FROM THE DEVIL TO THE DEEP BLUE SEA: Clare Allcard Tells All

Nov. 7/2025:  This isn’t really a sailing book, but in one sense it is sort of an ultimate sailing book—a story of sailing and the sea as a saving grace. I first met its author, Clare Allcard, in the spring of 2016, when I set out researching The Boy Who Fell to Shore, my biography of her foster son, Thomas Tangvald, who had disappeared at sea two years earlier. Though we met at Clare’s house high in the Pyrenees Mountains in the tiny micro-nation of Andorra, where she lived with her husband Edward Allcard far from the ocean, it was a very nautical encounter. For joining us was famed British nautical personality Tom Cunliffe and his wife Roz. Tom had prepared a slide show and regaled us all relating his early adventures aboard Johanne Regina, a 69ft traditional Baltic trading ketch Edward and Clare had also once roamed the world aboard.

Johanne Regina back in the days when Clare and Edward cruised aboard her

After that one festive afternoon, I spent a few days in the Allcards’ basement, studying and duplicating an immense archive of letters that Thomas Tangvald had written his foster parents over the years. In the evenings I chatted with Clare, and among other things she shared the story of how she and Edward met. I in turn shared this story with my readers in The Boy Who Fell to Shore, relating only the base facts—that Clare had been forcibly raped by a stranger at age 19, had been treated in psychiatric institutions, at times against her will, had endured four suicide attempts, many rounds of electroshock therapy, plus one very long bout of “deep narcosis” therapy. She wrote Edward a fan letter after reading of his sailing adventures in a discarded newspaper she found in her psychiatric ward. Her note somehow struck a chord in Edward, and he wrote back. They met in person and began their relationship after Clare was finally discharged at age 22.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my very brief account, published in 2022, was the first time this remarkable story had been made public. Not that Clare hadn’t been trying to tell it. She’s long since come to terms with the ordeal of her early life and first started writing this newly published book, From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea, in the 1990s. In it you will find a wonderfully honest, very detailed account of how a cheerful, outgoing teenaged nursing student from a happy family was transformed into an insecure, suicidal, repressed psychiatric patient.

This is obviously a very personal story, but it is also an important historical document in that it thoroughly describes what it was like to be a psychiatric patient, most particularly a female patient, in Great Britain during the 1960s. It is telling, for example, that the most critical moment in Clare’s recovery—her finally being able to consciously recall the fact that she had been raped—grows not out of any relationship with a doctor, but instead emerges in a close friendship with another patient. Likewise, the continual misdiagnosis of severe chronic pain Clare suffered in one arm, which only compounded her misery and depression, does not reflect well on the medical profession. Where doctors were only too willing to conclude the pain was psychosomatic, effectively blaming the patient, it eventually emerged it was the result of a botched surgical procedure.

Still Clare is not angry or accusatory in relating all this. The tone throughout is calm and compassionate, and she is willing to credit the doctors who did make very honest attempts to help her as best they could. Her primary concern is simply to let others know what happened to her. For this has become her credo: the best way to deal with psychic pain is to shed light upon it.

And yes, Edward’s thoughtful reply to Clare’s fan letter, and his ultimate willingness to include her in his own adventurous life, did play an important affirming role in Clare’s recovery.

Clare and Edward shortly after they married in South Africa in 1973

One of my clearest memories of my first visit to Andorra is of the evening Clare told me of how she and Edward met. We were the three of us sitting together in their living room. Edward at that point was 101 years old, and Clare, some 30 years his junior, clearly had her hands very full taking care of him. I wondered if on some level she might resent this, even just a little bit. I had an answer to this when Edward, who was hard of hearing, interrupted to ask what we were talking about. Clare turned to him with the most adoring look in her eyes, still alive with all the flame of young love, and said: “Oh, darling. I’m telling him about how you saved me.”

Clare and I became good friends and corresponded frequently by e-mail over the next few years. Even as I was writing my book about the foster son she lost in 2014, she lost her husband to old age in 2017, and then, most unfortunately, she also lost her daughter Kate to cancer in 2018. I was frankly amazed at how well Clare coped with all this tragedy. Never once did she complain or bemoan all she had lost, but only did all she could to make the best of things and ease the pain of others. She is, I have learned—as was the case in 1991 when she took in Thomas Tangvald—always helping people. Lending money, providing shelter, offering emotional support.

Clare aboard my boat Lunacy in the Spanish Virgin Islands in 2019. It was the first time she had sailed in the West Indies in 40 years!

I promise you will not regret reading the story of how she got that way.

To score your own copy click here. Or here if you want to buy direct from the publisher.

To read a great interview with Clare about her new book in the Daily Telegraph click here.

From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea

By Clare Allcard

Golden Duck Ltd. (2025)

240 pp.

NOTE: If you do you read this book and want to learn more about Clare’s life with Edward, be sure to check out her classic nautical memoir, A Gypsy Life, which tells of their 12 years sailing together on Johanne Regina. As recounted by Clare, they had many intriguing adventures, including being nearly sunk by a French fishing boat, getting raiding by the Italian Mafia, attacked by the Ethiopian navy, and jailed as spies in Yemen. Very good stuff!!!