The Life of Sir Thomas Johnstone Lipton
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Sir Thomas Lipton Sir Thomas Lipton, July 1920 Sir Thomas Lipton in Vanity Fair, 19th September 1901 Sir Thomas Lipton was one of Glasgow’s most famous and successful sons. From humble origins he was to become world famous as a tea merchant and a yachtsman. Thomas Johnston Lipton was born on 10 May 1848, the youngest of five children. His parents, Thomas senior and Frances, had emigrated in the 1840s to Scotland from Shannock Mills near Clones in Northern Ireland. The family lived in a four room tenement at 10 Crown Street, Hutchesontown. It was a typical "respectable working class" home. Lipton’s father Lipton Lipton’s mother He attended St. Andrew's Parish School where primary education cost threepence a week. Although not academically inclined, he mastered the three Rs. He and his friends formed a club which raced toy yachts on the pools of High Fields near Crown Street and around this time he carved and rigged Shamrock, his first model boat. He left school in November 1860 and soon began his first job in A & W Kennedy, Stationers in Glassford Street receiving a wage of half-a-crown. However, looking to move up in the business world, he perceived this to be a dead end job. His next job was at Messrs. Tillie & Henderson in Miller Street. The job of cutting of shirt patterns was extremely dull but he doubled his wage to four shillings a week. His early working life wasn't without incident. After fighting with another boy in the pattern department when asked to explain himself to his boss he answered "I hit him, sir because he cut the toorie aff me bonnet". (Lipton, p56) He was soon showing his confidence by asking for a 25% increase which was refused with the answer: "You are getting as much as you are worth and are in a devil of a hurry asking for a rise". After this terse refusal he lost the little interest he had in the job and soon found another working as a cabin boy on the Burns Line between Glasgow and Belfast which earned him a wage of eight shillings a week. He was enthralled with the job "...it was good to be alive and better still to be a cabin-boy on a gallant Clyde-built steamship". He claimed he was "never happier...than when in the atmosphere of ships, sailors, boats and the waterside generally". While his love of water and boats continued throughout his life, his job at the Burns Line didn't last: he was given a week's notice for allowing a cabin lamp to smoke and discolour the white enamel of the ceiling. He "wasted no time in vain regrets" after being dismissed from the Burns Line. He had managed to save some of his wages and tips and made enquires about the cost of a steerage passage to New York and, after a long discussion with his parents, he was soon on his way. He was not yet fifteen. Arriving in New York, he couldn't find work and accepted a job in the tobacco fields of Virginia. He grew close to his employer, plantation owner Sam Clay, who looked after him after a serious foot injury. After a trip back to New York, Lipton's next job was on a rice plantation at Coosaw Island in South Carolina where the responsibility for the finances and book-keeping gave him a good grounding in running an enterprise. Soon he got that "restless feelin'" and took the sudden decision to board a schooner bound for Charleston. The next two years are vague in detail but we do know that he returned to New York for a third time. This time he was lucky and got a job as an assistant in a prosperous New York grocery store. He liked it from the very start: "People must eat...and the store that tempted people to buy goods would never be empty of customers". He quickly learned the grocery trade and the secrets of his future success, picking up the American techniques of salesmanship and advertising which were to become his trademark. In the spring of 1869, he made the surprising decision to return to Scotland. This was at a time when most of the ships crossing the Atlantic carried immigrants to America. Arriving back in Glasgow he hired a cab and on top of it placed a rocking chair and barrel of flour for his mother. Lipton had the driver proceed slowly along Crown Street while he waved and shouted greetings to his old friends and neighbours - a spectacle long remembered in the area. Soon after his return he took over his parents' shop and quickly turned its fortunes around. This wasn't without some resistance from his father who, when faced with Thomas's grand plans commented "Ah, no Tom, we'd be getting above ourselves. The neighbours would say that the peas were getting above the sticks". After two years working in his parents' shop, on his 21st birthday, Lipton opened his first shop at 101 Stobcross Street in Glasgow. In the heart of industrial Glasgow, full of smoke and fog, the shop was said to be so brightly lit that at night it became a beacon in the street. Goods were stacked in the American fashion, not for the convenience of the proprietors, but with the purpose of catching the customers' attention. Lipton used another selling technique learned from his mother. When his parents had opened their small shop, Mrs. Lipton, rather than deal with middlemen at the markets, dealt directly with the farmers of her homeland. Lipton followed this example. He bought his bacon, eggs, butter and other produce directly from Irish farmers. He lived, worked and breathed his shop. His days were 18 hours long and often he would sleep on a makeshift bed under the counter. His shop at Stobcross was doing so well that in 1876 he moved to larger premises at 21/27 High Street; he later added shops in Paisley Road, Anderston and Robertson Lane. By 1882 he had shops in Dundee, Paisley, Edinburgh and Leeds. It was with stunts and advertising that Lipton was to make his mark. He employed the talents of Willie Lockhart, a leading cartoonist of the day, to produce weekly posters for him. One of the most famous shows a "typical Irishman, knee breeches, cutaway coat, billycock hat, shillelagh an' all an' all" with a pig, its eyes full of tears, slung in a sack over his shoulder". The caption reads "What's the matter with the pig, Pat?" The Irishman replies "Sure, Sirr [sic], he's an orphan so, out of pity, I'm taking him to Lipton's!" Lipton subsequently took to buying pigs in the market, tying ribbons to their tails, and having them driven through the streets under a banner which declared them to be "Lipton's Orphans". Each day the pigs were driven to his shop by a different route, bringing in new customers. The opening for each new Lipton shop was cause for newspaper adverts, posters and parades. Lipton himself would be at each opening to offer prizes to the first customers. In 1881 Lipton announced that he was to import the world's largest cheese from New York. Apparently, 800 cows were milked for six days and the labour of 200 dairymaids was necessary to make this enormous cheese. The streets were lined with spectators cheering the giant cheese on its way to Lipton's new store in High Street. As an added touch Lipton announced, since it was Christmas, his cheese, like clootie dumpling or Christmas puddings, would contain sovereigns and half sovereigns. When the cheese went on sale, the last piece was sold within two hours of the store opening. These giant cheeses became part of Lipton's Christmas displays. One was so large that the manager of Lipton's shop in Nottingham hired an elephant from the local circus to transport it through the town. By 1890 Lipton was a very rich and successful man. He remarked, later in life, that the only politics he had were to open a new shop every week. After achieving what he had originally set out to do in the general trade provision he turned his attention to tea. Drinking tea had become much more popular in the late 1880s but still was prohibitively expensive for the average working class family. After investigating the trade further with tea brokers in London he took the decision to do what he had done with ham, butter and eggs, that is, "cut out the middleman, with profit alike to myself and my customers". (Lipton, p166) Within a year he was selling huge amounts of tea in pound, half pound and quarter pound packets. The blends were made especially for the area around the shops so that Lipton could advertise "the perfect tea to suit the water of your town". While he made substantial profits his rule was to abolish "wherever possible, the middleman or intermediary profiteer between the producer and consumer". The only way he could do this was to control the whole production process. He secretly booked a passage to Australia but disembarked at Colombo, Ceylon to visit the plantations for himself. The summer of 1878 brought a coffee crop failure in the island of Ceylon which all but wiped out that commodity. As a result tea production increased and the purchase price of the plantations was only half of what Lipton had been willing to pay.