Elvstrom

Rupert,

As you know, one of my 'other jobs' is to write the more detailed obituaries when the occasion demands - last year it was Greg Gregory and 'Big Bev' Moss, this year Paul E. We're lucky in that Mark Jardine is happy to carry articles that are more of a retrospective than the more classical obit, but elsewhere there is, I am afraid to say, very little appetite for including obits. Two, no three Christmas' ago, just up the road from me here on the Island, Bill McCutcheon died. Now I knew Bill a tad and was happy to write something up for him but I had 'no takers' - not even the local press wanted to carry a look at the life and times of a real gentlemen and classic boatbuilder.

This issue will get worse, as the headliners from that golden generation of early post war championship sailing reach their own finish lines - but don't expect these passings to be given anything more than a paragraph or two (if we're lucky).

With respect to Paul, as I tried to gently point out in the obituary carried on this website, his greatest fame stemmed from a time that was not one but two generations past.. My guess is that if you polled many of the younger sailors of today they'd know Elvstrom as a name from the past, but not someone that they see has any relevance to the sailing world of today. However, that doesn't make right the ignorance shown by so much of the media, a shameful overlooking of someone with such a great record.

As well as writing the obituary for Y&Y.com, I did a number of others. But when a major print publication  asks for an obituary for someone of the stature of Paul and gives you a maximum word count of 300 words, you know that the battle is lost!

Cheers

Dougal

And "Marks to Starboard"