April 27, 1904-December 1, 1998
Boat builder Geary Pitcher was the last practitioner of a centuries-old Bermudian tradition. Sailors from Somerset to St George’s sought out the St. David’s legend to make 14-foot wooden dinghies that were so beautifully crafted they were considered “floating works of art.”
Pitcher, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, was an enterprising man who could put his hand to many tasks. He was a farmer, carpenter, fisherman, rope maker as well as a mason, who built five houses on waterside property he owned at Great Bay.
But it was the 60 boats that he meticulously crafted over the years that earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council in 1994.
Grandson Kelvin Waddell, who grew up on the family compound and spent many hours with his granddad, remains in awe of Pitcher’s craftsmanship.
The dinghies, Waddell said, were built low to the water, rode swells comfortably and were shaped like an hourglass.
“When you looked at the shape of the boat, it was like a beautiful woman,” he said.
Pitcher, a son of Richard and Edith Pitcher, was the fifth of six children. His elder brother Claude was a well-known carpenter.
He was named after a Bermuda governor, Henry LeGuay Geary, who served in Bermuda from 1902 to 1904, although no one in his family quite knows why.
Pitcher attended St. David’s School but went to work at age 13 to help support his family following the death of his father.
“I went to work on Ray Higgs farm, and I pretty well operated the farm,” he said in a cover story for The Bermudian in June 1993. “But one day we were talking and I told him I was going to quit.
“You see, I had it in mind to be a shipwright—my father was a shipwright—so I quit. I asked James Minors for a job. At first he didn’t want to give me one so he put me to the test. I was given the toughest jobs in the yard, any way he could test me.
“The thing is I was used to hard work after working on the farm. He couldn’t fool me.”
Pitcher had apprenticed himself to one of Bermuda’s top boat builders. One year, Minors was asked to build a fitted dinghy. Minors was not given a plan, so he drew a plan from a model of a boat designed by famed American boat designer Nathanael Herreshoff, who spent his winters in Bermuda. The plans passed muster with Herreshoff himself. The boat, Pitcher said, “turned out to be the fastest race dinghy.”
“We intended to build another one like her, but she was burned and we never found the blueprints again.”
Several years later, Pitcher was asked to build a dinghy himself. He told the customer he didn’t know how, but when he was presented with all the materials and promised £40 pounds, he decided to draw his own plan.
That plan has been used for all the boats he has built since although his admirers all agree that no two of his boats were alike.
“Every dinghy he built was a little different,” says his son Kenneth.
For many years, Pitcher worked at Meyer’s shipyard in St. Georges while filling orders for dinghies on the side.
Married in 1930 to fellow St David’s Islander Joyce Leyland McCallan, with whom he had eight children, he turned to farming and fishing to support his family. (Pitcher was twice widowed. His second wife was Ismay Mealey.)
He built two large fishing boats for himself, the Ochita and the 600, and two others. During the Second World War, he received a contract to supply British troops stationed at St. David’s Battery with fresh fish.
His weekly catch was around 700 pounds, and he also supplied fish to other establishments in the east end, among them St. George’s Hotel, Mount Area restaurant, Outerbridge’s Supermarket and Spurling’s Market. He was reportedly the first person in Bermuda to fillet fish.
Working with his brother Claude, Pitcher had a full-scale operation in St David’s, where he made fish pots and rope and had a boat slip.
Although commercial fishing became his main occupation, he always had a boat on the go in his workshed, Kelvin Waddell recalled.
To make the boats, he would purchase ten pieces of wood planks from Burland Conyers and Marirea, now BCM McAlpine, transporting them to St. David’s on the roof of his car.
“My daughter tells me that it’s illegal, but I been doing it for too long for it to be illegal,” he told The Bermudian.
He collected cedar from people clearing their land, using the “crooked” pieces for the keel and the stem and the flatter pieces for the transom and the seats.
His boats, which were unfitted dinghies as opposed to fitted dinghies that were used for racing, were traditionally used as workboats, although later models were used as pleasure craft.
They were rowed or fitted with motors and were often entered in the Round the Island Seagull Race in the traditional class.
As boat building became more mechanized and fiberglass replaced wood, his boats were prized by traditionalists, who were keenly aware that Pitcher represented the end of a tradition.
Photographer Ian Macdonald-Smith who owned one of Pitcher’s dinghies told The Bermudian in 1993: “Its aesthetics, the classic lines, the way it was built, and the traditional style do it for me. His boats are floating works of art.”
Fellow admirer Douglas Selley said: “They represented Old Bermuda to me; they’re like a connection to the past.”
Estimates of how long it took to make one boat vary, from one month to four, depending on you talk to, but Pitcher was never idle.
The last boat he built was completed just months before his death in 1998. His fee was $4,500, Waddell recalled. A handful of his boats survive—one belonging to son Kenneth is in his old workshed, while another is owned by the National Museum of Bermuda—but the exact number is not known.
Pitcher told The Bermudian that someone would continue to build wooden boats when he was gone, but the more accurate forecast came from Macdonald-Smith.
“When these hands stop building boats, along goes the art of wooden boat building in Bermuda,” he said.
