1934-10-20 — Page 11

THE HONGKONG & TELEGRAPH BATURDAY, OCTOBER

YOUNG TOM" SOPWITH A STUDY

Men who go down to the son in sleek and costly yachts will tell you that Mr. T. 07 M. Sopwith in worthy successor of the late and great sportsman, Sir Lipton.

Thomas

Old Tom was just that sports- man Five times ha tossed for tunes into the building and unfl- Ing cutters, and five times he look- ed on amiably while his challengers, manned by professional skippers and crews, lost to American de- fenders.

Young Tom-Thomas Octave Sopwith-is no swivel-chair com- modoro. He's a yachtsman who can handle wheel and nail. It goes without saying that he, also is a sportsman; none other would spend $700,000 in an effort to recapture "the ugly old mug won by the New

York Yacht Club in 1851. ·

ท

Better than being a practiral sailor, T. O. M. Sopwith is engineer who knows what makes yachts go. An airplane designer, and chairman of the biggest hir craft factory in the British Empire, he has been ablo to turn his technical skill to the building of Jachts. Flying and sailing, ho says, really are allied sports.

•

Several times during the previous attempts to lift the America's Cup, faulty rigging and Inadequate mechanical appointments proved the undoing of the British chal longers. United States' defenders always went to the line with all sorts of gadgets, trick maste and booms and winches. Sopwith, the engineer, overlooked no bets in fitting out his Endeavour with fool- proof, time-saving contraptions. Ilis mast is the tallest ever set into a sailing vessel of any kind.

NEA

"YOUNG TOM",

Windsor Castle In a command per- formance for the King.

Newfoundland and was picked up. 1,000 miles at sea,

Tom Sopwith was rich, of course, and was able to buy the marble palaco which Lord Ribblesdale bad built in a select section of London's Was end. He remodelled the house of until it became a showplace England, Queen Mary visited it a few years ago, and shortly after ward it wAS sold to the Crown. Sopwith moved nearby.

He always had been Interested In boats, but the aristocratic world af yachting saw nothing of him, until about six years ago. Then

THE GLOOMY DEAN"

By MILTON BRONNER

A huge gap has been created in the public life of England by: the resignation of the Very Revorand William Ralph Inge who retires from his position as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London to go to an estate at Wallingford in Berkshire and cultivate his garden.

There is nobody. In the Church of England to fill his shoos adequately for he was at one and the same time theologian, philosopher, Greek scholar, acientist and a speaker of arresting

|phrases.

Long years ngo a claver.

he appeared with a ten-meter craft, reporter dubbed him "The Gloomy and almost immediately began win-Dean" and the name has stuck to ning races. He ordered a new him ever since-much to his dis“ yacht, the Mouette, and took 75 taste. He was called gloomy and firsts in three seasons. In 1982,

pessimistic because he doubted the

the death of Sir Thomas

he purchased Shamrock Vsuccess of democracy, lashed the. from the tea magnate's estate. follies of his age, recalled the good After making a fow changes he old days, feared the" decline of took it out against other craft of England's greatness. - the Royal Yacht Squadron, and in one 'season won 24 fags to 18 for the King's cutter Britannia. Last year he captured the King's Cup.

OUTSPOKEN IN DISLIKES..

Pet

He is full of prejudices. dislikes are Soviet Russia, Ireland, America, the Roman Catholic Church, the working classes, mod- or women with their rouged pe and painted finger-naile. He is original, fearless-and often witty. ng. well as, gloomy. In religion ho was a liberal, holding miracles and such things very cheaply.

"THE GLOOMY DEAN".

Sopwith had become the best amateur akipper in England. There could be only one other goal That feat really started Sopwith for him, and that the America's So he ordered Charles on his distinguished career. He Cup,

A new boat, shipped three planes to the United Nicholson to design States and came here in 1911 to and tossed a challenge to the New make exhibition flights. Many pro-York Yacht Club, in whose vault minent people rode with him, and rests the oldest trophy In Inter- Nelson Doubleday was a passenger national sport. Sopwith worked when Sopwith crashed at Garden with Nicholson in studying out the City, LI Nalther WAS hurt, flestest lines and sturdiest rigging.

He was preordained for the this bitter sentence: This is The following year he brought: He even helped pour the keel when over a speedboat and captured the construction started, and his wife pulpit. His father was a distin- perhaps a world where everyone is Harmsworth Trophy. Then ho christened the finished craft Enguished clergyman. His mother wanted, but no ono is wanted very

much." returned and outfitted a machinn deavour.

was on Archdeacon's daughter. shop for the manufacture of air- planes.

He was fated to become Dean of England's most famous church, and now is retiring, because, at 74, ho faela himself an old man with all his work done.

