sir james dyson yacht

• Email newsletter
• MY MOODBOARD

James Dyson retrofits classic steam yacht

• Image tools
• Email image
• Previous Page

Sir James Dyson, the renowned English industrial designer has refitted a 300 feet classic steam yacht named Nahlin.

The 1930 steam yacht Nahlin was completely restored at Blohm + Voss (B+V), a German yacht building firm. The yacht has been refitted with new diesel engines and period-correct paneling and moldings.

Sir James Dyson, who is best known as the inventor of the Dual Cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, has refurbished the classic yacht and has re-launched it. Nahlin was originally designed by G.L. Watson for a British heiress and was later owned by the Romanian Royal Family. The 1,574 ton Nahlin, which is 91.4m in length and can hold 58 crew and 351 passengers, was built for Lady Annie Henrietta Yule in 1930.

The historic super yacht was involved in the abdication of King Edward VIII, and has spent much of the last 70 years as a floating restaurant on the river Danube until it was reportedly bought by Dyson. It is believed that Dyson has shelled out GBP25 million ($38.7 million) for the retrofit project.

!{Model.Description}

!{Model.Body}

RELATED NEWS

One to Watch

Light + Tech

Related projects.

Football Association of Irelands flooring emphasises mobility of the game

Discover content from our architecture and design magazines

Email Newsletter

Subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter

Progressive Media International Limited. Registered Office: 40-42 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8EB, UK. Copyright 2024, All rights reserved.

Login or Create account

Forgotten password

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

A who's who of Britain's legal offshore tax avoidance

Sir stelios haji-ioannou, easyjet.

The founder of the successful Luton-based budget airline, who no longer runs it. He is listed as a Jersey bank client. Inherited wealth from Greek-Cypriot shipowner father. He has described himself as "British by birth". His spokesman says, however: "Sir Stelios is not – and never has been – resident in the UK for tax purposes. He has been a Monaco resident since the mid-1980s (ie when he was a teenager) when his family relocated there from Athens."

Sir James Dyson, vacuum cleaners

The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner is worth up to £2.5bn and owns the £15m Dodington Park estate in Wiltshire. He set up a 1985 onshore children's trust to hold 30% of company shares. His spokesman said: "The trust was dissolved and the shares distributed to the beneficiaries." His wife and his three children, Sam, Jake and Emily (who runs a fashion shop in Notting Hill, west London), also appear as past beneficiaries of a offshore trust in the Channel Islands. The spokesman said that trust was never actually used, had no assets and had not avoided tax. In 2010, Dyson transferred shares offshore to Malta, another tax haven. Following criticism, the move is being unwound. The firm said: "Dyson is a UK owned company, and paid taxes of over £100m in 2013. The administrative companies referred to in Malta will soon be inactive." [see footnote]

Laura Ashley, fashion

The celebrated late designer moved to St Tropez at one point to avoid UK tax. Her late husband, Bernard Ashley, then set up an offshore trust in 1985, after Laura's death, and after the company went public. Five years later he sold out to foreign investors for £60m. The children appear to be named as beneficiaries. Neither their daughter Jane nor son Nick, who runs a menswear shop, wanted to comment.

Sir Donald Anderson, shipowner

The late Old Etonian chairman of the shipping line P&O passed wealth down the generations. His Sir Donald Anderson Trust records beneficiaries as four grandchildren, Caspar and Barclay Fox, Tamara Onslow and Fenella Dernie. Caspar, now a 42-year-old tax lawyer in London, declined to comment.

Khoo Kay Peng, Malaysian tycoon

Worth up £400m and named as a Jersey offshore client. In Britain, he occupies the £30m Rossway estate near Berkhamsted. Currently owns 40% of the Laura Ashley fashion business. His divorce battle in the UK courts with former beauty queen Pauline Chai scandalised Mr Justice Holman this year, who said it was a piece of "appalling litigation" at phenomenal expense. "Neither of them currently pays any English taxes whatsoever." He will be a non-dom. Peng declined to comment.

Sir Ken Morrison, supermarkets

Jersey trusts protect the billion-pound wealth of the 83-year-old Bradford-born Morrisons supermarket founder and a large number of his family members. He declined to comment, as did his daughter Andrea Shelley, who occupies Thimbleby Hall in Yorkshire and has had held shares worth more than £300m. Other big shareholders are his niece and her husband, Susan and Nigel Pritchard, who relocated for a while to Jersey in 1999.

