Francis Chichester
Sir Francis Charles Chichester KBE (17 September 1901 – 26 August 1972) was a British businessman, pioneering aviator and solo sailor.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for becoming the first person to sail single-handed around the world by the clipper route and the fastest circumnavigator, in nine months and one day overall in 1966–67.
At the age of eighteen Chichester emigrated to New Zealand where in ten years he built up a prosperous business in forestry, mining and property development, only to suffer severe losses in the Great Depression.
After returning to England in 1929 to visit his family, Chichester took flying lessons at Brooklands, Surrey, and qualified as a pilot.
He then took delivery of a de Havilland Gipsy Moth aircraft, which he intended to fly to New Zealand, hoping to break Bert Hinkler's record solo flight back to Australia on the way.
Finding that he was unable to carry enough fuel to cross the Tasman Sea directly, Chichester had his Gipsy Moth fitted with floats borrowed from the New Zealand Permanent Air Force, and went on to make the first solo flight across the Tasman Sea from East to West (New Zealand to Australia).
Some hours before making his turn, close to local noon when the Sun was to his north, Chichester made two observations with his sextant to check his dead-reckoning course.
[3] Chichester then decided to circumnavigate the world solo; he made it to Japan but at Katsuura, Chiba, he collided with an overhead cable, sustaining serious injuries.
He purchased 15,000 surplus Air Ministry maps, initially pasting them onto boards and making jigsaw puzzles out of them, and later founded his own successful map-making company.
The voyage was also a race against the clock, as Chichester wanted to beat the typical times achieved by the fastest fully crewed clipper ships during the heyday of commercial sail in the 19th century.
[a] His global voyage was the first to be commercially sponsored, with the International Wool Secretariat's Woolmark featured on the bows of Gipsy Moth IV and Chichester's baseball cap.
Chichester was also honoured in 1967 by a newly issued 1/9d (one shilling and nine pence) postage stamp, which showed him aboard Gipsy Moth IV.
This went against an unwritten tradition of the General Post Office, because Chichester was neither a member of the royal family nor dead when the stamp was issued.
His younger son, Giles Chichester, was for many years a British politician, and Conservative Member of the European Parliament for South West England and Gibraltar.
