Courtesy of Scottish Yachting ArchivesDr. William Collier’s interest in preserving the U.K.’s extraordinary historic vessels has extended over time to include yachts that have been physically lost and largely forgotten—but for their presence on paper, in model form, in paintings, or in photographs. Restored yachts are survivors by pure chance; for every successful restoration, there are a hundred equally worthy possible resurrections waiting in the archives.
Imagine a bustling light-filled drafting office somewhere in a humming Scottish riverside city in 1903. It’s filled with activity: pencils sharp and ink flying; a balcony for blueprinting a few steps away; the rustle of hundreds of drawings being stamped, revised, shuffled, copied, and studied. There’s a naval architect looking over a draftsman’s shoulder, signing off the exquisitely executed details inked on luminous and translucent starched or waxed linen, copied from penciled drafts on crisp, white, cotton-rag paper.
Blink, and it’s 2025. Now those thousands of precious drawings are cataloged, cleaned, and numbered in neat pencil lettering, stored in pristine (and expensive) oversized flat files, digitally accessible, physically protected by alarms and HVAC systems, surveilled by cameras behind locked doors in a museum vault. What happened in the decades between their heyday and their preservation?
In an ideal scenario, a shipyard or design firm on the brink of closure recognizes the value of its corporate archive, and, if lucky, finds an institution that agrees and has the resources to receive it. Just as often, it can be decades between the active life of a naval architecture or commercial photography repository and its eventual conversion into an accessioned collection—if it happens at all. The transition may take decades. Then, a stressful (but surprisingly common) call might suddenly arrive: “Come today, come now. It all goes to the trash tomorrow!” A scramble ensues, often involving an emergency van rental.
Every curator or archivist has a story of an emergency collections acquisition—of that one time when they climbed into a dumpster or delicately picked around animal carcasses or went, fully masked and suited up, into a recently flooded basement. And no matter how a collection arrives at an archive’s doorstep, that’s just the beginning. Next come the months or years of physical labor and resources required to process and conserve it for the public access.
No one is more keenly aware than William Collier of the foresight and stubborn persistence required to save and preserve a collection, or the precariousness of “the time in between” for a potential archive. He and partner Antony Harrison direct the Glasgow-based Scottish Yachting Archives (SYA). The SYA mission is “to collect, maintain, and preserve records which document the design, construction and use of yachts in Scotland and the people associated with this.” Currently, the archive consists of some 20,000 drawings and more than 500′ (155m) of shelving containing yard books, correspondence, photo albums, half and full models, paintings, tools, and ephemera. It is rapidly growing. The archives were formally established as a separate entity from parent company G.L. Watson Ltd. in 2020 and were awarded nonprofit status as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation in October 2025, but the journey to public-facing archive has been in the making for more than three decades.
Collier began his career in 1988 at the Camper & Nicholsons brokerage office in Cannes, France. In those pre-internet days, he was already aware of the value of the firm’s overlooked files not yet recognized as a goldmine of historical data. He discovered that no one else in the office was referencing the old brokerage files, stored 200 yards away from the main office and dismissively called “the dead” by staff. They turned out to be an incredibly rich untapped resource: “The dead” included records of any vessel listed and sold by Camper & Nicholsons from the mid-1930s on. “By going through those files,” he told me, “you could see every time the boat had come up on the market, and sometimes what its fate was, if it had been destroyed…so that gave me a lot of leads in terms of where boats might be. I used that archive as a tool to find classic yachts, many of which I was able to save and are now sailing again.” The files included details rarely recorded after the initial design and construction of a yacht: “lots of interior photos, surveys, communication with owners… you could also use them to establish values, which was very interesting, because we have very few financial records on what boats cost and what they are perceived to be worth.” The list Collier developed out of these files would evolve into a career-making global hunt tracking down derelicts on the brink of destruction and matching them with prospective owners for increasingly high-profile restorations (see WB No. 157).
Courtesy of Scottish Yachting ArchivesOversized files store the largest plans in the collection flat and in the best possible condition for their long-term preservation. Conservation is ongoing, though 50 percent of the Fife archive has been cleaned, humidified, flattened, and repaired—a critical first step. The entire Watson archive has been put through this process. Both the Watson and Fife collections also contain a number of decorative half and full models in addition to design models, some of which are on display here in the archive.
