![]() It’s the Oyster 1225, the new 37.45 metre flagship hull of the British yard that Hadida bought last year. The biggest single section known in the world is this one here.” Between them is a glass cabinet, containing a model of a very modern sailing yacht. ![]() “He was buried in it,” Hadida says, “but at the last minute, as his most trusted guys were lowering his coffin into the tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral, they suddenly ripped this flag to pieces and everyone took a piece. On another wall is a large piece of the White Ensign that flew from HMS Victory on that October day in 1805, with the holes shot through it serving as a reminder of the fate that befell Admiral Lord Nelson. Richard Hadida, superyacht owner and CEO of Oyster Yachts Hadida describes the action with awe and wonder, and a great deal of knowledgeable detail. On one wall hangs an epic scene from the opening of the Battle of Trafalgar – HMS Royal Sovereign, carrying Nelson’s deputy, Vice Admiral Collingwood, has broken the enemy line and is raking the Spanish flagship Santa Ana. Hadida’s passions are distilled into the elegant drawing room of his home in rural Berkshire, 50 or so kilometres north-west of London. He has succeeded spectacularly with the former, having created a £2 billion-plus tech company, and while the latter is rather harder to pull off, Hadida is keeping that dream alive by devoting his life to sailing while honouring Britain’s most revered nautical figure. But what Richard Hadida really wanted to do as a child, and what he still hankers after even now, at the age of 53, sitting in his handsome home with the trappings of his life and his success all around him, is to be at sea on a 19th-century battleship, experiencing the kind of swashbuckling adventures that defined his hero, Horatio Nelson. ![]() His serious, grown-up ambition was always to follow his father and become an entrepreneur, to work for himself and make his own millions. Richard Hadida, the owner of Oyster Yachts, tells David Edwards why being on board a battleship with his hero Horatio Nelson is the ultimate dream.
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