(The late) Chris Ralph MOLESWORTH (49B) Fondly Remembered

Author: William TRACY (written in August 2007)

I knew Chris Molesworth very well and skippered his first boat in the Mediterranean in the late 1970s. Incidentally, it is exactly 30 years ago this month that we were preparing ‘Loch Tummel’ in Lymington for the passage south, departing on September 3^rd. I remember working on the slipway and being soaked to the skin on too many days - because the summer weather in the UK had been just about the same as this year’s - and cursing Elvis Presley for having died because that's all we heard on the radio for about 2 weeks before we sailed!

Chris was working in Dubai and used to join us during his fairly generous leave periods, whilst we chartered the boat to guests when he was in the Gulf. He had clearly done, and was doing, quite well for himself – he was certainly not fabulously wealthy, but he wasn't short of a few bob either. He paid about £40,000 for the boat, albeit with some on mortgage, and this was a tidy sum in those days. I could never work out quite how he'd done it, but I think that it may have partly been a case of being in the right place at the right time. There were some relatively enormous salaries being paid in the oil business in the 1970s, probably as a result of skill shortages (outside of the USA) in what was an industry that was starting to boom worldwide. Chris had a pronounced ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent - presumably from having worked alongside and lived amongst Americans for many years!

Technically, he was quite competent, but he could certainly be infuriating sometimes! He was also somewhat accident prone, a bit of a Mr. Bean character, and it was difficult not to take the mickey out of him. Even though I was fifteen years younger, I always had to be looking out for him - like one would a child! I was sorry, but not entirely surprised therefore, to read on your website that he was the butt of many cruel jokes at Arborfield. I am afraid that he was the kind of guy whose mannerisms and personality would have always 'invited' that kind of behaviour - from which you will be able to tell that he was still the same when in his mid 40s!  He could be a real 'old woman', and we used to call him 'Molly', sometimes even to his face when he was being particularly aggravating! I only spent a total of a few months with him on the boat, and that was spread over 2 or 3 years – I don’t think that I would have relished the prospect of spending that whole period almost continuously confined in barracks with him!

But he was a nice guy too, the kind that would not knowingly ‘hurt a fly’.

I left the boat in 1980 and he took her off to Cyprus, but we kept in touch for many years afterwards. We met up a couple of times, once in Cyprus, and once when I had to 'dig him out of a hole' in Guernsey. He could be naive and gullible in the extreme, and had been persuaded to purchase a second boat to lease to a 'sailing school' in Spain – and then, of course, the thing disappeared, and reappeared again in Guernsey en route to Holland, complete with a couple of hundred kilos of cannabis on board! Technically, he should have forfeited the vessel, but there was no way that he was involved in what had gone on, and the Court made an exception to the rule.

After that, we still used to speak on the ‘phone every few months, but he stopped calling about ten or fifteen years ago. Both I and his UK based boat insurance broker tried to contact him in Larnaca every few months for quite some time, but he just 'disappeared'.  Knowing how accident prone and unlucky he was in many ways, I had a hunch that he had departed this life many years previous to when, as I now know through your website, he did. Also knowing him, I now think that it was probably a case of his having lost his address book, or something like that - and, as he certainly having little or no fondness for the UK when I knew him, it would have always been highly unlikely for him to have ever just ‘dropped by’. And perhaps it was around that time that he actually left Cyprus and returned to Germany, as he occasionally mentioned that he might do – some of the dates that appear on his Arborfield profile do seem to be a fairly long way ‘adrift’.

I have 'Googled' Chris’s name on occasions previously without success, and so I am pleased in many ways to have ‘found’ him through your website. It is, of course, a pity that he is indeed no longer with us, but at least I know that he lasted longer than I thought that he had done. I am also pleased that it seems that he may have found a degree of contentment in his final years - I do not believe that he had really experienced too much of that previously. I always had a feeling that life had probably been quite unkind to him in many ways, and I often felt quite sorry for him. He was, however, albeit unwittingly, something of a master at being his own worst enemy, and my impression is that he was probably the same at Arborfield.

Being from more of a seafaring family, as you would expect, I’m afraid that the existence and history of Arborfield is all new to me. I’m not even sure that I recall Chris telling me that he had once been in the Army - he never spoke much about his years before he was in the oil business. But congratulations re. the website - I am sure that it brings pleasure to many, as it has to me, even though this has been in a slightly strange and surreal way in my case.

Published: 15^th September 2007