You can see why the true-life story of the Helga Maria put playwright Bea Roberts in mind of an Ealing comedy. It is a tale of British pluck, high-seas adventure and small-town amateurism.
In 1991, a crew set off from Whitby to the Arctic island of Jan Mayen in an unseaworthy vessel. The purpose of their 3,000-mile voyage was to honour William Scoresby, a local navigator and inventor of the barrel crow’s nest (he also inspired the name of Lee Scoresby in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
