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Dragon
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In 1927 the Royal Gothenburg Yacht Club organized a design competition to find a new type of sailing boat. It was to be aimed for younger sailors and the cost of construction should be cheaper then other popular racing classes of the time, such as square meter yachts and Int meter rule yachts..

John Anker had just designed a small yacht with long overhangs and a small cabin that made the yacht liveble for several days. Anker sent in the drawings for this yacht and won the design competition with it. The name of the design? It was the Dragon of course!
The first Dragons for the Royal Gothenburg Yacht Club where built in 1928 and they order 7 yachts to be built in the first year.
The Dragon class soon became very popuarl, especially on the west cost of Sweden but soon spread to other coutries. Denmark and Norway where of course amoung the first to pick up the class but it soon reached  Germany and Great Brittan.
The Dragons came to Great Brittan in 1933 due to a A H Ball who had visited Scandinavia during a sailing oliday and he fell inlove with the design.  After his vaccasion he brought  the design with him home to the UK and showed it to several other member in the Clyde Yacht club where he was a member. Soon several members of the Clyde Yacht club had ordered dragons and in 1936 the first races where held on the river Clyde with no less then 14 Dragon yachts eantering the race! The very same year the first International dragon race was held on the Clyde and the winning boat was a Swedish boat.
The first British built Dragon was to be completed in 1938, owned by a Mr J.H Hulme and named Anita. The same year saw no less then 25 dragons racing on the Clyde so the class was getting popular very fast! By the outbreak of WW2 there where no less then 120 Dragons registered in Great Brittan, spread over several places such as the river Clyde, the Solent and
During the war not many Dragons where built, but as soon as the war was over yachts started to be built again. They where seen as a cheaper alternative to the International Meter Rule Yachts.
In Great Brittan the design got a good boost after the war from the fact that John Anker gave the design away for free to any Britt who wanted to build a Dragon, this was his way of thanking Great Brittan for the help his home country Norway had gotten trough the war.
In 1948 the Dragons where selected to be an Olympic class, this shows how popuar the class had become. But it also meant the change over from a popular weekend cruiser and club racer to an international yacht racing class with all the commes with it. Now it was time to try and mae the yachts lighter and faster! One of the changes made was replacing the small cabin with just a small cuddy, therefore making the boat lighter and also making the cockpit larger.
 
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