A big player in Argyll’s nautical history was the boatbuilding business at Sandbank on the Holy Loch north of Dunoon which was run by Alexander Robertson and his sons.

Robertson’s parents (his father was a fisherman from the Isle of Skye) moved from Inverkip, where he was born, to Sandbank to take over the Post Office there. Young Alexander was apprenticed as a boatbuilder in Dunoon then in Govan.

In 1876, when he was 25, he began building small wooden boats at his Sandbank workshop, in partnership with Daniel Kerr. Two years later that partnership broke up but Robertson went on to expand the business in bigger premises. He was still Chairman of the company in 1935, two years before he died.

He started by designing himself but later employed many of the leading designers of the day to work on, for example, the 12 metre and 15 metre racing yachts which made the firm its name. The business was obviously a major employer in the area – particularly in its heyday in the early 1900s.

Naturally he was a multi-tasking bigwig in Cowal and in Argyll – representing Cowal on Argyll County Council; being a Parish Councillor; appointed as a Justice of the Peace; being a member of the local School Board; acting as director of Dunoon District Cottage Hospital and being on the Board of Management of the Parish Church.

The company built the first 15 metre racing yacht – the Shimna, in 1907, designed by the famous William Fife.

It built over 55 boats in Britain’s preparations for the First World War. It managed to stay in business during the Great Depression of the mid-1930s as rich businessmen went in for a bout of highly conspicuous consumption by building and racing yachts on the Clyde. (Yacht racing is fairly, if modestly, described as ‘standing in a shower tearing up £100 notes.).

Between the wars, as well as racing yachts for the depressions-proof, the company built lifeboats. It got its first RNLI lifeboat order in 1935. This was for the Charlotte Elizabeth, the first motor-powered lifeboat launched in Scotland, later stationed at Port Askaig, in Argyll’s Isle of Islay. Robertson’s built and maintained ten more lifeboats and also built a series of tenders to service larger boats being built further up the Clyde.

It was during this period that Robertson’s built the Ron, later renamed Ron of Argyll on which For Argyll has published a companion article to this one. Ron was – and is – a 15 metre ketch designed by J A McCallum in 1928. She was followed by Southern Cross – an interesting coincidence, given where Ron of Argyll is currently sailing. Southern Cross was a 16 metre ketch designed by Alfred Mylne in 1930

In the Second World War the yard built a range of the large and fast Fairmile Marine Motor Boats for the Admiralty. These included Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs) and Motor Gun Boats (MGBs), both renamed after the war as ‘fast patrol boats’.

After this war, the company had success in building the one-class Loch Long boats – 6.4metre, 2-man keelboats. Cove Sailing Club on the shores of Loch Long on the Rosneath peninsula describes itself as ‘the home of the Loch Long one-design’. Interestingly, there is a fleet of these still racing in Aldeburgh in Suffolk and there is a class association website, run by Cove Sailing Club, for more information.

As well as this class of boat, Robertson’s were selected to build two of Britain’s 12 metre challengers for the America’s Cup: Sceptre in 1958 and Sovereign in 1964, both designed by David Boyd. Neither won. Sceptre lost to Columbia and Sovereign lost to Constellation.

Business began to slow markedly after this time and the yard spent its time building fast launches for the RAF. They also took on fixed price contracts for two 63′ General Service Mk 1 Pinnaces. These contracts were effectively the end of Robertson’s. Delays, design changes and rising materials costs saw the business in the sort of financial difficulties described as being ‘between a rock and a hard place’.

The Robertson Family sold the yard in 1965.

The footnote is that it became a subsidiary of Glasgow’s Auchinleck Investment Company who built there a wide range of fibreglass (GRP) boats there – like Pipers, Ohlsons, Etchells and Pilot Launches – for 14 more years. They shut down in 1980, faced with rising costs of oil and resin – and tough competition from established GRP yards down south.

The buildings in the lower yard were pulled down in the late 1980s and the site was levelled for re-development. Now all that’s left is the slipway, although some of the classic boats built at the yard – like Ron of Argyll now in the Whitsundays – are still sailing in a wide variety of waters.

The photographs show Alexander Robertson (bearded) with his sons at the Sandbank yard and Alexander Robertson himself. Both are reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.