Between 1993 and 1996, Collier earned a PhD at the University of Liverpool. His thesis focused on the business history of the Camper & Nicholsons yard from its earliest inception in the late 18th century through World War II and was among the first PhDs ever awarded on the subject of yachting. From there, he set up on his own but worked very closely with Fairlie Restorations, based out of Port Hamble in Southampton, Hampshire, England.
Fairlie Restorations was established in October of 1989 by Albert Obrist, owner of ALTAIR (1931) and TUIGA (1909). The company was named for the original location of the William Fife & Son yard, some 475 miles north on the River Clyde in Scotland. Working closely with Collier, Obrist had acquired several important Fifes in need of restoration, including MARIQUITA, THE LADY ANNE, and FULMAR. In 1991, Obrist took ALTAIR back to Fairlie to celebrate her 60th birthday. While he was there, he persuaded Archie MacMillan, the last owner of the Fife yard, to sell him the surviving Fife archives. MacMillan had saved the key drawings from the offices after selling the yard for redevelopment and had stored them in a large shed in his garden. Obrist took the collection to Port Hamble and used it intermittently over the next years in service of Fife restorations.
In 1993, Fairlie Restorations began a long association with Ernst Klaus, for whom they restored FULMAR and KENTRA, Klaus employed Collier in 1997 to catalog the archive. Up to that point, Fairlie Restorations had only mined the collection for yachts they were interested in restoring. The Fife design office originally filed the drawings by size and shape—long lines plans stored together, square sail plans together. This might have been practical at some point, but “there was quite a lot of chaos in those drawings; you might find something from the 1950s right next to something from the 1890s.” A decision was made to reorganize the collection by boat. Collier said it was as an exciting time: “You would have no idea if you had a complete set of drawings for a specific boat or not, and then all of a sudden you realized you had a happy family.…” The physical processing was a challenge, and the facilities were less than ideal, however. “I was processing the collection with David Ryder-Turner, and they didn’t have a building, so the archive was stored in a refrigerated container with very limited physical space to lay anything out. We spent three months in this container together. We produced a catalog from it for the company, and all the drawings ended up on shelves in acid-free folders where they lived for a very long time….”
Pursuing both his PhD and subsequent restoration projects put Collier in contact with all manner of archives in addition to the Fife collection. As a formally trained historian, he strongly believed that finding the original drawings and documentation for these historic yachts was imperative to their revival. It wasn’t enough to simply make things look vintage during a restoration; they had to be correct. “In the 1980s,” he said, “there were some very generic yacht restorations going on; if it looked ‘old-world,’ that was ‘a restoration.’ But that’s like putting a Rolls-Royce engine in a BMW. The problem was that people didn’t have the information, so the question becomes, where is the information?”
The state of maritime historical preservation from the final days of large-scale wooden boatbuilding differed widely in the United Kingdom and the United States. Nearly all major port cities in Great Britain had been bombed during the world wars, leading to the dispersal or outright loss of many shipyard archives. Yachting repositories in the United States at institutions such as MIT, the Peabody-Essex Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, had companies donate their corporate archives upon their closure, and U.S. ports were never bombed during World War II. The situation in the U.K. was more often a salvage operation. This was a combined result of historical circumstance and attitude. For example, Yachting Monthly magazine recounted Camper & Nicholsons’ bombing by the Luftwaffe during WWII: “In the files of the Gosport yard lay the records of [Charles Nicholson’s] life’s work in yacht design; then, during one night of war, they perished in flames. His chief draughtsman went to meet him on his way to the yard the following morning and with some hesitation broke the news. Charles Nicholson, after a moment’s pause, said: ‘Never mind. Think how much rubbish was lost as well.’”
The industry’s wartime attitude toward its own history was further illuminated by Boyd Baird, grandson of the last manager of William Fife & Son in Fairlie, who recalled, “In 1940 the Navy took over the yard and grandfather was charged with closing the yard up. He took all the administrative papers home and they remained with him for many years. He was told to empty out the [half] model store. Two horse drawn cart loads were needed to deliver them all to where we lived. They were used as firewood through two winters.” In part these are tragedies induced by wartime privation, but even outside the extremes of war, it was a common attitude. William Fife III, for example, threw out all his father’s drawings when he took over the yard in the 1890s.
