.jpg "Barry Bucknell sailing a Mk 1 with his sister - Photo © National Maritime Museum & Jack Holt")
I suppose it was really in a Pub in Ealing. For six months I had been slaving and growing ulcers to keep the Bucknells House programme on the TV every week. I was mostly designing the built-in wardrobes, kitchen cupboards and so on which I was building into the Ealing house I was converting. These were usually designed, the building instructions written and the building completed just in time to be rushed over to the house before I and the cameras reached that particular point in the recording — hence the ulcers.
This BBC programme has some wonderful footage documenting how sailing for pleasure became available to the masses via affordable dinghies in the 1960s.
There is a section featuring Mirror dinghies which is just over 8 minutes long and starts the documentary (the video above is of this section). It features Sid Morris' boat 11 - Legs Eleven, Roy Partridge's boat 6330 - Menna, which was runner up at the 1967 Nationals. There is a bit of early footage which is thought to be from IPC (Iver) YC in Bucks (the International Publishing Corporation, IPC, was the parent company of the Daily Mirror newspaper) and this was also Roy Partridge's club. There is some more recent footage of 67808 'Scare the Fish' . Also featured is Barry Bucknell (about 6 minutes in) giving his views from aboard his catamaran in St Mawes harbour in Cornwall.
The full length video is linked from Yachts & Yachting here https://www.yachtsandyachting.com/news/228996/BBC-Four-presents-The-Sailing-Sixties
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is currently running an exhibition called 'Plywood: Material of the Modern World',
'Labour as Leisure—The Mirror Dinghy and DIY Sailors' by Andrew Jackson is an an academic article which appeared in volumn 19, issue 1 (Spring 2006) of the Journal of Design History.
The Mirror was conceived in 1962 by Barry Bucknell as a kit boat for amateur woodworkers. Bucknell was the first popular DIY expert, appearing on television programmes throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He played a major role in the popularization of home improvement as a leisure activity, particularly amongst men. In collaboration with Jack Holt, a yacht designer, he also managed to revolutionize the previously elite sport of sailing. This paper explores the place of the Mirror dinghy in the development of the post-war male's role in the home. Working with frameworks drawn from social and cultural theory, it argues that DIY and the home workshop acted as means of integrating men into family life, whilst simultaneously preserving existing masculine role models. The paper concludes that the success of the Mirror dinghy can act as a representation of increased social and economic autonomy for large sections of the British population in the last half of the twentieth century.
This is an interview with Dinghy historian David Henshall who gave a presentation at the 2013 RYA Dinghy Show on the history of the Mirror Dinghy. Sadly, the presentation itself was not recorded (or if it was, it was never published).
There are also some more photos from the 2013 show by Chris Bowen.
