Cheverton sailboats: an Isle of Wight yard whose sailing cruisers were its founding act, not its greater legacy
David Cheverton built his name in wood, in the Solent, before his Cowes yard became known for something else entirely. The company he formed in 1957 designed and built a small run of sailing cruisers, then diversified into commercial and paramilitary workboats — a business that grew far larger, and lasted far longer, than the sailing line that started it.
Origins and ownership
David Cheverton was born in Newport, Isle of Wight, in 1930. After Newport Secondary School, he was apprenticed to the dinghy designer and sailor Uffa Fox at Medina Yard in September 1945, completing his boatbuilding apprenticeship at J. S. White's, building boats for the Royal Navy and the RNLI. National Service followed as a Royal Navy shipwright, then a spell in the mould loft at Saunders Roe. His own 1950 Yachting World design-competition entry, Quiver, spawned a family sailing-cruiser design and encouraged him to start his own yard with two others in 1957 — originally called David Cheverton and Partners (Production) Ltd, based at West Medina Mills.
Cheverton designed his yard's early sailing craft himself, and a number of them raced in the Solent; he was one of naval architect Robert Tucker's rivals in the small-boat market of the day.
From the mid-1960s the business diversified into commercial craft, and Cheverton Workboats was born. That work led to other ventures, including building and equipping a coastguard base in Bahrain and Flotta Marine Services, a joint venture operating Cheverton-built craft for Occidental Oil in Scapa Flow.
Cheverton Workboats merged with previous competitor Fairey Marine in 1983. Cheverton retired from the merged group in 1985, and after a succession of owners the Cowes Yard closed in 2002. He was awarded the OBE for Services to Export in 1984, later became the Isle of Wight's High Sheriff in 1993, and was a Deputy Lieutenant of the Island.
Construction through the eras
The Caravel, the yard's best-documented boat, was built of mahogany, with a compact, easily-handled rig and four berths in a practical cruising interior — Yachting Monthly called it one of the most popular small wooden boats of the early and mid-1960s. A Mk II version, launched in 1966, brought a more powerful rig and an improved specification.
The workboats that came to define the yard's later years started from a different construction basis. Cheverton Workboats began with lifeboat hulls and grew from there into what became a world leader in commercial and paramilitary craft, at one stage building as many as 20 different craft simultaneously at the Cowes shipyard.
Lines and generations
Cheverton's own documented design list names four sailing classes built to his designs: the Caravel, Crusader, Campaigner and the very successful Danegeld class. Two of those, the Caravel and Crusader, carry into our lineup by name; the Campaigner and Danegeld exist only in the historical record. Our lineup also carries a Cavalier 30, built from 1966 to 1968, as a Cheverton design, though that boat does not appear anywhere in the yard's own documented list.
Who Cheverton is for
A Cheverton means a small, single-designer Isle of Wight yard's take on the early-1960s wooden Solent cruiser — the Caravel most of all, the boat with the fullest documented record among the three. Buyers should hold two things in mind: the yard's own greater legacy lay in commercial and paramilitary workboats rather than sailing craft, and the record supporting some models in our lineup, the Cavalier above all, is thinner than the sailing story built around the Caravel and Crusader.
