A famous America's Cup character - Sir Thomas Lipton

Shamrock V at the America's
Cup Jubilee, 2001

Sir Thomas Lipton holds a place in the America's Cup heart as being the most reliably consistent and deftly congenial loser. Five times he challenged for the Cup, five times being defeated. Despite his best laid plans and momentous effort to bring the Cup back to Britain, the tea magnate simply didn't cut the mustard. Nonetheless, he did have a penchant for beautiful boats. His last challenger, Shamrock V, never really stood a chance of winning the race but it did win marks for pure beauty.

Sir Thomas Lipton
Thomas' family owned a grocery store, and he had an interest in the business from an early age. Ambition must have nipped at the young boy's heels, though, because at the age of fourteen, with eight dollars in his pocket, he became a stowaway on a ship to America. He earned a living as a farm labourer in Virginia and South Carolina, and later became a grocery clerk in New York. In 1870, Thomas returned to Glasgow, and four years later opened his own grocery store. By the time he was thirty, Lipton ran a chain of stores, moved his headquarters to London, and was a millionaire. He demonstrated a keen sense of advertising and marketing that would help him live up to his ambition to put a Lipton shop in every Scottish city, and beyond.

Innovation in tea business
Lipton became a household name through innovation in the tea business. At a time when tea was shipped and sold in bulk, Lipton developed tea bags, thus insuring consistency and freshness for tea consumers. He also sold different blends to different countries, to make up for variations in water from region to region, and managed to lower the cost of tea with greater efficiency of production.

Knight Lipton
Queen Victoria knighted Lipton for his commercial success as well as his philanthropy. During the Spanish-American war, and later during WWI, Lipton gave money and services to aid the wounded. A keen yachtsman, Lipton first challenged for the America's Cup in 1899, with his yacht, Shamrock. He made five attempts to win the cup, but never won. However, he earned a reputation as "the world's best loser,” and was presented with a gold cup by the people of America for his good sportsmanship in 1930. Although he tired of being the perennial good loser, he did not lose enthusiasm for the event which consumed so much of his life. "It has kept me young, eager, buoyant and hopeful. It has brought me health and splendid friends," he remarked shortly before his death. Lipton died in London in 1931. He had no heirs, and left much of his fortune to the city of Glasgow, to aid the poor, and to build hospitals. His tea companies in North America remained, and have since expanded into many areas of food production, to be leaders in the industry. Much of his fortune was spent unsuccessfully competing for the Americas Cup, the premier sailing trophy.

Shamrock V
Towards the end of 1929, Lipton issued his fifth and final challenge for the Cup (he was busy planning his sixth when he died). In the negotiations that followed as they always do when someone lays a challenge, Lipton agreed to build his yacht to the American Universal Rule, and that the yacht would be of the J Class, between 75 and 87 feet on the waterline. For the design and building of Shamrock V Lipton went to Camper and Nicholson's. Shamrock V was the first of his yachts to be built to Lloyd's A1 scantling requirements, this stipulation having been agreed between the Americans and the British earlier to avoid the construction of lightweight hulls which in the past had proven unseaworthy and expensive.

Teak and elm
Of semicomposite construction, Shamrock V had her stem, stern post and counter timbers of teak and her wooden keel of English elm. Her lead keel weighed 78 tons. Her frames were entirely of steel with a longitudinal ‘trough' of steel plates. The planking was mahogany and the main deck was laid with yellow pine. The mast, pear-shaped in sections was not less than 162 feet from truck to heel and was constructed of about 50 pieces of silver spruce. Shamrock V contrasted strongly with the other British Bermudan rigged yachts because although she carried some 700 sq ft less sail area, her sail plan was 152 feet high compared with the 137 feet of the others.

A Sycamore of steel
On the day Shamrock was launched – 14th April 1930 – Lipton's old skipper, Sycamore, was buried. Falling ill during the winter, he had retired and Ted Heard had taken his place. Sycamore was one of the great professional skippers and was obviously greatly loved by the public. ‘Old Syc' they called him, and knew him to be a man of steel. Apparently he had a rather shrill voice which could be heard across the water, egging his crew to greater effort. His sarcasm was famous. "If you gentlemen would come up to windward,' he was once heard to say to some guests on Shamrock. "You will be in the sunshine, altogether more comfortable and out of the way of my main boom.”

Shamrock V under-rated by experts
That first season Shamrock V sailed in 22 races before departing for America, and out of those she won 15 and came second in 4 – an outstanding record which had all the contemporary yachting writers speculating wildly on her chances of bringing back the Cup. Special regattas were organised for her, all of which were centred on Cowes, creating what one writer called ‘a little season' at the beginning of June. But the truth is, the Yacht Racing Association (the body responsible for handicapping) had expected Shamrock to be beaten boat-for-boat and so gave her 5 seconds per mile over a 24-metre. After 5 races however, they had to reverse the handicap and give the other big boats six seconds per mile but by then Shamrock already had some wins clocked up. Also, she was racing with a shallow spar, no cabin fittings and a centreboard – none of which was allowed at the time. Her rating at the beginning of the season certainly showed how the event experts under-rated the power of the new high-aspect sail plan.

Well-tuned and highly praised
By the time she was ready to cross the Atlantic, Shamrock V had been raced and tested in races totalling nearly 720 miles. Far more than any of her potential adversaries. No previous challenger had been so well-tuned, none so highly praised. Why then, didn't she win? The America's Cup races have been analysed and reanalysed in many books and the 1930 challenge has been discussed at length along with the rest. On the whole, it was a dull series as Shamrock V did not win a race, nor did she look like doing so. It was not so much a case of what went wrong but just not being nearly good enough. The Americans had the distinct advantage of being able to build four boats to Britain's one, all of them different lengths to seek out the best performances for racing under the Universal Rule.

Vanderbilt brought in a new era
A lot can and has been written about hull lines, rig and gear but what it really came down to was a case of the better man winning on the day. Building to the J Class rating had brought in a new era of yacht design and Lipton's competitor, the American billionaire, Vanderbilt complemented this breakthrough by bringing in a new era of management and sailing skill. But the skipper and crew of the British yacht were professionals, paid by the yacht's owner to race as best they could. Crew members who raced her during the 1930 series say she was not a particularly happy ship during the races and that the afterguard were amateurs in the worst sense of the word. They did not know what they were doing and disregarded the advice of professionals. Whatever the truth of the allegations, the fact is that Enterprise was a superior boat in every way. Vanderbilt who should have known, simply said that the reasons he beat the British were that "the luff of Enterprise's headsails, owing to the shorter headstays and greater tensions thereon, sagged off to leeward much less that Shamrock V's and that Enterprise's lighter mast and Park Avenue boom roved superior to Shamrock's spars.”

Shamrock V still alive and sailing
After Lipton's heyday, through a depression and another world war, most of the J class boats disappeared into maritime afterlife. Few remained in existence but even fewer were salvageable. Shamrock had now become Quadrifoglio which was refitted by her original builders, Camper and Nicholson, and relaunched in 1980 as a luxury cruising yacht for her Italian owner. In the spring of 1986 with the help of a grant from the Lipton Team Company, she was purchased by the Museum of Yachting at Newport, RI, and renamed Shamrock V, and in 1988 a private grant enabled her to be restored to her original racing trim. In the mid 1990s she was sold to the International Yacht Restoration School at Newport and in 1998 was purchased by a private owner who has given her a new rig which includes a Park Avenue boom.