Backhouse/Wynter/Gratze

From The Golden Falcon
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~pillagoda/genealogy/ch13-03.htm
John Winter - Dinghy racer and designer of the trapeze [6.7.2002 Obit]

John Kift Winter, sailor and engineer: born Cambridge 4.8.1911; married 1941 Rachel Meynell (died 1998; two sons, one daughter); died Dereham, Norfolk 8.6.2002. The international 14 class of sailing dinghies has been at the leading edge of sailing technology since the early 20th century. John Winter was at the forefront of this revolution in dinghy design. Perhaps the most perfect example of his work was “Thunder and Lightning”, the 14-footer he jointly owned and raced in the 1930s with Peter Scott (later knighted for his contributions to wildlife conservation). It was on this boat that Winter first devised the trapeze, catapulting the pair to victory in the Prince of Wales Cup of 1938. It was also on “Thunder and Lightning” that they modified a primitive version of what is now known as the kicking strap, today a standard fixture on every yacht and sailing dinghy.
Born in Cambridge in 1911, John Kift Winter was the eldest of three sons of William de Lappe Winter and Bertha Fisher. His father, an engineering coach in Cambridge, died young, leaving John to take responsibility for his brothers and their education. Money was tight, and an extreme care in financial matters remained with him all his life.
Childhood days were spent on the river Cam messing about in boats and fly-fishing and fostered a fascination with wind and water. John attended St Faith's Preparatory School in Cambridge and then Rugby School, where he worked hard and was a fine athlete. He won an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences and Engineering.
More important than his academic achievements were the friendships he made at Cambridge, the most influential of which was with Peter Scott. It was a companionship of opposites: Winter provided a practical foil to Scott's impulsiveness. Patient, good-natured and with striking good looks, Winter was an excellent subject for Scott to draw and paint, testament to which are some of Scott's finest portraits.
Another great friend was Stewart Morris, two or three years Winter's senior and the leading force behind the new university sport of dinghy sailing. He spotted Winter's talent and together they ran the Cambridge University Cruising Club. In 1934 Winter, Scott, Morris and David Beale, with the boat builder and designer Uffa Fox as team manager, formed the UK International 14-footer team to compete against Canadian and American teams on the Canadian Lakes. The British team won five of the six races.
Although he was a quiet and unassuming young man, Winter's determination to win was absolute. The International 14 Class was a restricted but not a "one design" class, which meant that design and innovation were of paramount importance, within permissible parameters. Length, sail area and mast height were normally constants, while the beam and shape and size of sails were variables to be manipulated and played around with. Winter would spend hours rigging his boat before a race, and one of his many secret weapons was to coat the hull of the boat with egg whites, so that she would glide serenely through the water. His perfectionism paid dividends, and between 1934 and 1938 alone he clocked up 34 first-place wins; in fact he got an unprecedented 62 guns out of a total of 83 starts.
Having spent many years competing against each other in their International 14s, Scott in “Thunder” and Winter in “Lightning”, they decided to join forces. With detailed specifications, “Thunder and Lightning” was built by Uffa Fox. She was to have a wooden- rather than the usual lead- or bronze- ballasted centre-board and a reinforced wooden mast (in 1938 reinforced translated to "painted aluminium") to take the added compression of the trapeze.
In this partnership, Winter and Scott became notorious and won more than their fair share of trophies. They alternated between being helmsman and crew, often within the same race - the physical effort of sailing a pre-war racing dinghy of this type is not to be underestimated. It became the role of the crew to decide upon the tactics of a race; enabling the helm to concentrate his efforts fully on sailing the boat. This system, of which Winter and Scott were the originators, is now used in team racing.

Within minutes of “Thunder and Lightning's”: being launched from Uffa Fox's boatyard at Cowes in 1938, Winter and Scott were sailing her to victory and a week later won the premier yachting trophy, the Prince of Wales Cup, off Falmouth. This race also marked the birth of what is now known as the trapeze.

