Category: Ted Heath, the Guardian and the Fastnet Mutiny of ’89

David Fairhall, 1934-2026

David Fairhall, Guardian defence correspondent, sailing author and a very good friend, died last month at the age of 91.

Below is a link to an obituary I wrote for the Guardian, where David was a senior journalist for 38 years, and a colleague for the 15 years I worked there.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/apr/30/david-fairhall-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

David lived in Maldon, Essex, and was a friend of many east coast sailors, including the cartoonist Mike Peyton, who illustrated David’s Pass Your Yachtmaster and Pass your Day Skipper. (I updated both for their most recent editions). As a young man, David crewed on yacht deliveries for Peter Haward, who wrote All Weather Yachtsman, a book whose title says it all about the kind of passage making they did.

David’s books covered a much wider range than sailing, from his first on Russian sea power to his last on US and Russian competition for the arctic as the ice melts. He covered conflict from the 1967 Six Day War through the Falklands to the first Gulf War and Bosnia.

My favourite book of David’s is East Anglian Shores, about the creeks, estuaries and harbours of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, an east coast classic that should be on every shelf.

I published a post on this blog a few years ago commemorating the 25th anniversary of a memorable Guardian Fastnet challenge in 1989, skippered by David. We persuaded the paper to finance us to charter a yacht and train a crew of novice Guardian staffers. Here is a link to the post.

Ted Heath, the Guardian and the Fastnet mutiny of ’89

 Roger Justice, David Fairhall and Ted Heath at the launch party – the photo that never appeared.

The Guardian newspaper has a long tradition of involvement with sailing, but many of its staff had forgotten all that when David Fairhall and I came up with an idea for a season of ocean racing. The paper was split down the middle by the plan.
It all came to a head in a spectacular fashion one day in early 1989 when every department head refused point blank to run a story and photographs of the launch of our Guardian-sponsored racing yacht. The former Prime Minister, the late Ted Heath, a well known sailor, had agreed to our invitation to launch the boat at a reception in Southampton. Heath was baffled when none of the photographs and copy about the event appeared in the paper. For some of my then colleagues, the combination of a top Tory and yacht racing was too much to swallow. Mutiny was in the air.
For the 25th anniversary of the Guardian’s unusual ocean racing challenge, here is the full story – find it using this link.