Tea as in Thomas

THE LIPTON STORY (277 pp.)--Alec Waugh--Doubleday ($3).

It would be the biggest cheese in the history of the world. To make it, said the advertisements, 800 cows had given, six days' supply of milk, "the world's greatest experts" had consulted endlessly, and 200 American dairymaids had devoted a week of their lives to the project.

When the boat bearing the monstrous cheese docked at Glasgow in the fall of 1881, hundreds of cheering Scots lined the quay. Hundreds more pushed and shoved their way into Thomas Lipton's produce store on High Street when it went on display there. A few days later, tall, rawboned Owner Lipton had another thought: Why not hide gold pieces in the cheese and let the public know it? When the cheese was finally sliced up and sold on Christmas Eve, Glasgow shoppers mobbed the store, bought up every crumb of Lipton's "Jumbo" in two hours.

No Man to Gamble. Tireless Tommy Lipton reversed an old igth Century success pattern. The son of an Irish-born Glasgow groceryman, he quit school at ten, worked around Glasgow for a few years, in 1865 sailed for the U.S. Instead of finding his fortune he drifted from job to job--a worker in the rice fields of South Carolina, a plantation bookkeeper, a clerk in New York. But Tommy Lipton never forgot some of the things he learned in P. T. Barnum's U.S. In 1869, with savings of $500, he went back to Glasgow and two years later opened a store of his own. Within a decade, with the help of such publicity stunts as Jumbo the cheese, he owned more than 20 stores.

He hired a dozen plump ladies carrying baskets inscribed "We shop at Lipton's" to march up & down outside, drove a hefty, traffic-blocking pair of hogs marked "Lipton's Orphans" through the streets of Glasgow, scattered broadsides from a balloon, even issued authentic-looking pound notes as advertisements--and got in some minor trouble with the law. As Author Alec Waugh* delicately puts it in his readable but repetitious biography: "Lipton had no objection to being a public nuisance where his own interests were concerned."

He neither drank, smoked, gambled, nor married, took no interest in politics, science, art or literature; during the first 40 years of his life had no hobbies and no friends. Often after a long day's work he slept under the counter of one of his stores, too worn-out to go home. When his mother, the sole inspiration for his Spartan drive toward big money, died in 1889, he buried himself still more deeply in his work, spent his spare time shopping around for new products to stock. He settled on tea.

"I Take the Liberty." Because Lipton "had no use for middlemen," he sailed for Ceylon in 1890 and invested in several tea plantations to supply his 300 stores. Britons were used to buying their tea in bulk; Lipton packaged it, hired sandwichmen dressed as Indians to parade through the streets advertising it, soon had everyone persuaded that tea and "Lipton's" were synonymous. By the time he moved his offices to London in the early 1890s, Lipton's name was a British household word.

It took Queen Victoria herself to show him where to draw the line in his publicity schemes. With no middleman to pave the way, Lipton wrote to the Queen in 1887: "I take the liberty of writing to inquire whether your most gracious Majesty would be pleased to accept of the largest cheese ever made [it was to weigh five tons] as a [Queen's Golden] Jubilee offering." A member of Victoria's household staff promptly replied, in effect, that the

Queen could not accept cheeses from strangers.

But Lipton, unabashed, regained lost ground a decade later with an anonymous donation of $125,000 to the Princess of Wales's fund for the poor of London. "It was the most important single act in his whole life," for when Lipton permitted the release of his name, he immediately became red-hot news on both sides of the Atlantic, won a knighthood from Victoria, and made a friend of Heir Apparent Prince Edward. With one shrewdly timed piece of generosity, "the millionaire who two years before was dining every night at home had become a part of international society."

Cheer & Perseverance. To top off his triumphant leap into the social whirl, quick-acting Sir Thomas, never a yachting fan, surprised everyone by issuing a transatlantic challenge for the America's Cup. During the next 30 years he combined yachting with business, raced five different Shamrocks against U.S. defenders, never won the cup. A year before Lipton's death in 1931, Comedian Will Rogers wrote a letter to the New York Times suggesting that "everybody send $1 apiece for a fund to buy a loving cup for Sir Thomas Lipton, bigger than the one he would have got if he had won." When the trophy was presented, a substitution had been made for the inscription Will Rogers had suggested: "To possibly the world's worst yacht builder but absolutely the world's most cheerful loser."

Cheerful Loser Lipton, who left $4,000,000 to the poor of Glasgow in his will, was no loser at all on his own terms. At a dinner speech delivered during the height of his career, he succinctly summed up his philosophy: "A man may have many friends, but he will find none so steadfast, so constant, so ready to respond to his wants, so capable of pushing him ahead, as a little leather-covered book with the name of a bank on its cover."

* Older brother of Novelist Evelyn (Brideshead Revisited) Waugh.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.