Some die of winding winches,
and some of drinking beer.
Gretel II songbook, 1970
THE 1970 AMERICA’S CUP series was the last to be sailed in wooden boats. After that memorable battle between Gretel II and Intrepid the next 12-metres were made upside-down in aluminium. Australia’s challenge in 1970 is also often considered to be the last of our great larrikin campaigns. Today the America’s Cup is raced in high-tech carbon-fibre monsters sailed by grim professionals. Thirty-five years ago the Gretel II crew were all amateurs, drawn from many walks of life. Skippered by helmsman Jim Hardy, they sailed hard and partied even harder.
Newspaper tycoon Sir Frank Packer headed the challenge, paid all the bills and expected his team to represent their country and the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron with all the dignity that befits yachtsmen whose club enjoyed the privileges of royal patronage. But Sir Frank was himself a bit of a buccaneer. He understood that boys away from home will be boys, and tolerated a fair degree of larking about. One of the most distinctively Australian sporting habits the lads brought with them to snooty Newport, Rhode Island was their delight in singing bawdy football songs. In a tradition well-known to most antipodean sporting teams, familiar old melodies had been enlisted to carry new words inspired by the characters and anecdotes of their America’s Cup campaign.
The musicology of those Gretel II songs reflects the knockabout Australian spirit of the whole enterprise. The yacht’s main ‘deck apes’ (grinders) – Chris Freer, a transplanted Pom, and John Freedman, a former Wallaby tight-head prop – were steeped in rugby’s robust tradition of post-match sing-alongs. On a cold winter’s night before the team left for Newport these two ‘rugger buggers’ were enjoying a few grogs together in front of a roaring fire at Freedman’s home on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Inspired by the adventure that lay ahead of them in America they set about writing down the doggerel verses that were already being sung a cappella by the crew. To these they added some new Gretel II words set to the melodies of old rugby favourites. Before the beer and inspiration ran out Freer and ‘Freedie’ had created a complete set of lyrics.
Freedman’s mate Peter Johnson, the legendary Wallaby hooker, chipped in with a collection of cheeky cartoon illustrations. Rhys Jordan, a member of the challenge support team, then co-opted the printing skills of his father Ben, who ran a typesetting business attached to Sir Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph empire. Freedman believes the whole disreputable job most probably went through as a ‘foreign order’, unbeknown to Sir Frank in his huge office upstairs.
The new lyrics were quickly learned by repetition and Gretel II’s unlikely all-male choir of yachties soon became notorious around the waterfront for bursting into these lewd songs at the most inappropriate moments. Copies of the songbook went to America with the crew, and one was even presented to Baron Bich after Gretel II had defeated his France in the elimination series. The most celebrated choral recital by the Australian crew during the 1970 challenge was at a cocktail party given for them at the exclusive Bailey’s Beach Club. What their upper-crust Newport hosts made of these bawdy sailing songs was, regrettably, not recorded.
Thirty-five years later, I was lucky enough to unearth a copy of the Gretel II songbook, by now a rare and holy document of Australian yachting history. The outrageous words and illustrations evoke the spirit of that legendary America’s Cup challenge with wonderful hand-made freshness and good humour. And so, without further ado (quoting directly from the cover):
By the same team that produced
PAINT YOUR DRAGON
and
PIDDLER ON THE ROOF
we proudly present
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY
TO THE CHALLENGE
featuring an international cast drawn from
New York, Paris and Balmain
The songbook establishes its, er, tone from the very first ditty, sung to the tune of ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’:
The balls of Jim Hardy, are wrinkled and crinkled,
Curvaceous and spacious
Like the Dome of St Pauls,
The crew they all muster, to gaze at that cluster,
That bloody great pair that’s hanging there,
Jim Hardy’s balls!
Shall we go on? When Martin Visser (notorious for his frequent visits to the crouch house) finally got the nod as back-up helmsman, the Aussie minstrels promptly serenaded his appointment to the melody of the old carol ‘O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree’:
The sailing class can kiss my arse,
I’ve got the helmsman’s job at last,
All those on deck can bend and kiss,
My fundamental orifice,
I’m down the back
I won’t come back
I’ve got the job
So **** you, Jack!
