It is almost impossible to describe the history and development of one of the most famous German boatyards without describing the life of its founder and owner or vice versa. For this reason my article on Henry Rasmussen in KL No. 9 ought to be completed by an overview of the historic development of A & R, the boatyard founded by Henry Rasmussen and Georg Abeking in Lemwerder near Bremen in summer 1907.

Unfortunately hardly anything can be reported about Rasmussen's co-founder Georg Abeking except from the facts included in the article on Henry Rasmussen’s life published in KL No. 9: Abeking, born in 1881 in Lichtenwalde near Berlin, was an engineer at Nordseewerke where Rasmussen first met him during his time in Emden. Like Rasmussen, Abeking had decided to be self-employed in future, so they started together. Abeking obviously handled the whole business more as an investment as he left almost all business activities to Henry Rasmussen. Undoubtedly Georg Abeking provided the company with the major part of the necessary capital; but it is evident that in Rasmussen’s thoughts and among his many friends and contacts he never achieved more than a minor position. In his memoirs published in 1956 Rasmussen only mentioned him twice: when describing their decision to found A & R and with the single sentence "for my partner, Mr. Abeking, the times were too enervating, and his only wish was to leave A & R". – So he did in 1925, and as he preferred life in the mountains to sailing and dealing with boats, Abeking settled in Bavaria where he died in Ingolstadt in 1970. To return his partner’s investment, Rasmussen had to pawn his wood-depot. Even though it seems as if Georg Abeking somehow fell in to Rasmussen’s bad books, he has survived in the yard’s name as a partner – and US-customers usually talk about A & R as "Abeking’s".

In 1925 Abeking was followed by Edmund Schulz, a former Navy admiral, whose loans were transformed into shares but who left A & R after only five years.

After 1931 A & R was completely owned by Rasmussen and due to the special relationship between Georg Abeking and Henry Rasmussen we primarily think of Henry Rasmussen when talking about A & R.

Moreover there was no boatyard building fine sailing-yachts in the vicinity, so when he was offered an area on the banks of the river Weser, it seemed too good an oportunity to be missed for the start of their business.

The yard started – sheltered by the old silver-poplars on the river banks – with two wooden halls and a brick building. Everything always looked like a natural part of the enviroment. One of the halls was fully equipped for boatbuilding and contained all necessary machinery and equipment, including A & R’s own workshop for making brass fittings. The other hall gave room for winter-storage of boats and their equipment, 750 square metres without any supporting pillars inside. Here they also had painters’ and riggers’ workshops, in later years completed by their own sailmakers; the brick attachment lodged Rasmussen’s office close to the smiths’ workshop and the place for zincing metal parts. The whole yard was powered by an own 30 hp steam engine so that all in all it was almost independent.

This basic structure remained over the years, frequently changed and adjusted to the changing demands and needs of every special historic period: in 1910 A & R’s estate was enlarged by about 100% when the neighbouring Weser Yacht Club built a new harbour; in the twenties A & R built new halls for storage and building of boats with a stronger emphasis on ships and boats built from iron or steel; another enlargement occurred in the thirties when Rasmussen bought more estate close to the original place for storing wood and for the sawing department. By the end of the thirties A & R already owned an estate of about 45,000 sqm with 12,000 sqm of buildings. Since then the area has not been enlarged much, but nowadays three blocks of halls, in total covering an area of about 25,000 sqm, each of them up to 25 m high and equipped with a central heating and air-conditioning system securing an even room-climate and a controlled air-speed inside the halls, each of them allowing the daylight to get in through skylights that can be opened pneumatically, provide the yard with all necessary facilities for modern boat building (excluding plastic boats!).

As A & R worked for both, the German Navy as well as US customers, as Jimmy Rasmussen started intensive business with the US already in the twenties and as he also had good connections to the British, the yard fortunately did never suffer from any bombings or severe losses during either of the wars. As Rasmussen’s instinct for business and his flexibility always helped the yard to survive economic decreases and depressions, either by changing from building leisure boats to the construction and delivery of boats for the marines or even by starting the production of wooden toys and handcarts after WW II, the whole enterprise grew steadily over the years and survived its first fifty years in a rather healthy state while other boat yards founded in the same decade did not survive the historic and economic confusions of two wars. A & R, giving work to about 800 people in the late fifties, always followed the concept to do special work on an extraordinary high quality-level, in delivering elegant yachts and cruisers of all sizes including the famous Concordia series, boats for the Navy, working boats for German authorities or – still later on – passenger ferries and even catamaran passenger-ferries which nowadays connect Hamburg with several towns down the river Elbe. Starting with the wooden sailing-yachts we still sail (and love), A & R started to work with modern materials like aluminium already in the thirties; they delivered one of the first (if not the first) sailing yacht with a 5 hp auxiliary engine already in 1909, in the fifties they started working with laminated wood and in the eighties "modern" A & R begun to work with modern (non-rusting) steels. They always returned to wood as an important material in boat-building, e.g. when developing a special (wooden and therefore non-magnetic) mine-searcher for the German marines. Already in 1907, the first year of the yard’s existence, A & R was not " absolutely handy-craft", but the machinery was of such a high quality that some of the equipment was still in use 70 and more years later.

A & R always refused to build "plastic" boats, but a series of tests and research in the yard’s own laboratories on epoxy-glassfibre- and epoxy-carbon-materials helped today’s A & R to gain a special Navy order in the seventies, followed by the order for rotor-wings for wind energy units which have been continuously produced since 1993 (two subsidiaries have been founded to deal with this business).

