Thompson sailboats: two designers, one shared surname, no company between them
"Thompson" was never a boatbuilder. It's a surname two unrelated naval architects happened to share, informally applied to boats they designed decades and hemispheres apart: Guy Thompson, an English architect whose imperial-numbered "T" designs were built in Chichester from the late 1960s, and Steve Thompson, a New Zealand designer trading as Tboats whose metric-numbered sportboats followed from the late 1990s. No source ties the two men together, and the boats themselves signal the split before any research does -- imperial feet on the English side, metric numbers on the New Zealand and Australian side.
Origins and ownership
The English line began as a single private commission. Dick Pitcher, a former world champion in the International Flying Dutchman class, asked Guy Thompson to design a cruiser-racer for himself and his family; the resulting boat, named Goosander, proved itself in the 1966 East Coast racing season, beating its competitors convincingly on several occasions. By early 1967 the Chichester firm DC Perfect had begun building sister ships to Goosander as the T24. By 1969, Hawkbridge of Chichester had succeeded DC Perfect as the T24's builder and was expanding production toward 90 boats a year -- a handover between two Chichester yards, not a rivalry between them.
Steve Thompson's boats trace to a different start, decades later and an ocean away. Working out of Auckland, New Zealand, he designed and built the first T8 himself with a few mates, and that boat became the start of his design practice, Tboats. Early production ran the T750 in New Zealand, followed by the T8 and then the T7 production boat, which was built in Australia -- contract work spread across yards rather than the output of one company. Thompson later carried his design work further afield still: in 2005 he traveled to Vietnam to help start a boatbuilding business that produced the Stomp38, its name an acronym for Steve Thompson; when he exited, Corsair took over the business and shifted its focus to trimarans, leaving Stomp monohull production at three boats.
The designers
Guy Thompson's approach on the T24 carried over to the larger T31 that followed it: both designs used the same method, including scale sailing models built to predict a hull's performance in advance -- an unusually rigorous process for a small production run.
One of Steve Thompson's early designs, the Thompson 8-meter that carried the yacht Tom Tom Taxi, was winning races on Auckland Harbour with what Sailing Magazine's Robert H. Perry, writing in his "Perry on Design" column, described as extremely well-rounded performance.
Construction through the eras
The T24 is the one boat in either line with construction detail on record, and it's unusually specific. The hull was GRP up to deck level, while the deck itself was built up from marine plywood on conventional beams and shelves; the cabin top, by contrast, was cold-molded in GRP. Interior trim combined Burma teak with white melamine lacquer to a high standard of finish, the mast was stepped in a special sliding track for fine adjustment when rigging, and halyards ran down the inside of the mast, surrounded by sound-deadening material, to stop them banging against it.
Lines and generations
Two lines carry the Thompson name, and they don't overlap. The English line runs the T24, T27, and T31 -- Guy Thompson designs built in Chichester from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. The New Zealand and Australian line runs the T750, T8, and T7, Steve Thompson's later, metric-numbered designs; a later Tboats version of the T7 updated that original design.
This catalog's own listings carry a further set of numeric names -- 590, 850, 980, and 30 -- and it's worth being precise about what is and isn't established: none of them is confirmed to correspond to a specific model in Steve Thompson's T-series. The 850 in particular is recorded at 29 feet, which doesn't match the 26.4-foot Thompson 8-meter that carried Tom Tom Taxi -- evidently a different boat, not an alternate name for the same one.
Who Thompson is for
A buyer drawn to the English T-series is really buying into one story: a private commission for a champion dinghy sailor, tested with scale sailing models before a single production hull was laid up, then handed from one Chichester yard to the next as demand grew. A buyer looking at the New Zealand and Australian boats is buying into a design practice built by a working sailor across a string of contract yards, later carried as far as a startup boatbuilder in Vietnam. Neither is a company with one factory to trace under a single name -- in both cases it's the design, not a builder, that carries the story.