Kings of the hill – Part I


For more years than any other designer in history, and with more international influence, during the course of the 20th century the New York office of Sparkman & Stephens was the dominant force in yacht design. Today a much changed company of the same name still ticks along nicely in various fields of naval architecture but with a much lower profile. Nevertheless, pioneering Sparkman & Stephens offshore designs like Dorade and Stormy Weather, as well as America’s Cup winning 12 Metres such as Intrepid and Courageous, continue to draw the eye wherever they appear at modern regattas... and they are still winning too. Designer and former Seahorse editor Julian Everitt takes an extended look at one of the most famous yachting brands of them all


In a sunny New York City on 20 October 1970 a team of FBI agents scoured the buildings on both sides of Manhattan’s Madison Avenue between 28th and 29th Streets. Questioning shopkeepers, janitors and secretaries, they gave special attention to the offices overlooking no79, a dull 16-storey building on the east side. From early the next morning uniformed police


46 SEAHORSE


banned all parking on the block and kept pedestrians on the move. They vetted every entrant to no79. Shortly before 11am three cars drew up


and disgorged 10 men into the building. Two stayed in the lobby; the rest took an elevator to the 12th floor where two more took up station on the landing. The remainder marched through a door num- bered 1209 bearing the legend Sparkman and Stephens Inc Naval Architects. Finally two of the men, one a tanned,


plumpish, slightly hunched figure with silver hair and a pointed nose, often carica- tured by political cartoonists, were shown into a corner office and the door shut behind them. The then leader of Her Bri- tannic Majesty’s Opposition, the Right Honourable Edward Heath, Member of Parliament, was interrupting diplomatic business at the United Nations to discuss the highly confidential matter of the design of his new ocean racing yacht – the second Morning Cloud. She would become the boat in which, as Prime Minister, he was to captain a team of three British yachts, all of which were designed, as it happens, by Sparkman & Stephens, to victory against 17 other international three-boat teams in the 1971 Admiral’s Cup. But the waiting phalanx of bodyguards,


a mix of FBI and Scotland Yard men, had no interest in the yacht or any design secrets it held; this was the beginning of a dangerous era of political abductions. The


detectives were nervous when an S&S secretary got up to take a telephone message in to Mr Heath; several leaped up and restrained her before one of them eventually took the message in himself. An hour or so after the grand entrance,


Heath, with his personal assistant, re- emerged and swept out, beaming at the secretaries and at the bent heads of the disinterested draughtsmen. The occasion is vaguely remembered by


some of the designers working in the office at the time, if only because it held a touch of irony. At the same time that morning, in the office’s small conference room, sat another client of Sparkman & Stephens, a client whose followers, far more impassioned than those of Mr Heath, numbered tens of millions, and whose personal fortune could also be counted in tens of millions of dollars, and who therefore might reason- ably have been regarded as a far greater kidnapping risk. Yet the Aga Khan, there to consider the specifications for his radical new turbine-driven 90ft, 60kt three-million dollar (sic) motor yacht, was accompanied solely by his private secretary. For more than 50 years and even after


his retirement in 1982 Olin Stephens presided over a design office, for the most part housed in 79 Madison Avenue, that opened its doors to a procession of princes and premiers, of the world’s famed and wealthy, all bent on acquiring a fragment of the genius of the two brothers Olin and


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