The most exotic of the preserved Rouse yachts must now be Tai-Mo-Shan, not seen in British waters for many years and recently refitted at Kusadasi in Turkey, after 38 years in the strict and careful ownership of Ian Bowler C.B.E., an 81 year old pioneering engineer in the international oil and gas industry. She retains her original teak hull, her camphor and ipol frames, a one-piece camphor stem, a yacal sternpost, a teak keelson, a 7 tonne lead keel and the steel floors that were installed in 1933, under the
supervision of the five young officers and her joint designer, Mr Cock, the managing director of Hong Kong & Whampoa. Her hollow spruce masts were designed and constructed at Berthon in Lymington in the 1960s. This was Ian Bowler's third refit of Tai-Mo-Shan. He relaid a deck that had been fabricated in Italy in 1971 from 50 years old teak salvaged from a steamer. After finishing the job at Kusadasi, shipwright Leo Aston, a graduate of the International Boatbuilding College at Lowestoft, described Tai-Mo-Shan as "Pretty unparalleled". "She's built to about twice Lloyds specification, very heavily overbuilt in places. I've never seen such tremendous construction. When I was working on her I used to call her, in a friendly way, 'The Incredible Hulk'. The quality of teak used in Hong Kong is far beyond what we can find on the shelf today. Even the Italian salvaged teak used on the deck, which was 50 years old when it was laid, is of a very high quality and density. The Italian deck had not lasted as long as
the original pine deck largely because the ends of the teak had been unsupported where hatches had been let into the deck. There had been an inherent fault with plywood under the teak being unsupported by some of the deck beams. I had to take the king plank up, but I never found any fault with the marvellous work of her Chinese builders." The locations of previous refits, in La Rochelle and at the Cantiere Navale Dell'argentario at Porto Santo Stefano, indicate just how widely Tai has been cruised in the years since Ian Bowler discovered her. Mr Bowler's instructions to Leo Aston were intended to ensure that "Tai" will remain one of the "most original" of the surviving pre-war teak yachts from Hong Kong.

IN 1932, five adventurous young naval officers took advantage of the world slump to finance the building of a 54 foot ocean racing ketch in the yard of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co Ltd. She was to be constructed in teak and named Tai-Mo-Shan [High Hat Hill], after the highest mountain in the colony.
Her chief designer was H.S. Rouse, Vice-Commodore of the Hong Kong Yacht Club, who had raced yachts of his own design in 1928-9 against the pioneering yacht designer John Illingworth, who was then serving as a Lt Cdr with the Royal Navy's submarine flotilla and racing his gaff yawl Queen Bee. In those halcyon years, before the outbreak of the Second World War and the end of empire, "Uncle Rouse", as Illingworth called him, designed a series of fast cruising yachts for men on the China Station. But when the smoke of war had cleared and the British Empire was gone, only ten Rouse yachts were still listed in Lloyds 1959 Register of Yachts.
Thanks to Chinese craftsmanship, two of them were to become very famous in the post-war era and at least half a dozen have survived into the second millennium, none more magnificently than Tai-Mo-Shan. The best known of the Rouse yachts has been Tzu Hang, the 46 foot ketch, built by Hop Kee in 1938. She survived fifteen years of world cruising in the hands of Miles and Beryl Smeeton and underwent a terrifying pitchpoling and later capsize off Cape Horn in 1956. Then there was Rouse's own 47 foot cutter, Golden Dragon, completed in 1938 at Wing On Shing yard, and raced in Europe after the war. Sailing off the Crouch in 1970, she won the Houghton Cup, Britain's oldest offshore race. Golden Dragon was eventually owned by the naval historian Dudley Pope, author of the Lord Ramage novels. Another astonishing Rouse survivor has been Mairi Bhán, a 26-foot sloop
from Hung, Hom Hop-Kee & Co., built in teak with an iroko keel and a 2 tonne cast iron tear drop keel. Mairi Bhán survived some years in the long grass outside No1 Coastguard House on the headland above Penmon Point, on the Isle of Anglesey, before being bought and rescued by Mike "Mac" MacNamara. "Mac", at age 75, was sailing Mairi Bhán, aged 62, in the River Mersey in the year 2001, berthing her in Liverpool Marina.

