Colin Swale obituary: The son of a Yorkshire headmaster whose bucaneering spirit took him around the world
Colin Swale, who has died at 88, was a Yorkshire headmaster’s son and amateur yachtsman who in the early 1970s became a national celebrity by taking his new wife and two small children around Cape Horn in a catamaran.
With little sailing experience but a buccaneering spirit to match that of Sir Francis Chichester and other maverick matelots of the time, Colin and his bride Rosie bought a 30ft craft they named Anneliesse and, after a short period teaching themselves how to sail it, cast off across the Solent with their 13-month-old daughter Eve aboard.
By the time they returned to Plymouth in 1973 to a heroes’ reception, they had been joined by Eve’s little brother, James – born while the boat was moored in the mouth of the River Tiber in Italy and delivered with the assistance of an article on childbirth they had found in a nautical almanac.
Asked if they had been foolhardy to attempt a potentially perilous round-the-world voyage with two infants, Rosie professed to having no regrets and reported that “Eve fed Jimmy during the storms while we handled the boat”.
By that time they were national figures. Colin had taken a crash course in film making so he could shoot footage on a camera supplied to him by ITN – as a result of which the whole country had followed the Swales’ adventure on the high seas.
It had been a journey punctuated by disaster. At one point Rosie collapsed with appendicitis and had to be airlifted to hospital.
In the Caribbean, 900 miles from land and with her safety harness unfastened, she was swept overboard by a freak wave; and later she and Colin suffered food poisoning from undercooked beans.
They navigated Cape Horn, where the Atlantic meets the Pacific on the route of the old clipper ships, against all advice.
Even Francis Chichester had said anyone would be mad to take it on without a proper crew.
Yet overwhelmingly it was a voyage of triumph.
Colin and Rosie covered 30,000 miles across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and on to the Pacific, stopping at the Galapagos Islands, the Marquesas, Tahiti and Tonga, before reaching Australia – guided all the way only by an old Spitfire compass, nautical charts and a sextant.
By the time they finally returned to Plymouth, three years after they set off, Rosie had completed her first book, Rosie Darling, and begun a second, Children of Cape Horn.
The voyage had been cooked up with Colin, who told his wife she could choose between suburban Britain and a life at sea.
He sold his gardening business and they bought Anneliesse, which they named after Rosie’s half-sister who had been among the 75 passengers killed when a British Eagle Airlines flight crashed in heavy fog in the Austrian Alps in 1964.
Colin Swale, born in Staffordshire in February 1938, was the youngest of three sons of Walter Swale, a D-Day veteran who had become headmaster of Heath Grammar School in Halifax.
The boys went to Bradford Grammar and Colin ran marathons, climbed mountains and developed the love of physics that won him a place, after national service, at Oxford to study biochemistry.
Once there, he abandoned his degree and became a lab technician to the pioneering German-British biochemist Sir Hans Krebs, a Nobel laureate. He said it was one of the most formative periods of his life.
Decamped to London at the height of its Swinging period, he indulged in motor racing and running, as well as gardening.
At Earls Court station he met the glamorous Rosie Griffin, eight years his junior and the daughter of a Swiss mother and Irish father.
After an unconventional childhood in County Limerick, she had hitchhiked through Asia and eventually landed in London where she found work as a journalist and model.
She and Colin married and took a small flat in the capital, from where they plotted their voyage. In July 1970 they set across the Irish Sea in a storm.
When it was all over, Rosie (now Rosie Swale Pope, MBE) enjoyed a colourful life.
Obsessed over by the tabloids, she published four more books, pursued a media career and sustained her buccaneering spirit by sailing single-handed across the Atlantic in a small boat, running marathons and trekking 3,000 miles alone through Chile on horseback.
Colin, in contrast, retreated from the spotlight, fearing he had become a creature of showbusiness rather than a serious scientist.
Sponsorship difficulties caused a second projected nautical expedition to be cancelled and by the end of the 1970s he and Rosie were divorced.
He settled in an off-grid home at Patterdale in the eastern Lake District, from where he home-schooled Eve and James.
His second marriage was in 1992, to Hilary Davey. She died in 2019 and he is survived by his son and daughter.