FRANK CARR

Now online ... an edited version of Peter Elphick's monograph...

Foreword

Since we cannot have our lives over again it is through others we measure our own achievements. Those that leave clear records of one sort or another - mostly written - are our bench markers. Such a one was Frank Carr and in this little booklet outlining his life, which Peter Elphick calls an "appreciation," he shows what a great service he did to all those who fear and love the sea and have a fascination for man's endeavours to create seagoing vehicles for the exploration of the world in which we live and for exploration of that element as a highway for trade.

I first met Frank Carr when Francis Chichester suggested I accompany him down to Greenwich to take a look at the model replica of Cook's Endeavour then being fashioned in the workshop of the National Maritime Museum. Frank was then Director of the NMM [National Maritime Museum]. Later, much later, I was to give the address at the Thanksgiving Service in the Chapel of the Royal Naval College Greenwich; in it I recalled that first meeting with him, remembering how he was already looking to the future and "talking, talking, talking - he was a great talker, and all he said was of interest, and almost all of it was about ships, or sailing."

In this respect you could say he had a blinkered, one-track mind. But, like most people whose efforts are concentrated on one particular field, he succeeded in achieving a very great deal. It is all here in Peter Elphick's account of his life, a progression from the Maritime Museum which, as we know it, was largely of his creation, to the Cutty Sark with Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth a stone's throw away, and finally to the creation of the World Ship Trust as the vehicle to encourage the preservation of old ships and the creation of replicas like the Matthew that can sail the seas.

That line from Masefield's "Dauber" epic seems the basic tenet of Frank's life. It was what drove him, and Peter Elphick has quite rightly used it, as I did, to close this booklet of his life:

'Ships and the Sea, there's nothing finer made.'

Hammond Innes