A Celebration of Atkin Schooners:

The Atkin Legacy

I came to the Atkin boats at about the age of 12. My dad kept a number of manila envelopes full of cuttings, usually design articles, from Rudder and other boating magazines. When I had reached an age where he felt I had developed the ability to look at plans and understand them, he would hand me an envelope and say “You might find something interesting in this.” In one of them, there was a piece about a small cutter (20’) called the Maid of Endor, designed by William Atkin. I looked at that article until it almost fell apart. In fact, I ordered study plans at a princely sum, at that stage in my life, of $5.00. After the intervening 38 years, it still summons a nostalgia for a time I never experienced. And that, in a nutshell, is the Atkin legacy; boats that are traditional, but able, and evoke an emotion in the beholder beyond anything close to reason. When I see a picture of Maid of Endor, as I have in the pages of Wooden Boat magazine, I still involuntarily say “That would have been a great boat to build.”

As Daniel MacNaughton said in the Wooden Boat article about the Atkin Design Legacy, “It is better to ask why these designs have continued to have appeal to this day, and why William and John Atkin were frequently called upon to produce variations on those designs years later. The answer might be that the boats were technically excellent to begin with and also had romantic appeal that never became outdated—a good enough definition of quality in design.”

There are other places to read a biography of this father and son and the designs they created, but for those of you who are reading about the Atkins for the first time, let me give you a short synopsis. William Atkin purchased a boatbuilding firm from Charles G. Sammis, located in Huntington, Long Island. His partner in the venture was Cottrell Wheeler, and the name became Atkin and Wheeler. They proceeded to make a name for themselves in building high-speed motorboats at a time when such boats were very new to the world. Not only did they talk clients into having them build the boats, almost all of them were built to Atkin designs, these coming from a 24 year-old at the time. Not only did they design the boats, but for some, the engines, too, and the engines were fabricated right on site. The firm also became known for their very able ocean cruising double-ended cutters, in the Colin Archer tradition. Part and parcel with the design business was William’s career as a yachting writer for magazines like Yachting, Motor Boating, and others. He also published two books, The First Book of Boats, and The Second Book of Boats, and these are as close to a text representation of his design philosophy as exists anywhere.

After WWII, William’s son, John Atkin, starting working with his father in the family firm. He continued his father’s approach to providing good boats with a “touch of Romance” (MacNaughton’s term) and providing boats for boys of all ages to pour over, until 1999.

There will be no more new designs coming from William or John Atkin, but their body of work, totaling over 900 designs, has given the world something unique and unsurpassed. But perhaps the best testament is that no one, and I mean no one, glances once at an Atkin boat.