Cutty Sark: The Last of the Tea Clippers

Eric Kentley

Adlard Coles

£20

A new edition of the National Maritime Museum’s 2014 title, published to mark the 150th anniversary of the Cutty Sark’s launch. Cash-flow problems forced her Dumbarton builders into bankruptcy and she remains unrepentantly expensive. Two pages of this latest edition describe the re-gilding of her ‘gingerbread’. Cutty Sark ( ‘short petticoat’) was famous for her speed and beauty, averaging over 300 miles a day on one voyage but Kentley also tells the story of her tramping years when she struggled to find cargo. This lovely clipper ship has now spent sixty-five years in dry dock. She has become a national icon, a sculptural concept, a theatre. The photographs of her twenty-first century self are sensational; her immobility heart-breaking.