Sir Charles Willink was a scholar, a classicist and a schoolmaster. He was one of the visionaries who in 1975 launched the project of reconstructing a Greek trireme, the warship from which ancient Athens ruled the seas.

The trireme (in Greek trieres) was the ship that built the Athenian Empire. It is the heart of pine in the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. With it the small Athenian fleet drove the great Persian armada of Xerxes from the Mediterranean at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC. But how the trireme worked was a mystery.

It was a long rowing-ship with a square sail. Its principal weapon was a bronze ram, fixed on the prow at the waterline. The heyday of the trireme was the 5th century BC, when the finest practitioners of trireme warfare were the Athenians, who perfected the art of turning at speed to ram and disable enemy ships, and the maneouvre of diekplous to break the enemy line.

But apart from conflicting descriptions, vase paintings, sculptures and coins, no one knew how the trireme worked, or believed that it could have been rowed as fast as its ancient spinners alleged. The scholars calculated 7 knots maximum.

The Great Times Trireme Controversy was initiated by a feature article by Eric Leach in The Times on August 30, 1975. Instead of taking the trireme as ancient literature, it asked practical questions. Where did the oarsmen sit? How was the trireme built? How fast did it move? How long was a long day’s sailing?

This provoked one of the classic as well as classical correspondences in The Times. Classicists, admirals, rowers, ambassadors, athletes and the man on the towpath produced 32 letters that were published, and hundreds that were not; one fourth leader; and two Latin elegiac couplets. This was an epic correspondence: acerbic, witty and entirely resistant to conclusion. It was one of the longest-running academic debates in our letters columns. Eric Leach later published it as a book: 69,000 Oarsmen or The Great Trireme Controversy.

At a dinner party in Westmorland in April 1982, the conversation turned to triremes, as it does. Frank Welsh, a banker, suggested trying to reconstruct the trireme, using the clues from literature and pottery and coins.

Willink persuaded Welsh that he should get in touch with John Morrison, the classical scholar and first president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, who had been Willink’s tutor at Cambridge, and had been fascinated by triremes since boyhood. Later that year Welsh, Morrison, Willink and the naval architect John Coates established the Trireme Trust to rebuild a trireme.

The design was problematic, since it was based on a tiny painted fragment of a broken cup held at Vienna University. Of the three other fragmentary illustrations on pottery or sculpture, all were too crude to show the nature of the joints and the strengthening required for a narrow hull that was being used as a battering ram; and despite copious and colourful descriptions, by Aristophanes and others, of the conditions in which the oarsmen worked and the bustling trireme ports, technical information was nonexistent.

The ship was around 120ft long and only 18ft wide. It was rowed by oarsmen arranged in groups of three, sitting one above the other and each oarsman pulling a single oar of equal length. The topmost level of men were called in Greek thranitai, the middle ones zygioi, and the lowest ones thalamioi. On an Athenian trireme of the Classical period there were 170 oarsmen, ten marines, four archers and sixteen sailors, including the helmsman, making a total of 200.

The biggest question was how such a large number of oarsmen could row in unison when their blades were a mere 30cm apart, let alone perform with such precision through yard-high waves. It was feared that the trireme could never justify the stories of her speed and agility.

After six years of trial builds, the trust succeeded in securing £400,000 from the Greek government to construct a full-scale trireme, which they demonstrated in the Aegean with a crew drawn mostly from English university boat clubs. The launch in Piraeus harbour in 1987 of the reconstructed trireme Olympias — attended with great fanfare by the Greek government’s minister of culture, Melina Mercouri — demonstrated that, even with an inexperienced modern crew, the vessel could make more than nine knots, and that her speed depended on the vertical synchronisation of her oarsmen rather than the horizontal. The ship was so manoeuvrable that she could turn 360 degrees in under two boat lengths and within two minutes.