In the early 1980s, a journalist visiting the Trinity House ship Winston Churchill asked its master, Commander Woodman, about any alarming foulweather experiences. “Oh, once my photocopier was thrown right across my cabin and broke. But my publisher was very understanding,” he replied.
The dry seaman’s joke was relevant enough as he had already published the first two of his successful Nathaniel Drinkwater novels about the 18th- century navy, and was working on the first of his books about the Corporation of Trinity House and its buoyage and lighthouse service. But in reality he had been through many hard seaborne experiences beyond the quiet world of authorship.
In 1974, as first officer on the Trinity House flagship Patricia, he boarded a stricken German cargo vessel aground on the Haisborough Sands of Norfolk in deteriorating weather. He negotiated salvage and towing, and remained onboard for 30 hours in a northwest gale, alternating the watch with the ship’s master, who had lost trust in his own oQcers after the grounding.
It was not the only assistance by a Trinity House ship in which he was involved, nor the only personal danger. He twice nearly drowned, once when landing on Lundy Island to relieve the lighthouse keepers in a rigid inflatable craft suddenly overwhelmed by high surf.
But he often observed with pleasure the fact that through the 1970s and 1980s, the daily work of the service still reflected, more than most modern seafaring careers in the age of helicopters and automation, the traditional skills of seamanship in diQcult weather. Boats were lowered, buoys replaced, oQcers sometimes had to climb up high pillar buoys in places such as the Bristol Channel, armed with a box of matches to relight them. “Just as men used to climb the rigging on the old tall ships,” he would say.
Richard Martin Woodman was born in London in 1944, to Douglas Woodman, who worked in local government and police administration, and Rosalie Woodman. He claimed that academically he was a “poor pupil” at Westminster City Grammar School, but a keen sea scout and Outward Bound success.
This won him an indenture as midshipman on the Blue Funnel Line, and before he was 18 he had circumnavigated the globe. By 20 he had studied and won his ticket as a second oQcer, but having met his future wife Christine considered other work beyond long deep-sea journeys.
The Royal Navy might well have been glad of him, but Woodman reflected that he was more drawn to the idea of useful public service than the specific job. So after a winter on a North Atlantic weather ship he joined the Corporation of Trinity House in 1967, and after getting his master’s ticket moved to Harwich, near its depot. From this home base he served the seaborne part of his career relishing work as variable as delivering to lighthouses and lightships, checking and maintaining buoys at sea, and occasionally as master of the Trinity House vessel Patricia escorting HM Elizabeth II in pilotage waters when she was embarked on the Royal Yacht Britannia.
OV watch, and often away from home, he “began scribbling” both fiction and factual works, which eventually included a five-volume history of the British Merchant Marine (“our greatest squandered asset”) and several accounts of the merchant marine in the Second World War. The contribution of civilian merchant seafarers in Arctic and Malta convoys and in provisioning was, he felt, at risk of being overlooked in public perception. Commenting on his work, the Princess Royal wrote: “Richard Woodman reminds us of the importance of merchant ships and our debts to the seafarers — men and women — who manned them.”
His career afloat until he came to shore duties in 1991 was varied. He took command of the Trinity House vessels Stella, Winston Churchill and Patricia, and alongside other senior oQcers he found himself seconded for months to command deep-water trawlers acting as guardships in the busy Channel waters during the sinking of a cable linking the national grids of the UK and France.
In 1998 he took redundancy to continue writing, racking up a total of 51 fictional works and 18 respected histories, including the 500th anniversary chronicle of the Trinity House service, A Light Upon the Waters, which won the 2014 Mountbatten Literary Award. In 2000 he was made a Younger Brother of Trinity House and six years later an Elder Brother: the first of their own staV in its history to receive this honour.
He continued to sail recreationally on his own boats Andromeda and Kestrel. Both as skipper and on friends’ boats he had soon visited both the Americas, Atlantic islands and Baltic coasts as well as home waters; he knew the secret waters and creeks of the Essex estuaries intimately. Those with whom he sailed remember his quiet competent willingness to be, despite his rank and experience, an uncritically useful crew member. They also remember not only his broad scholarship in the traditions and practicalities of world seafaring, but his remarkable eye for problems in any yacht’s rig and equipment, and his willingness to shin up the mast to fix it, like any of his fictional 18th-century square-rig heroes.
On such small, amateur-sailed boats, one skipper said he would “rarely oVer advice unless asked, though he must have wanted to. But it was always sound.” As a passenger on a big tourist boat that snagged its anchor on a seabed cable, he murmured after some time, “I know how to fix this,” and he did. Willing if asked to bring his experience and professional calm to the sometimes fraught world of leisure yachting, he was never alarmed by ordinary failures or engine trouble.
He was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, and a 20-year battle with the illness meant he was eventually too infirm for sailing. With his wife, the artist Christine Woodman, who survives him along with his two children Abigail and Edward, and grandson, Arlo, he travelled often across Scotland, finding there something of the same energetic connection with wild nature that had marked a long and adventurous seaborne career. He continued to write prolifically and the last short story collection about ships and their people, The Petrel’s Cry, was published last year.
Richard Woodman, seafarer and author, was born in March 1944. He died of cancer on October 2, 2024, aged 80
