On February 18, 1948 the Pious Puffin II was registered in Gibraltar under the name of Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid. The Captain was a British WWI flying ace credited with seven aerial victories (but not, as previously indicated in this history, the one who shot down the Red Baron). He was a Member of Parliament for periods between 1922 and 1945. His first marriage was to Ruth Mary Clarisse Ashley, and they had a son, Michael who is the founder of Hippo Point Sanctuary in Kenya (which we’ll come back to below).

De Vries Lentsch indicated, in a letter to the Curtises in 1974, that Captain Cunningham-Reid had purchased a “Lemsteraak” type of yacht prior to WWII. At the conclusion of the war he sought to order a new one, but in 1947 it was not allowed for British subjects to spend foreign currency in the building of a yacht abroad. In 1940 the Captain and Ruth had divorced and he was now having an affair with heiress Doris Duke Cromwell, so she agreed to pay for the yacht and present it to him as a gift. The original price of the Puffin was $80,000.

However, in the course of the construction, Captain Cunningham-Reid ordered a number of alterations and extras. The price became “much higher”, and while Mrs. Cromwell did pay one or two of the upgrades, she refused to pay the last one. The shipyard sued and put a lien on the Puffin in the south of France, but lost the case. The Captain said that it was not he, but Mrs. Cromwell who ordered the yacht. But by this time the two of them were no longer on speaking terms, and she was remarried to her second husband, Porfirio Rubirosa (in 1947).

Jon was contacted in June of 2009 by a man from Kenya who was putting some items up for auction in Oxford. Until this event, we did not know of the Kenya connection, or any of this history, except for what De Vries Lentsch had indicated. The items included the ship’s bell, a cocktail shaker engraved with a penguin, and a book of photos given at the original dedication of the Pious Puffin II by the shipyard to the Cunningham-Reids. Apparently these items had come down through the family and Michael Cunningham-Reid who moved to Kenya in 1940. The good news is that the auction was won by one of our own “friends of the Pious Puffin”, and the items will continue to be kept by one of the former owners.

One curious item in the book is a dedication to “Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham-Reid”. It has not yet been determined when the Captain married his second wife, Dorothea Helen, but it now appears that both the Captain and Doris were remarried by the time the Puffin was delivered, which certainly must have contributed to the lack of a final payment.