Birth of an idea
It all started in 2000, when Mark Cawsey saw a pilot gig in Falmouth and thought it would be good to have one at Clovelly. Having only recently moved into the village he talked to people like Steve Perham, harbour master John Tucker, and Larry Winsborough of the RNLI. They were enthusiastic, so they talked to John Rous, and put a thousand fliers through people’s letterboxes all over Clovelly, Hartland, and Woolfardisworthy inviting people to a meeting to discuss the whole idea.
Creating the club
About 30 people turned up to the meeting on 26th July 2001 which was enough to get things going, so they set up the first committee of eight people. Some 200 people signed up as members, each paying a pound to join.
A huge step forward came from a very generous donation from Mrs Loveday Walker, who gave £100 towards the first boat, and £1000 towards the second one. That enabled them to buy 30 cubic feet of elm from a sawmill in Wales, because elm was very difficult to get hold of in Cornwall even then, and that was just enough for the first gig, Christine H.
Help from outside
While the club were raising funds, Rame Gig Club brought their gig Spirit Of Rame up to Clovelly one weekend, so that people who were interested in joining the club could have a go rowing her.
It gave Mark Cawsey’s dad Donald and his uncle Sid Ford, who were going to build the gig, a chance to see what they’d let themselves in for, and meant the club members could check whether it was physically possible to get a gig down the back hill on a trailer, and through the tunnel under the Red Lion!
Building the first gig
Donald Cawsey and Sid Ford were amongst the last wooden boat builders in Appledore. They agreed to build the first gig even though they’d been retired for 20 years, were in their seventies, and had never built one before. It took them nine months, and they did it all for free.
A lot of the work was only possible because of people’s generosity – the apprentices at Appledore Shipbuilders built the first gig trailer, and Mark’s cousin’s husband who was the paint manager there persuaded International Paints to provide the paint for the gig free. Roy Cann filmed the whole build, and it’s available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm3e4lvwJsE&t=17s or just search for “Christine H gig”
Launching the gig
Christine H was named after Christine Hamlyn, who did so much to restore Clovelly in the 19th century. When the gig was launched in Appledore in July 2002, she was officially named by Sheila Ellis who’d lived in Clovelly all her life, and had met Christine Hamlyn when she was a little girl.
After the launch members of the Clovelly lifeboat crew rowed her from Appledore, out and over the Bideford Bar and then down to Clovelly, even though they’d never rowed a gig before. Because there weren’t any gig clubs in the area then – Clovelly was the first one in North Devon.
The club’s first regatta in 2002 was quite a small affair, with just Swanage and Weymouth invited because they were also setting up at the same time.
The second gig
Then Donald Cawsey and Sid Ford built the second boat, Leah C, named after Leah Cawsey, who was Donald’s mum and Sid’s mother-in-law. Leah took about six months to build. She was launched in 2003, with the local historian Pat Slade naming her and Prebum Andersen the Baptist Minister from Clovelly blessing her. Again Donald and Sid did it all for free, which was incredible. Because without them, there wouldn’t have been a gig club at all.
From the beginning, the emphasis of the club was on it being for the local community and the social side rather than just being obsessed with winning regattas. It was important to the founders that membership should be affordable so that it was open to everybody, and that’s still the case today.
