Building a wooden boat is an art that is almost lost. What else is lost with it?

Brought to you by the New Zealand Maritime Museum

Robert Brooke speaking at a Tino Rawa Trust event

Robert Brooke, who completed his apprenticeship at P. Vos Ltd from 1955-1960, was one of the last true young apprentices in wooden boat building. He started building clinker dinghies and decades later, he went on to eventually lead New Zealand’s marine industry apprenticeships program. We spoke with Robert in 2022. 

Robert believes there is something special about making things with your hands, and in his time, children built model yachts in their workshop class that were displayed and judged at the end of the year. 

“Some of the things were magnificent,” he says. 

“In my time in the workshop we built model yachts. The kids had to do this kind of thing.”

Robert strongly believed that children needed to go beyond technical drawing: they needed to think about what they needed to make, and how to make it. With three other teachers, he developed a new program called graphics that was very successful. 

But with the advent of computers, he believes that design skills are lost, as is the collaboration that happens from boys and girls coming together and working together in a workshop to make an object and to think about what they need to do to make it. 

He says that when he was young he benefited from working alongside others. “We always worked alongside someone else. If there was a problem to be solved a good builder would ask the junior what should we do here. It was wonderful. All my life with my education I believe that it’s so important that pupils should get to work and understand the thing [that is being made].” 

 “We don’t do that now. We work in computer rooms. We do technology. I think they have lost basics. I think it will come up. I feel there is room for this kind of thing. 

“I am a great one for believing you can go into a workshop and make something.”

Robert Brooke gifted his collection of boat plans to the New Zealand Maritime Museum and they can be viewed on the Museum’s website:

Robert was interviewed in 2022 by Zoe Hawkins on behalf of the Maritime Museum. 

Photos / from the collection of the Percy Vos Trust, and Eke Panuku