BY THE WAY

Southland Times, Issue 21097, 31 May 1930, Page 13

BY THE WAY

THE FIFTH SHAMROCK

(By

Rowan).

For the fifth time in thirty years Sir Thomas Lipton will send a Shamrock to challenge for the immobile piece of silver that Queen Victoria presented at Cowes to the boat that led a fleet on the day when she asked “What boat is second?” And the answer was: “There is no second.” Shamrock V, which was launched at Gosport, England, last month, and whose trials are being so anxiously watched at the present time, as an indication of what she will accomplish next September on the Atlantic waters off Newport, when an immense crowd will gather to watch two boats race for a cup which America has never lost in the seventy-nine years that have made it the country’s oldest international trophy —this fifth of' the Shamrocks, then, will not have the freakish features that the old America’s Cup rules built into some of her predecessors. To the layman her most distinguishing feature will be J?er 160-foot mast,'the tallest mast a challenger has ever carried.

Sir Thomas Lipton is beyond question the world’s outstanding cup contender —in duration of time, in sportsmanship and in interest. There had already been serious unsuccessful challenges in 1899 when he built the first Shamrock. The ancestress of the green-hulled line was beaten three straight by Columbia, and when Sir Thomas came back for more two years later the same boat in the same way beat the Shamrock 11. In 1903 the undaunted Baronet sent over Shamrock 111, and she was beaten so easily by Reliance in three straight races that her owner took a rest for ten years before challenging again. Reliance was the largest defender America had ever entered. She carried more canvas than most yachtsmen believed a boat could carry. The time had come, many nautical authorities said afterwards, for the exercise of moderation in the cost and design of the boats. Shamrock IV was in mid-Atlantic, on her way to America, when the war began, so she went to Bermuda under convoy and then-to New York to wait for the nations to settle the differences that were interfering with international yacht racing. It. was a long postponement, but worth waiting for, since in the famous drifting races off Sandy Hook in 1920 Shamrock IV twice crossed the line ahead of Resolute before she went the way of her predecessors. Charles Francis Adams, who now holds the post of Secretary of the Navy, sailed the American defender.

Shamrock V now belongs to a dynasty of challengers as established as the British Constitution or the London General Omnibus Company. Lipton alone has built them all, with no syndicate anywhere in the offing, and it can pretty safely be assumed that by the time all the bills have been paid each of them has left him very small change out of £20,000. But, for all that, he is as ready to “shovel on the five-pound notes” to-day as he was thirty years ago. And yachting is only his hobby. Shamrock V is the first British attempt to apply fully to a big yacht the modern idea of relying upon the shape rather than the area of the sails, and of deriving the shape from the wing shapes of swallows, swifts and falcons, birds of the highest known flying speeds. She has no bowsprit, and a main boom nearly level with the end of her counter. In very light Summer airs the long booms and enormous sail spreads of the older yachts cannot be beaten. Building of a mast as high as that of the Shamrock so that it would stay on a hull of the Shamrock’s dimensions involved a serious engineering problem. The mast is a hollow spar made pf more than sixty pieces of wood glued together, as great and as beautiful a piece of carpentry as only a yacht-builder’s yard could produce. What mysteries Shamrock V embodies will be a subject of increasing speculation until September 13 when she and the American defender cross the starting line on the first of their series of seven races, the winner of four to win the cup. It can hardly be doubted that she.does embody a mystery or two, although this year neither challenger nor defender will have been built in the padlocked secrecy maintained in former years. For the first time in the history of the cup, both yachts will have been built to the same rule and will be matched without a handicap. The fact that both will also have been built to Lloyd’s Rules (which means in brief that in weight of construction they will be the same as ordinary cruising yachts) has made it doubly certain that the hush-hush era of freak racers is finally and definitely ended. No description of Shamrock V has been given out by her designer, but a number of correspondents have been admitted to the yard to see her in process of building. There is nothing freakish in her hull with the possible exception of her centreboard, a subject on which British yachtsmen who have seen her are inclined to be reticent. She is steel-framed and wood-planked, longlooking with fine ends but with more freeboard amidships than most British yachtsmen like, an eccentricity which they attribute to the New York Yacht Club’s rules. Her new sailing master, Captain Ernest Heard, and her crew of twenty-two hands were signed last March. She began racing at Harwich on May 17 and works her way back to the Solent where the Royal Yacht Squadron and five other clubs have arranged a fortnight of special regattas for her. Then she goes on to her home waters in Belfast Lough and, after a fortnight on the Clyde in Scotland, she leaves for New York about the middle of July. By that time, with nearly two months’ racing behind them, both she and her crew should be at the very top of their form. Her owner will not follow until shortly before the cup series, provided he goes over at all this year. Himself a member of the New York Yacht Club (and of fourteen British yacht clubs, .according to the most recent census of his memberships), he is dne of the major institutions of New York yachting, and his little goatee is as famous on one side of the Atlantic as on the other. A man who can accept defeat with unfailing sportsmanship and a rawboned optimfism, he has as many and as staunch friends in the enemy’s camp as in his own. It should not of course be assumed that defeat is a habit of his. Far from it. It is only “the old mug” itself which has so far eluded him. He has won more yachting trophies than any man alive. The dining saloon of his steam yacht Erin (the Erin that ran hospital supplies to the Serbians during the war and was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, not the new Erin that goes to New York with Shamrock V) used to be so full of gold and silver flagons, bowls and cups, some of them magnificent trophies two feet high, that another and a smaller saloon had to be used for the serving of meals and even there the amount of valuable space was reduced by the presence of two gorgeous presentation galleons of silver with beaten silver sails and rigging of silver wire as fine as silk. Nowadays these trophies are kept at Osidge, his old-fashion-ed place well outside the northern suburbs of London, where they fill a large room almost to bursting point.

Sir Thomas is a self-made mat>. He began with nothing. He ran away from Glasgow at the age of 15 and reached New York in the steerage. He worked on a ; farm near New York for a while and then went South, to drive a street car in New Otleans and " I' •

to hoe cotton in South Carolina. But times were hard in the South (it was soon after the Civil War) and he finally gave up the plantation business and walked to Charleston, where he stowed away on a steamer for New York. There he made enough money to pay his fare back to Glasgow, and he reached home at the age of 18 with 150 dollars and an old-fashioned American rocking chair which he had brought as a present to his mother. He rented two rooms on the ground floor of a te'nement in Stobcross Street where he opened a small grocery store, his entire staff consisting of himself, a small boy and a black cat. Soon he was able to give the small boy £1 with which to buy a new suit, and the small boy was so impressed with his new suit that he got a new job and has never been heard of since. Before long a second store was opened in Glasgow’s High Street and Lipton began attracting attention by displaying a series of comic cartoons in the windows of his two stores. There is a story to the effect that in those day he bought the two biggest hogs in Scotland and led them gaily beribboned through the streets, labelled “Lipton’s Orphans.” to advertise a special cure for hams which he had. And then in 1889 he discovered tea. His pennies were not many, but they were nimble and they have rolled far.

The 15-year-old Glasgow emigrant is now a man of eighty, and many times a millionaire. He began his yachting in the very early days when cutters could be hired on the Clyde for sixpence an hour. He became so keen a yachtsman that he felt the lure of the greatest of all yachting trophies, the world-famous cup which the schooner America won at Cowes in 1851 and which the New York Yacht Club has successfully defended from that' day to this.