GRAMPIAN MARINE ADVERTS

GRAMPIAN MARINE ADVERTS

Throughout its years of operation from the early 1960's to the late 1970's Grampian Marine built a number of boats under contract to other companies including US Boats, Triangle and George B. Walton prior to designing and building its own line of Grampian boats.. These boats were advertised by the various companies and Grampian ran many adverts for its own boats.

Tim Nye has been kind enough to share some information on these adverts that he found while browsing through material at the Toronto Reference Library. Included here is a description in his words of some of the information he uncovered as well as some of the adverts he found and that I have obtained from various sources. Thank you Tim for your research.

"The earliest mention of Grampian is in ads by U.S. Yachts of Connecticut, starting in May, 1963. The bottom of their ad says "PRODUCED FOR CANADIAN YACHTSMEN BY GRAMPIAN MARINE LTD. OF OAKVILLE, ONTARIO". The April, 1964 ad has asterisks on some models and at the bottom says "*Built in Canada for Canadian Yachtsmen".

U.S. Yachts ran large ads from '63 to '65, then small ads in '66 and by '67 only ran a few ads highlighting their 22' powerboat.

Also in '64 & '65, George B. Walton advertised the "Walton 37", noted at the bottom of the ads as "Built by Grampian Marine Ltd.". During 1965 George B. Walton company advertising tapered off and disappeared completely by '66, but by September '65 Grampian was advertising this boat as the "Classic 37".

It appears to me that Grampian initially was building boats on a contract basis for other firms such as U.S. Yachts and Walton. These firms contracted with famous designers such as Bill Tripp and Sparkman & Stevens and did the marketing, while each order went to Grampian for manufacture.

Those businesses, however, appear to have been on the wane in 1965 so Grampian started their own marketing in the U.S. Each year they added models such as the 420 and Albacore, until the late 60s when the first Grampian models were marketed. The first Grampian 26 advert below talks about the launch of the first Grampian 26.

By the latter part of 1970, after the G26 had sold 100 copies in the first year, Grampian offered the Triangle 32, Triangle 40, Classic 31 (now called Grampian 31), Classic 37 (now the Grampian 37) and U.S. 46 only as kit boats. Presumably the G26 was such a hit that it used up all of their production resources so building other (older) models as one-off jobs wasn't worth their time anymore. Grampian ads through the rest of the 1970s often mentioned kit boats being available, but only as footnotes." (Tim Nye, October 2007)

More adverts can be found at http://www.floridaboats.net/archive/grampian%20slide%20show/index.html
or to http://grampian26sailboat.blogspot.ca/p/blog-page_26.html