Before the Belmonts: Schooner Days MXXXI (1031)

by C. H. J. Snider

WE were talking about Commodore George Gooderham's flyer Oriole II being the "spiritual mother-ship" of the Belmont Dinghy Club, which flourished within the R.C.Y.C. fifty years ago.

Coming alongside her accommodation ladder in a 12-foot dinghy was as awesome experience as trying to park an Austin in the shadow of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. But the Oriole gave better kerb service. Capt. Dick Fugler, Oriole's sailing master, always had a pot of tea on the galley range and milk and soda-pop in the icebox, with sandwiches and biscuits ready for the aspiring young sailors after the Saturday regatta, and the mate and paid hands, seasoned Ontario sailormen, always had yarns to spin.

BECAME R.C.Y.C. ACE

It was not her material comforts, but the inspiration of her prestige and her triumphs, and her impressive mountains of canvas, which made her the Madonna of the Belmont boys. Some of them were taken out for sails in her. Young Norman Gooderham used to be carried kicking aboard his grandfather's noble craft. He hated it. He suffered agonies from seasickness. But he had grit—and from being cock-of-the-walk in the 12-foot dinghies in 1899 he became an international champion in R-boats and P-boats, at Toronto and Toledo and Chicago, and Commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club from 1933 to 1936.

STILL AT THE STICK

Tom Wade, another of the Belmont boys, became Commodore of the R.C.Y.C. in 1937. He is now the Vice-Commodore, re-elected for the club's centennial year, 1952, and still going strong. For nearly forty years he has sailed the same magnificent ship, the black-hulled P-class sloop Patricia. With her he has won twenty season's championships in the club, prizes and honors innumerable abroad. George Lamont, another of the Belmont boys, has been in Wade's crew almost as long as he has been sailing.

ANOTHER GOOD SKIPPER

Then there was Charlie Sweatman, first and last Commodore of the Belmont. He died not long ago, prematurely all felt, for he was only in his sixties. All recalled how he had exerted himself to win the honor of representing Canada in the world's Olympic sailing races on the Seine. The trial races were in the new C-boats, which required a crew of three to race. They had to be sailed singlehanded for the trials. Sweatman sailed twelve such races, changing boats each time and defeating all competitors on points. The strain was enough for three men's hearts. He had only one. It was a good one. but he never really got over the effort, though he lived and worked and sailed for twenty years afterwards. He was true blue all through, an excellent skipper in any racing craft. He was at his best, to our mind, when sailing the fine Fife-designed cutter Zelma, but he was also a wiz in his own C-boat Charmat.

GAVE THEIR ALL

These are but a few of the Belmont boys who brought high honor to the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. Others survive in the world of finance and law and science. Others have left their names in the noble muster of yacht club members who gave their all in the great wars of this century and are commemorated in the memorial capstan on the club lawn. The needle of the compass rose beside that capstan points to the pole star and the city which they served so well in life and death. All will be honored in the R.C.Y.C. centennial celebration of 1953.

THIS afterguard of the good ship GRACIE was photographed years before the Belmont Dinghy Club came into being. The snapshot was made by Charles Laurie, son of the yacht owner, whose belt-reaching beard, like the handle-bar moustaches, may have been a handicap in reefing, but was prized as highly as would be now a nylon parachute spinnaker or boomless twin-wing.

Left to right, Mr. Laurie, Ernest C. Tyrrell, the yacht's cook, modestly seated in the dinghy slung across the counter; A. Kinzinger and Percy Robert—all well-known yachtsmen for half a century.

Mr. Tyrrell showed us the photographs at a recent meeting of the Shellbacks Club. He is one of the standbys. The sloop GRACIE was built at Cobourg by Capt. Alex Cuthbert before the famous White Wings. She had a long life as a racer and cruiser, was owned at one time in Kingston.