William Fife III
| William Fife, Jr. | |
|---|---|
Fife in 1903
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| Born |
15 June 1857 Fairlie, Scotland |
| Died | 11 August 1944 (aged 87) Fairlie, Scotland |
| Other names | William Fife, III |
William Fife, Jr. OBE (15 June 1857 – 11 August 1944), also known as William Fife III, was the third generation of a family of Scottish yacht designers and builders. In his time, William Fife designed around 600 yachts, including two contenders for the America’s cup. The Royal Yachting Association was formed in 1875 to standardise rules, and Fife and his rival G.L. Watson, were instrumental in these rule changes. Around one third of Fife's yachts still exist. His last designs were built in 1938.
Fife was born in Fairlie, North Ayrshire on the Firth of Clyde. His father William Fife, Sr. (1821–1902) and grandfather William Fyfe (1785–1865) had also been designers and boat builders in Fairlie. The family business operated from a shipyard on the beach in the village. Fife began building yachts in 1890 and soon surpassed the achievements of his father and grandfather and became known as one of the premier yacht designers of the day.
As the third generation of a venerable Scottish boat building family, William Fife inherited a rich legacy but was quick to establish his own reputation as one of the top designers in the yachting world. Often dominating his chief competitors, Fife was a master of his trade who received commissions from European royalty and from clients as far away as Australia. Following on the heels of the success of his design Dragon (1888), Fife adopted a stylized Chinese dragon as his trademark. Thereafter, those yachts that took shape on the shingle at Fairlie were known throughout the yachting world by this distinctive scrollwork.
Fife designed two America's Cup yachts for grocery and tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton who challenged for the cup a total of five times. The Fife-designed challenger Shamrock I (1899) lost to Columbia (Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, 1899) and Shamrock III (1903) lost to Reliance. After the establishment of the first International Rule in 1906, Fife became a prolific designer of metre boats, designing and building several successful 15-Metre and 19-Metre yachts in the years leading up to the Great War. Between 1907 and 1913, William Fife, Jr. designed eight of the twenty 15mR yachts ever built, but his first 15mR named Shimna was not built at his famous Fairlie boatyard, but by Alexander Robertson and Sons Ltd (Yachtbuilders), because all Fife's principal yacht builders were needed to work on Myles Kennedy’s new 23mR, White Heather II.
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