Richard Reed investigates the history of Cruiser Kits and its founder, Charles Greene

When I bought my plywood centre-cockpit Santa Barbara 32, Seven Summers, I’d never heard of Charles Greene or Cruiser Kits, writes Richard Reed.

That changed on the pontoon at Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight where, by pure chance, I met Malcolm Fieldhouse.

He’d been a teacher at the school next to the home of Seven Summers’ builder, the late Louis Louth-Davies, and had watched him build the ketch in his Barnham garden.

It started a quest to learn more about the company and the designer.

Cruiser Kits was founded by yacht designer Charles Greene – a name now sadly little known.

A Cruisers Kits brochure

Just some of the Cruiser Kits range. Credit: Cruiser Kits

Yet in the 1950s, Greene was the pioneer of modern plywood boatbuilding.

In its heyday, the company was incredibly successful, selling hundreds of kits and partially-completed boats in the UK and Europe, and winning rave reviews in Practical Boat Owner and other sailing magazines.

Cruiser Kits was a regular exhibitor at the Earl’s Court and Southampton boat shows and on the Continent.

At the Genoa Boat Show in 1963, the firm secured perhaps its biggest ever deal worth £100,000 – £2.8 million in today’s money – for 10, 60ft catamarans from a holiday firm in Sardinia.

However, it was selling boats to hobbyists that was the firm’s bread and butter – with enthusiasts able to choose from more than 50 kits, ranging in size from a simple canoe for £16 to a 99ft trimaran for £7,500.

Three men standing around a boat

Charles Greene (right), and Brian Gower (left) at a boat show talking to Robin Knox-Johnston, who later became a customer. Credit: Collen Gower

You could also buy partially assembled boats in three stages, buying the next section when the first had been completed.

Cruiser Kits even offered working holidays, which allowed clients to build their boats under supervision at Cruiser Kits’ headquarters in Suffolk.

Greene grew up in The Creek, Sunbury, just off the Thames, and soon started experimenting with building makeshift boats with friends.

At 16 he signed up as an apprentice at the James Taylor boatyard at Chertsey, and showed early entrepreneurial flair, setting up a company and building a couple of boats in his spare time in a rented garage.

He worked for several yards on the South Coast and the Isle of Wight, before enlisting in the RAF at 19.

People working in a factory building boats

The Cruiser Kits factory where partially assembled boats were built ready for purchase. Credit: Cruiser Kits

He returned to Sunbury while waiting to be called up, working briefly at Walton Yacht Works.

The firm assigned him as being in a ‘reserved occupation’, but Greene got himself removed from the list. He wanted to fight.

During this pre-war period, he developed several innovative boat designs, including multi-chine hulls and box keels, which he mentions in his book, Boatbuilding without Brainstorms, Blisters or Bankruptcy.

Greene served in the RAF during World War II, flying Lancaster bombers, despite wearing contact lenses – pilots were supposed to have perfect eyesight.

“He cheated by memorising the eye test,” says his daughter Shelley.

After the war, Greene experimented with making a dinghy using plywood from an old landing craft, and realised what a strong yet lightweight and versatile material it was.

He bought more landing craft, and in 1951 he built a 29ft sloop, named Shelley after his daughter.

The idea for Cruiser Kits was born. After a brief spell working on rocket propulsion for the Royal Aircraft Research establishment at Farnborough, Greene started his boat business, and soon picked up orders.

In 1956, he moved the business to an old pub in Earsham, Norfolk, before buying a former water mill at Bungay, in Suffolk, as sales took off.

Each of the models in the catalogue was built as a prototype, then disassembled, with the panels used as templates when a customer ordered a kit.

A brochure for Cruiser Kits

Over 50 kit boats were available to buy. Credit: Cruiser Kits

“Dad was the most wonderful designer, says Shelley. “If you went into his office his drawings were impeccable, all from
his own head.”

Although Cruiser Kits sold a range of monohulls, catamarans and trimarans, she says her father was “very much into multihulls”.

One of Greene’s first employees, Brian Gower, remembers going to Tilbury docks in a pick-up truck to collect the plywood for the kits, and also went with Greene – affectionately known to everyone as Ginger, from his RAF days – to several boat shows, both at home and abroad.

Chay Blyth visited the yard at Bungay, and on another occasion, Brian delivered a dinghy kit to Robin Knox-Johnston.

In 1973, when the UK joined the Common Market, VAT was imposed on kit boats, which had previously been exempt from tax.

This, together with the supply of cheap glassfibre moulds for fitting out at home, sounded the death knell for Cruiser Kits, which was forced to lay off staff, and the company was wound up in the 1980s.

Time, perhaps, to remember the place Charles Greene has earned in the annals of British yacht design and boatbuilding.

A Cruiser Kits builder’s story

Derek Lucas bought his flat-pack Cruiser Kits 38ft ketch for £6,000 in 1982, not long before the company went into liquidation.

A carpenter by trade, he had the skills and the tools, but it still took him nearly 14 years to build, initially in his garden at Ryarsh, Kent, before finishing it off at Medway Bridge Marina.

AnnJilly (named after his daughters) finished up as a motor cruiser rather than a sailing boat.

A boat being built in a garden

AnnJilly under construction. Credit: Derek Lucas

“By the time I finished it my wife had gone off boating so I never put the masts on,” he says.

Perhaps because the company was close to shutting down, not all the interior panels fitted as well as they might have done, and Derek ended up remodelling the interior.

He also raised the aft cabin coachroof by a foot to give himself standing headroom.

“I put an escape hatch in the aft cabin,” he adds. “It wasn’t until I finished it I realised that if there was a fire I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get out.”

All Cruiser Kits’ boats were designed to have a glassfibre sheathing to protect the top-quality plywood hull.

Derek used a local factory in Tonbridge to supply the materials.

A motorboat in a harbour

Originally a ketch, Derek ended up making AnnJilly a motor cruiser. Credit: Derek Lucas

“They were really brilliant,” he remembers. “I’d smoothed the hull nicely, but he told me to put some nails in a block of wood and score it all up. I said, ‘You’re kidding!’, but he said ‘No, this is the biggest mistake people make – you’ve got to get that resin into the first layer’. I did that and then put two coats of glassfibre on.”

He found assembly straightforward.

“I built the hull upside down, and then got eight or nine friends round to help turn the boat over. They were expecting a dinghy, but I was really surprised how light it was; she went over very easily.”

Derek found he needed to add much more ballast than recommended. He filled the keel casing with concrete weighing 1.5 tons, but it still wasn’t enough.

“She floated like a cork, so I melted down some lead and added another 1.5 tons of internal ballast,” he recalls. “I also put in a bow thruster because she is light on the bow.”

Despite the cost – which finally added up to £34,000 – and the years of toil, Derek has no regrets.

“I can honestly say I really did enjoy building it. I just don’t think people have the time now.”

Ill health has sadly forced Derek to put AnnJilly on the market. Visit www.networkyachtbrokers.com


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