Iverna - a short history 1890-1974

On the banks of the Salcombe estuary in Devon lie the remains of a once great racing yacht which competed and won against the finest sailing yachts of her age.

In 1890, Iverna represented a new design of great racing cutter – a handsome yacht with her distinctive fiddle or cutter bow and undercut stern. Commissioned by John Jameson (of the Irish whisky family), designed by Alexander Richardson and built by J G Fay in Southampton, she was 98ft. in length – 118ft. with her bowsprit – with a beam of 18ft. and a sail area of 8157 sq. ft.

Iverna’s closest rival was the Kaiser’s first yacht Meteor (formerly Thistle) with whom she had an exciting four-year contest between 1890 and 1893. They raced the Royal Yacht Clubs from Dover to the Clyde against the famous yachts of the day – Calluna, Navahoe, Valkyrie, Satanita, Queen Mab, Thalia, Creole, Varuna and, most famous of all, Prince Edward’s Britannia. Her best year was 1891 when she won 23 prizes.

In 1924 Jameson sold Iverna to Walter Cottle who had her refitted over the next ten years by Luke Brothers on the Hamble. Cottle sailed her into Salcombe in 1934 and removed her valuable lead keel, replacing it with concrete. The sounds of racing gave way to those of society parties which carried from her decks over the calm estuary waters in the run-up to the Second World War.

In 1968 Iverna was bought by the Neusinger family and for the next eight years was used as a floating holiday home. In 1973 she sprung a leak and had to be beached while her future was decided. The then harbour master insisted she be sheathed in concrete, an expensive operation, and, despite the owners efforts to save her, she was towed to her final resting ground beside the earlier wrecks of Rulewater and Rose of Devon and broken up through the summer of ’74.

And there she lies on the mud, a seaweed-encrusted skeleton of ironwork, stripped of her teak planking and Bermudan cedar panelled saloon, her carved fiddlehead and ship’s wheel – an unfitting monument to the greatest days of sailing the world has ever seen.

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