New book published on yachting cartoonist Mike Peyton

Dick Durham, features editor of Yachting Monthly, who has sailed in every type of craft, has described Mike Peyton, the subject of his new biography, as “the world’s greatest yachting cartoonist”.

There cannot be anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the sea, or interest in boats, who has not chortled with delight as, with a few brief strokes of his pencil, Mike depicts every kind of marine misadventure.

We know them all too well – whether or not we are prepared to admit it, we have all been there, aground on a sandbank, uncertain of our position, misled by tides or technology, or just trying to do something plain stupid.

Nothing escapes Mike’s eagle eye or his wicked sense of humour, honed by a lifetime of sailing every sort of craft, sometimes single-handedly, at others with a crew of paying customers or with his long-suffering wife Kath.

There is a cartoon to be found in the unlikeliest encounter, as I know, having cherished for more than 30 years one which appeared in Yachts and Yachting almost within days of our first meeting at his home in North Fambridge.

Behind all this is a life so wildly improbable that it almost defies imagination.

Born in 1921 into a mining family in County Durham and with a father disabled by war wounds, Mike knew enough of coal-pit disasters to realise all he wanted out of life was something different.

Joining up under-age, by the age of 19 he had served in the Army on the Desert Front, been taken prisoner, escaped not once, but twice and ended up in Russia dodging between the two advancing armies.

Back home, all he wanted was solitude, and found it on the northern moors, in his favourite pastime of walking (or bog-trotting, as he describes it) and sleeping rough. A ready skill with his pencil pointed the road to Art School in Manchester, where he met his future wife Kath, finding someone who shared his passion for the outdoor life, and the frugal hippy lifestyle.

Neither had any money or any prospects. Both their families were horrified by the match, and even more so by the four-month-long honeymoon spent sleeping rough all over Europe for the princely sum of £40.

Pocket money could be made en-route by collecting waste paper and Kath recalled: “I reckon I am the only bride that ever had to collect salvage in Paris to earn her fare back across the Channel.”

Other early adventures included canoeing across Canada.

Mike was beginning to sell his cartoons and Kath to write her best-selling books when they came to Essex and fell instantly in love with the wide skies and marshland scenery around Clements Green Creek, an arm of the River Crouch, an area now almost completely swallowed up by the new town of South Woodham Ferrers.

To Kath’s fury, instead of spending their last few pounds on repairs to their dilapidated cottage, Mike went out and bought a boat – not, as Dick Durham describes it, “a Burnham-type boat”, but an old tore-out which had definitely seen better days.

But their tidal creek became a little bit of heaven, with a community of other like-minded friends, who helped to repair and maintain a variety of decaying craft.

Over the next few years, while Mike established himself as a popular cartoonist, the couple sailed many miles in their new acquisition.

Two daughters were born (and taken to sea wedged into safe corners) while Mike and Kath taught themselves how to sail and navigate and got into all kinds of scrapes and many adventures whose delights more often than not turned into terrors for Kath.

Many other boats and adventures followed, including the building of one of the first yachts to be made of ferro-cement.

This is a delightful book, a story of a remarkable couple determined to live life on their terms. It is also a wonderful antidote to conspicuous consumption, and the excessive commercialism, wastefulness and greed of the modern world.

JAN WISE

* Peyton – The World’s Greatest Yachting Cartoonist, by Dick Durham, is published by Adlard Coles Nautical, price £16.99.