History
Ruda was built in 1938 at Lady Bee boatyard in Shoreham, W. Sussex.
At that time, the recently-created enterprise of Lady Bee Ltd. had drawn together the Shoreham yards of H T Stow and Courtenay & Birkett, and Ruda was the first boat of their newly conceived ‘Adur’ class cruising motor yacht. She was designed by E A Stow for the waters of the English Channel, and was built for Mr. C. M. Haworth, a director of Lady Bee.
Although originally specified with a pair of Swedish ‘June’ 2-stroke diesel engines, she was instead fitted with twin Ailsa Craig RF2 16-24hp 4-stroke diesels, which for the first eighty years of her life powered her along at a cruising speed of around 7 knots.
Ruda is carvel built with copper fastened pitch pine planking on oak frames, and with teak deck and superstructure. Her hull and deck, as well as her teak and Honduras mahogany interior joinery, are almost entirely original. Today she exudes the charm and quality of a lost age, but when she was launched at the end of the ‘thirties, it could have been argued that Ruda looked a little old-fashioned when compared with the other hopefuls lined up along the banks of the River Thames for the 1938 London Boat Show. True, she was fitted with electric lighting and could boast a pair of the latest, high-speed diesel engines but everything else, from the rake of her straight stem to her stern, dark interior was decidedly unadventurous.
Perhaps for this reason Ruda returned home to Shoreham un-sold, remaining in the ownership of Mr. Haworth until June 1940 when she was requisitioned by the Ministry of War Transport, and although she played her part in the war effort there is so far no evidence that she participated in the Dunkirk evacuation. In 1941 she entered service with the Royal Navy and, armed with a Vickers K-class gas-operated machine gun, helped patrol Britain’s coastline. When hostilities ceased, she was bought back by the yard and had a series of private owners before being purchased in 1995 by the present owner. She underwent a significant restoration in south Devon, and in 2004 began cruising in Europe – you can see where she’s been on the ‘Travels’ page.
As Ruda was starting to take shape at Lady Bee, the yard employed a young apprentice named Stanley Page who, doubtless proud of his work but lacking a camera of his own, “borrowed” from his employer some pictures of the boats he worked on. Thanks to Stan, and happily for us, we can see Ruda on the stocks in the Lady Bee boatshed, being launched under the watchful eyes of the owner, alongside for final fit-out and stability tests, and undergoing trials in Shoreham.
