10 - The Golden Age of Yachting, 1880–1900 Part One: The Rich

Summary

… on one occasion when asked the Princes of Wales’ whereabouts, the Kaiser replied that his cousin was sailing with his grocer, a reference to Sir Thomas Lipton. The Prince is rumoured to have shown his feeling about this remark by kicking a silver cup he had just won, which had been presented by the Kaiser, off the side of his boat.

During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, yachting achieved a higher level of social and cultural – and even, to a limited extent, political – centrality than before or since. The next two chapters concern this centrality and examine it in six different areas:

• the sea, especially the English Channel, was central to the nation's anxieties and its imagery; and this importance extended to those who sailed on it, be they the Navy, merchant seamen or yachtsmen

• the leisure activity of the monarchy and the very rich

• the growth of yacht racing, as rich owners hired the best yacht designers, such as the Fifes of Fairlie and George Watson of Glasgow, to create winning yachts for them

• the attention paid to yachting in newspapers, magazines and in the cultural media – photography, art and novels

• the development of small boat racing. In this chapter, I discuss the development of keel-boat racing

• a final factor, which I discuss in the following chapter, was the arrival of the dinghy, which allowed much cheaper sailing and which, because of its lightness, made successful small boat racing feasible for women sailors.

Yachting, Patriotism and the Navy

One major reason for the centrality of yachting was its links with the monarchy and the Navy. After the 1870s, national identity and the nautical became increasingly fused into a complex of public emotions concerning patriotism, the Navy and Englishness. For the empire to flourish, our seaborne trade required safe passage anywhere around the world. Naval supremacy was seen as the key to winning a major war, if not to the nation's very existence. British wealth, security and prestige depended on the effectiveness of our Navy.