Ep. 45: Crowhurst Movie Director Simon Rumley Talks about the Greatest Fraud in Sailing History

Simon Rumley directed the Crowhurst movie about Donald Crowhurst, who pretended to sail around the world in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. In that race roughly a dozen men competed for two prizes to be the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo and non-stop and the fastest man to sail solo non-stop around the world. He discusses the strange story of Donald Crowhurst who filed false position reports after he believed his boat was not seaworthy enough to sail around the world solo, non-stop in the Southern Ocean and around Cape Horn.

The Crowhurst movie is distributed by StudioCanal UK which is also distributing The Mercy (2018) starring Rachel Weisz and Colin Firth premiering in the UK on February 9, 2018. The Crowhurst Movie is likely to become available in March 2018 in the UK and later worldwide. 

StudioCanal UK's production notes for The Mercy (2018) describe the story of Donald Crowhurst below:

Donald Crowhurst was born near Delhi in British colonial India in 1932 to John and Alice Crowhurst. At the age of eight he was sent to an Indian boarding school where he would spend nine months of the year. Two years later, his parents moved to Western Pakistan. After the Second World War, aged fourteen, Donald was sent back to England to board at Loughborough College. His parents returned to England in 1947 when India gained Independence from Britain and the Partition took place. His father ploughed all of his retirement savings into an ill-fated business deal in the new territory of Pakistan. The Crowhurst’s life in post-war England was a far cry from colonial life. The lack of funds forced Donald to leave Loughborough College at the age of sixteen once he passed his School Certificate, and sadly John Crowhurst died in March 1948.

After starting as an apprentice in electronic engineering at the Royal Aircraft Establishment Technical College in Farnborough, Donald went on to join the RAF in 1953; he learned to fly and was commissioned. He enjoyed the life of a young officer and was described by many as charming, warm, wild, brave and a compulsive risk-taker who defied authority and possessed a madcap sense of humour. After he was asked to leave the RAF, he promptly enlisted in the army, was commissioned and took a course in electronic control equipment. He resigned from the army in 1956 and went on to carry out research work at Reading University aged twenty-four.

Crowhurst is remembered as being quite dashing and he caught the attention of his future wife Clare at a party in Reading in 1957. Clare was from Ireland and had been in England for 3 years. Apparently he told her that she would “marry an impossible man”. He said he would never leave her side and took her out the very next evening. Theirs was a romantic, whirlwind courtship that took place over the spring and summer of 1957. They married on 5th October and their first son, James was born the following year. It was at this time that Crowhurst began sailing seriously.

He secured a job with an electronics firm called Mullards but left after a year and aged twenty-six, he became Chief Design Engineer with another electronics company in Bridgwater, Somerset. His real dream was to invent his own electronic devices and he would spend hours of his spare time tinkering with wires and transistors creating gadgets. He also found solace in sailing his small, blue, 20-foot boat, Pot of Gold.

Crowhurst designed the Navicator, a radio direction-finding device for yachting and set up his company Electron Utilisation to manufacture and market the gadget. Donald and Clare’s family expanded with the arrival of Simon in 1960, Roger in 1961 and Rachel in 1962 and they lived happily in the Somerset countryside.

When Electron Utilisation hit financial difficulty, Crowhurst was introduced to Taunton businessman, Stanley Best, who agreed to back the company and Best eventually sponsored Crowhurst’s attempt to circumnavigate the world in the trimaran Teignmout