The recent biography of Johan Anker, published in May 2003, contains some interesting information about Christian Jensen, his partner from 1905 – 1915. As frequently happened when he was alive, there has been a tendency to treat the historic personage of Christian Jensen as an appendage to Johan Anker, rather than as an interesting subject in his own right. Let us try to do justice to Christian Jensen alone, then, and gather the threads of his life, which at times was quite eventful.

Christian Jensen was born (1871) and bred in Vollen. His ancestors were connected with the commerce of the sea, captains on their own sailing ships. At an early age he joined Gudmundsen’s, the best boatyard in Vollen, as an apprentice in boatbuilding. Gudmundsen was a demanding taskmaster, but Jensen thrived and learnt the trade thoroughly. In 1897, as a young man in his mid-twenties, he took over the yard from Gudmundsen when the latter retired.

At the same time he was a keen sailor and had ambitions to be a yacht designer. In SEILAS, the Norwegian yachting magazine founded in 1906 by members of the Royal Norwegian Yacht Club, and still going strong today, Christian Jensen wrote a small anecdote many years later (in the early 1930s) about his dramatic sailing experience in the 1890s of being asleep down in the cabin one night when the sailing boat he was on as crew crashed over a rock in the treacherous waters to the south of Tonsberg. He and his friend, the owner and captain, were on their way home from Risør, having won a regatta. They had celebrated their victory with a good deal of liquor, and had set their compass wrong. The yacht heeled right over, but righted itself half-full of seawater. Very subdued, they made their way to the nearest port, Stavern. This literary evidence from the hand of Jensen at least shows that as a young man Christian Jensen was quite adventurous – he also mentions that he had once fallen overboard in the North Sea ( on a large merchant vessel?) and had been miraculously rescued. So he was used to the sea elements and must have put his sailing experiences to good use when he started to design yachts.

As a young man Christian Jensen learnt the basic techniques of design under Director G. A. Sinding at the Kristiania Technical School. Sinding designed boats were most popular at the time. In 1904 he took a break from the duties of being boatbuilder at his own yard to study in Great Britain and Germany. He visited the most famous designers of the day – William Fife in Scotland and Max Oertz in Germany. This was all thanks to a government funded scholarship – he must have been considered very promising to get such a scholarship. Norway was still in the Union under Sweden at the time and was a relatively poor country..

We have more evidence from the early years of the 20th century about his boatbuilding activities before Johan Anker came onto the scene at Vollen. A boatbuilding contract between Christian Jensen and one of his customers, Fernando Ringvoll of the Royal Norwegian Yacht Club, was published not long ago in CLASSIC LINES (the membership magazine of the Norwegian Classic yacht Club 1995 – 2000).. One can see from this what a tough business boat building was – the cards seem to be mostly stacked in favour of the customer, and woe betide late delivery or shoddy work! Christian Jensen had quickly established his reputation as a thorough and quality conscious boatbuilder who always delivered on time at a reasonable cost.


In 1905, the same year that Norway gained her independence from Sweden, Christian Jensen and Johan Anker became partners. While Jensen was the conscientious boat builder par excellence, Anker had all the social contacts necessary for new orders to be placed at the yard. If we look at the list of yachts built and designed at the Anker and Jensen yard at Vollen , we see that in the early years of the partnership Jensen did do some designing, but there was gradually an increasing tendency for Anker to specialise in this, while Jensen had to cope with the everyday running of the yard.

In the next part, I will try and provide details about the yachts which Christian Jensen designed (and built) up to the advent of Johan Anker as his partner.