Newbridge sailboats: a Wolverhampton yard built on someone else's hull
Newbridge made its name building other designers' boats rather than its own. The yard's defining product, the Corribee, was Robert Tucker's design; Newbridge's own contribution came later, when it took that same hull and reworked it into the junk-rigged Coromandel. It's a brand built on production and adaptation more than on in-house design.
Origins and ownership
Don Whistance started a GRP boatbuilding yard in Wolverhampton and named it Newbridge after the area itself. Before the Corribee, he was already moulding, under licence, a small American 20-foot cruiser designed by Ray Kaufman called the Signet. Newbridge became one of two UK distributors of a wooden, clinker-built Robert Tucker design, the Corribee; the firm relocated from Wolverhampton to Bridport, Dorset, and in 1969 took over production of the boat outright. Whistance later sold the business to Ron Lunney. Under later ownership, the company was liquidated in 1987, rebranded as N.B. Yachts, and moved production from Bridport to Chard, Somerset, before ceasing trading entirely in January 1990.
The designers
Robert Tucker designed the Corribee in 1964 as a fractionally rigged centreboarder, at the request of R.G. "Ronnie" Hollands, who commissioned the design outright rather than merely distributing the finished boat once built - he knew Tucker personally and asked for a simply built weekender reminiscent of a Dragon in profile. The original boats were built clinker-style in plywood by Mallon Boats, on the banks of Lough Corrib, County Galway, Ireland. Whistance and Hollands met at a London Boat Show and agreed to translate the wooden design into GRP production, splitting the cost of building the strip-plank wooden plug between them.
Construction through the eras
The GRP conversion produced the Corribee Mk I, of which around 150 were built. The Mk II, on a slightly stretched hull, gained an all-moulded interior pan and coachroof adapted from Newbridge's existing Signet moulding. Both marks carried an unintended quirk: a miscalculation in the original plug left every hull about an inch narrower on the starboard side than the port. Newbridge corrected the asymmetry in the Mk III, built from a new plug that also added two inches of headroom by cambering the side decks.
Lines and generations
In 1982, Newbridge's design team took the Corribee hull - externally identical below the waterline - and fitted it with new topsides and a coachroof to carry a Chinese junk rig, creating the Coromandel, which brochure material of the time described as the first production yacht designed specifically for the junk rig. It's distinct from the occasional junk-rigged Corribee, a standard hull simply re-rigged rather than purpose-built for it. Practical Boat Owner tested the Coromandel that September, in a piece titled "A Jaunt with a Junk."
Beyond the Corribee line, Newbridge's later catalog widened under commissioned designers: yacht-archive listings credit Bill Dixon with the trailer-sailing Navigator and the larger Venturer 22, and with the wheelhouse-equipped Pioneer 26 in the mid-1980s. The lineup also included the Spinner 28 and the 17.5-foot Topaz, the yard's earliest model, launched in 1965.
Who Newbridge is for
Newbridge suits buyers drawn to a specific, well-documented pocket cruiser - the Corribee, across its three marks - or its unusual Chinese-rig sibling, the Coromandel, more than buyers looking for one unified house style. This was a yard that built other people's designs as often as its own, and its catalog reads that way.
