Sheila was designed and built for Robert E Groves, who then made her famous.
A marine and landscape artist in pencil, watercolours, gouache and oils, Robert Emmanuel Groves, was born in Richmond, Yorkshire on the second of December 1868, the son of Thomas Groves and Lavinia (nee Medd), he was the eldest of seven children.
The family had a brewery business in the Manchester area trading under the name “Groves and Withnell” and would spend the Summer month in Ramsey – Isle Of Man.
Aged just 12, he was living with his parents in Leicester in 1881, but at 24, was apparently living in Bohemian Chelsea in 1893. His addresses in that period were believed to have been 50 Tedworth Square and 42 Paultons Square.
He studied art under Albert Strange in Scarborough, Yorkshire in the early 1890s, and exhibited his first works at the Royal Academy in 1893, exhibiting five works there during the period 1893-1903 from around 15 works exhibited there overall. He was living in St Albans by 1894, teaching at the Art School of the St Albans School of Science and Art, taking the first of a number of trips to the Western Highlands with a trip to Iona, off the coast of Mull, in 1897, resulting in works like The Iona Ferry, 1897. Marriage to Mary Hall Keir Cameron took place in Glasgow in 1894, and they had a daughter Sheila on October 16th 1901, after whom Groves named his two yachts: Sheila and Sheila II.
The former was constructed by Robert Caine, Port St Mary, Isle of Man in 1904, the latter constructed in 1911 by A. Richardson at Tarbert, Loch Fyne, from designs by Albert Strange (Design Nos. 70 and 117 respectively).
He was heavily involved in the St Albans pageant of 1907, designing a series of historical postcards, published by printer Raphael Tuck, to be sold to raise funds for the event. He was still at St Albans in 1910 when he was complimented by a visiting American scholar, Mr Charles A. Bennett, when he wrote up his experiences in St Albans for an article in Manual Training Magazine (Vol XII, No. 1, Oct 1910) of which he was editor.
As a practising Bohemian, Groves was a lover of life – and women. It is known he had at least one long running extra-marital relationship, with Jessie Smith, with whom he had five children : John (1925), Jessica (1928), Donald (1931; who died in infancy), Seonaid (1934) and Robert (1936).
Becoming a member of the HumberYawl Club in 1904, no doubt shortly after committing to the building ofSheila, he made the first of many trips to the Western Highlands in her andthe later Sheila II, writing of his experiences cruising in a small yacht, many stories of which were published in the HYC journals and in theYachting & Boating Monthly. An early and prolific contributor toYachting Monthly, in the pre-WWW1 under its original founder/editor, Herbert Reiach, Groves’ produced many fine pencils sketches of yachts and marine subjects, and his contributions were especially valued.
It is understood his exploits in a small yacht (only 2 ½ tons) were unusual atthe time, and his artcles taken from his logs, encouraged others to emulate them and paved the way for the sport of ‘yacht cruising’ more generally.
By 1908 he had made his first visit to North Africa, writing of his experiences in The Studio (Vol XLV, 1908, p25) and writing Morocco as a Winter Sketching Ground for The International Studio (Vol XXXVI, No. 141, Nov 1908). He is thought to have returned in 1918, painting a series of oils and pencil works of various landscapes, including: In the souk; Horseshoe arch, Morocco; and Powder play in the Running Ground Square, Mogador, Morocco, 1918, the latter held by the Art Gallery of NSW. It is believed these trips to Mogador (now Essaouira) inspired the name of his St Albans home, ‘Mogador’.
In 1919 he had again returned to the Western Highlands, where he painted a number of seascapes including West Highland Lobster Fishermen, 1919. A keen amateur ornithologist, Groves especially loved the seabirds and waders of the Western highlands, and spent many happy holidays there, observing, sketching and painting, usually with one of his beloved yachts in the picture. An ardent theatre-goer and thespian, Groves was heavily involved in local theatre, including various pantomimes and such works as ‘The
Beggar’s Opera’, his production of which is believed to have toured the Midlands in 1926.
He retired to Lymington, Hampshire, on the shores of the Solent Estuary, to The Old Coast Guard House in the early 1930s, where he spent the rest of his life, including the WWII years when he was, in his seventies, a member of the Home Guard.
There is no doubt the TV-series ‘Dad’s Army’ would have amused him greatly, as he was a great ‘wag’ all his life, and loved humour and intrigue. According to family history, he was a great Romantic, who loved the idea of buried treasure and tales of derring do, which may explain the article ‘An Echo from the Past’, published in Scottish Country Life (Dec 1934) purporting to be the story of the finding of a ‘treasure map’ contained in a deathbed letter written by a Jacobite who had stolen some of the famed Arkaig gold of Bonny Prince Charlie. The story might have been dreamed up on his 1909 cruise in Sheila to the western highlands, recorded in the Humber Yawl Club journal the following year, in which he visited a friend at Arisaig, anchoring in ‘Camus an Talmhainn’ [sic] (Camas an t’Salainn: the Bay of Salt), a sheltered anchorage in the south-east of Loch nan Ceall (Arisaig harbour). The letter claims the ‘treasure’ is to be found under a black stone at the side of ‘Sgurr Eigg’ in the Bay of Salt, no doubt the house ‘Faire na Sgurr’ (meaning ‘view of’ the Sgurr) at the eastern head of the bay, as this house would have at that time had a good view of the ‘Sgurr’ (meaning high rocky hill) on the island of Eigg, although its view has since been masked by trees.
He was fascinated by the life of fishermen, boatmen and boat builders, executing many sketches of the workers and yachts under construction in the Berthon yard, Lymington, during the inter-war period, a collection of which are now held by Brian May, the owner of
Berthons. He often visited his lover, Jessie Smith, in Poole, and did lots of sketching around the harbour. It may have been on one of these trips in the late-1930s that he was approached by JohnWay-Hope and BillPinniger of the nascent British Seagull outboard motor company in Poole, to produce marine artworks for their company’s advertising
efforts. He drew many pencil sketches fo British Seagulls’ advertisements, all of which were clearly signed with his memorable signature.
Robert E Groves died in Lymington on 24th August 1948 (barely three months after the death of his wife, Mary) and was cremated, his ashes being scattered on The Solent.
He was survived by his daughter Sheila Cameron Groves (d.1972), and by Jessie Smith (d.1981) and four of his five children with her. Not long after Jesse’s eldest was borne and christened John Graham Smith, she dropped the ‘Smith’ and thenceforth called herself
(and all her subsequent children with ‘Uncle Robert’) by the surname of Graham.
In 2012, three of his children were still living: Seonaid and Robert Edward Graham in Bournemouth in the UK, and John Graham in Rushworth, Victoria, Australia. John’s daughter, Teresa and her husband, Gerard Vaughan, are in the process of compiling a biographical memoir of Groves.