JANE FRYER: Unique group of pupils' haul of Regatta trophies
JANE FRYER: How a dinghy bought on eBay launched a truly unique group of pupils from Tottenham and their inspiring teacher to a haul of trophies at this year’s Regatta
- Greig City Academy won prize after prize at the Cowes Week sailing regatta
There was quite a stir at Cowes Yacht Haven marina, the crisply turned-out epicentre of British sailing society, earlier this month.
Because by the end of Cowes Week — one of the longest-running and most prestigious annual sailing regattas in the world — one team was sweeping up an obscene amount of silverware. And for once, it wasn’t a bunch of former Olympians and world champions. Or even anyone sponsored by an investment bank or accountancy giant.
No, this was a group of black teenagers from Greig City Academy in Hornsey, near Tottenham in North-East London. A school where 70 per cent of the pupils are on free school meals and more than 60 languages are spoken.
Not so long ago, most of them had never set foot on a boat. Some had never been outside London.
But when I met Kai Hockley, 17; Chris Joel Frederick, 18; Jaydon Owusu, 18; and Jessye Opoku-Ware, 17, this week, they were swinging in the rigging like pros.
A group of black teenagers from Greig City Academy in Hornsey, near Tottenham in North-East London swept up an obscene amount of silverware at Cowes Week — one of the longest-running and most prestigious annual sailing regattas in the world
Because of their hard work, commitment and extraordinary talent, they have been embraced by members of the sailing community, who have fallen over themselves to offer advice, kit, support, job offers and cadetships
When I met Kai Hockley, 17; Chris Joel Frederick, 18; Jaydon Owusu, 18; and Jessye Opoku-Ware, 17, this week, they were swinging in the rigging like pros. Pictured: Jane, centre, with (left-right) Jessye, Chris, Jaydon and Kai)
Brandishing gleaming trophies the size of small children, they made it clear that sailing — a traditionally white, posh and notoriously expensive sport — is no longer elitist and inaccessible to the masses.
Cowes Week Regatta director Laurence Mead admitted as much after Chris, from Tottenham, was named winner of the inaugural Cowes Week Youth Trophy and Kai received the coveted Cowes Young Skipper prize, both chosen from more than 600 under-25s taking part in the week-long event. As Mead put it: ‘Chris and Kai are a great example of how if you show interest you can excel.’
He’s right. Because the boys and their schoolmates have made their mark by winning and setting records again and again in recent years (last year a Greig team set a record time by circumnavigating the Isle of Wight in just seven hours 32 minutes).
But also, because of their hard work, commitment and extraordinary talent, they have been embraced by members of the sailing community, who have fallen over themselves to offer advice, kit, support, job offers and cadetships.
To find out how they pulled it off, I pop down to West Cowes for a quick whiz on their 24ft boat, Cote, in the surprisingly choppy Solent. And learn that it’s actually all down to one man.
‘Mr Holt!’ the boys chorus as we sit in the bright sunshine. ‘It’s all Mr Holt. He’s made everything happen. He’s changed our lives. He’s changed everything.’
Jon Holt, 47, is their ‘very strict’ geography teacher and the head of outdoor sports at Greig Academy. He is also the power behind the sailing project and a truly extraordinary man.
‘Bonkers’ is how Greig’s headmaster, Paul Sutton, tends to describe him. ‘I never know what’s next but it’s usually good.’
Brandishing gleaming trophies the size of small children, they made it clear that sailing — a traditionally white, posh and notoriously expensive sport — is no longer elitist and inaccessible to the masses
America’s Cup skipper Lawrie Smith, round-the-world yachting heroine Tracy Edwards and, more recently, Olympic gold medallist Stuart Bithell have all been persuaded to lend time and support to his boys
‘Very obsessive. Yes, completely obsessive,’ is how Mr Holt describes himself. (Somehow, like the boys, I can’t quite call him Jon.) ‘If I’m going to do something, I’ll do it properly.’
He had dreamt of becoming a teacher since he was a boy, but when he started work at an inner-city school after a degree in geography at Cambridge, he found himself questioning the purpose of his vocation.
‘School’s not just about getting qualifications and making it through,’ he says. ‘It’s about preparing them for the future, culturally and socially. Because the world is not an equal place. People have very different chances.’
So Mr Holt set about helping to even things out for his boys.
Broadening their horizons, he splashed out on 25 ex-hire mountain bikes and a couple of trailers and started taking them on mountain biking and canoeing trips all over the UK.
‘It was my own money — thousands — which was a massive outlay for a very young teacher. But it was worth it. It gave them a different outlook,’ he says.
He set challenges and the boys embraced them.
‘I’d say: “This week we’re going to climb the highest mountain and canoe the longest lake,” and they loved it. Every weekend was booked to capacity.’
Jon Holt, 47, is their ‘very strict’ geography teacher and the head of outdoor sports at Greig Academy. He is also the power behind the sailing project and a truly extraordinary man
Then, about ten years ago, unperturbed by the cost or the fact that their home borough of Haringey was light years from the centre of sailing, he introduced the sport to Greig Academy.
Which, yes, must have seemed a bit bonkers.
But Mr Holt knew the power of sailing and the joy, commitment, skill, teamwork and resilience it required. Growing up on the Wirral peninsula, he and his father spent five years building a 19ft cruising boat from scratch in the garage of their semi-detached home.
Two weeks after they launched, a storm wrenched it from its moorings and smashed it on rocks. A year-long rebuild followed and he still sails it today.
