Sir T. Lipton

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 114, 16 May 1931, Page 7

Sir T. Lipton

ROYAL YACHT CLUB MEMBER HUMBLE PAST OVERLOOKED [By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright! Received Alay 15, 7.10 p.m. LON DON. Alay J 5. Sir Thomas Lipton has at long last been elected a member ol the Roy;.! Yacht Squadron. For years ir has been a wonder in the yachting world "hy le has not been elected when he has spj'it a million on the sport and is easily the most famous yacht owner living. More over, he is a member of 16 other jacht clubs. Sir Thomas Upton was 81 last Sun day. Apparently members of the Rov.il Yacht Club have obliterated the mem c.ry of the fact that he began life as a grocer, so he has been elected to the club, which has the reputation of being rhe most exclusive in the world. Sir Thomas Lipton is a self-made man. He began with nothing. He went away from Glasgow at the age of J 5 and reached New Y’ork in the steerage. Ho worked on a farm near New Y’ork for a while and then went South to drive a street car in New Orleans and to hoc cotton in South Carolina. But times were ha'*d in the South (it was soon after tho Civil War) and he finally gave nt, the plantation business and walked •'» Charleston, wi'.crc he stowed away ou a steamer for New York. There he made enough money 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 tenement in Stobcross Street where he opened a small grocery store, his entire staff consisting of himself, a small boy, and a black cat. Soon ho was able to give the small boy £1 with whi«eh to buy a new suit, and the small boy was so impressed with his now suit that he got a new job and has never been heard of since. Tn 1889 he discovered tea. His pennies were not many, but they were nimble and they have rolled far. Now (here are 500 Lipton stores and tea shops all over tho British Isles and thousands of Lipton employees. Lipton himself has never seen all his worldwide properties. He began hi* yachting in tho very early days when cutters con! 1 bo hired on the Clvdc icr sixpence a a hour. He became jo J<cen a yachtsman that, he

SIR THOMAS LIPTON felt the lure of the greatest of all yachting trophies, the world-famous cup which the schooner Ameren won at, Cowes in 1851 and which <he New Y’ork Yacht Club has successfully defended from that day to this. “Having a shot at the old mug myself’’ became merely a matter of time. He first planned it in 1887, but it was not until 1899, after ho had formed his huge business into a limited company and so gained leisure for himself, that he dispatched the first of his famous dynasty of Shamrocks to New Y’ork. Sir Thomas is a member of the New Y’ork Y’a'cht Club (and of fourteen British yacht clubs, according to the most recent census of his memberships), he is one ol: the major institutions of New Y’ork yachting, and his little goatee is as famous on gtic side of the Atlantic as on the other. A man who can accept defeat with unfailing sportsmanship and a raw boned optimism, ho has as many and as staunch friends in the enemy’s camp as in his own. He has won more ynchtini? trophies than any other man alive. A. long-legged Glasgow Trixhninn n colossus of the trrocerv business who bestrides the narrow world with one foot firmly planted in Ceylon tea-grow-ing and the other in Chicago meat packing; ho is a bachelor with a number of hobbies—orchids, gardening, horses, cricket, golf, motoring, billiards, and above all yachting—which serve him in place of family ties. Theatres he docs not care for. 11 is reading ho does mostly in magazines and newspapers. The open country he loves. Be can tell more good stories than Lord Dewar or Sir Harry Lander, and some of them arc about his own grocery and provision businesses, for in his early days he was the first and the most original advertiser in these islands. He discovered in 1889 that there were big profits to be made in tea and he bought 20,000 chests. Did he hasten to bury them in tho obscurity of a warehouse and beg the storage company to say nothing about it? Not he. He hired fifty drays, covered them with large banners inscribed “Use Lipton’s T<*a,’’ and carted as many chests ns ho could carry round and round 'through tho heart of Glasgow, with a brass band nt the head of them and a piper’s bnnd bringing up the rear.