Professional Skipper Magazine from VIP Publications

local government, Sir John Alum, Chairman of the Auckland Harbour Board, directors of Sanfords, the Devcich Family who owned Waitamata Fisheries, and other heads of business from the Nathan and Donald family. Quite simply this was ���show time��� and a marketing opportunity like no other. Percy and his wife also hosted masters and officers of foreigngoing ships at dinner parties at his St Heliers Bay home. These people were influential decision-makers who decided which boatbuilders were going to provide services to shipping companies. Percy Vos was a man who made no division between his business and personal relationships, and these friendships were his top priority. However, he had no time for fools at any level in his life, and he admired people who had high energy and a passion for whatever they were doing. One might think that a man like this was class orientated, but again, this was not Percy Vos. Some of his top men were not qualified boat builders, but if they could produce a finished result to his high standard he didn���t give a hoot where they came from. Percy Vos��� greatest passion was to create a sustainable environment where young men could learn good boat design and construction. He had a notebook in his desk filled with the names of dozens of boys whose fathers had walked up Percy���s stairs, knocked on his door, and asked if he could take their son on as an apprentice boat builder. In short, there was a waiting list even though Vos��� took on more apprentices than any other yard. And they were not treated as cheap labour as this often happened in other yards and industries. In the early 1950���s Percy, Alec Collings and Jack Brooke set up the very first structured boat apprenticeship scheme. This was the Auckland and Whangarei Ship Yacht and Boat Building Committee, and became the forerunner to the courses later run at Carrington Technical Institute. Vos��� had a buddy system and each apprentice was under the wing of a tradesman. The names of these men were once well-known in the boat building industry as the were some of the best in the industry. There are simply too many Vos apprentices to put on paper, but they learned that doing an honest job was the only way to do things, and this attitude flowed on to other aspects of their lives. Another unique feature of doing your time at Vos���, as in part one of this story, was to build a clinker dinghy to a quality that Percy was happy with, within a given time, with the stocks set up at the bottom of Percy���s office stairs. In most cases, apprentices had by now come to grips with what sort of man Percy was, and saw building a clinker dingy as a chance to work with an absolute craftsman: for them, this was a big deal. However, if you didn���t understand Percy���s manner and you thought he knew little about boatbuilding because you���d never seen him pick up a tool, this could be the end of the road for your career. Often Percy would come down the stairs, scan his eye over a job and even if it was going okay he had to be involved in some way. Clinker dinghy building was his thing, a skill learned from his old boss and lifetime friend, Ernie Harvey. There was a particular challenge to these boats, they had no temporary frames to form their shape: each plank had to be shaped so that it created the destiny for the next plank, and so on. Very few people today can do this; it was an art you had to be familiar with. Percy was known to ruin many a suit and be late for meetings, all for the sake of teaching a young man this art form, and I must say that Vos clinkers are lovely looking dinghies. Percy did not have a son, and Percy���s son-in-law, Bill Ostick joined the yard in early 1954 and took over from his wife, Percy���s daughter Fay. Percy groomed Bill to run the yard, gradually taking days off to do other things like gardening and visiting his race horses. P Vos Ltd still produced very large wooden vessels right up to the Percy Vos in hi s twilight year s pr shows of Man oudly ia to the cameraman an d on lookers end of the wooden boat era in the mid 1970���s The two largest and mid-1970���s. largest, the last big boats, were Mania, a 75ft x 17ft 6in x 5ft 6in pilot boat for the Whangarei Harbour Board, and the Valkyrie a 70ft x 18ft x 9ft 6in purse seiner for Union Fish and Ice of Tauranga. Apart from the Korea mentioned in the last article, Mania was the largest in tonnage, and some say was the highlight of Percy���s career. It was designed by his colleague and friend Alec Collings, and built of the very best materials with no expense spared, this was the perfect situation for any quality boat builder to be in. The boat had cabin sides and deck fittings built of the very best Burmese teak and was finished to a standard that most superyacht owners today would drool over. Again, textbook stuff, and Percy���s boys gave the boat their very best. When it was launched it was done in normal fashion but time was running out for wooden boats, and steel construction was becoming the name of the game for P Vos Ltd. Percy didn���t officially retire but came to the yard less and less as Bill took over. To keep the order books full and compete, Bill started a new division to build steel boats and Scholten & Brijs was formed which soon became Vos and Brijs Ltd. Percy would often phone Bill to see what was going on down at the yard. His opening words were always, ���How are the rusty tin cans coming along Bill?���. A man with his common sense could see the future in steel-built boats but Percy simply loved the smell of freshly worked heart kauri which he had enjoyed since the first day he started work in 1913. Percy passed away in 1972 and for many in the industry, his death marked the end of an era. I don���t know if you watch the Olympic Games on TV and note that the final event is the 4 x100 relay. All of the teams leave the last 100 metres to their anchorman to bring that winning baton home. To me in the world of commercial wooden boatbuilding in New Zealand, that man was Percy Vos. The original P Vos Ltd workshop and yard has now been designated as a heritage site and will be managed by a trust known as The Percy Vos Charitable Trust. The structure of the workshop will be stabilised and preserved, and the slipways restored. It will be used as a base to maintain Auckland���s classic boat fleet and part of the Auckland Traditional Boat Building School will be in the building. Eventually it will become part of a linked maritime heritage trail and a destination for schools and educational groups. March/April 2013 Professional Skipper 29

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