The broader deindustrialization of the U.K. in the 1980s led to interest in preserving a vanishing industrial heritage, but a line was often drawn at the stories of the upper class. “There wasn’t an awareness on the part of the custodians, liquidators, or families of these companies [dedicated to yacht building] that they should protect these business histories, so it was all very ad-hoc….” During research for his PhD and while consulting for Fairlie Restorations through the 1990s, Collier realized that a substantial portion of the U.K.’s (and particularly, Scotland’s) surviving yachting heritage existed on paper outside formal institutions or within institutions whose focus was so broad that the yachting portion of their collection barely registered in their larger missions. “In terms of institutions, archives, and museums, yachting is not seen as a serious subject. The navy and national security issues are clearly worthy of preservation in museums, as well as trade and wealth and breakthroughs in technology, but people have forgotten that in the early 19th century yachting was a venue for breakthroughs in technology…but the perception of yachting was all too often that it’s something frivolous enjoyed by rich people.” He is quick to point out that this blind spot for yachting leads to “the abandoning of the histories of whole communities and of the tens of thousands of people involved with the construction, maintenance, and operation of yachts” and this is “not just preserving the talismans of rich people, we’re preserving the memories of whole communities.” A 19th-century Clyde yard might, for example, be the economic mainstay of a whole village and involve such engagement that it had to shut down for the whole of Clyde Week because everyone wanted to go watch or race.
After cataloging the Fife collection and working on many restoration projects for Fairlie and others, a project Collier initiated back in 1989 gained traction. He had had his eye on the 300′ 1930 steam yacht NAHLIN since discovering records of her in “the dead” at Camper & Nicholsons, and he tracked her down in then-communist Romania. The yacht was designed by G.L. Watson & Co. and built by John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Glasgow, arguably Scotland’s greatest shipyard. Scotland had an extraordinary role in global shipbuilding in the 19th and 20th centuries: around the time of the First World War, fully one third of the world’s ships had been built on the Clyde. By the turn of the millennium, NAHLIN was the only John Brown–built vessel still in commission. In 1999, Collier engineered her return to the U.K. to be restored, and it was with her arrival in England that the partnership with IT engineer and project manager Antony Harrison began. The story of NAHLIN’s recovery from Romania and subsequent restoration deserves a book unto itself, but the project also resulted in the first major acquisition for what would become the Scottish Yachting Archives almost 20 years later.
Collier spent years seeking to obtain a license to use NAHLIN’s drawings, and in 2001, he sat down with Greg Copley, the then-owner of G.L. Watson & Co. At that point, NAHLIN “was in a beautiful old dry-dock, looking relatively shiny…. I knew Copley through the business, and I invited him to come and see her. I thought he should see her, because his company designed her, and not many people have been able to see a 300′ steam yacht in dry-dock, relatively untouched. And then I took him to lunch, I approached the subject of the drawings, and it became apparent that he wanted to sell the company. So, the conversation moved from buying the drawings…to buying the entire company.” By the end of the meal, they had a handshake agreement. “It had never occurred to me before that lunch that I might purchase G.L. Watson & Co.— it was certainly not part of the plan! I had just bought a house…and I thought to myself, ‘How are we going to find the money?’” To pull it off, Collier partnered with Harrison and Feargus Bryan. Though now working full-time in yacht restoration, he became, for the first time, not just a researcher or a cataloger but an owner of a substantial paper archive in need of serious care.
At the time of the company’s purchase, the G.L. Watson drawings were not housed at their offices but were instead stored in the Glasgow city archive, where they had been held since the 1970s, accessible to the public. When Collier visited to survey their acquisition, it became clear that the collection was only partly cataloged and required conservation and improved housing. Frequent requests for the most celebrated Watson yachts by casual visitors were leading to the rapid deterioration of some of the most significant drawings in the archive. As a privately owned collection within a public institution with many other responsibilities, the Watson collection was, unfortunately but understandably, low on the priority list for collections care. At one point in discussions over access and care, Collier suggested, in some frustration, “What if I just took it off your hands?” To his slight surprise, the archivist replied, “That would certainly save us a lot of space.” By this time the company was based in Liverpool, and so the archive was moved there.
