In 1946, a boatbuilder on the River Thames looked at America's biggest cruiser brand and decided he could beat it. Nearly 80 years later, his boats are still trading anywhere from £35,000 to £130,000, depending on length, year and condition.
Meet the Bates Star Craft, built by Leonard "Len" Bates in Chertsey, Surrey. Bates sketched the first hull himself, then sent it to Fred Cooper for a second opinion, the designer behind the "Miss England" hydroplanes, boats that had chased the world water speed record through the 1920s and '30s. That's like getting a Formula 1 aerodynamicist to check your daily driver.
Cooper's answer wasn't what Bates expected. He wasn't there to make the Star Craft fast. He was there to check whether the hull worked at all. Bates had been torn between a chine hull and a round-bilge one. Cooper's call: round-bilge, if you want the everyday market rather than the racing crowd. Bates listened. He later described the result as sitting somewhere between an American Richardson and a Chris-Craft cruiser, the exact two brands he was gunning for. A speed record designer, shaping a boat built for gentle river cruising. Odd pairing on paper. It worked.
Even the engines were a compromise. Bates wanted Lincoln automobile units. He ended up importing American Chryslers instead, at a price that stung, to power a boat built specifically to stop people buying American in the first place.
The engineering, decoded
The build spec held steady as the range grew. Early hulls: double diagonal mahogany, mahogany decks and cabin sides. Over time, teak took over, decks first, then hulls, ending up double diagonal teak on oak. When W Bates & Son showed a 25ft Star Class cruiser at the 1948 motor show, a magazine at the time described the planking as mahogany "worked on a double diagonal system on English oak timbers and main framing," with a copper-sheathed bottom on export models. Not the fastest way to build a boat. The most durable one. That's the whole reason these things are still on the water, and still for sale, eight decades on.
The £300 boat that undercut a black market
The first Star Craft run: 25-footers (7.6m), sold as hire boats in 1946 for £200 to £300. Context matters here. Britain in 1946 was flat broke on dollars. Buying American, anything American, was hard and expensive. According to the surviving Bates history, people were paying wild sums just to get an American light cruiser like a Chris-Craft or a Richardson into the country at all, and once they had one, they could flip it for up to seven times what Bates was charging for his own boat.
Bates read the market perfectly. £200 to £300 for a homegrown alternative looked like a steal next to that. Demand landed almost instantly. He built more than 100 of the 25-footers before the range scaled up, eventually running from 20ft (6m) day cruisers to 47ft (14.3m) ocean-going motor yachts.
Even the naming got a little chaotic. Bates' wife Beryl wanted to call the fleet White Star Line. Taken. So she pivoted to stars: Silver Star, Evening Star, Golden Star, White Star. By the time the hire fleet hit two dozen boats, the family was apparently flipping through an astronomy book for inspiration.
What one of these actually costs today
That original build spec still shows up in every listing, and so does the range's spread in size. Bonhams carried an estimate of £65,000 to £70,000 for a 1961 33ft (10.06m) Star Craft named Belle Epoque, sold at Henley-on-Thames. Double diagonal teak on oak, 9ft 9in (2.97m) beam, a shallow 3ft (0.91m) draft built for serious Thames running, twin Watermota 1600cc petrol engines. One classic yacht broker puts total surviving numbers of the 33ft model at around 35 boats.
Go bigger and the 1968 40ft (12.19m) Sudena is independently listed at £80,000. Six berths, three cabins, two heads, double diagonal teak-on-oak hull under a mahogany superstructure, repowered in 1982 with twin 1500cc BMC "Captain" diesels.
Or go smaller. A 1960 33ft (10.06m) example, Shermini II, listed by an independent broker at a £35,000 guide price. Double diagonal teak, copper-fastened to steam-bent oak, flared bow, long keel, twin 35hp BMC "Captain" diesels.
Current listings back up that wider range. Henley Sales & Charter has offered a 1962 40ft Star Craft, Rajdhani, at £129,950. The Star Craft Owners' Club's own for-sale listings currently include Louis Phillipe, a 40ft flying-bridge Star Craft, at £95,000, and Hippocampus, a restored 1960 33-footer, at £79,500.