Winter had developed the model in secret, but it was inspired by an idea Beecher Moore had used on his Thames Rater, in which the helmsman and crew could place their weight right out of the boat - thus keeping the hull totally flat in the water, however strong the wind or hard in the sails. This early trapeze, affectionately known as the "King George's Jubilee Truss", was well ahead of its time and, said Scott in his autobiography, “The Eye of the Wind” (1961), “when Winter swung out on the trapeze, it was a startling sight even to me”. To the other competitors the spectacle was irresistible. At an important time a great many of them gave their attention to our trapeze at the expense of sailing their own boats.
After Winter and Scott's monumental victory, by four minutes, its use was banned in the International 14 class. Furthermore, it was Winter who was persuaded to draw up the rules by which it should be banned. It did not reappear in competition until it was adopted by the Flying Dutchman class in 1951. It is now standard equipment for most racing classes, including the International 14 class.
In 1936 Winter was beaten by Scott in the Olympic trials, Stewart Morris went to Berlin as team manager, and Scott won a silver medal. By a curious twist of fate, Grantchester produced two Olympic athletes that year, Peter Ward (running) and Ran Laurie (rowing), but Winter didn't quite make it a hat trick.
These "golden" Cambridge boys were not simply content with winning cups, they also shared their passion for dinghy sailing and helped to promote the considerably cheaper "National Twelve" class, launched in 1937, which was a scaled down one-design based on the International 14. After the Second World War they were also central to the launch of the Fox- designed Firefly class in 1946. Both these boats were designed for mass production and for those on a tighter budget, and were aimed at bringing younger people into the sport. The Cambridge group were a driving force behind the Yacht Racing Association (later the RYA)'s enlightened fostering of dinghy sailing. Winter was on the first dinghy committee of the RYA.
Another interest winter shared with Scott was in wildfowl and wildfowling. One of the activities that sparked this interest in geese and wildfowl was participation in the ancient sport of punt gunning - traditional for generations in the fen country. Killing large numbers of birds with a large-bore gun might seem at odds with the desire to study and conserve these creatures. But punt-gunners held their prey in great respect - seeing them as a formidable adversary - and were as likely to take home and care for an injured bird as to take pleasure in a stalk in which they were outwitted.
This group of adventurous young men saw wildfowling as a challenge, but also tried to explain why they loved it. Certainly the books written by Scott, Michael Bratby and Haig Thomas about wildfowling, in which Winter features heavily, are regarded as classics today, and it was from this love and respect of wildfowl that Peter Scott went on to form the Wildfowl Trust and later took part in the founding of the World Wildlife Fund.
John Winter's profession was as an engineer, and when war broke out in 1939 he had a "reserved occupation" with the Universal Grinding Wheel Company in Stafford, which he had joined in 1934. He was to stay there for the whole of his working life and played an important part in the rise of the small company into an international group, of which he later became group managing director.
Although not able to go abroad on active service during the war, Winter remained in correspondence with Scott, during which time they discussed ways of improving camouflage for the destroyers and torpedo boats of coastal command and buildings, much of which was top secret, and it seems extraordinary that they used such crude forms of communication. Their experience of using camouflage in punt-gunning rendered them well-qualified and, as part of their experimentation, they painted the exterior of the Universal Grinding Wheel Company. Winter set up his punt gun in the entrance to the factory, pointing at the door.
Sailing remained a passion throughout Winter's life and, in his eighties, he won a sailing race that he had first won as an 18-year-old, when Burnham Overy Staithe was known only to a handful of keen dinghy sailors and fishermen. Even in his 90th year, he sailed his mirror dinghy, single-handedly, in the old north Norfolk haunts.
In 1989, “Thunder and Lightning” was presented to the National Maritime Museum and is to be a central exhibit in the National Small Boat Collection when it opens in Falmouth this autumn. Any sailing enthusiast visiting the 2002 Earl's Court Boat Show could not fail to remember the historic boat, and marvel at the craftsmanship of the 1930s: the golden age of dinghy racing. [From: "Linda Vallee"cvallee@dccnet.com]

Three children
Children of John Kift Winter and Rachel Meynell
Julia Winter+1 b. 11 Nov 1944
Mark John Winter+1 b. 24 Sep 1948
Giles Meynell Winter+1 b. 18 Oct 1950
http://www.thepeerage.com/p7395.htm#i73945