Below: the Clyde 30-footer Thetis was designed by Mylne for Tid Coats and was the yacht that first brought Coats to the attention of Clyde yachting ‘royalty’. Opposite: Coats is seated at the far right with his 1908 Olympic gold medal-winning crew on the 12 Metre Hera – the second of a pair of 12s designed by Coats, one for himself and one for his uncle Andrew Coats who was a loyal supporter during his nephew’s career as a yacht designer. There was some initial prejudice, perhaps understandably against a designer whose immense wealth opened him up to being labelled a dilettante, but the disparaging remarks soon died away as the yachting community was forced to acknowledge the quality of Coats’s Olympic champion
The great divide – Part II
Students of the yachting rivalries between England and its northern neighbour in the early years of the 20th century may well be surprised that it took another 100 years for Scottish independence to rear its head in anger. Yet between periods of great rivalry there were worthy efforts at combining forces for the common – or to be accurate not so ‘common’ – good. Clare McComb
In the family Thomas Glen Coats started his designing career in 1906 under the tutelage of world famous naval architect Alfred Mylne in Glasgow. But whereas his mentor tended to stay in Scotland unless pressed to travel south, ‘Tid’, as he was known, became one of the Edwardian characters who raced successfully in both countries, drawing the sport together north and south of the border. Primarily Tid’s sporting successes were
facilitated by money, millions and millions of pounds of it. The Coats family was based in Paisley, a tightly connected clan of multi-millionaires who owed their fortunes
52 SEAHORSE
to thread manufacture, with a global out- reach laid down over previous generations. Tid was born not only with a golden
spoon in his mouth, but a full 24-carat service to match. His relatives had under- pinned the sport of yacht racing and magnif- icent steamship cruising around the Clyde for many decades. The Yachtsman declared they had given more to competitive sailing than any other family in the British Isles. In fact, Tid’s uncles, George and
Andrew Coats, were not averse to compet- ing on the English south coast. George Coats had even commissioned one of the Mylne South Coast One Design Class in 1903: Kelpie, built stoutly enough to survive into the 21st century, had been intended to sail against her seven sisters, but something went seriously wrong and she was towed back up to the Clyde after scarcely a handful of races. The jury is out on why: it may well have
been the snobbery of the English yachts- men and their crews that did not sit well with George Coats and his forthright skipper, Robert Morris; these were two men who had known each other for decades, worked closely together, and who shared trust and respect, despite the great
contrast of income and social status between them. If Morris was insulted or cold-shouldered, whether by aristocratic English owners or their sometimes equally superior-minded crews, he would not have been asked to remain in such circum- stances.
In search of victory However, Tid was a different personality from his uncle George, desiring far more than occasional individual victories in southern waters as recreation from man- aging a large business empire. The young man wanted to dominate any class in which he competed, wherever he could transport his boat. And he had family money and talent enough to achieve those aims. And he also wanted to pursue a career not in the family firm but in the very different field of naval architecture. But access to a great fortune is no handicap for a budding yacht designer… So there was never any problem finding,
or funding, his dreams. What Tid wanted Tid got, whether that was a new crack racer every year, an Olympic gold medal, international fame or just an apprentice- ship with one of the foremost naval
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