Denys Rayner

Denys Arthur Rayner DSC & Bar, VRD, RNVR (9 February 1908 – 4 January 1967) was a Royal Navy officer who fought throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. After intensive war service at sea, Rayner became a writer, a farmer, and a successful designer and builder of small sailing craft - his first being the Westcoaster; his most successful being the glass fibre gunter or Bermudian rigged twin keel Westerly 22 from which evolved similar "small ships" able to cross oceans while respecting the expectations, in terms of comfort, safety and cost, of a burgeoning family market keen to get to sea. Before his death in 1967, Rayner had founded, and via his pioneering GRP designs, secured the future expansion of Westerly Marine Construction Ltd - up until the late 1980s, one of Britain's most successful yacht builders.

Denys Rayner was born in Muswell Hill in a Georgian house, on the outskirts of London, to Francis (née Parker) and Arthur Rayner, a master electrical engineer, who became a commodity broker moving with his family to West Kirby on the Wirral Peninsula and sending his son to Repton School between 1921 and 1924. Flat feet kept Denys from entering the Royal Navy but not from pursuing a successful naval career. In October 1925, he joined HMS Eaglet, Mersey Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a part-time midshipman with time to pursue his interest in exploring the rocky coast of the Western Highlands in a small boat of his own design.

As an eight-year-old prep school boy, at the height of the First World War, Rayner was disappointed to be beaten for drawing an "infernal" U-boat sinking device in a school geometry book. "Diagrammatically portrayed, this spoiled the page - I can see that now" wrote the adult Rayner in the preface of his book Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic (1955). At school Rayner, impressed that an uncle by marriage was an officer on "a real destroyer", sketched a "continuous border of destroyers" in the margins of his school books. In later school years came "an endless stream of model destroyers...which really floated and were fitted with systems of propulsion..."

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