42 CLASSIC BOAT APRIL 2016HISTORY OF HOLLOW SPARS
Sweden to race in the Tivoli challenge cup that year
(which she won) via their Baltic agent GR Liligren.
Covering Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, he
wrote in 1902 that the firm had supplied hundreds, if not
thousands of masts and spars around the world.
In early 1903, citing the need to be near the sea for
shipping his products, Fraser established the Whitestone
Hollow Spar Co of Long Island as the successors to the
Spalding St Lawrence Boat Co, taking staff and moulds
from Ogdensburgh. Investing some $200,000 with four
other directors, Fraser aimed to employ around 75 staff.
They were commissioned to build the topsail spars for
Fife’s America’s Cup challenger Shamrock III as well as a
35ft fast launch for Lipton, but the company seems not
to have thrived; the land, buildings and machinery were
sold off in March 1904. Fraser went on in c1905 to start
another similar company (Fraser Hollow Spar & Boat
Co) out at Greenport on the north fork, which itself
folded in late 1907 or early 1908. Fraser of New York
supplied the first hollow yacht spars seen in Australia for
the Fife-designed Sayonara, for a series of challenge races
that she won in early 1904, and the firm supplied a mast
and full set of spars for the Mylne design 52-linear rater
Britomart in 1905, amid numerous other similar orders.
William Fife was an agent for the Spalding St
Lawrence Co and then Fraser spars for some years and
many of his early International Rule yachts, such as the
12mR Cintra (1909), all seven 15-Ms he built and both
the 19-Ms Mariquita and Corona all had at least some
hollow American spars. Fife made alterations to his
premises in 1907 to accommodate making larger spars(possibly as a result of Fraser’s ongoing problems in
America), and he adopted the same hollowed out system
that Young and Fraser had perfected.
In the end most British spar makers, and that included
many of the boatyards, built spars in the same way. It
has several advantages, allowing the builder to retain
precisely the right wall thickness and outside shape. Fife
and others were able to exploit this potential for
precision and designed spars with wall thicknesses to(^1) / 16 in tolerances, giving a high degree of weight control.
Sibbick was a designer who took pains to reduce the
weight of his rigs, as did Linton Hope but neither took a
lead; Hope discussed bamboo spars and their limitations
in some detail is his 1903 book Small Yacht Construction
& Rigging, where he praises the ‘Canadian hollow spars’
as ‘very neat’, but offers no guidance on construction.
There was certainly a Montreal-based hollow spar
company operating around that time which supplied the
spars for the 1901 Canada’s Cup contender, Invader.
Young’s apprentice from the St Lawrence Company,
William Miller, ended up in Boston, where he worked for
Pigeon & Co, long established as spar makers for ships
as well as yachts from about 1830. It may be that his
arrival is connected with the establishment of the Pigeon
Hollow Spar Company as a specialist off-shoot company
in 1900; if so, it is highly probable that the secret of
Young’s glue was involved. The company became the
Pigeon-Fraser Hollow Spar Company around 1910,
which may have heralded the arrival of John G Fraser in
Boston after the failure of his various New York
ventures. The company built a few aircraft around 1917
that were notable failures, but indicate the cross-over in
the technology, from yacht spars to the struts and spars
of early aircraft, especially biplanes.
NEW TECHNIQUES
Another specialist spar maker, now forgotten, was a Mr
Hallett of George Hollwey & Sons of Dublin, who
specialised in hollow spar manufacture between about
1900 and 1910. They were said to be “first class spars,
and many yachts had them fitted including HMY
Britannia”. Apparently Hallett also had “experience of
the Fraser hollow spar in America”.
What was to prove an important breakthrough in the
development of strut and spar construction methods was
developed in the UK in time to make a substantial
contribution to British efforts in the First World War.
Ewing McGruer, one of the founders of the McGruer
boatbuilding company, wrote to the editor of Yachting
Monthly (the naval architect Herbert Reiach) in 1911
explaining his proposed system of spar construction,
based on the methods of Paul Butler in the USA (see part
one of this series). This was essentially to roll plies of
Below: Using a
special glue
recipe, in 1901
the Spalding
St Lawrence
Company
supplied hollow
spars to the
America’s Cup
defender
Independence
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