Hurley sailboats: a Plymouth production line that outlived its own closure
Hurley is really two stories sharing one name. The core is Hurley Marine Ltd of Plymouth, England, a family-run yard that built small cruising sailboats through the 1960s and into the mid-1970s before closing in 1974. The rest is what happened to the name and the moulds afterward: a chain of British and Dutch companies kept building "Hurleys" for another two decades, some from the original tooling, and one lineage from a design that had no connection to George Hurley's yard at all.
Origins and ownership
George Hurley was a carpenter and shipwright who worked in Plymouth dockyard during the war before setting up his own business in 1946. That first venture, A.G. Hurley Ltd, built commercial vehicle bodies from premises in Keyham with two employees, Reg Yates and Ernie Miners, and George and his wife Marion as Directors. The business expanded into larger premises in Richmond Walk, Stonehouse, in 1952, and it was from there in 1958 that Hurley began building the Silhouette cruisers, starting the path toward Hurley Marine. Additional Directors joined in 1964, bringing capital that funded a new, purpose-built factory in Valley Road, Plympton; at its peak that factory employed around 140 people and turned out roughly 17 fully completed and certificated boats a week, making Hurley Marine one of the UK's largest boat builders of the period. George Hurley retired at the end of 1967, and the company carried on under a new Board chaired by Charles Woodrow, but it succumbed to the industrial and financial conditions of the mid-1970s and closed in 1974. Hurley remained a keen member of the Royal Plymouth Corinthian Yacht Club, which presented him with a plaque in 1986 to mark his retirement; three decades later, the Hurley Owners Association marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first Hurley 22 and Hurley 18 production with an anniversary weekend in Plymouth that Hurley's widow, Marion, attended with her family.
Construction through the eras
Valley Road's output depended on Ian Anderson's designs carrying Lloyds Series Production Certificates for each class, which let the yard certify boats at volume rather than build to individual order. That template didn't disappear with the 1974 closure. In August 1974, two ex-Hurley employees bought the Hurley 22 moulds and set up South Coast Marine, restarting production in 1975 with hull and deck mouldings supplied by Moody Marine Projects. A separate, later Dutch-built chain used different builders again: hulls for the boats sold as the Hurley 800 were constructed by Coniplex, the yard also known for building Contest yachts, and from 1985 that GRP work was spread across several Dutch shipyards, including Conyplex of Medemblik, by then trading as Contest Yachts.
Lines and generations
Triba, a Dutch importer, brought genuine Plymouth-built Hurley 22s into Holland from 1967 under the Hurley name — real Hurley Marine boats, not a rebadge. The naming gets more tangled after 1974. South Coast Marine's revived Hurley 22 sold well enough that around 40 percent of its output went to Holland, where Holland Yachting at Harderwijk marketed the boats from about 1977 as the "Hurley 700," a name Triba never used. South Coast Marine itself went into receivership in April 1980 after building about 425 boats.
A second, entirely unrelated Dutch lineage began later in the 1980s, when Jachtbouw Twente bought the rights to the Hurley name. The boat that became the Hurley 800 traces not to Plymouth but to Denmark: naval architect Arne Borghegn designed the Junker 26 in 1977, and 146 were built in Denmark over the following four years before Holland Yachting took over sales from 1981 and gave the boat the Hurley name; a further roughly 100 ready-built hulls followed from the Holstebro Plastværk yard, and the design was later developed into the Hurley 830 by adding a sugar-scoop stern. Owner-community accounts of exactly how Twente came to the name differ, but the Borghegn-designed, Danish-originated lineage has the strongest outside corroboration. A further 160 Dutch-built 800/830 hulls followed, ending at construction number 402. Twente separately acquired the rights to the discontinued Contest 34 and renamed it the Hurley 1050 — a third, unrelated model carrying the same adopted name. When Twente's owner fell ill and later sold the business after a family dispute, the moulds and naming rights passed to Jachtwerf De Eemhof, near Almere, whose new owners built the 800 and 830 but chose not to market them in the UK.
Who Hurley is for
Hurley's own designs sat at the small-to-midsize end of the range built at Valley Road's volume: the Hurley 18 and 22 alone found more than 1,200 buyers between them, many exported to Europe and the USA. Anyone drawn to the name should recognize it covers boats from genuinely separate design lineages — the Plymouth-built (or Plymouth-mould) originals, and the later, unrelated Danish-designed, Dutch-built 800, 830, and 1050 — a distinction worth keeping straight before assuming any two "Hurleys" share a pedigree.
