Hey, There!
I’m Tony.

My name is Tony Duke and my journey began in 1955. I was born in Huddersfield with roots out of Africa.

My mother died in early 2020 at the ripe old age of 94, She taught me ‘sharing is caring’, ‘waste not want not’ and ‘knowledge is king’. I inherited her ashes and a dream to take them to my grandfather’s homeland in Africa.

This aspiration and a belief in a net zero future led me to found the Duke Voyagers Shipyard Ltd with ambitions to develop low carbon technologies, materials and processes to tackle sustainability challenges in the luxury yacht building industry.

My plan to build the net zero ‘MollyD’ has since expanded to a fully-fledged strategy which involves repurposing and commercialising an existing heritage building as a low-carbon shipyard and Innovation Centre with heritage and local community at its heart.

From the start, I have been based where innovation and new ideas are being generated, incubated and shared. For my start-up, education offered the pathway to growth, leading me to seek partnerships with Universities to co-produce work through their talent pools and internship programmes. This collaborative approach led me to work with the University of Kent and the Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce on their Net Zero Pathways to Change project.

Over several months, I worked with academics from the Division of Natural Science at the University of Kent to assess the life cycle of a yacht and identify sustainable alternatives to traditional yacht building materials.

We are currently producing a scale model of the MollyD to be tested with a bio based composite for the hull and deck construction providing a possible route for future composite boat construction to enter the circular economy.