On January 10th, surfing lost one of its pioneers. Percy Blandford, a naval architect from Warkshire, England, was 101-years-old when he passed away.
Blandford was known for his boat and canoe designs. In the mid-1960s, he began creating cheap, hollow wooden surfboards that could be made at home for a fraction of the price of a store-bought surfboard at the time. In 1965, Boy’s Own Paper published a spread featuring his instructions, enabling aspiring British surfers without the means to purchase a surfboard to get in the water.
In 2013, he was interviewed by the Museum of British Surfing and spoke about his prototype boards and how the story came to be.
You can see a 1964 surfboard made by Blandford in the Museum of British Surfing’s 2014 exhibition, The First Wave – Surfers and their Stories.
