Most people know that the Club gave to HRH the Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh a Dragon class yacht called Bluebottle as a wedding present. Less well-known is that the following year Bluebottle crossed the Atlantic on board a British aircraft carrier, and was then campaigned all over North America. She sailed on lakes and rivers all over the North American continent, and wherever she went her crew, consisting of members of the RNSA, were given a burgee as a memento of the occasion. Her programme was a hectic one, and if the names of the clubs had originally been attached to the burgees it is perhaps not surprising that by the end of the summer nobody could remember from which club each one had been given.
Bluebottle returned to England and with her a pile of unnamed burgees. The burgees were sent to Buckingham Palace, who decided that the best solution to the problem of where to keep them would be to send them down to the Island Sailing Club, who had of course started the whole thing off with their Royal wedding gift.
These American burgees were exhibited in the bar of the club, without of course any name tallies. They encouraged visiting yachtsmen to add to the collection a burgee of their own club, but none was named. The racing flags of a few distinguished members were added over the fireplace. In the late 1980s I was asked to join the Committee, and felt that the time had come to name all the burgees in the collection, however they had been obtained. By then the introduction of masthead electronics was providing an excuse for discontinuing the old practice of flying a club burgee, and I felt that there was a need to record their designs before it was too late. And besides, surely Bluebottle's original collection should be named if it was possible to do so. This was long before the Internet, so identifying many of Bluebottle's American collection was very difficult. I corresponded with American sailing friends, and eventually identified about two thirds, and installed name tallies for each, as well as for the presentation burgees which they had attracted. This left a good number of gaps, and I set about filling these by writing to British yacht clubs to ask for one of their burgees in exchange for an Island one. This was successful, and attracted more presentation burgees from visiting yachtsmen.
In those days smoking was of course permitted in the bar, and there was a resultant need to wash the burgees every two or three years. The reinstallation of the washed burgees in the correct location had always been a problem, and I decided that a photographic record was needed to ensure that after washing, each went back in the correct place. So I set about photographing each one and recording the name of its club. I purchased two large photograph albums and indexed each burgee in them, one album to be kept in the bar, and the other in the safe in the office.
By the mid-1990s all six recesses were filled. Spaces have since been found for additional ones presented to the club over the years, but the foundation of the collection was undoubtedly Bluebottle's campaign.
In those days the configuration of the ceiling in the bar and dining room provided two recesses in each for the display of burgees. Shortly after I had filled both recesses, the Committee decided on a redecoration scheme which resulted in a third recess being available in each. Fortunately at about this time we were planning a transatlantic cruise involving a visit to many yacht clubs on the east coast of the United States and Canada, and I took with me a pile of ISC burgees. In this way, and by further correspondence, I was able to fill the new recesses. Also fortunately, the albums were designed so that additional pages could be added to them, and these were used for the photographs of the new burgees