Ed Botterell died at 93, he represented Canada at the 1964 Olympics.Supplied
Ed Botterell, born to a man celebrated for daring feats in the air, chased the wind at sea as one of Canada’s top sailors in the 1960s.
Mr. Botterell, who has died at 93, represented Canada at the 1964 Olympics, where he was a medal contender after early races only to finish a disappointing 11th.
He then sought the men’s North American sailing championship, finishing third in 1966 and second in 1967 in a race hosted by his home yacht club in Montreal.
A peppery, slight sailor, at 5-foot-7, 141 pounds (170 centimetres, 64 kilograms), he wore glasses and showed a widow’s peak at an early age, looking more like a suburban commuter than a first-class yachtsman.
As a teenager, he had emerged as a competitive sailor in dinghies. After moving to Vancouver as a young man, he competed in five Swiftsure races off Vancouver Island. In a career spanning six decades, it was said he raced 45,000 nautical miles, or about 10 return trips from Victoria, B.C., to Maui, Hawaii.
Away from the water, he was a prominent sailmaker who operated lofts in Toronto and Kingston.
Edward John Langdale Botterell was born in Ottawa on Jan. 24, 1931. He was the first of two children for the former Alice Maud Langdale Goater, the India-born daughter of a British army officer, and Henry John Lawrence Botterell, an accountant and bank clerk who was a fighter pilot in the First World War.
The boy carried the first name of his late uncle, a rower and football player with the Toronto Argonauts who survived being gassed at Ypres only to be killed later when shot in the chest by an enemy sniper while patrolling a trench in the front lines on the Western Front. Edward’s death spurred his younger brother, Henry Botterell, to volunteer. He served in the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Air Force, flying Sopwith Camels over the battle lines. When he died in 2003, aged 106, he was believed to be the last surviving fighter pilot of the Great War.
Ed Botterell was just 16 and still in high school when he sailed the 14-foot cat dinghy Vix to victory in a Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club regatta held on Lake Saint-Louis, outside Montreal. In 1948, at 17, he narrowly lost a semifinal contest to represent Canada in the debut of the Firefly class at the first postwar Olympic Games.
He also raced two-person International 14s, as well as three-crew Lightnings, a 19-foot sloop.
After moving to Vancouver, Mr. Botterell held classes for beginning sailors as a member of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.
When Prince Philip’s Bluebottle, a Dragon-class sloop, arrived in Vancouver for repairs in 1959, Mr. Botterell was selected among local sailors to join the three-person crew. Bluebottle, which was presented as a wedding gift to the royal couple by an English sailing club, was earlier loaned to a British sailing crew, which won a bronze medal at the 1956 Olympics on Port Phillip Bay, near Melbourne, Australia. With Mr. Botterell aboard, she won two of three races against nine other yachts in a series held on English Bay.
After starting a family and moving back to Montreal, the crack skipper put together a crew to challenge for an Olympic spot aboard Serendipity, a beautiful, 30-foot, mahogany sloop with 235 square feet of sail. Joining him in the Dragon-class boat were Lynn Watters, who had been with a crew that finished fifth in the same discipline at the 1960 Olympics, and Joe MacBrien, a naval veteran of the Second World War who later became a fighter pilot. While on an exchange tour with the U.S. Navy, he flew 66 combat missions during the Korean War, flying Panther jets off the deck of the carrier USS Oriskany, becoming the first Canadian to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by the United States.
Sailor Ed Botterell, Ed always had a fascination with flying. Because of his father being a WWI pilot Ed had a few joy rides in Air Force jets.Supplied
The veteran crew won the Olympic trials in Kingston harbour with three firsts, a second, a third and a fourth.
Racing on Sagami Bay, off the coast of Enoshima, Japan, the Canadian crew opened the Olympic regatta with consecutive fourth place finishes to be in third place overall. Medal hopes were dashed when they failed to finish better than seventh in the remaining races.
Mr. Botterell then set his sails on becoming the first Canadian to win the Clifford D. Mallory Cup, sponsored by the North American Yacht Racing Union, which was awarded annually to the top male skipper in a three-crew keel boat with spinnakers. The cup, a sterling silver tureen, is thought originally to have been presented to the family of Admiral Lord Nelson by Sultan Selim III as an expression of gratitude for the victory of the British fleet over the French at the Battle of the Nile.
After winning a regional championship at Buffalo in 1966, Mr. Botterell, joined by Roger Hewson and Sicotte Hamilton, competed in the Mallory Cup finals in the waters off Riverside, Conn. The Montrealers finished third after winning three of the eight races in the four-day, round-robin regatta, including the final, sailed in Shields, a 30-foot, fibreglass sloop.
With the 1967 championship slated for the waters of his Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club during Canada’s Centennial Year, Mr. Botterell declared to the press that he was determined to win. Joined by Mr. Hamilton and Ian Bruce, a Jamaica-born past and future Olympic sailor, the crew dominated other regional contenders to gain a spot among eight crews competing for the cup.
Going into the final race, Mr. Botterell’s boat was tied for the lead with a crew from the Toms River (N.J.) Yacht Club. The two Sabres, a racing scow designed and built in a Montreal suburb by Roger Hewson, who died last year, waged a criss-cross battle along Lake Saint-Louis at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. “Theirs,” reported the Montreal Star, “was a private, but friendly sailing war.”
With victory nearly at hand, Mr. Botterell made a tactical error around a race mark, losing positioning to finish fourth to his rival’s second place to lose the championship.
“I would call it a minor disaster,” Mr. Botterell told the Star after the race. “I made a mistake.”
Mr. Botterell took part in several Marblehead (Mass.) to Halifax races, as well as several Southern Ocean Racing Conference events, including serving as a crew member aboard the 61-foot fibreglass Sorcery, which won its class in a St. Petersburg-to-Venice race in the waters off Florida. Sorcery helped establish the Canadian design firm of Cuthbertson & Cassian, later called C&C Yachts, as a premier yacht builder.
After a career with Dominion Textile in Montreal, Mr. Botterell joined forces with sailmaker Ted Hood of Hood Sailmakers in Kingston, which was the site of the 1976 Olympic regatta. He eventually bought the firm, moving the loft to Toronto. He later moved to Doyle Sails, becoming a specialist in Nonsuch yachts.
Mr. Botterell died on Dec. 2 in Mississauga, Ont. He leaves a son, John Botterell, of Breckinridge, Colo., and a sister, Frances Marquette, of Houston, Tex. He was predeceased by his second wife, the former Garlyne Brummell, who died in 2002. A first marriage to the former Ann Vedder ended in divorce. She died in 2005. He was also predeceased by his Olympic crewmates, as Mr. Watters died on Christmas Day in 2012, at age 96, while Mr. MacBrien died in 2018 at age 93.
As his fighter pilot father’s longevity generated interest in his wartime exploits, it fell to Mr. Botterell to both accompany his father and represent him at events honouring military veterans. He was also asked on occasion to represent the uncle killed in action whose name he carried.
In 2010, Mr. Botterell delivered an exhortation at the dedication of a war memorial at Gravenstafel Ridge in Belgium, where his uncle had served. He read from the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen.
“At the going down of the sun and in the morning,” Mr. Botterell recited, “we will remember them.”