He started by buying a dinghy on eBay and, with the boys, did it up. Next, he found a 22ft wreck of a boat that was languishing in a field in Burnley, Lancashire.
Despite very strict instructions from Mr Sutton to ‘look but don’t buy’, he snapped it up, sticking the £600 on his personal credit card, before spending the summer holidays showing the boys how to refurbish it.
Soon afterwards, as his sailing mission really got going, he sold his house and moved into the school caretaker flat ‘to ease cash-flow problems’.
Something, he says, that his wife Vanessa — who is head of maths at Greig Academy — was surprisingly OK about.
The owner of East Cowes Shipyard gave the school 24ft Cote, a boat originally made for the King of Spain in the 1980s and worth at least £30,000. Pictured: Cowes on the Isle of Wight
‘To be fair, we weren’t married then,’ he says. ‘Though she doesn’t really like sailing.’ So when he suggested they should buy another boat, and live in it, she put her foot down.
‘She has always been amazing at supporting anything that improves the boys’ life chances. But she drew a line there,’ he says.
He might not sound like everyone’s ideal husband, but Mr Holt does have a tenacity and ease of manner that opens doors and invites favours. It’s not just Vanessa he has talked round over the years.
He persuaded former America’s Cup skipper Lawrie Smith, round-the-world yachting heroine Tracy Edwards and, more recently, Olympic gold medallist Stuart Bithell to lend time and support to his boys. And he teed up a sailing tutor who would teach 24 boys at once in Poole, Dorset.
He convinced Mr Sutton to think not ‘what if something goes wrong?’ but ‘what if something goes really, really right?’.
And, for the past decade, he has spent pretty much every weekend — in rain, snow, ice and occasionally sunshine — shuttling his boys back and forth to sailing training and marvelling at the open-armed response of the sailing community.
‘Obviously the boys stand out in sailing. But maybe for the right reasons. Because, yes, they’re a bit different, but they’re good at sailing. They compete very hard. They behave well. They impress.’
So much so that the owner of East Cowes Shipyard gave them 24ft Cote, a boat originally made for the King of Spain in the 1980s and worth at least £30,000.
Back at school, the impact has been astounding. Truancy levels plummeted while grades, behaviour, confidence and social skills improved. Badly behaved pupils were not allowed to sail — and everyone wanted to be part of the programme.
By 2015, the huge demand among pupils meant the school had already outgrown its newly refurbished yacht. So back on eBay, Mr Holt found Scaramouche: a 45ft racing yacht built in 1981 for the U.S. Admiral’s Cup team.
With his own credit card maxed out, he convinced a fellow teacher to stump up £16,000. And didn’t mention the extra £30,000 needed to make it seaworthy.
‘I knew we’d find the money somewhere,’ he says. ‘But it couldn’t come from the school budget — we had to cover our own costs.’
So he taught the boys to be self-sufficient. Not just to take responsibility for all the demands of sailing — fitness, strength, nutrition, networking and asking for help — but also to raise all the money needed to maintain the boats and keep the sailing programme alive.
Kai and Chris tell me that last year they raised a staggering £180,000, mostly by giving talks about their sailing project to fellow sailors, the City of London, nautical groups here in Cowes — pretty much anyone who would listen.
‘Of course, it’s still terrifying but we’re getting more confident,’ says Kai.
‘We can all do so much more than we thought we ever could. Mr Holt has showed us that,’ adds Chris. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if it wasn’t for sailing. I’m not very academic.’
Instead, this year he has sailed in Miami, Portugal and St Tropez and is just back from a three-month stint in the Netherlands, working on a 70m yacht. He will soon be off to the Caribbean to work as a deckhand.
Jaydon is about to start a year-long cadetship here on the Isle of Wight, training to skipper a superyacht. And Kai is aiming to be a professional sailor.
They are all extraordinarily mature, together and charming young men.
As for Jon Holt, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where his almost superhuman drive comes from.
He has always been utterly focused — with his studies, in his Varsity cross-country running club, where he transformed membership from 40 to 200 in just a year. And when, despite being ‘hopeless’ at football, he ran a Sunday league team in Haringey.
‘It was a horrible atmosphere. We experienced so much racism, whereas we’ve never had any in sailing — not one bit. Nothing. But we won nine trophies in four years. If I do something, I’m full on.’
Like Kai, Chris and friends, he also had a teacher who changed his life — Mr Carroll, his geography teacher at school, who told him to apply to Cambridge.
‘When the other teachers said: “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s for a different sort of person”, he believed in me.’
But for all the boys’ success, Mr Holt refuses to take any credit himself. ‘I’m just facilitating it — they’re doing it themselves. They want to improve their situation and they’re doing so much of it themselves, and getting the benefits.’
So far, more than a thousand boys have been through his sailing programme. Some for fun, others to cruise. Some to race.
Of all Mr Holt’s budding sailors, these four have taken it to a whole different level, racing and winning against world champions and Olympians.
Jaydon was just 12 — the youngest person ever — when he first completed the Fastnet, a gruelling race of over 600 nautical miles from the English Channel to Fastnet Rock on the coast of Ireland and back.
‘It was clear even then that they were really, really good — that sailing could be their future.’
And with that, he points out across the Solent to his brilliant boys aboard Cote — skimming and racing and slicing though the choppy waves, with the sails buffeting and billowing like something from a Hollywood fantasy film — and suddenly looks suspiciously pink around the eyes.
‘Sometimes I look back and I see the spinnaker flying, and I think, “from an inner-city estate in Tottenham and they’re doing that!”’ he says. ‘I really don’t think they have any idea how talented they are.’
Source: Read Full Article