Donald Crowhurst

Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932 – July 1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who disappeared while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race held in 1968–69.

Soon after starting the race his boat, the Teignmouth Electron, began taking on water.

Crowhurst secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually doing so.

His ship's logbooks, found after his disappearance, suggest that the stress he was under and associated psychological deterioration may have led to his suicide.

Crowhurst's participation in the race has exerted a fascination over many commentators and artists.

Donald Crowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad, British India.

His mother was a schoolteacher and his father worked in the Indian railways.

During her pregnancy, his mother had longed for a daughter, and Crowhurst was dressed as a girl until the age of seven.

After India gained its independence, his family moved back to England.

The family's retirement savings were invested in an Indian sporting goods factory, which later burned down during rioting after the partition of India.

Crowhurst's father died in 1948.

Because of family financial problems, Crowhurst was forced to leave school early that year and started a five-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield.

In 1953 he received a Royal Air Force commission as a pilot, but was asked to leave in 1954 for reasons that remain unclear, and was subsequently commissioned into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1956.

After leaving the Army in the same year owing to a disciplinary incident, Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation in 1962.

He was a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council.

Crowhurst, a weekend sailor, designed and built a radio direction finder called the Navicator, a handheld device that allowed the user to take bearings on marine and aviation radio beacons.

While he did have some success selling his navigational equipment, his business began to fail.

In an effort to gain publicity, he started trying to gain sponsors to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race.

His main sponsor was English entrepreneur Stanley Best, who had invested heavily in Crowhurst's failing business.

Once committed to the race, Crowhurst mortgaged both his business and home against Best's continued financial support, placing himself in a grave financial situation.

The Golden Globe Race was inspired by Francis Chichester's successful single-handed round-the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney.

The considerable publicity his achievement garnered led a number of sailors to plan the next logical step – a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world sail.

The Sunday Times had sponsored Chichester, with highly profitable results, and was interested in being involved with the first non-stop circumnavigation, but it had the problem of not knowing which sailor to sponsor.

The solution was to promote the Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world race, open to all comers, with automatic entry.

That was in contrast to other races of the time, for which entrants were required to demonstrate their single-handed sailing ability before entry.

"Tahiti" Bill Howell, a noted multihull sailor and competitor in the 1964 and 1968 OSTAR races, originally signed up as an entrant but did not actually race.

Crowhurst hired Rodney Hallworth, a crime reporter for the Daily Mail and then the Daily Express, as his public relations officer.

The boat Crowhurst built for the voyage, Teignmouth Electron, was a modified 40 ft trimaran designed by Californian Arthur Piver.

At the time, this was an unproven type of boat for a voyage of such length.

Trimarans have the potential to sail much more quickly than monohulled sailboats, but early designs in particular could be very slow if overloaded, and had considerable difficulty sailing close to the wind.

Trimarans are popular with many sailors for their stability, but if capsized (for example by a rogue wave), they are virtually impossible to right, though crews have lived for months with a boat in the inverted position and ultimately survived.

To improve the safety of the boat Crowhurst had planned to add an inflatable buoyancy bag on the top of the mast to prevent capsizing; the bag would be activated by water sensors on the hull designed to detect an impending capsize.

This innovation would hold the mast horizontal on the surface of the water, and a clever arrangement of pumps would allow him to flood the uppermost outer hull, which would (in conjunction with wave action) pull the boat upright.

His scheme was to prove these devices by sailing round the world with them, then go into business manufacturing the system.

Entrants were required to start between 1 June and 31 October 1968, to pass through the Southern Ocean in summer.

The prizes offered were the Golden Globe trophy for the first single-handed circumnavigation, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest.

This was then a considerable sum, equivalent to almost £73,000 in 2023.

The other contestants were Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Bernard Moitessier, Chay Blyth, John Ridgway, William King, Alex Carozzo and Loïck Fougeron.

It has inspired a number of books, stage plays and films, including a documentary, Deep Water (2006), and two feature films, Crowhurst and The Mercy (both 2017), in which Crowhurst is played by the actors Justin Salinger and Colin Firth, respectively.

Teignmouth Electron ended its days as a dive boat in the Caribbean and its decaying remains can still be found in the dunes above a beach in the Cayman Islands.