ASTRAPE

Astrape was the last of Brooks Richards’ yacht designs to be built, and is regarded by many as his most beautiful. Drawn while he was a first year history student at Cambridge University, she was built by Berthons at Lymington in the spring of 1939, and completed four months before the outbreak of war. Her name and some features in her design were suggested by Rear Admiral Turner, who took an interest in the yacht’s metacentric analysis. (…)

She was undoubtedly the most beautiful of all Brooks Richards designs and in all aspects she confirmed the astonishing talent of her 21-year-old designer. (…) Sadly, she was to be the last yacht designed by Brooks Richard to be built.

About Sir Francis Brooks Richards

In his teens and early 20s, Francis Brooks Richards drew some of the most original yachts to emerge before the war. Then he gave it all up to became a secret agent and crave out a brilliant diplomatic career. (…) F. Brooks Richards was arguably one of the greatest yacht designers Britain never had. Between the ages of 16 and 21, much of the time while still at school, he conceived and – remarkably for one so young – had built five cruising and racing yachts, all bermudan cutters, all now regarded as classics of hull form, rig and performance. They were seaworthy, innovative craft, representing original thinking in the relatively new field of cruiser-racer design, and some of the finest to emerge during this period from the board of any designer, regardless of age. (…)

These offshore yachts designs of young Brooks Richards attracted much attention during the mid- and late 1930’s, for their merits as well as his youth. This was at the time when leading designers such as William Fife III and Camper & Nicholson were only just beginning to realize the interest in, and the potential of, offshore yacht racing, which was then going through a period of rapid expansion.