Charlotte Rhodes

Few ships could have had a more inauspicious first entry to the river Dart: nearly crashing into another vessel down to the inexperience of her crew and a faulty gearbox.

Such was the first voyage along the river for the schooner Charlotte Rhodes in September 1970.

Charlotte Rhodes, The Onedin Line

Charlotte Rhodes, The Onedin Line

Charlotte Rhodes, The Onedin Line

Few ships could have grown to such heights of esteem in the town, nationally or around the world either.

For the Charlotte Rhodes was destined to become the star of one of Britain’s most popular television shows of the 1970s: the Onedin Line.

The writer of the Onedin Line, Cyril Abraham, told an interesting story of when he first set foot on the Charlotte Rhodes, the ship of his series’ hero: James Onedin.

Abraham was a seasoned seaman, who had spent many years in the merchant navy before becoming a successful television writer. His new series, based on the trials and tribulations of an irascible Victorian shipping magnate, needed a ship and the Charlotte Rhodes had been chosen. Abraham travelled down to Dartmouth for the filming of the programme’s pilot. The ship was loaded up and headed out past Dartmouth Harbour for a day’s filming. Abraham started to talk to the crew and found his unease growing steadily as it turned out none of them were professional sailors: He met a pub landlord, a biochemist and one ex-naval officer who turned out only to have trained in using a radar. Growing more worried by the minute, he asked what the Captain had done for a living: “He used to be a pilot,” he was told and he began to relax. When he met the Captain he asked where he had been a pilot: “For British Airways” he was told.  

The captain of the ship was one James Mackreth, who had started his flying career in Bristol fighters and ended up in Trident airliners.  He had retired in 1968 and had begun looking for what he called ‘a new project’. On one of his last professional trips he had found himself in Denmark and went to look at a small harbour in the north of the country. There he saw a 130ft long schooner called the Meta Jan that was for sale.  Chatting to the owner, Mackreth heard about its history and found himself falling for the old girl: how she had been built in a shipyard in Svendborg in Denmark in 1904 and launched as the Eva and had spent many years carrying cargo from Northern Europe to America across the wild northern Atlantic. He knew he was in love and agreed to buy the ship. 

All there was left to sort out, he thought, was the issue of the vessel’s name.

He felt that if it was to be in a British port, it ought to have a decent British name. He looked back at ships sailing the seas around Britain when the Eva was first launched, and found countless solid ladies’ names, such as Ellen Fisher, Elizabeth Ellen or the Margaret Ann. He then saw the name of his wife’s great, great grandmother, Charlotte Rhodes  - and it seemed absolutely perfect. Before he sailed from Scandinavia he had the name carved on a grand wooden plaque and attached to the ship’s prow.

And so we arrive back where we came in: the ship, with its inexperienced crew, sailing into Dartmouth in glorious September sunshine. The Charlotte Rhodes had just come across the North Sea and through the channel under sail. As it came into harbour, Captain Mackreath planned to turn into the wind to pick up her moorings.

The important word there is; planned.

The crew wasn’t quick enough bringing the sails down to allow it to make that rather difficult move  - and the Lower Ferry was forced to check its progress as the 130ft ship careened past, with Mackreath hoping that he would be able to hug the Kingswear side of the river before swinging across the river – he tried this, but the sails were still not down and the ship was heading rather fast towards a line of boats moored on the Dartmouth side. The Captain started the engine, but the clutch wouldn’t disengage and actually began to drive the ship faster towards the moored vessels. Mackreath tried to disengage the engine but only managed to catch a crewmember’s hand in the mechanism. Eventually he got it into reverse, but the tide then started to drive the ship towards a ‘gin palace’ that had failed to spot them, it seemed, until too late.  

They missed, but Mackreath was never to forget that rather rude introduction to the Dart.

For the next two years he spent much time in Dartmouth onboard, removing various modern additions on deck that ruined her lines and added two more masts, returning her to the graceful form she had when she had first sailed. His ‘project’ was now a fully functioning, beautifully finished topsail schooner.

This brought it to the attention of BBC when scouts arrived in Dartmouth for the pilot episode of a programme described by its producer as ‘the Forsythe Saga at sea’.  ‘Captain Mac’ as he was known around the town now, took the ship out for its very first trip under full sail on the first day of filming. Not that he told the television crew that.

They had plans to change the name of the ship to ‘Anne’, but it proved so much trouble to remove the name plaque he had already attached that the script was changed to make James Onedin’s ship, the Charlotte Rhodes, ensuring her fame would reach unfathomable heights.

The Onedin Line became a phenomenon, not just in the UK but around the world. In a decade when countless programmes came from America to the UK, it was one of the few to make the opposite journey. You might say it was the Downton Abbey of its day, and the Charlotte Rhodes was instantly recognisable to millions.   

Over the next nine years, the Charlotte Rhodes would become as big a star as Peter Gilmore or Anne Stallybrass: it attracted flotillas of admirers wherever it sailed. Many asked to see the plush captain’s quarters they watched each week but were often disappointed to find a three and a half tonne Rolls Royce engine. The Charlotte Rhodes was eventually destroyed by arson in October 1979 when the ship was moored in Amsterdam. In later episodes, the role of the Charlotte Rhodes was filled by the “Kathleen and May”.

By Phil Scoble

First Published in By The Dart August 2015 Issue