FAMILIES have stories to tell of the past and the present. Here, descendants of a herring fisherman with a home in Part Bannatyne, reflect on the ultimate yachting race undertaken by Captain Archie Hogarth.
HE WAS a good-looking thirty-five year old sailor with a salty complexion, a thick head of hair and a fine moustache.
His name was Archie Hogarth, and he was my great-great uncle. The year was 1899. Archie, once a fisherman, was suddenly world-famous.
Captain Archie had been picked to skipper the Shamrock, Britain’s entry in the most famous and glamorous of all international yacht races, the America’s Cup.
He would captain the 127-foot cutter Shamrock against the US defender, Columbia, in New York Harbour in October 1899.
It was quite a journey for great-great uncle Archie, from humble beginnings as a Clyde herring fisherman to international yachting stardom.
Here’s how it happened.
Archibald Hogarth was born into a long line of fishermen in July 1864. The Scottish branch of my family, on my mother’s side, had been fisher folk on the West Coast of Scotland, near West Kilbride, for generations – the Saltcoats Hogarths. It was said they were descendants of shipwrecked sailors from the Spanish Armada.
He was born in a fishing village called Portencross, where the wreck of a Spanish galleon still rests offshore. His father James – like his father before him – was a herring fisherman. Archie’s mother, Mary, was probably a weaver as well as the mother of nine children.
No doubt Archie learned the ways of the sea early. When he was about six, in 1870, the family moved from the mainland to the Isle of Bute in search of better fishing. Thus began my family’s association with Bute, which continues after many generations to this day.
They settled in Port Bannatyne, a fishing village on the island’s east coast. Distant cousins lived in an isolated cottage on the west coast. By 16, Archie was certainly working as a herring fisherman out of Port Bannatyne or Rothesay.
Four years later, though, life changed for ever for 20 year-old Archie. He joined the crew of the Doris, a Clyde racing yacht. He never looked back.
The final years of the nineteenth century were the glory years for high-octane Clyde yacht racing. Wealthy industrialists and businessmen – the billionaires of their day – lavished gigantic sums on high-performance vessels, and entered them in races round the world.
It was a game the young ex-fisherman played well. Archie knew the dangerous seas and tides of the Clyde estuary, where so many of the yachts were raced.
He learned to handle the bigger superyachts. He won his Master Mariner’s certificate in 1895 and two years later, aged just 32, took his first command, the 65-foot cutter Isolde. (He raced the Isolde 340 times and won 141 first prizes.)
It was then he came to the attention of a millionaire Glasgow grocer, Sir Thomas Lipton – he of Lipton’s Tea.
Lipton, a flamboyant and uber-wealthy businessman, was a legend in his own tea-time. A keen yachtsman and boat builder, he was obsessed with the America’s Cup. During his lifetime he sponsored challenges for the Cup five times, each time in a different superyacht, all named Shamrock (Shamrock I-V).
His first try came that autumn of 1899. On New Year’s Eve of 1898 Lipton appointed Archie Hogarth as skipper of Shamrock I. No expense would be spared.
Archie lost no time in gathering a crew of 52, including three from his own village of Port Bannatyne, and his own brother Malcolm.
The Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald declared in May: ‘The crew will be the best paid and best kept set of hands that ever shipped, and if they do not bring back the Cup they will come home the most disappointed set of men that ever crossed the Atlantic’.
As sea trials began, Captain Archie placed a collection of rare coins under the mast ‘for luck’.
In July Shamrock arrived in Rothesay to a rapturous reception, fireworks and a civic dinner. The awe-struck Greenock Telegraph breathlessly reported how ‘Three Congolese servants of Sir Thomas’s … in their native dress and quaint headgear, created a sensation by strolling along the shore, where they were followed by large crowds’.
In August the Shamrock sailed to New York. The Columbia lay at anchor in New York Harbour. Excitement rose to fever-pitch. Archie was now world famous, pictured and profiled in all the best newspapers. Such was the frenzy, the US government deployed warships in the harbour to keep the press and spectators at bay.
At 11am on Monday October 16 the competition began. It was to be held over five days, best-of-five to win.
On day one, Shamrock suffered a ‘mishap’ when a mast broke. The Columbia won the heat. In the second race, Columbia edged ahead again to win. In the third, on Friday, October 20th, a strong breeze and perfect racing sea unexpectedly pushed Columbia ahead once more. .
Columbia had won.
The race was ‘unexpectedly brilliant and exciting… Columbia fairly and squarely beating her British rival’, reported the Buckingham Express generously.
Archie’s dreams of America’s Cup success were over – though he continued racing for many decades. Sir Thomas Lipton got on with commissioning his next super yacht.
The news of Shamrock’s defeat must have reached Port Bannatyne in the early hours of Saturday morning. In the days before modern communications, the fastest way to share the news was by telegraph.
Perhaps the news arrived at the Post Office or the offices of The Buteman in Rothesay. It would then have been flashed by bicycle to the pubs in Port Bannatyne. No doubt the Glasgow newspapers were standing by to get it into print for the Saturday editions. The disappointment must have been palpable.
Great-great uncle Archie lived for another 40 years and died in 1939, but remained a hero. He was buried in St Colmac’s cemetery on Bute.
He is still well remembered today in Rothesay, where locals I met in a back street pub five years ago told me the story of Captain Archie.
Sir Thomas Lipton died in 1931. He never achieved his dream of winning the America’s Cup, despite his five tries and the millions he spent. In fact, Britain has never won the America’s Cup since it was first raced in 1851.
Archie’s younger brother Malcolm, who crewed with him in 1899, drowned at sea a year later off Milford Haven, after falling overboard during a race. He was thirty years old, and recently married. His body was never found.
But his widow, Jeanne, lived for many more years. She ended her days in 1959 in the house in Port Bannatyne where our family still has a flat, next to Archie’s old home. I can just remember her, a doughty lady of the old school.
With her death the last link to Captain Archie was severed. But the legend of great- great Uncle Archie, the fisherman who skippered in the America’s Cup, lives on.
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