Her most remarkable exploit was her very first voyage - 16,217 miles without a motor, from Hong Kong to Dartmouth. The five young officers had been warned about economising on canvas by their sailmaker Ah Lung, who made them sixteen sails in eight-ounce cotton duck. Every sail was entirely hand-stitched. Ah Lung had rejected the first canvas offered to him, as it was, "All can-do for play-pidgin harbourside, no can-do outside". After deciding to economise by leaving out an engine, the officers had to ask the formidable Admiral Howard Kelly for permission to sail the new yacht to England by an unorthodox route, against the
prevailing winds, via Japan, the Kuriles, the Bering Sea, the Aleutians, California, Panama and the West Indies. "Quite rightly", wrote Lt Martyn Sherwood later, "We were placed on half-pay for the entire voyage". The irascible admiral's approval, that
it was "refreshing to note this spirit of adventure and initiative", came with a pay cut, down to seven shillings a day for each man. Their economy, in sailing Tai-Mo-Shan to Britain without a motor, was to leave them stranded for sixteen days on Crooked Island in the Bahamas. Admiralty penny-pinching was somewhat balanced by a splendidly-timed congratulatory telegram, sent to Dartmouth by King George V.

The crew were four submariners and a naval doctor; Lt Martyn Sherwood, 32, Lt George Salt, 24, Lt Philip Francis, 24, Surgeon Lt Bertie Ommaney-Davis, 27, and sailing-master Lt R.E.D. "Red" Ryder, 24. They repaid the Navy and the nation in the subsequent world war by winning four DSOs, a Croix de Guerre and a VC between them.

Robert Ryder won the Victoria Cross in 1942, commanding naval forces in the raid on St Nazaire in which the destroyer HMS Campbeltown, disguised as a German gun boat, rammed the gates of the only Atlantic drydock capable of handling the German battleship Tirpitz. HMS Campbeltown was jammed in the lock gates and still carrying 4.3 tonnes of concealed, time-delayed explosives when Ryder went ashore from MGB 314 to rescue survivors from her crew and to pick up some of the very
few survivors from the marine commando raiding force. When he ran the gauntlet to escape, with MGB 314 loaded with dead and wounded, the gunboat was under very heavy German fire for over an hour. A German naval report described the raid as "a model example of a cleverly planned operation, superbly prepared down to the last detail, carried out well and boldly, with a daredevil spirit." Churchill said it was "a deed of glory intimately involved in high strategy". Cdr Martyn Sherwood was awarded two DSOs, in 1940 off the Norwegian Coast and in 1941 in the Greek withdrawal from Piraeus harbour. Lt Philip Francis earned two DSOs as a determined submarine captain in the Mediterranean in 1941 and 1942. His crew said he had "a brain packed in ice" and on nine patrols, defending Malta, sinking supply ships bound for Rommel's Afrika Korps, Philip Francis scored 20 hits out of 51 torpedoes fired. In 1945, commanding the Northern Ireland submarine base at Lisahally, he took the surrender of 63 German
U-boats, complimenting the crews on their discipline and impeccable conduct in a bloody campaign that had ended in total defeat.
George Salt was lost in the Mediterranean in 1940. He was the captain of the submarine Triad, missing for forty years, but now known to have been sunk during a close quarters exchange of gunfire and torpedoes with the Italian submarine Enrico Toti in the Gulf of Taranto. Both vessels were on the surface at night. His son, Rear Admiral 'Sam' Salt (Captain of HMS Sheffield when she was sunk by a missile in the 1982 Falklands War) also served as a submariner. Red Ryder was Sam Salt's godfather.

George and Philip Francis, who became Sam Salt's uncle, were life-long friends. George married Philip's sister, Bridget Francis [now Bridget Lamb], still with us and well enough to take a three week trip to Antarctica in 2006. Bridget's older brother, Geoffrey, married George Salt's sister, Patience. In 1938, Geoffrey had another yacht built at the Whampoa Yard in Hong Kong, also designed by Rouse and named Ma-On-Shan, after another mountain in Hong Kong. She was a wishbone ketch, larger than Tai-Mo-Shan. Geoffrey Francis planned to sail Ma-On-Shan back to England via Singapore, where he was serving in the
Royal Air Force. The westabout voyage would have meant that the two brothers had jointly circumnavigated the world.
The plan was thwarted by a severe typhoon and the Second World War. Geoffrey sailed with Patience, a Chinese cook boy called A Lo and the Number One Boat Boy from the Hong Kong Yacht Club, who was called Tai Sing.