Over all the years designing and building of sailing yachts, leisure-boats of all sizes, has steadily decreased. Although small leisure-boats and especially dinghies (until 1962 they built 832 units of the 4,12 m rowing and sailing-dinghy called "B-Jolle") made up a comparatively high portion of all leisure boats A & R built over the centuries (until the early seventies they built 2,626 smaller keelyachts and jolly-boats), the number of leisure boats being built did no longer exceed 1/3 of the yard’s whole output (notabene: during the periods from 1919 to 1939 and from 1950 to 1972 which totals to about 50% of the time of the yard's existence the number of leisure boats built well exceeded 50% of the yard's output!). Building and repairing of sailing yachts decreased steadily after WW II: wood was challenged by plastic as a building material for leisure boats, expensive high-quality boatbuilding met decreasing prices for modern materials (which A & R refused to handle in the boat-building sector) – factors that led to a dramatically decreasing request for wooden (leisure) boats in the sixties (the number of yachts A & R built decreased dramatically and steadily from 115 in 1960 to only 4 in 1970), and factors that enforced Herman Schaedla, Rasmussen’s grandson and nephew (see KL No. 9!) and todays’ owner and director of A & R to take leave of everything dealing with the sailing of smaller yachts. Instead of that A & R has concentrated on building special units for the Navy as well as for private customers and authorities’ use on the one hand, and on building and repairing of large motor- and sailing-yachts on an international level on the other hand. For this reason the name has been slightly changed in 1969 from the original "A & R boat- and yacht-yard" to "A & R ship- and yacht-yard", and for this reason they invested about 13 Mio. DM in the yard’s renovation and expansion during the seventies: a special lift has been installed to allow repairing of larger ships, the equipment for shifting boats and ships on the area has been renewed, and A & R bought a large area formerly owned by the neighbouring Weser Yacht Club (in exchange they got a new clubhouse and an extra hall for winter-storage) to turn the yard by about 90º southeast. The old silver-poplars have vanished. A & R today looks more like a modern factory than like a boat-yard existing since almost a century.

Herman Schaedla once said that A & R has never built ships but "toys for adults". They still love those boats old Henry Rasmussen formerly built, but they do not build them any longer for economic reasons. A & R still is a family-owned enterprise but its outward appearance has completely changed over the centuries due to economic demands. These changes made the former boat-yard "fit for the future", although nobody in this yard would work on the restoration of one of the old yachts Jimmy Rasmussen designed and built. While Rasmussen drew his benefits from "German navalism" as well as from his own European and atlantic, his international attitude, today’s A & R lives on specialisation. A second basis has remained unchanged: extraordinary quality and – if big sailing- or motor-yachts are built today – a marvellous elegance. These traditional habits allowed A & R to survive for almost a century and will let them stay in business for many more years.

The restoration of old yachts, especially of those designed by Henry Rasmussen, has become the profession of the youngest grandson of old Jimmy: Andreas Krause, now 35 years old, and the boatbuilder Edzard Wucherpfennig started their own boatyard about five years ago. Everything started when Andreas bought the old 50sqm windfall-yacht "Seefalke" designed by his grandfather in 1935 as No. 2941 for the Marine Regatta Club in Wilhelmshaven. The ship had to be restored completely and meanwhile she returned to her old beauty (those who were in Laboe in 1998 could admire the result of K & W's work on the quay). Besides working on several projects at the moment Angelita, an eight metre built in 1930 that won the olympic gold-medal in 1932, is about to be restored at K & W. When talking to the yard’s owners, the author hears old Jimmy’s enthusiasm: Andreas Krause explains that they don’t see the restoration of old yachts as a job, but they feel that it is a profession. Krause:"When dealing with old yachts we don't primarily do it because of the money, but we do it because we love these old beauties". – Their plan is to integrate the owners in each and every restoration project as much as possible to give the whole work a certain transperency within a boat yard open for new ideas, integrating the owners’ demands and experiences – again we feel the Rasmussen-spirit "the best way to build good yachts is the integration of one’s own and the owners’ regatta- and sailing-experiences". Also Andreas Krause and Edzard Wucherpfennig are active (regatta-) sailors and active participants on the German classic yacht scene – family-tradition in the word’s best sense.

To honour Henry Rasmussen, German Classic Yacht Club will celebrate again the "Henry Rasmussen Race – Nations’ Cup for Classic Yachts" during this year’s Laboe event on the weekend August 19 to August 22. There will be an extra race for twelve metres as three twelves built by A & R have already announced their participation: OSTWIND and WESTWIND now owned by the German Navy and ANITA, now owned by a very active cruising-association – and there is hope for some more twelves from Denmark, Norway and probably Sweden. This will be real "sailing in the spirit of yesteryears" as ECYU has put it in one of the association’s aims.

Information and photos have been partly taken from a German publication about A & R with kind permission of the author (Klaus Auf dem Garten: Abeking & Rasmussen – Eine Weserwerft im Spiegel des 20. Jahrhunderts, Hauschild 1998). For some of the photos of Henry Rasmussen the author has to thank the Rasmussen family. Another book which is available on A & R is Svante Domizlaff: Abeking & Rasmussen – Evolution im Yachtbau, Delius Klasing 1996.