Edgar Cove Boat Builder: Rise and Fall of Family Business

ABOUT MYSELF

I am Edgar John Cove, born in 1925, the eldest son of the founder of the business, Henry Edgar Cove.

I had two younger brothers, Richard and Edward. We were all born in Island House, which my parents bought early in the 1920’s together with Island Quay which my father used to enlarge his business. We had the good fortune to grow up in Salcombe before the war, when it was a very different place to the present day. The harbour was quite uncrowded by modern standards and in the town everybody still knew everybody else as the postwar explosion in holiday houses had not happened and shops were open all the year round. There were schools, shops and churches which have all disappeared now.

I will try and illustrate how different things were by relating some stories from my boyhood.

I grew up next to our boatyard and as a boy spent many hours in the yard watching boats being built and helping out as required. We had a large hire fleet before the war and my brothers and I, having been used to boats from a very early age, were very used to starting hirers off in rowing, sailing and motor boats and we ourselves were always free to take any boat that was not currently hired and go wherever we wanted.

Our parents knew we were competent so we went off unsupervised and explored, not only the whole of Salcombe harbour, but sometimes the coast well outside the harbour as well.

One activity we always enjoyed was to go to the rescue of boat hirers who had got stuck on the mud somewhere or had landed at Sunny Cove or Gara Rock when the tide was low and the beach calm, only to find themselves cut off by surf as the tide came in. We would go there in another boat and anchor off and swim ashore, then launch the hirers dinghy through the surf and return with the motor boats while the hirers came back on the ferry.

On one occasion the hirers had actually left their motor boat grounded on the beach and the waves of the incoming tide had filled her with water and were breaking over her. My brother Richard stayed in our motor boat and I swam ashore with a rope and made it fast to the bow of the casualty. Richard went hard ahead while I managed to push the bow of the swamped boat out and she came free. Unfortunately she had a very heavy engine and when we got her into deep water and stopped to sort things out she sank and we had a 16'’motor boat hanging vertically by its painter!. I stayed in the water while Richard went full speed ahead and the waterlogged boat rose to the surface. I had to ride in it and keep it balanced all the way back to Island Quay where we let it sink onto the foreshore and recovered it at low tide. Then it was taken to Ewart Thornings workshop by Whitestrand for the flooded engine to be got going again.

It was always a nuisance when hirers would get aground at about midday at Blanks Mill or Collapit creeks. They would return on foot and we would have to go there in the middle of the night to recover the boat for the next days hire.

When one looks at Salcombe today with the harbour so crowded with boats, everything heavily regulated and ‘health and safety’ regulations everywhere it is hard to remember how things were before and just after the war when the harbour had much more space in it and everyone was expected to rely on common sense and accept the consequences of any mistakes they made.

On one occasion before the war my father sold a 20’ motor boat to a Dartmouth man. After he had bought her he admitted he had never been outside the river Dart and asked my father if he could recommend someone to take to boat around to Dartmouth. My father said ‘my son will do it’ and I took her round to Dartmouth with the new owner as passenger and my brother Richard came for the ride. I was 13 years old and Richard 11. When we entered the Dart the purchaser said ‘I’ll take over now, boys’ and steered her in wearing a yachting cap and looking very efficient!. We came back to Salcombe on the bus.

It is easy to imagine the reaction of the health and safety brigade if someone let young boys do such a thing today and yet my father knew the weather was good and trusted us to be competent to make the trip. Both of us had been handling motor and sailing boats since we were about six years old so we knew what we were doing. Having all sorts of boats in the hire fleet of gave us plenty of experience at an early age. Boat engines were simple, robust and crude in those days but all you needed to fix any problem was a clean spare plug, a shifting spanner and a screwdriver.

I followed an engineering career and am by profession a Chartered Engineer, long since retired. After demobilisation from the Royal Navy I spent my working career with builders of high speed diesel engines. This gave me experience of a wide range of other applications but Marine engineering, especially for the Navy, was always one of my main interests.

On the Deck of HMS Glasgow, 1946

This website is the result of my desire to put on record the history of the family business founded by my father and to show some of the many boats which were built.

John Cove
September 2009