The venerable G.L. Watson & Co. Ltd. had been revitalized as a specialist design and project-management company for large classic-yacht restoration projects. BLUE BIRD was redelivered in 2007, NAHLIN in 2010, to be followed by MALAHNE, CACOUNA, and others including several Fife designs. In 2006, additional Watson materials had come up at auction after the sale of the Watson family home, and they, too, were added to the collection. Then, in 2016, Collier got word that Camper & Nicholsons was closing an office and planned to dispose of “the dead”—the brokerage files that had helped launch his career. It was soon agreed that if he arranged the shipping, the collection was his. “I didn’t have a particularly clear idea of what we could do with it,” Coillier admits, “and, truthfully, it is somewhat anomalous in the collection today, but it was ridiculous that it would get thrown away.” Around the same time, Fairlie Restorations came under financial stress, and concern began to grow within the community of Fife owners that the Fife collection was at risk, needed to be preserved, and should return to Scotland.
In 2020, two critical things occurred: G.L. Watson relocated from Liverpool to its historic seat in Glasgow, and the firm agreed to the acquisition of the Fife Archive from Ernst Klaus, who had stepped in to save it from creditors after the demise of Fairlie Restorations. The Fife Archive had heightened an awareness of the risks that owning archives within trading companies can bring; it also did not sit naturally within G.L. Watson & Co. To resolve this a new ringfenced company, Scottish Yachting Archives Ltd. (SYA), was formed and the Fife Archive was its first acquisition. The archival assets of G.L. Watson & Co. were then passed to the new entity. Suddenly, the SYA owned two of the most significant collections of Scottish yachting history.
At this point, SYA was still funded out of the business, and the collection continued to grow. This was the result of salvage and acquisition activities and not any competition with already-established museums and archives. “Since the crash in 2008 and the introduction of austerity politics,” Collier said, “every British museum has lost over 50 percent of its public funding. The implications for staff and the maintenance of collections and buildings are enormous. The direct effect is that these museums, which already weren’t very proactive in the yachting arena, can’t do much because they’re fighting to survive at all.” The SYA’s intent is not to compete or duplicate the efforts of peer institutions but to begin where those other organizations end. Then again, Collier acknowledges that “collections don’t come in the door by magic” and nor do you want them to, “but they’re not at risk with their hands up saying, ‘come save me’; generally you have to go find them.” But, as the collections grow, he is adamant that the archive cannot take on material that it cannot care for to its high self-imposed standards.
Collier and Harrison gradually arrived at the decision, over the past five years, to reorganize as a nonprofit organization. “Becoming a nonprofit doesn’t change anything for the quality of care, but what it does change is recognizing we won’t live forever and that the organization is still reacting to the need to save a vast amount of material that is at risk. It also helps the organization’s need to grow with the appointment of a board. Importantly, it resolves the issue that private ownership is not appropriate for internationally significant historical archives. The point was never to own the material but to save it. More prosaically, if it’s going to keep growing we need to find other sources of funding, because we’ve been funding it out of the business beyond what is reasonable.” Knowing something will be held in the public trust is also a great motivator for the donation of artifacts.
SYA operates as an archive, not a museum, which is to say it has no gallery with exhibits or regular hours for public access. Researchers are encouraged to write with requests or make a research appointment. A long-term goal is to make the collections increasingly accessible online. Collier does envision galleries or some sort of heritage center as one possible future for the organization. He is currently negotiating the deposit of a collection that has well as over 50 boxes of papers, includes paintings that record the years of Scottish yachting before photography, and includes nearly 100 models. This will substantially change the nature of the archive’s holdings, with much potential if there were a properly run venue where some of the material could be shown. However, that will also depend on the direction of SYA’s board and future fundraising. Before embarking on development plans, current projects must be advanced. A key one is the deployment of a new catalog system that will allow better collections care. More digitization is on the horizon, but for now the emphasis is on conservation. The major initiative now is the Fife archive, which includes many frail and damaged drawings. All can be made good, the project is well advanced, and Collier has started appealing to Fife yacht owners to help bear the cost. Responses have been positive.
