in 1957 to one Mr William Geoffrey Bowland, in 1964 to Lieutenant-Commander "Tan" Tivy. Lt Tivy sailed her out of Weymoth Harbour and used her as a charter boat for John Lewis.

WINFRITH changed hands again in 1992 to a Mrs Valerie Marry Warren. Valerie sold the boat in 2003 to John and Jan Ridgeway who lived on her for 17 years and sailed her extensively. ​ Scott purchased Winfrith from John and Jan in February 2020 and has been living aboard full time since then and is undertaking restoration work whilst sailing and living aboard full time. What follows is the obituary of Commander Tivy who is arguably WINFRITH'S most notable owner. Taken from the Telegraph. "Lieutenant-Commander "Tan" Tivy, who has died aged 88, was a Swordfish pilot who played a vital part in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, before returning to make a spectacular crash landing on his carrier. Taking over on May 26 1941 from a land-based RAF Catalina which had been holed by shrapnel, Tivy spent five hours circling Bismarck, just out of her guns' range, while reporting her progress to Brest. As he came in to land on Ark Royal with an engine spluttering from fuel starvation, with the deck heaving up and down by 60 ft, he missed all the arrester wires before his tailhook caught the top of the steel crash barrier, and the aircraft plummeted. Tivy recalled that he had only just failed to hit the aircraft parked ahead of him, which would have prevented any further torpedo attacks on the German ship. Later a mechanic knocked on his cabin door to explain the fuel problem: in the haste to install an extra fuel tank, nobody had thought to fill it. But Tivy had the consolation of being given, by the C-in-C Admiral Sir Jack Tovey, particular credit, along with the Catalina pilot, for unspectacular (and afterwards largely forgotten) work, which was both dangerous and important. Tivy was later mentioned in dispatches.

Lawrence Ryder Tivy was born on May 17 1918 in Kingston, Jamaica, where his family owned rich deposits of bauxite. He was educated at St George's, Weybridge, and joined the RAF in 1937, qualifying to fly the Fairey Battle fast bomber. The following year he transferred to the Fleet Air Arm and joined 810 squadron, equipped with the Fairey Swordfish torpedo reconnaissance bomber. Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939 he was with 811 squadron in Courageous when she was torpedoed off southern Ireland, becoming the first carrier to be lost in the Second World War. Some 518 men were lost, but he was saved after several hours. Flying with 818 squadron in the carriers Ark Royal and Furious, Tivy made a successful bombing attack on the French battleship Strasbourg as she escaped from Mers el Kebir in July 1940. Three months later he duelled with a French flying boat; but since neither aircraft had the manoeuvrability for a dogfight he eventually flew parallel to the Frenchman; to his chagrin, his own rear-gunner failed to fire. "Chicken" was Tivy's note in his log book. The following year he led five Swordfish in dropping mines in an attack on La Spezia. They also bombed Sardinian airports and harbours as well as making a torpedo attack on an Italian cruiser, which was close enough for him to record in his log that he hoped at least to have broken some crockery. Later he flew with 840 and 842 squadrons from the escort carriers Battler, Attacker and Fencer. From 1944 to 1946 he experimented with rocket-assisted take-offs in the Fairey Barracuda. Tivy was noted for his luck and his superb airmanship. In 1939 his "stringbag" spun into the sea and was lost. In 1943 he had a prang landing on Attacker which wrote off his aircraft. While on loan to the Royal Canadian Navy in 1949, the passenger in his Fairey Firefly trainer mistakenly turned off the magneto switches and the engine died. But Tivy skilfully glided into a narrow forest glade in Nova Scotia, tearing off the wings and destroying the fuselage in another otherwise successful belly landing. Appropriately, his last appointment was as commander of the Fleet Air Arm's air accident branch. He was appointed MBE in 1962. In retirement Tivy chartered his 38ft centre-cockpit Hillyard Windfreith; his clients included many staff from the John Lewis Partnership. Tan Tivy was a devout Roman Catholic who never married, though his last words, after many setbacks (including blindness), were for his long-standing friend Majorie Wilson: "Say goodbye, I have had a really good innings.""