Donald Crowhurst
Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst was a British businessman and amateur sailor. He died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. He secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually doing so.
About Donald Crowhurst in brief
Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst was a British businessman and amateur sailor. He died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Soon after starting the race, his ship began taking on water and he wrote it would probably sink in heavy seas. He secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually doing so. His ship’s log books, found after his disappearance, suggest that the stress he was under and an associated psychological deterioration possibly led to his suicide. Crowhurst’s convoluted and ultimately tragic participation in the race has exerted a fascination over subsequent generations of commentators and artists. It has inspired a number of books, stage plays and films; among the latter a factual 2006 documentary Deep Water and the films Crowhurst and The Mercy, in which his part is played by the actors Justin Salinger and Colin Firth. The other contestants were Robin-John Tetley, Nigel Knox, Chayth, John Ridgly, William King, Alex Carozzo and William Loïck. The boat Crowhurst built for the trip, Teignmouth Electron, was a modified type of 40-foot trimaran designed by Californian Arthur Piver. At the time, this was an unproven unproven type of type of trimaran, but Crowhurst hired Rodney Hallworth, a crime reporter for the Daily Mail and then the Daily Express, as his public relations officer. The race was inspired by Francis Chichester’s successful single- handed round- the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney.
The Sunday Times had sponsored Chichesters, with highly profitable results, and was interested in being involved with the first non-stop circumnAVigation, but it had the problem of not knowing which sailor to sponsor. The solution was to promote the Golden Globe race, aSingle-handed race, open to all comers, with automatic entry. Entrants were required to start between 1 June and 31 October 1968, to pass through the Southern Ocean in summer. The prizes offered were the Golden Globes trophy for the first single-handedly circumnaviigation, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest. This was a considerable sum of money, equivalent to almost £80,000 in 2019, and Crowhurst did not actually sign up as an entrant but did actually do not actually enter the race. He was active in his local community as a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council. He designed and built a radio direction finder called the Navicator, a handheld device that allowed the user to take bearings on marine and aviation radio beacons. After leaving the Army in the same year owing to a disciplinary incident, he started a business called Electron Utilisation. He mortgaged both his business and home against Stanley Best’s continued financial support, placing himself in a grave financial situation. His main sponsor was English entrepreneur Stanley Best, who had invested heavily in his failing business.
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This page is based on the article Donald Crowhurst published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