Detailed construction notes in a G.L. Watson yard book for the palatial 306’ steel-hulled steamer NAHMA, which was built by J.G. Johnson on the Clyde for the New York businessman Robert Goelet in 1896. His brother, Ogden Goelet, commissioned the 320’ steam yacht MAYFLOWER from Watson the same year. MAYFLOWER went on to become the first U.S. Presidential Yacht in 1902 and served in this capacity until 1929.
The Fife collection includes around 10,000 drawings, books of offsets, calculation books, account books, a few photographs, one scrapbook, half models, and many small artifacts such as these tiny planes that Fife III used for half-model carving.
The collection also has a precious number of tiny half models (possibly preliminary “sketches”) that escaped being burned for firewood after their removal from the yard.
This drawing is one of many charming and evocative scenes sketched by Robert Cree Crawford in BLOODHOUND’s logbooks, which are now part of the Fife collection held by SYA. It shows William Fife II (in the bowler) after his retirement in the 1880s aboard the famous cutter BLOODHOUND, seated alongside his friend Andrew Bain.
This view of the Fife yard shows both the benefits and challenges of the flat tidal landscape at Fairlie. Large, deep-draft yachts had to be launched via pontoon. In this image (ca. 1875), Fife II’s brother Allan stands at right amid dunnage and with an unidentified yacht in the background.
The SYA is uniquely placed to tell, in a fresh and fascinating light, the story of the relationship between George Watson and William Fife III and their transatlantic counterparts Edward Burgess and Nathanael Herreshoff in the bid for the AMERICA’s Cup. This image of the Burgess-designed 1885 American defender PURITAN, for example, is part of a set of clandestine photographs solicited and collected by Watson of American defenders. Watson went on to design the 1887 challenger, THISTLE.
The 1890s were a high point of presentation with fine detail and watercolor enhancements. This drawing shows William Fife III’s design No. 298, ZINITA, an 1893 20-rater. The plan, showing longitudinal section, deck plan, and general arrangement, is typical for Fife III, and they exist for virtually all his designs.
Interior layout and deck plan for the legendary BRITANNIA, designed by G.L. Watson for Edward VII as Prince of Wales. Like other legendary yacht designers of the era, good business sense and a desire to push the boundaries of design outweighed patriotic feeling; Watson also designed rival yachts for Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Prince Luigi Amadeo, Duke of the Abruzzi. BRITANNIA though, happily for Watson, was still one of the most successful racing yachts of all time and continued to race very competitively for 30 years after Watson’s death.
This is a longitudinal section of the AMERICA’s Cup challenger SHAMROCK II, designed in 1901 by G.L. Watson for Sir Thomas Lipton to race against N.G. Herreshoff’s new CONSTITUTION. In SHAMROCK II’s design, Watson pioneered tank testing with leeway and heel, a technological breakthrough that was subsequently lost until redeveloped more than 30 years later by Olin Stephens and Starling Burgess.
This image gives a fabulous sense of the social history of Fairlie and the village’s relationship with the Fife yard, which is visible in the background. The local population was deeply connected to the yard and the sense of pride and ownership felt in the yachts launched from their own beach extends to their local descendants today. Material relating to the Fife yard that has been passed down through generations of local families is currently surfacing and being donated to SYA.
Ogden Goelet, a New York real estate magnate, commissioned the 320’ steel-hulled steam yacht MAYFLOWER from Watson in 1896. MAYFLOWER went on to become the first U.S. Presidential Yacht under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 and served five administrations until 1929; her subsequently checkered career ended after World War II, when, in a greatly diminished state, she made two trips carrying Holocaust survivors from the south of France to the new state of Israel. The 306’ steamer NAHMA was ordered the same year by Ogden’s brother, Robert Goelet.
The archive holds nearly 100,000 images, of which a sizable proportion are in the Watson collection. Here, the Watson-designed LIBERTY is painted for use as a hospital ship during WWI, when she ferried the wounded from the Western Front back to Britain. The 286’ steam yacht was built in Leith in 1908 for American newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, but like many yachts of the era was volunteered for service during the war.
