Whatever Glala's origins were, by the 1920s she was a motor yacht, initially called Pampa III and then Doris. She was powered by two Thornycroft 50hp paraffin engines and probably had clear decks with no wheelhouse or funnel. She would have been conned from an open cockpit (even now, just below the wheelhouse, there are two cockpit drains, not functional since this time). Between 1923 and 1929 she was owned by H.H. MacLean of Windover, Bursledon, Hampshire. There is some evidence that this was Henry Hugh Maclean whose Royal Navy career spanned both world wars, he was a Lieutenant-Commander in the RNR in the 1940s.

TS Motor Yacht Grey Mist. Rigging Plan - Camper & Nicholsons Ltd, Gosport, Drawing Office. [enlarge]
[This is the earliest known image of the boat. The date is uncertain but the name Grey Mist suggests around 1930. The original drawing is lost and this copy is incomplete.]

By 1930, vessel No.144471 had been renamed Grey Mist and was registered in Bristol to W.G. Verdon-Smith CBE (later to be Sir William), chairman of the Bristol Aeroplane Company. By this time she had been back to Camper & Nicholsons for a refit. A rigging plan drawn by them at the time shows the addition of a low wheelhouse forward of the engine room. The canopy aft and the coving beneath it suggests an open cockpit in the after deck. Around 1931 her hull was clad in copper by Hillyards of Littlehampton.

In 1935 she was bought by the millionaire brewer Lord Brocket of Mallaig (a rather sinister Nazi sympathiser) who named her Cupid and kept her on the West Coast of Scotland for a couple of seasons.

Sir Alan Cobham [-]. Helping his wife into a seaplane [Flight 1926].

In 1936 the aviation pioneer Sir Alan Cobham decided that he should have a boat. Having been told that the best boats were to be found in Scotland he sent his wife, the former stage actress Gladys Lloyd, there to find one. She found Cupid lying at Greenock and, with the help of an Irishman named Sullivan, arranged to buy her for £900, a bargain even then. Sir Alan combined his wife's name with his own and named the boat Glala. In his memoirs A Time to Fly, Sir Alan wrote;

"Early in May [1936] we set forth from Greenock to take her down to Itchenor. Sullivan and a mechanic were with me. Our voyage south started magnificently, the weather being perfect and the sea like the proverbial mill-pond. The day passed, and I went below to sleep, but was soon woken up by a lot of alarming noise, and found that the port engine had failed. The mechanic got it going again, but soon afterwards the starboard engine failed as well, and then the port engine once again; we just managed to limp into Milford Haven on practically no power at all."

Sir Alan thought that Glala had been built for an expedition up the Amazon and, although she probably would have been a suitable vessel, there is no evidence to show that she was built for this. It is true that due to her narrow beam and shallow draft she rolls at sea.

"We had great fun with her. She had been specially designed to be easy to get off any shore or sandbank on which she might run aground in those Amazonian waters..."

Many years later their son Michael visited Glala. In a letter written afterwards (1989) he recalls cruising in the Irish Sea; engine trouble and repairs at Milford Haven; the whole family living aboard for two months at Itchenor and a trip to Dartmouth where he saw the 'J' class yachts racing. He mentions that the 1980s interior was not as he remembered it, there used to be a lot of dark mahogany, but the wheelhouse was much the same and he says that there was no direct engine control, the helmsman communicated with the engine room through an impressive brass telegraph.

Sir Alan sold Glala to "a determined lady" for a small profit. In 1938 she was sold by Thomas Needham to AEC Ltd, an engineering company best known for their buses and lorries.