In the grand antipodean tradition of industrial-strength piss-taking, any personal weakness, embarrassment or eccentricity was fair game in the Gretel II choral repertoire.
No member of the team was spared in these songs, from the yacht’s venerable designer Alan Payne to the keen young headsail trimmer John ‘Aero’ Bertrand, fresh from his lofty academic thesis on the aerodynamics of sails (and long before his eventual triumph steering Australia II to victory 13 years later). Like ‘deck apes’ the world over, the 12-metre’s grinders also endured a good-natured shellacking. Everyone’s travails were robustly chronicled in an extended lyric sung to the tune of ‘Men of Harlech’. Some representative verses:
Life presents a dismal picture
Dark and dreary as the womb,
Alan has an anal stricture
Gretel has a fallen boom.
Even now young Aero’s started
Having academic fits,
If he sees the tell-tales parted
You can bet he’s got the shits.
Freer and Freedie fiercely flaying,
Grinding hard with groans and grunts,
Strength is waning, Jim is praying,
‘Come on, wind, you hopeless *****!’
Even technical problems were satirised in song. During training, Alan Payne felt the crew was putting too much strain on Gretel II’s boom in their attempts to extract better windward performance. Fearful that his bespoke aluminium spar would break under these loads, he devised a crude warning system. Payne fixed special, cast-iron ‘go-fast’ tangs at a key stress point on the boom. If anyone cranked the vang on too hard, these fail-safes would break with an explosive ‘bang’. A replacement tang then had to be immediately fitted by the crew. Inevitably, this rather bizarre solution inspired a vocal response, sung loudly to the chorus of ‘Rule Britannia’:
Rule Australia,
Pass another can,
Five go-fast fittings up your arsehole,
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!
The boom, of course, never broke. It’s on the boat still. Out on the water the Gretel II team, including their support crew on the tender Offsider, did Australia proud in the challenge series of races. They may even have had the faster boat, and certainly pushed defending skipper Bill Ficker and Intrepid to the limit in an exciting series that was much closer than its final 4–1 scoreline.
This was also the challenge that established Australia’s wellfounded suspicion that the New York Yacht Club was prepared to do just about anything to retain the America’s Cup. Cynical rule-bending by the home-town measurer had allowed illegal underwater modifications to Intrepid. Australian outrage was then compounded by the notorious start-line protest by Ficker that robbed Gretel II of her dramatic, come-from-behind win in the second race. (The NYYC protest committee unsurprisingly upheld the protest lodged by their own yacht.)
Officially, Sir Frank Packer’s team tended to maintain a sporting silence on these matters. But stung by such a blatant injustice, Packer declared that ‘complaining to the New York Yacht Club is like complaining to your mother-in-law about your wife’. And at Christie’s Bar and other favourite Newport watering holes the crew exacted their revenge in the following shanty, sung to the tune of ‘The British Grenadiers’:
Some die of winding winches, and some of drinking beer,
Some die of constipation, and some of diarrhoea,
But of all the world’s diseases
There’s none that can compare
With the drip, drip, drip
Of a syphilitic *****,
And the Newport Gonorrhea!
If that didn’t get right up the noses of the New York Yacht Club snobs, then nothing would. More than a generation after these lampoon songs first rang out over the waters of Rhode Island Sound they retain a larrikin bite that marks them as characteristically Australian. Rough-hewn, politically incorrect, irreverent, lusty, scatological – and funny.
They also form an important part of the historical record. Sir Frank Packer’s two full-blooded tilts at the America’s Cup in 1962 and 1970 were the bedrock of the success that finally came for Alan Bond and the Australia II team. Maybe the trustees of the National Maritime Museum should round up the surviving veterans of the 1970 Gretel II campaign and record them singing these songs together just one more time. It would be a night to remember.
Rule Australia,
Pass another can!