Sam Salt recently recounted their fate: "The wishbone, a heavy beast that could not be lowered, had broken adrift and carried away the upper cross trees and the shrouds and snapped the lower cross tree tubing. For many hours my uncle had to stay lashed at the foot of the damaged main mast with an axe waiting to cut away the rigging when the mast eventually fell. "Having passed close to the centre of the typhoon - and survived it - they made for Saigon to carry out repairs. But because they had all been reported dead, they were unable to secure a bank draft from the Lloyds Bank agent in Saigon. Eventually they continued to Singapore where with the onset of World War II they had to abandon their plans. Sadly, Ma On Shan fell into Japanese hands when South East Asia was overrun and was presumably destroyed."

In 1935, Lt Martyn Sherwood published The Voyage of The Tai-Mo-Shan, his account of the yacht's first three years. The book was re-published after the war by Arthur Ransome's publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, in The Mariners' Library series. Sherwood told how Red Ryder had largely supervised construction of Tai-Mo-Shan, while Sherwood and Salt had prepared for the voyage by taking cooking lessons from a Swiss chef in Hong Kong. They loaded some fairly advanced radio equipment and promised to observe currents and visibility for the Admiralty. They were cruising the cold and foggy seas where eight years later, Admiral Yamamoto would hide his aircraft carriers in the days before the attack on Pearl Harbour. Against Tai-Mo-Shan's strong cockpit
"breakwater" was lashed a "canvas collapsible boat", which saw much action in the Bahamas, when the ketch was trapped on Crooked Island and heeled over at 45 degrees with a broken tiller. As Red Ryder travelled to Nassau, to try and hire a tug, the other men camped ashore and tried to persuade the poverty-stricken permanent inhabitants to excavate a breakwater around the stricken ketch. The islanders were Seventh Day Adventists, so poor that they owned only one shovel between them and dared not use it on rough work in sea water, as they needed it for burying their dead. The cash cost of escaping from Crooked Island was
eighty pounds in payments to the islanders, a tow by a local schooner, the replacement of two teak planks and some Muntz metal sheathing. All agreed it would have been cheaper to have bought an engine in Hong Kong.

After arriving in England, Tai-Mo-Shan [29 tons TM] joined Amaryllis [36 tons TM] as the pair of yachts run by the Royal Naval Sailing Association. Amaryllis, launched in 1882, had been inherited by the navy after the death of bachelor George Muhlhauser, a Q-ship commander in the First World War who had died shortly after bringing Amaryllis back from an epic and very bizarre circumnavigation in the 1920s. Tai-Mo-Shan was raced in British waters in the under the RNSA burgee and by 1936 she was equipped with a two-cylinder Ailsa Craig diesel. The RNSA still awards a Tai-Mo-Shan Tankard, nowadays presented for the
best sailing performance during the yachting season by a lady member. John Illingworth, in his important book Offshore, told how he converted Tai-Mo-Shan into a yawl for the RNSA, to try to improve her sailing performance. He eventually recognised that with 23.8 tonnes displacement, 9ft 2in draught and 12ft 2in beam, she would sail better as a ketch and he soon reverted to "Uncle" Rouse's original three-quarter rigged ketch design.
Faster yachts appeared after the war and after a few seasons being demoted to cruising trips, "Tai" was sold by the RNSA to the yacht brokers Berthon in 1964 and spotted at Brightlingsea by Ian Bowler, who resolved to become her third private owner. She was given a new 50 hp Parsons four cylinder diesel and her original solid masts were replaced by hollow spruce spars with internal halyards and a masthead rig, designed by David May of Berthon. In La Rochelle she acquired new Goiot winches and stainless steel wire rigging and below decks was transformed into a proper gentleman's yacht. She was given a library of leather-bound books and the sort of elegant saloon you might expect in the cruising home of an owner whose hero is Lord Nelson, who wrote the
definitive monograph Predator Birds of Iran and lived in France, England and Iran when he was running an international engineering
consultancy. Tai-Mo-Shan cruised in those days with a suit of sixteen sails and 500 charts.

After 38 years of protecting Tai from the hazards of the twentieth century, Ian Bowler has recently appealed for information on her
history, hoping to make contact with some of the hundreds of yachtsmen who must have cruised and raced her in her RNAS years, after the five young officers had arrived back in Western Europe with their beautiful Oriental artefact. He hopes to find a suitable curator for Tai-Mo-Shan in the first part of the twenty-first century.