Martin Read , software

Was Britain's highest-paid executive the year he received £27m as head of the Logica software firm 1993-2007. The Jersey trust was a Furbs (funded unapproved retirement benefit scheme) to provide him with extra money. A government efficiency adviser, he told us: "This trust has been set up for the perfectly legitimate purpose of providing pension benefits, has been operated with full visibility to HMRC at all times and is not the subject of any dispute with HMRC. I have paid income tax on all the pension contributions made by Logica." He said he was "a UK resident taxpayer who has been meticulous in all my dealings with HMRC".

Edward Lumley , insurance

More than £100m in Jersey trusts benefits at least 40 Lumley, Hemphill and St Aubyn relatives, many living in the UK. Henry Lumley, in Bagshot, Surrey, told us: "My grandfather was a successful Australian businessman who ... set up discretionary trusts for his assets and his successors in 1940. These trusts ... comply with UK law and returns are made to HMRC in accordance with treaties set up between the two countries. If beneficiaries receive income from the trusts, they have and always will return them in their annual tax returns in the normal way and are subject to UK tax."

Bruce Gyngell, TV

An Australian tycoon, the late Bruce Gyngell founded TV-am and set up Jersey trusts for his wife and children – one of whom, David, was in the headlines this year for brawling with James Packer on Bondi Beach. His widow, Kathy, works for the rightist Centre for Policy Studies. She said: "I am choosing not to comment."

Rothermere family, Daily Mail

A Lady Rothermere trust is recorded in Jersey. It appears to refer to the late Lord Rothermere's second wife, Maiko Lee, of Korean nationality. She did not respond to our invitations to comment. Rothermere's son Jonathan by his first wife inherited the Daily Mail, also through a Jersey trust, and a Bermuda-registered offshore entity. Jonathan is estimated to be worth £760m. He has not denied claiming tax concessions as a "non-dom", on the grounds that his father lived in Paris. He resides at Ferne Park, a stately home in Wiltshire built for him by architect Quinlan Terry.

Bernie Madoff , fraudster

The names of Bernie Madoff and of MSI (Madoff Securities International), the London end of his financial operation, are among the most unexpected entries in Kleinwort Benson's Jersey records. Madoff is serving 150 years in a federal prison for masterminding a £38bn fraud – one of the biggest ever on Wall Street. Shortly before his downfall in 2008, MSI funded one of his more notorious purchases – a £4m yacht, called the Bull, to be registered in his wife's name and moored on the French Riviera.

This article includes content provided by Spotify. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue' .

• Tax avoidance
• Corporate governance
• Tax and spending

More on this story

Cameron crackdown on tax havens 'purely political gesture', says Tory peer

Nando's using secretive tax haven trust to avoid inheritance tax bills

How does nando's avoid paying tax in the uk - video.

Labour’s 10p tax rate dismissed as ‘gimmick’

Tycoons Bruce Gyngell and Edward Lumley set up offshore tax empires

Labour leader Ed Miliband can be bold on offshore tax havens

Britain rules the world of tax havens, Queen is warned

David Cameron talking tough on tax as G8 nears – but what can he deliver?

Most viewed.

From Edward VIII to James Dyson: the yacht that tells a tale of British wealth

In the early years of this century, soon after he began moving production of his bagless vacuum cleaner from Wiltshire to south-east Asia , James Dyson bought a superb yacht. The Nahlin is exemplary in the beauty of its lines and instructive in its history, though how much of this history Dyson understands or relishes is hard to know. Despite spending a fortune (at least £25m) on its restoration, Dyson has never talked publicly about his yacht, no more than he has about his purchase of Singapore’s most expensive flat (£43m) and its sale soon after, at a loss. For a time, a kind of omertà prevailed about the vessel’s ownership among its team of restorers, though to own and care for such an elegant piece of naval architecture would surely be no shame.

What Dyson certainly knows is that it was on the Nahlin that King Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis Simpson shed any discretion and “came out” as a couple – a relationship reported across the world, though not at the time in Britain – precipitating the crisis that ended with the king’s abdication a few months later, in December 1936. “The cruise of the Nahlin” became an inevitable chapter in any telling of the event, though how the king came to be aboard such a mysteriously named vessel tended to be overlooked. In fact, the name is said to have Native American origins, and reportedly means “fleet of foot” – the yacht’s figurehead wears a chieftain’s headdress – and the king was aboard because the Foreign Office, worried by social unrest in France, had warned against his original plan to rent a villa there.

So instead he rented the Nahlin, to avoid the fuss that a voyage in the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, would create and perhaps also because the Nahlin, commissioned only six years earlier, appealed to his appetite for cocktail modernity. Fuss, however, was unavoidable. At Šibenik, the Dalmatian port where the king and Mrs Simpson boarded the yacht, an exuberant crowd of 20,000 turned up and (thanks to reports in the American press) showed as much interest in her as in him; at sea, two Royal Navy destroyers, the Grafton and the Glowworm, accompanied the Nahlin wherever she went – a leisurely August progress down the Adriatic, through the Corinth canal to the Greek islands, and eventually to Istanbul. The “nanny-boats”, as Lady Diana Cooper called them; she and a few other prominent society figures were also aboard, as well as a crew around 60-strong.

