Cutty Sark

John Willis ordered her during the tea-clipper building boom of 1865 to 1869, when a cut in import duty made speed pay: a fast ship earned a higher rate of freight, and merchants advertised the names of the ships that carried their tea. The mark to beat was Thermopylae, Aberdeen-built, which had run London to Melbourne in 61 days on her maiden voyage in 1868. Willis chose Hercules Linton to design and build the answer, and took him to see The Tweed in dry dock, a converted frigate whose bow shape Willis credited for her performance.

The contract was signed on 1 February 1869 with Scott & Linton, a firm barely nine months old, whose yard stood at Dumbarton on the River Leven on a site once occupied by William Denny & Brothers. She was to be finished in six months at £17 a ton, built to Lloyd's A1 standard, with a £5 penalty for every day late. It was a punishing price for an experimental ship, and when Lloyd's inspectors demanded extra strengthening the money ran out. Denny's took over the contract and launched her on 22 November 1869, named by Captain Moodie's wife.

Her hull is composite: East India teak above the waterline, American rock elm below, an English oak rudder, all bolted with Muntz metal to a wrought-iron frame of vertical frames, horizontal beams and diagonal cross bracing. The diagonals stopped the frame racking, which meant less working and leaking, less crew time at the pumps and more spent on sail. Muntz sheeting up to the 18-foot mark kept the bottom clean. At 212.5 feet registered and 921 net tons, she has one of the sharpest hulls of all the tea clippers, with an under-deck tonnage coefficient of 0.55 against Thermopylae's 0.58.

She is named for Nannie Dee, the witch in Robert Burns's Tam o' Shanter of 1791, who chased Tam's horse to the Brig o' Doon and caught its tail. A cutty sark is a short shift, and Nannie's was too short because she had been given it as a child. The figurehead, attributed to the Blackwall carver Frederick Hellyer, shows her bare-breasted with a grey horse's tail in her hand. Carvings of the other witches once followed her along the bow until Willis had them removed in deference to good taste. Tam and his mare Meg were carved along the quarter.

The motto along the taffrail read Where theres a will is a way, spaced so that it could also be read Where there's a Willis away. She lived up to the name: a maximum logged speed of 17.5 knots, a best noon-to-noon run of 363 nautical miles, 2,164 miles in six days and 3,457 in eleven. Thermopylae's best day was 358 miles. Sailors reckoned Cutty Sark had the edge in a heavy wind and her rival in a light one.

Her first round trip began on 16 February 1870 under Captain George Moodie, out from London with wine, spirits and beer for Shanghai, home from 25 June with 1,305,812 pounds of tea by way of the Cape of Good Hope, docking in London on 13 October. She sailed eight tea seasons in all. Her launch had coincided almost exactly with the opening of the Suez Canal, which cut about 3,300 nautical miles off the run from the Far East for any ship that could use it, and a tea clipper could not: the northern Red Sea did not suit her rig.

Steam had also taken a long stride forward in 1866 with Agamemnon, whose higher boiler pressure and compound engine transformed fuel efficiency. When the clippers reached China in 1870 they found steamers in high demand, drawing nearly twice the freight rate to London and cheaper insurance on the cargo. In 1871 alone, 45 steamers were built in Clyde yards for the Far Eastern trade. The number of clippers going out for tea fell year on year, ships were sold into general cargo work, and rigs were cut down to barque so that smaller crews would serve.

The famous race with Thermopylae began at Shanghai on 18 June 1872, the two ships within a foot of each other in length, beam and depth. Two weeks out Cutty Sark had built a lead of some 400 nautical miles, then lost her rudder in a gale beyond the Sunda Strait. Willis's brother, aboard, ordered Moodie into Cape Town; Moodie refused, and the ship's carpenter Henry Henderson built a new rudder from spare timber and iron in six days of gales, working over a brazier that spilled and burned the captain's son. She reached London a week behind, 122 days out. Henderson got £50.

The years that followed were grim. Tiptaft died at Shanghai in 1877 with no tea to be had for London, and the mate James Wallace took over. In 1880 the first mate Sidney Smith killed the seaman John Francis and was allowed ashore at Anjer, at which the crew stopped work; becalmed for three days in the Java Sea, Wallace jumped overboard and was gone. His replacement William Bruce drew pay for crewmen who did not exist and sailed with provisions so short the crew starved. A New York inquiry in April 1882 suspended both master and mate.

In December 1883 she left Newcastle, New South Wales with 4,289 bales of wool and twelve casks of tallow and was in London in 83 days, 25 days faster than her nearest rival that year. That run opened a second career carrying the Australian clip home in time for the January wool sales, and from 1885 to 1893 she ran between England and New South Wales under the Sydney agency of Dangar, Gedye & Co.

Richard Woodget took command in 1885 on £186 a year and drove her south to find the strongest westerlies in the Roaring Forties, accepting icebergs, gales and storms for the speed. He made 77 days outward on his first attempt and 73 home. She was the fastest ship in the wool trade for ten years. In July 1889 the log of the passenger steamer SS Britannia recorded that, running at 15 to 16 knots, she was overtaken in the night by a sailing ship doing 17. It was Cutty Sark.

Steam took the wool trade too, and in 1895 Jock Willis sold her to the Portuguese firm Joaquim Antunes Ferreira for £1,250. Renamed Ferreira, she worked cargoes between Portugal, Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Mozambique, Angola and Britain, her crews calling her Pequena Camisola, a straight translation of the Scots. Dismasted off the Cape of Good Hope in May 1916 and towed into Table Bay, she could not be re-rigged as she had been because the war had made the materials unobtainable, so she came back over eighteen months as a barquentine.

By 1922 she was the last clipper working anywhere in the world. A storm in the Channel drove her into Falmouth, where the retired merchant navy captain Wilfred Dowman spotted her; he bought her for £3,750, with the support of his wife Catharine, and rigged her back to something like her original arrangement as a cadet training ship, rowing visitors out to see her. After his death she was given, with £5,000 for maintenance, to the Thames Nautical Training College at Greenhithe in 1938, where she served alongside HMS Worcester.

In 1953 she passed to the Cutty Sark Preservation Society, and in 1954 she was stripped of upper masts, yards and ballast and towed to a custom-built dry dock at Greenwich, with 83-year-old Captain C. E. Irving, who had sailed round the world in her three times before he was seventeen, aboard as skipper. The Duke of Edinburgh, who had founded the society in 1951, laid the foundation stone of the dock. She is a Grade I listed monument and part of the National Historic Fleet, one of only three intact composite ships left with the clipper City of Adelaide and the warship HMS Gannet.

On the morning of 21 May 2007, closed and partly dismantled for conservation, she caught fire and burned for hours. The London Fire Brigade concluded in 2008 that the likeliest cause was an industrial vacuum cleaner left running over the weekend, with no overnight fire watch and a faulty relay in the alarm panel. Because half the fabric had already been removed for the work, the Trust reckoned under five per cent of original material was lost. She reopened to the public on 25 April 2012, and survived a smaller deck fire on 19 October 2014.