William Durrant is believed to be the first professional photographer to specialize in yacht photography. He was active in Torquay, England, from the late 1860s, and although he was not Scottish, his images are often the only ones of large Scottish yachts visiting the South Coast to compete in English regattas. William Fife II designed CUCKOO, which was owned by Lord Henry Lennox. SYA has been actively tracing Durrant’s yachting images.
The SYA photo archives hold nearly 100,000 images dating from the very earliest known photographs ever taken of yachts up through the modern era.
Although one could argue that many of the plans and photographs in the collection are fine art, the majority of material in the SYA consists of traditional archival material—which is to say, primary source documents largely used for research purposes. This spectacular portrait of G.L. Watson, however, is undeniably fine art; it was painted by Sir James Guthrie, a leading painter associated with the 19th-century realism art group called the Glasgow Boys. The painting was purchased by SYA in 2006 from the Watson family.
James Coats Jr. of Coats & Clark thread fame was the most active yacht owner in a family that commissioned more than 100 yachts in the pre–World War II era; most of these were from Watson and Fife, and included racing yachts of all sizes, palatial steam yachts, and several steam tenders built just to tow large sailing yachts. Here, EXPRESS tows Coats’s MARJORIE and her competitor, VANDUARA; all three were designed by G. L. Watson.
Among recent additions to the collection is the yachting section of the photo library of one of the major Scottish papers. This panoramic photo by George Outram is among the thousands of yet to be cataloged images features a knockout cast: LULWORTH, WHITE HEATHER II, BRITANNIA, WESTWARD, and SHAMROCK—all drifting off Hunter’s Quay in the summer of 1926, waiting for a breeze.
This spectacular photograph gives a sense of the scale of construction on the Clyde during the 19th and 20th centuries. More famous for building liners such as QUEEN MARY and battleships such as HMS HOOD, John Brown’s shipyard had an entire photographic department that documented activity in the yard and vessels they built. This 1923 image shows THALASSA under construction in a covered slip—one of several primarily used for large yachts.
The sail plan for Watson’s 1887 AMERICA’s Cup challenger THISTLE (design No. 330) includes a full spar list.
This is the only known surviving scrapbook from the Fife yard; it contains images of Fife designs built around the world. The album is open to photographs showing the 8-Meter VANESSA, built in Sydney, Australia, in 1927.
All of the pre-war G.L. Watson & Co. drawings have been professionally conserved, and the William Fife collection of drawings is currently undergoing treatment. Historic naval architecture repositories present unique challenges to the archivist, researcher, and conservator. These collections are frequently oversized with some drawings exceeding 8’ in length, making them particularly susceptible to damage when handling. Historically, lines plans were often rolled for storage (again due to their inconvenient size requiring massive drawers to store flat) and large fragile rolled drawings are an enormous challenge to handle safely on a regular basis. Materials such as tracing paper commonly employed in late-19th and early-20th-century drafting offices often exhibit what is called “inherent vice”—that is, they become acidic over time and would self-destruct if left untreated. SYA has committed significant resources towards ensuring the best state of storage and preservation possible for its collections.
For every drawing or photograph safely stored at the SYA today, thousands have disappeared. The transition from working object to outdated file taking up needed office space to precious artifact is a perilous one; from fire to floods, pests, or the industrious and well-meaning person intent on “cleaning this place up,” or just the natural tendency for collections to disperse, the risks are infinite, and the survivors are the lucky few. Untold half models have ended up as firewood, and countless waxed-linen drawings have been taken home and boiled down so their fabric could be reused as rags.
For every plans collection that is preserved in a public-facing institution today, at some point one or two people looked at the pile of drawings gathering dust and said, “these are far too important to be allowed to disappear.” We are fortunate that William Collier and Antony Harrison are two such individuals. 
Evelyn Ansel is a long-time WoodenBoat contributor and maritime curator with a particular focus on digitization and collections accessibility. She has previously worked at Mystic Seaport Museum, the Vasa Museum, the MIT Museum, and the Herreshoff Marine Museum. She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her boatbuilding partner and their sardine-loving cat.