Of course, the term yacht is misleading. No sails have ever been involved. The Nahlin, like its bland modern equivalents, was a yacht only in the sense that its sole purpose was its owner’s pleasure, the owner being in this case a Lady Yule. Launched in 1930 from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown & Co – builder of celebrated liners such as Cunard’s two Queens – it measures 300ft in length and was originally powered by four steam turbines. Characteristically of the steam yacht, of which the Nahlin was among the very last examples, its hull preserves elements of the sailing ship, with a curved clipper bow and a counter stern, each stretching well beyond the waterline. The shape and colour of steam yachts – white hull, cream funnel – made people think of swans. Their costs and months of idleness meant they were an indulgence that only the richest magnates on either side of the Atlantic could afford: JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Sir Thomas Lipton.

And Lady Yule? She was thought to be the richest widow in England. How had she come by her money? Jute, was the short answer. A longer one involves a story of British innovation and industrial expansion overseas that Dyson might recognise, beginning in the 1820s when Dundee manufacturers began to look for an alternative to hemp in the making of sacking, rope and sailcloth. Jute was cheap and reliably available from Bengal in British India, but it was tough and brittle and broke easily when it was spun or woven. After years of experiment, it was successfully made pliable by the application of whale oil, of which Dundee as a whaling port had no shortage.

The demand for jute fabric and jute rope boomed, and Dundee enjoyed a near monopoly until the 1870s, when British industrialists began to open jute mills in Bengal itself because, as economic historian Morris D Morris has pointed out, “jute manufacturing was not a complicated process [and] cheap labour was a very great advantage”. Bengal had five jute mills in 1870 and 69 jute mills in 1914, as cheaper Indian-made jute conquered foreign markets previously served by Dundee, and exports of jute cloth from India grew 272 times over the same period; even better was to come with the first world war, when the word “sandbag” must have sounded like a ringing cash register in the inner ear of every Indian jute trader.

The Yule family benefited enormously. Annie Henrietta (Lady) Yule was the daughter of Andrew Yule, the son of a small-town draper in Scotland who arrived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) in 1863 as an agent representing several British firms, and whose family eventually owned tea estates, coalmines, cotton and flour mills, railways, and 2,400 square miles of productive land – as well as the jute mills that Andrew Yule’s nephew and successor, Sir David Yule, had taken an especial interest in expanding. Sir David was a shy workaholic who rarely left Kolkata. Aged 42, he married another Yule, his cousin Annie Henrietta. When he died in 1928, soon after ordering his steam yacht, the Times described him as“one of the wealthiest men, if not the wealthiest man, in the country”.

Where did it all go? Lady Yule and her daughter Gladys made a long and expensive world cruise in the Nahlin in the early 1930s. She invested heavily and sometimes unwisely in the British film industry; she opened a stud farm. She had, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “strong religious opinions, a sharp tongue, and imperious habits”. Her attempt to force teetotalism on the Nahlin’ s crew was probably not a success. At any rate she sold the ship to King Carol II of Romania in 1937, after which the Nahlin disappeared from the map of British interests – missing, presumed dead – until an English yacht broker, Nicholas Edmiston, discovered it moored in the Danube as a floating restaurant in the 1990s. It passed briefly through the ownership of another Brexit-supporting tycoon, Sir Anthony Bamford, before Dyson bought it in 2006.

This week, thanks to the wonder of digital ship location, I traced the yacht’s present whereabouts to the Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg; it had reached there from the Caribbean via Gibraltar and Falmouth. Blohm+Voss spent millions of Dyson’s money when the yacht was first restored and re-engined, and it may be there now for its annual overhaul. The shipyard is old and distinguished, and still fills the harbour with the sounds of building and repair work. They even build luxury yachts there; the clients include Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Putin.

Nothing remains of the Nahlin’s birthplace at Clydebank, apart from a large crane that stands useless at the river’s edge. Ships, like bagless vacuum cleaners and jute, are made elsewhere.

Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist

• AI Generator

Sir James Dyson's Motor Yacht, Nahlin, Moors Off Cornish Coast

• Standard editorial rights
• Custom rights
• James Dyson - Industrial Designer ,
• Business Finance and Industry ,
• Businessman ,
• Colour Image ,
• G7 Summit ,
• Lifestyles ,
• No People ,
• Politics and Government ,