Lipton Tea, in the distinctive yellow and red box, is instantly recognised in 180 countries throughout the world. Even a hundred years after his heyday Sir Thomas J Lipton is remembered for the shrewd entrepreneurial streak that made him millions, his publicity stunts, his hob-nobbing with royalty, and his many challenges for the America’s Cup. But what exactly made Tommy Lipton the man, ‘tick’, is as Churchill said of Russia’s intentions in 1939 “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

Lipton never smoked or drank, nor ever married. He never gambled yet took enormous commercial chances. As a household name familiar enough to be caricatured as Mr Tea in a popular stage play he shaped Victorian retail history, yet he took no part in politics, science, art or literature – asked once what his politics were he replied “To open a new grocery shop every week”. Until his forties he was virtually friendless and had no hobbies, often sleeping under his own counter rather than go home, yet he was to enter society as ‘one of the most eligible bachelors in the world’ and would become a close and discreet friend of King Edward VII. Without ever learning to sail he built and unsuccessfully raced five expensive yachts against the USA. Lipton was a man who had by his own endeavour raised himself from poverty to high society and who passionately believed in the power of self-help – yet left a million pounds in his will to the poor of Glasgow. A clue to the Lipton riddle can perhaps be found in one of his many after dinner speeches: “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 his bank on the cover.” This philosophy explains almost his every action – but his early life clearly shows the influencing factors that drove and enabled Mr Tea to achieve his empire.

Thomas Lipton’s parents fled the 1847potato famine leaving County Down for the slums of Glasgow. Engels after visiting the Gorbals in the 1840s wrote “I did not believe that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery and disease existed in one spot in any civilised country.” Tommy was born in 1848 during a cholera epidemic that killed 4,000 Glaswegians including his four year old sister Frances. Little wonder that to survive one had to be tough. Young Tommy thrived on the local turf wars: fist fights and narrow escapes from the police. Once he stood up to the local bully, a butcher’s son, who had been demanding protection money from children in the form of marbles. Tommy hadn’t a chance against the well fed bully and eventually his friends pulled him, battered and bloody, away from the fight. Lipton always remembered the lesson; that though he had lost the fight he had gained far more in admiration and respect. He recalled in later life “my stock soared high among all the boys of the district.”
The Clyde was all about shipbuilding and small boys in Glasgow made paper sailed models of sailing ships. Tommy organised his gang – the Crown Street Clan – in racing their toy yachts for marbles on the flooded abandoned clay pits. Tommy’s yachts were always called Shamrock.

Tommy’s family lived a precarious life. His father like many others was thrown out of his box printing job by the import trade downturn due to the American Civil War. Facing destitution, Thomas Senior, with his wife Frances set up a tiny grocery in their tenement basement selling fresh provisions shipped from friends with a farm in Ireland. Tommy left school at 13 and helped out in the shop, every week going to the dock with his barrow to collect the ham, eggs and butter from the steamer – never thinking that his name would in his lifetime be synonymous with groceries – and thereafter with tea. Yet his marketing genius was beginning to show in his advice to his father that “Mother should sell the eggs, as her hands are smaller, so it makes the eggs look larger.”

Glasgow was a busy port as well as a ship building city. A boy growing up on the Clyde heard sailors tales about far places and, throughout his young life saw waves of desperate migrants set sail for a better life in the New World. Tommy tried his hand at several jobs – printer’s errand boy and cutter in a shirt factory – but already six feet tall and strong, chafed against being confined in a routine low paid job. Through his contacts at the dock he heard that the Burns Line was looking for a cabin boy on its Belfast to Glasgow ferry. Despite this being hard work, waiting on sea passengers’ every whim, it doubled his pay and with meals on duty gave him the travel and freedom he craved. But the seventeen year old’s time on the Irish sea came to an abrupt halt when the chief steward discovered that Tommy had let a paraffin lamp go untrimmed overnight: the tell-tale smoke stain on the white ceiling betraying that his mind was on other things – listening to the old hands talking endlessly about the Americas – so Tommy was dismissed. However, long hours and free food aboard had built up some cash and his next act after collecting his pay was to invest five pounds in a steerage ticket for the SS Caledonia bound for New York. Many such lads, with stars in their eyes, slipped quietly away from family duties to make their fortunes, but through choice or failure never made the long voyage home again. Whole initially considering this as an option Tommy’s strong ties with his family ensured his winning their support, so he went with their blessing and parting tears. Without doubt Lipton saw his adventure as a necessary step on the path to success. He would later recall “The parting was sad, but my mother, at least, had such faith in me that she believed I would soon return a rich man”

Leaving behind the wretched conditions below deck for 300 migrants in steerage on a small steamer tossed for 14 days on the choppy North Atlantic, Tommy disembarked to earn his first dollar on US soil. Unencumbered by baggage he was soon off the ship and fell in with an Irish lodging house keeper. For a week’s free keep he undertook to fill Mike McCauligan’s beds and soon, back on the dock and, promising the “the best house in town” while relieving them of 10 cents a head, he shepherded a dozen of his bewildered fellow travellers to McCauligans dubious rooms.

Much like Glasgow, in 1866 the overpopulated poor areas of New York were cess pits of filth, disease and crime; recently exacerbated by the influx of 20,000 demobilised Union Army soldiers. Lipton’s first task was to find employment but in a trading city faced with war ravaged loss of markets, teeming with returned soldiers and hopeful immigrants, the competition was severe. Despite the many attractions of New York Lipton faced the reality of his precarious position and rather than spiralling down into drink and squalor as did so many immigrants, decided to go south to Virginia, where the Civil War and abolishment of slavery had caused labour shortages on the plantations. However he found that tobacco farm hands were worked just as hard as the slaves had been but, true to form, Tommy Lipton took on extra duties and saved a little money. He might have continued there but for an accident with an axe that nearly severed his foot. Nursed back to health by his employer’s wife, Tommy decided on a change of scene and gained a job on a South Carolina rice plantation where his literacy and rudimentary book keeping skills gained him a clerk’s position. Coincidentally the rice plantation was very close to where, a century later, T.J Lipton Inc. as part of Unilever, would set up their tea research station, now owned by the Bigelow family and operated as Charleston Tea Farm – “America’s only commercial tea garden”

Back in New York Tommy was to place his foot on a significant rung of the ladder to his success: he landed a job in a Scottish department store. The owner A.T Stewart whose commercial success came from his compulsive competitive drive, rigorous staff discipline and attention to detail would inspire the young Lipton. He took well to retailing, enjoyed selling groceries to customers, and noted the influence of Stewarts’ presentation of goods and the effect of customer service – and the power of advertising. The observant Lipton’s two years’ of 12 hour days in various departments at Stewarts was today’s equivalent of an MBA. Macy’s too was thriving just a block away. Macy was a friend of circus owner PT Barnum who dreamed up many of Macy’s advertising stunts and aggressive promotions. Tommy saw and absorbed all this and, with $500 in his pocket (a large sum then) and the bushy moustache that would soon make him instantly recognisable, he returned to his parents in Glasgow determined to become a merchant showman – and millionaire

Next week Part 2: bizarre stunts, opening up a new shop every week, and venturing into tea.