1

Mrs. Sopwith is a yachtswoman who has Bailed with her husband during many of the races abroad, And in the America's Cup Races, scheduled for September 15, she'll he aboard in the official capacity of

Flying beats ware developed by Sopwith, and one of his firat cun- tomers was, of all things, the Greek navy. Great Britain didn't take military aviation very serioux-timekeeper. Sopwith Just smiles ly until the war broke over Europe. at the superstition that women Then the Sopwith factory began to bring bad luck to racing ships. He hum. He turned out more than smiles, too, at all the other folderol and secrecy usually connected with the contending yachts. When Endeavour arrived at the Bristol shipyards she was hauled out of the water with every line revealed for Inspection of the Americans. . Harold S. Vanderbilt returned the sporting compliment by taking Sopwith on board the Rainbow 10 watch it perform and to seo the crew in action, Nothing like that ever happened before,

This tall, husky Englishman Is 46, and his hair is graying, yet he belongs to a younger generation of sportsmen. He became interest- ed in aviation when he first emerged from a technical school. In 1908 Wilbur Wright flow 564,000 machines of various types, miles at Le Mans, and the world

among them the famous Sopwith began to grasp a faint idea of the

Camels, Pupe and Dolphins. He coming utility of airplanes. Bleriot

still makes about half the ships flow the Channel in 1900. By 1010

used by the Royal Air Force. His Tom Sopwith was learning to pilot

recent Hawker Fury probably is a Howard Wright biplane, and his

the fastest military plane in the licence is No. 34 on the Royal Aero world under full load. And Sop- Club registar. Later that same

with is said to be designing a new type of fighting craft. year, an unknown fledgling ho en- tered and won a non-stop distance competition with a hop of 176 miles from England to Belgium. Overnight he became a sort of Lindborghian here and circled

One of the first attempts to fly the Atlantic was made in a Sopwith plane. Harry Hawker, long one of his test pilots and now an associate In the business, made the try from

Sopwith is quiet, almost shy, but he is Bercely competitive and a daring helmsman.

Dr. Inge probably sets little value upon his fame. Last July, in an evensong sermon, he said:

"We ought neither to fear death nor to wish for it. We ought to count. All that matters is that a feel that death simply does not

life shall be well lived up till the time of its close."

A CYNICAL PARTING REMARK

He said he set small store by the talk, when some famous per son died, that he had left his work unfinished. Ho. wound - up

with

Dr. Inge la far away from funda- mentalism. On one ocension, he said that science gave no clear

in a personal God, but he had a answer whether we should believe very clear conviction that if there in a God, He is not at all what many religious believers have sup- posad-Him to be. Said Dr. Inge:

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dying slowly of an agonizing dis- Other flashes from the Ingo Base, wished to end his suffering,, and he rather favours birth con- trol.

THINKS DEMOCRACY FAILR Looking around his world, he folt that democracy was fargely a failure. If he lashed many of the working class as "won't-works," he attacked the rich for their money

madness,

Leathing the revolution which | put the Soviets on top in Russia and the Hitler revolution for its persecution of the Jews, he said In an address to the 1912 Club of London last June:

ity. Every civilized country Is full of savages and barbarians, ripe for revolt and ready to de-

"If there is a God. Ho is cer- tainly not like some, capricious, oriental Sultan from whom "I think revolution is really an favours may be obtained by mak- epidemic disease now become en- ing friends with His courtiers. demie-a contagious moral insan- ... He is certainly not the head of the clerial profession."

He is not afraid to advance stroy." daring thoughts. Thus in 1930 he suggested it might be a civil- lized thing to allow a criminal, con- domned to death, to carry out the sentence in his own way. He added also that he would not cen- sure a man who, knowing he is

Agafa he said: "Homo sapiens

dock (the thinking animal)

not deserve his title; but at least he is more intelligent than the chim- panzee and a million years hence he may really bo'n noble creature."

"The tendency in middle life is. for people to develop a sort of fatty degeneration of the consel- enoe and cirrhosis of the moral sense."

"My list of the four most pref- erable things in life is: first, wit dom; second, domestic happiness; third, recognition and encourage- ment: fourth, wolfare of one's country."

HOLDS.DISLIKE FOR US.

ant visits in the United States,

Dr. Inge, who twice had pleas once figured in a 'celebrated Sonate episode. In December, 1928, the lata Senator Gillett of Massa- chusetts sald he would vote for the big navy bill. Two years be- fore he would not have done so. Ho said he was moved by a pas soge in one of Dr. Luge's books which he quoted as follows:

"It is more than possible that European nations, enraged by the bloated prosperity and airs of su- periority of the man who won the. war, will unite to draw Shylock's (Uncle Sam's) teeth."

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