Twilight, speaker Dennis Craggs

SOUTH SEA BUBBLE, SHIPBUILDING, ACCOUNTANCY AND SCUBA DIVING

New members are normally asked to give a talk introducing themselves within a short time of their induction and at Tuesday’s twilight meeting of Henley Rotary Club at the Red Lion Hotel it was the turn of Dennis Craggs, a retired accountant, who joined the club in November.

He gave a comprehensive account of what he called the Craggs Dynasty, which started with George Craggs, his seventh great grandfather, who was born in 1610 in County Durham.

Although they were not direct ancestors, he described the activities of James Craggs the elder and James Craggs the younger, both Members of Parliament who were involved in the “South Sea Bubble,” as were 462 members of the House of Commons and 112 Peers. The elder died in some disgrace, but the younger, who was somewhat less involved, died of smallpox before his father, and his tomb is in Westminster Abbey.

Following the original George Craggs, there were four more generations before Robert Craggs, who was born in 1799, started the family’s connection with shipbuilding, later opening a yard at Middlesbrough, where they built iron and steel steamers. Robert’s second son, another George Craggs (and Dennis’s great-grandfather) left the Middlesbrough firm to take over a small barge building yard in Goole in Yorkshire with his son Herbert.

Dennis’s father (Herbert’s son) studied as a mechanical engineer and spent some time in Germany in the period between the wars when he lived in the house of an ex-Colonel on the Kaiser’s staff. Meanwhile Herbert had purchased Clelands, a shipbuilding and repairing yard at Wallsend on the Tyne and Dennis’s father moved to Newcastle to run it for his father.

During the war they built deep sea and salvage tugs and, post-war, six barges for the Burmah Oil Company before the communist came to the Burma. The business was sold to Swan Hunters in the mid-1960s and the yards were nationalised in 1977 and all but closed for shipbuilding in 1985.

Dennis himself had taken an engineering degree at Oxford in 1973 but eventually chose accountancy as a profession and, after qualifying with Coopers and Lybrand in Newcastle in 1976, spent four years in practice in the Bahamas, taking up scuba diving, one of the highlights of which was a visit to Micronesia where he discovered the wrecks of Japansese warships.

After a couple of years in practice in Edmonton, Alberta, he returned to London and worked for Robert Maxwell’s companies and, after his death, became chairman of the trustees of one of the pension schemes in attempting to recoup the losses.

Then he worked for other interesting entrepreneurs, notably the Barclay brothers in the motor trade, and spent the last 15 years working for American investors in Europe in the self-storage sector, retiring fully about two years ago.

His present activities include being a trustee of a number of charities including PACE in Aylesbury, providing education, therapy and support for children with cerebral palsy, and he is very much involved with the Rivertime Trust, crewing on the boat and assisting with the organisation’s accessibility regatta at Bisham sports centre. He is also treasure of the Regatta for the Disabled at Phyllis Court Club. And of course now a member of Henley Rotary Club.

Other interests include part ownership of three racehorses, walking in Patagonia and South Africa near Rorkes Drft and photography.

John Grout gave the vote of thanks. Later in the meeting Barry Prior reported that charity auction held last week at the Henley Golf Club had raised £1,500.