SOME CANADIAN CHARACTERS I HAVE KNOWN with Boatbuilder N. C. Blanchard

 

Harold A. Jones
Royal Vancouver Yacht Club
Commodore 1939, 1944-1947.
He was elected to an honorary
life membership in 1953.
Photo courtesy of the RVYC

"Harold A. Jones was a Canadian who lived in Vancouver, B.C., where he was in the towboat business. As I recall he had between seven and twelve tugs in his fleet, all with their uniformly painted stacks, and he was pretty much the Foss of Vancouver. You'd see his tugs pulling logs, helping ships get away from the pier, those sorts of things. He was a damned good fleet operator, and everybody knew his boats.
        One of my early trips to Vancouver to visit Harold must have been around 1936. Harold had a daughter--his only child--who was around 16 at the time but thought she was 25, and of course, she could do no wrong. Harold was likable and always very popular on both sides of the line.
        Harold Jones was a preeminent member of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, and for a long time, he owned a boat that my father built, the Gwendolyn II, which was previously owned by Fritz Hellenthal. Although I never had an opportunity to sail with him, Harold was a very good competitor until WW II came along, and all racing stopped. Well, shortly after the cessation of hostilities Harold phoned me and said he needed to meet with me––something about Princess Louisa Inlet. I said that that would be OK, so we arranged a date, and I drove up to Vancouver.
        When I got to Harold's house he was down in his playroom, I was highly surprised to find that in the space of the octagonal foundation in his basement, he had built, with his own hands, a light diorama of Vancouver from the water, and he had his Lionel model railway running through it.
        Harold continued with the Gwen for quite a few years, and then around 1946, he got Ed Monk to design him a new boat, a big sloop, about 65 feet with a nice teak house. He told Ed he wanted to build her skookum, and Ed designed it plenty skookum, and then Harold went and doubled all the dimensions. The frames were steam-bent oak and four inches square --really crazy. The result was that she floated about eight or ten inches below her designed waterline, but that didn't cut down on Harold's pride. He was very decent about how it came out, and always said, 'It was my own damned fault.'
        On his cruise down to Seattle Harold never came alone. He would always come through the locks with a helper. Of course, he could always pull a deckhand off his list to go along with him. The most memorable thing about his coming through the Lake Washington Ship Canal was that he would stand on the foredeck of his boat and play his trumpet. He always had his trumpet with him, and you could hear him coming. If we were planning to have lunch at the Seattle Yacht Club I'd leave the shop as soon as I heard his trumpet. I'd walk out on the dock at the club and here he'd come, with somebody else steering the boat, and Harold still on the foredeck playing his trumpet. You know, in those days very few adult men could play an instrument of any kind unless they were professionals.
        Harold Jones was a character, and that reminds me of the five old Canadian gentlemen who owned the Minerva. She was still gaff-rigged, but she was a big, powerful yawl, about 50 feet long. She belonged to these five old gentlemen, and they always kept a hired 'boy' on her––he was only 65!
        When the old boys finished their race they would sail right up to their mooring––they'd come in under full sail and pick up their buoy––and there was no sign of a breakwater near the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club like there is now. They always kept their dinghy on the mooring buoy. It was a pretty good dinghy, too, about 11 or 12 feet, because their hired boy would use it to row all of them together into the club float.

Yacht MINERVA
"Jones was also an exacting and
dominant skipper of Spirit II. His
pride and joy was Spirit which he built 
from an Ed Monk design in 1946."
Courtesy of the Royal Vancouver YC.

        

These gentlemen always imported their Scotch in the barrel from Scotland, and the barrel sat with a spigot in it between the berths in the after-stateroom. As soon as the first one came into the cockpit in his white flannels after a race, the 65-year-old boat boy would show up with a water server, but it was full of Scotch whisky. One by one each of them would show up in the cockpit in his white flannels, and then everybody knew it was an open house on the Minerva. If you were aboard you were immediately offered a drink, and one of them would start pouring, and if you didn't stop him he'd fill that tumbler right up to the top with Scotch whisky.

Everybody always liked to talk about these guys, and they were a popular topic of conversation. They had an agreement among them that as they died off, the last survivor would own the Minerva outright. Of course, once they began to die there were only a couple of years before all five of them were gone."

Words by: Norman C. Blanchard (1911-2009) with Stephen Wilen. Knee-Deep in Shavings, Memories of Early Yachting and Boatbuilding on the West Coast. Victoria, B.C., Canada. Horsdal & Schubart Publishers Ltd. 1999. 

From the library of the Saltwater People Historical Society.