Morgan Giles sailboats for sale

Buying a used Morgan Giles: one badge, two shipyards, and a hard materials turn

A used Morgan Giles isn't as simple a proposition as the badge suggests. The name covers boats built at a single Teignmouth yard that closed at the end of the 1960s — the Morgan Giles Archive itself gives both 1968 and 1969 — and boats built afterward at the Stone Pier yard in Warsash, once the business and the Morgan Giles name transferred there. It also covers a hard materials turn: founder Frank Morgan-Giles was, by his own account, totally dedicated to building in wood and rejected fiberglass outright, yet the yard's signature model went into fiberglass production immediately after his death. Buying used means treating build location and material era as more informative than the name alone.

Which era to target

The MG30 is the model to know: it began as chief designer Kenneth Collyer's wooden prototype, approved by founder Frank Morgan-Giles shortly before his 1964 death, with the fiberglass production version arriving only the year after — meaning every MG30 on the used market is itself a fiberglass boat, whatever wood-versus-glass reputation attaches to the yard's founder. What varies is where and when a given hull was actually built: the Teignmouth yard produced six before it closed at the end of the decade, and any MG30 dated later came out of the Warsash operation that continued under the Morgan Giles name, not the founding works — worth confirming from a build year before assuming the two sites shared the same supervision.

Navigating the lineup

Morgan Giles's own catalog runs thin next to its history: the MG30 is the one line with a fully traceable design lineage, from wooden prototype to fiberglass production boat. A second entry sometimes listed alongside it, under the name Swallow, does not appear among the sailing classes the Morgan Giles Archive itself documents, and no design record ties it to the yard — a buyer encountering that name on a Morgan Giles listing should weigh it against the well-documented MG30 and use the full model directory on this page for whatever specifics are actually on record.